Their Finest Hour (24 page)

West of Paris the remains of the Tenth Army, the equivalent of no more than two divisions, had been pressed back south-westward from the Seine towards Alençon. The capital fell on the 14th; its defending armies, the Seventh and the Armée de Paris, were scattered; a great gap now separated the exiguous French and British forces in the west from the rest and the remains of the once proud Army of France.

And what of the Maginot Line, the shield of France, and its defenders? Until June 14 no direct attack was made, and already some of the active formations, leaving behind the garrison troops, had started to join, if they could, the fast-withdrawing armies of the centre. But it was too late. On that day the Maginot Line was penetrated before Saarbruecken and across the Rhine by Colmar; the retreating French were caught up in the battle and unable to extricate themselves. Two days later the German penetration to Besançon had cut off their retreat. More than four hundred thousand men were surrounded without hope of escape. Many encircled garrisons held out desperately; they refused to surrender until after the armistice, when French officers were despatched to give them the order. The last forts obeyed on June 30, the commander protesting that his defences were still intact at every point.

Thus the vast disorganised battle drew to its conclusion all along the French front. It remains only to recount the slender part which the British were able to play.

* * * * *

General Brooke had won distinction in the retreat to Dunkirk, and especially by his battle in the gap opened by the Belgian surrender. We had therefore chosen him to command the British troops which remained in France and all reinforcements until they should reach sufficient numbers to require the presence of Lord Gort as an Army Commander. Brooke had now arrived in France, and on the 14th he met Generals Weygand and Georges. Weygand stated that the French forces were no longer capable of organised resistance or concerted action. The French Army was broken into four groups, of which its Tenth Army was the westernmost. Weygand also told him that the Allied Governments had agreed that a bridgehead should be created in the Brittany peninsula, to be held jointly by the French and British troops on a line running roughly north and south through Rennes. He ordered him to deploy his forces on a defensive line running through this town. Brooke pointed out that this line of defence was a hundred and fifty kilometres long and required at least fifteen divisions. He was told that the instructions he was receiving must be regarded as an order.

It is true that on June 11 at Briare, Reynaud and I had agreed to try to draw a kind of “Torres Vedras line” across the foot of the Brittany peninsula. Everything, however, was dissolving at the same time, and the plan, for what it was worth, never reached the domain of action. In itself the idea was sound, but there were no facts to clothe it with reality. Once the main French armies were broken or destroyed, this bridgehead, precious though it was, could not have been held for long against concentrated German attack. But even a few weeks’ resistance here would have maintained contact with Britain and enabled large French withdrawals to Africa from other parts of the immense front, now torn to shreds. If the battle in France was to continue, it could be only in the Brest peninsula and in wooded or mountainous regions like the Vosges. The alternative for the French was surrender. Let none, therefore, mock at the conception of a bridgehead in Brittany. The Allied armies under Eisenhower, then an unknown American colonel, bought it back for us later at a high price.

General Brooke, after his talk with the French commanders, and having measured from his own headquarters a scene which was getting worse every hour, reported to the War Office and by telephone to Mr. Eden that the position was hopeless. All further reinforcements should be stopped, and the remainder of the British Expeditionary Force, now amounting to a hundred and fifty thousand men, should be re-embarked at once. On the night of June 14, as I was thought to be obdurate, he rang me up on a telephone line which by luck and effort was open, and pressed this view upon me. I could hear quite well, and after ten minutes I was convinced that he was right and we must go. Orders were given accordingly. He was released from French command. The back-loading of great quantities of stores, equipment, and men began. The leading elements of the Canadian Division which had landed got back into their ships, and the 52d Division, which, apart from its 157th Brigade, had not yet been committed to action, retreated on Brest. No British troops operating under the Tenth French Army were withdrawn; but all else of ours took to the ships at Brest, Cherbourg, St. Malo, and St. Nazaire. On June 15 our troops were released from the orders of the Tenth French Army, and next day, when it carried out a further withdrawal to the south, they moved towards Cherbourg. The 157th Brigade, after heavy fighting, was extricated that night, and, retiring in their lorries, embarked during the night of June 17/18. On June 17 it was announced that the Pétain Government had asked for an armistice, ordering all French forces to cease fighting, without even communicating this information to our troops. General Brooke was consequently told to come away with all men he could embark and any equipment he could save.

We repeated now on a considerable scale, though with larger vessels, the Dunkirk evacuation. Over twenty thousand Polish troops who refused to capitulate cut their way to the sea and were carried by our ships to Britain. The Germans pursued our forces at all points. In the Cherbourg peninsula they were in contact with our rearguard ten miles south of the harbour on the morning of the 18th. The last ship left at 4
P.M
., when the enemy were within three miles of the port. Very few prisoners were caught.

In all there were evacuated from all French harbours 136,000 British troops and 310 guns; a total, with the Poles, of 156,000 men. This reflects great credit on General Brooke’s embarkation staff, of whom the chief, General de Fonblanque, a British officer, died shortly afterwards as the result of his exertions.

At Brest and the Western ports the evacuations were numerous. The German air attack on the transports was heavy. One frightful incident occurred on the 17th at St. Nazaire. The 20,000-ton liner
Lancastria,
with five thousand men on board, was bombed and set on fire just as she was about to leave. A mass of flaming oil spread over the water round the ship, and upwards of three thousand men perished. The rest were rescued under continued air attack by the devotion of the small craft. When this news came to me in the quiet Cabinet Room during the afternoon, I forbade its publication, saying, “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least.” I had intended to release the news a few days later, but events crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban, and it was some years before the knowledge of this horror became public.

* * * * *

To lessen the shock of the impending French surrender, it was necessary at this time to send a message to the Dominion Prime Ministers showing them that our resolve to continue the struggle although alone was not based upon mere obstinacy or desperation, and to convince them by practical and technical reasons, of which they might well be unaware, of the real strength of our position. I therefore dictated the following statement on the afternoon of June 16, a day already filled with much business.

Prime Minister to the Prime Ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

16.VI.40.

[After some sentences of introduction particular to each:]

I do not regard the situation as having passed beyond our strength. It is by no means certain that the French will not fight on in Africa and at sea, but, whatever they do, Hitler will have to break us in this island or lose the war. Our principal danger is his concentrated air attack by bombing, coupled with parachute and air-borne landings and attempts to run an invading force across the sea. This danger has faced us ever since the beginning of the war, and the French could never have saved us from it, as he could always switch onto us. Undoubtedly, it is aggravated by the conquests Hitler has made upon the European coast close to our shores. Nevertheless, in principle the danger is the same. I do not see why we should not be able to meet it. The Navy has never pretended to prevent a raid of five or ten thousand men, but we do not see how a force of, say, eighty to a hundred thousand could be transported across the sea, and still less maintained, in the teeth of superior sea power. As long as our Air Force is in being it provides a powerful aid to the Fleet in preventing sea-borne landings and will take a very heavy toll of air-borne landings.

Although we have suffered heavy losses by assisting the French and during the Dunkirk evacuation, we have managed to husband our air-fighter strength in spite of poignant appeals from France to throw it improvidently into the great land battle, which it could not have turned decisively. I am happy to tell you that it is now as strong as it has ever been, and that the flow of machines is coming forward far more rapidly than ever before; in fact, pilots have now become the limiting factor at the moment. Our fighter aircraft have been wont to inflict a loss of two or two and a half to one even when fighting under the adverse conditions in France. During the evacuation of Dunkirk, which was a sort of No Man’s Land, we inflicted a loss of three or four to one, and often saw German formations turn away from a quarter of their numbers of our planes. But all air authorities agree that the advantage in defending this country against an oversea air attack will be still greater because, first, we shall know pretty well by our various devices where they are coming, and because our squadrons lie close enough together to enable us to concentrate against the attackers and provide enough to attack both the bombers and the protecting fighters at the same time. All their shot-down machines will be total losses; many of ours and our pilots will fight again. Therefore, I do not think it by any means impossible that we may so maul them that they will find daylight attacks too expensive.

The major danger will be from night attack on our aircraft factories, but this, again, is far less accurate than daylight attack, and we have many plans for minimising its effect. Of course, their numbers are much greater than ours, but not so much greater as to deprive us of a good and reasonable prospect of wearing them out after some weeks or even months of air struggle. Meanwhile, of course, our bomber force will be striking continually at their key points, especially oil refineries and air factories and at their congested and centralised war industry in the Ruhr. We hope our people will stand up to this bombardment as well as the enemy. It will, on both sides, be on an unprecedented scale. All our information goes to show that the Germans have not liked what they have got so far.

It must be remembered that, now that the B.E.F. is home and largely rearmed or rearming, if not upon a Continental scale, at any rate good enough for Home defence, we have far stronger military forces in this island than we have ever had in the late war or in this war. Therefore, we hope that such numbers of the enemy as may be landed from the air or by sea-borne raid will be destroyed and be an example to those who try to follow. No doubt we must expect novel forms of attack and attempts to bring tanks across the sea. We are preparing ourselves to deal with these as far as we can foresee them. No one can predict or guarantee the course of a life-and-death struggle of this character, but we shall certainly enter upon it in good heart.

I have given you this full explanation to show you that there are solid reasons behind our resolve not to allow the fate of France, whatever it may be, to deter us from going on to the end. I personally believe that the spectacle of the fierce struggle and carnage in our island will draw the United States into the war, and even if we should be beaten down through the superior numbers of the enemy’s Air Force, it will always be possible, as I indicated to the House of Commons in my last speech, to send our fleets across the oceans, where they will protect the Empire and enable it to continue the war and the blockade, I trust in conjunction with the United States, until the Hitler régime breaks under the strain. We shall let you know at every stage how you can help, being assured that you will do all in human power, as we, for our part, are entirely resolved to do.