The World at War (15 page)

COLONEL MANTEUFFEL

The French fought in the beginning of the war, for some days, diffidently. I think this is caused by moral disarmament. The French soldiers were captured most without a struggle, and in addition to this I learned from prisoners of war that the French soldiers in the majority believed that they would have no more war on the end of the first week of this campaign.

CAPTAIN BEAUFRE

I must confess that the morale of the French High Command was very quickly broken. In fact the night when we happened to know that the front had been broken through at Sedan, at that time the feeling was that everything was lost, and as I have written in my memoirs I saw General Georges, who was commanding the north-eastern front, I saw him sobbing and saying, 'There have been some deficiencies.' You always have deficiencies like that and that's nothing new, so we made a plan to restore the situation. Then on the Somme in the beginning of June, where we had a certain superiority over the Germans because we were covering their left flank while they were attacking Dunkirk, we had given orders to attack and we achieved nothing. So that was for me the proof that the training and the mentality of the High Command was unable at that time to make an offensive which would restore the situation. From that time on I thought it was lost.

COLONEL MANTEUFFEL

The first crisis was on May 22nd when the spearhead of the Panzer Army was attacked by strong British tank units and we suffered heavy casualties. The second crisis was the halt of the
German panzer troops around Dunkirk. Hitler feared his experience in First World War; the panzers needed rest and maintenance, then they will go to the second phase of the Battle of France, so Hitler stopped his advances around Dunkirk.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

Nobody had and could have foreseen a success of such a totality, and that in a short time of hardly more than a month. There was a significant difference between the attitude of the military leaders on one side, in particular General Franz Halder, the Chief of Staff of the Army, and on the other side, Hitler, who joins the French campaign for the first time as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Halder, after the success of the initial operation, was entirely sure of himself and of the further course of the campaign.

SQUADRON LEADER THE HON MAX AITKEN

601 Squadron RAF, Tangmere

One interesting trip we made was to escort Winston Churchill to Paris. He went to Paris to ask the French to go with him – I think it was when he proposed that France and Britain should set up joint citizenship and that the government should move to North Africa. Our great hope was that he wasn't going to come back that night so we could have a last night in Paris – which materialised, and we weren't very fit next morning.

ANTHONY EDEN

British Secretary of State for War

On the 12th of May Winston published his first list of ministers on the formation of his government. That was Whit Sunday and that afternoon I repaired to the War Office to take over my responsibilities there. Although the Battle of France had only started two days before, it was already evident that there was some grim times ahead. And, in fact, the next four weeks were a tale of continuing defeat and disaster. Almost exactly one month later, Winston asked me to fly with him to meet the
French government. We took
Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with us and I can see the scene now at the table in the chateau where we met them. On the one side Winston and I and Dill; on the other side Prime Minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygand, who was the new French Commander-in-Chief, and
Pétain. We discussed for three hours without really making much progress because it was soon evident that there was nothing more that the French were in a position to do.
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MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS

Whether Raynaud's mistress was paid by the Germans or not I don't know – she couldn't have been more anti-British if she had been. She was completely sold on the idea that the Germans were far better than the French Communists and she did absolutely everything to thwart any little sparks of resistance that blossomed in her lover's mind. When she heard a proposal had been made to amalgamate the two countries – France and England – she dashed off on to the phone straight away to call all the people of her way of thinking in the Cabinet.

ANTHONY EDEN

The moment came for Winston to declare that whatever happened we should go on with the war, if necessary alone, and then Reynaud was quite inscrutable, Weygand was polite, perhaps slightly doubting, and Pétain was openly 'all my eye and Betty Martin'. So we knew from that moment pretty well what must await us and I say it now we've no right to reproach the French for this. None in my opinion, because our own contribution on land had been a very diminutive one, relatively. Quite true that the Air Force had been superb and relatively numerous, but even so we could hardly be called equal partners in the Battle of France.

MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS

Some years later in Cairo I asked Churchill what was the narrowest escape we'd had in the war so far and he said undoubtedly the fact that the French might have accepted our offer of unity. When you think of it, it couldn't have worked, it would have created a mess, it would have impeded us in our methods completely – we couldn't have done that.

JOHN COLVILLE

Assistant Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1939–43

On 19th May Lord Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, concluded that if the French armies had collapsed beyond repair then there was not the slightest chance that they were going to recover in order sufficiently to continue or maintain the existing front. He therefore instructed his people at home that they must prepare for the possibility of the evacuation of the BEF. It was not until 25th May that Lord Gort, against the orders of the
French High Command and contrary to the wishes of the British War Cabinet, finally decided that the proposed attack by the BEF to the south was not feasible and that a withdrawal to the sea was the only possibility. In making this
decision he saved the BEF because there can be no doubt that had he obeyed instructions and marched southwards, the entire fighting force of more than a quarter of a million men would otherwise have been killed or captured. It must be doubted whether this country could have continued to fight, Battle of Britain or no Battle of Britain, if all our trained officers and NCOs had been lost. By this single decision Gort changed the course of history.

CAPTAIN BEAUFRE

The recriminations started with the British Army whose orders were to attack near us and without warning we happened to learn the British were withdrawing. We have not the right to criticise this too much because after all we were the bosses and we lost the battle, and that is a good excuse for the British to be selfish. But anyway they were, very selfish. Let's say that also the British Army hadn't been really attacked during the battle – the French had the brunt of the German attack – so it was still in order, and they took advantage of the situation to do what they wanted and to re-embark at Dunkirk without being of any help to the French to begin with, which produced not a good feeling. At a higher level of command than where I was the discussion came from the use of the RAF, that we knew was a number of squadrons you had in Britain and we thought that you didn't support the battle as you could have supported it. I heard Churchill himself answer this question. Churchill said very clearly that he couldn't do more because he had to think of the future and save what was left to protect Britain. But we had the feeling that you were playing your game.

MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS

There was complete hatred of the English, wanting to blame them for their defeat, saying we hadn't sent over enough troops, that we kept our planes in England rather than engaging them in the last struggle of France for her life. We represented 'Perfidious Albion' in all its horror. They really disliked us, more than I can find an expression for even today.

SQUADRON LEADER AITKEN

We had been operating over France before that, gradually covering the retreat of the British Army towards Dunkirk. And it was very unattractive because none of the British troops knew whether you were German or whether you were British and everyone fired at you. But gradually it formalised as the Army came towards Dunkirk and our duty was much clearer to us. Our duty clearly was to stop the troops on the beach from being bombed or shot, so most of Fighter Command in the south was destined to protect the troops on the beach.

COLONEL ADOLF GALLAND

Luftwaffe Jagdgruppe 26

It is known that Hitler himself stopped the Army and the armoured division from taking Dunkirk. Goring offered that the Luftwaffe would fight the British Army in Dunkirk but it had been impossible to avoid the escape of the people. The material was kept and was destroyed, but for the first time the Luftwaffe was confronted with the whole of the British fighter planes and fighters were good, same quality and experience as we had, and technically also equal. And especially during the night time the Luftwaffe was not able to avoid the escape.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

Hider's fear to take any risk and his lack of knowledge or at least acknowledge the main Sickle Stroke principles. He was mistrusting of his generals, thus at Dunkirk he delayed the main aim of the whole campaign, which was reaching and closing the Channel coast before any other considerations. This time he was frightened that the clay plains of Flanders with its many streams and channels, which according to his own memories of World War One would endanger and possibly inflict heavy losses on the panzer divisions. Hitler failed to follow up the overwhelming success of the first part of the campaign, and instead initiated the steps for the second part before the first had been accomplished. This was a great mistake in view of the German military principle to follow up success to the last gasp of men and horses. I do not believe that he allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape for political reasons and by this chivalrous attitude would obtain a chance of coming earlier to terms with Britain. Such an assumption, apart from everything else, is in full contrast to Hitler's concentrating the whole power of the German Air Force on the coastline after the British retreat.

BERTIE GOOD

Chief Steward on the ferry
'
Royal Daffodil'

We arrived off Gravelines and were attacked by German aircraft. They just shot a few bullets at us but they really went for the hospital ship and tried to sink her. We went on into Dunkirk and the
St Helier
went in; he was there for about a quarter of an hour and came out and shouted to George Johnson, our captain, 'There's nobody there. I don't know what they've bloody well sent us here for, I'm going back to Southampton.' Well, George Johnson took us in and we tied up alongside and the troops came up out of the ground, like a lot of rats, and they just ran to the ship. We took seventeen hundred men on board and just when we were picking the gangway up about thirty or forty ambulances came down the pier. The ambulance drivers came up the gangway and the First Mate said, 'Anybody in those ambulances?' They said, 'Yes, there's six stretcher cases in each one of 'em. We've been chased from Boulogne to here.' So the ship's crew went ashore and brought every man out of the ambulances and put them in the after dining room. None of these chaps had had their wounds dressed, they were in a hell of a state. All the officers in the ship who had first-aid kits started to dress their wounds.

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JOHN McBEATH

Royal Navy, commanding destroyer HMS
Venomous

As soon as it was obvious the German Army had broken through and that the British forces, and of course a lot of French forces, were going to be pushed back on the coast and would possibly need evacuating, the powers-that-be back in the UK got this small-boat flotilla organisation going. It started in a rather haphazard way because all sorts of boats varying from little tiny family motorboats to much larger club boats and in fact almost everything that could steam across to the other side were operating it at first, rather on their own. Some of them never made it and a lot of them went to the wrong places, but eventually they got it channelled and then one came across lots of these little boats going to and fro, may of them with a dozen or so soldiers on board heading back to England resolutely. One quite often offered to take their crews of soldiers off them so that they could go back for another load but they said, 'No fear! We've got our twelve pongos and we're going back to England with them. You go and get your own!'

SQUADRON LEADER AITKEN

Dunkirk was a shambles: there was a huge pall of smoke which came from burning ships and burning oil installations, and aircraft were flying in this smoke and it was pretty hard to tell what sort they were. They'd come out, they'd see you and they'd go back in again, and equally if we saw a large formation of German fighters coming at two or three of us we'd dodge in and out of the smoke. We'd have occasional dogfights but it was very confusing. The weather was absolutely glorious – you could see for miles except for the smoke and the smoke was fantastic. We did not try to protect the troops over the beaches; that wasn't our job. Our job was to stop any aircraft getting to those troops because, believe me, if enemy aircraft had got superiority of the air at Dunkirk they would have massacred those fellows on that beach. Nothing could have been done – they had no guns, they had no anti-aircraft, and German bombers and German dive-bombers, the Stukas, would have just murdered them and we couldn't have got those troops off.

BERTIE GOOD

On the thirteenth trip we was off Gravelines when five German aircraft came down and had a practice. These planes came down and attacked us and dropped their bombs everywhere. We missed every one bar one that went right through three decks and we passed over it and it exploded astern. I organised the chaps to get all the bedding off the beds and we filled the bomb hole with all these fibre mattresses, but she was taking water and the port engine was out. The Ship's Writer was on the stern with a Lewis gun and it jammed. Well, he ran and as he did Jerry caught him. He'd pulled the smoke-room door back when Jerry practically cut him in half. There was five of my chaps all got wounded, one chap got seven bullets in his back and today he's still a cripple.