Blood tears and folly, p.25
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 25
Dunkirk
Perhaps the first indication the Germans saw of British determination to continue the war was the fortitude of the RAF fighter pilots covering the Dunkirk evacuation. Men do not readily expend their lives for a cause that is already lost. It was the belief in Winston Churchill that German fliers encountered over Dunkirk. ‘The enemy has had air superiority. This is something new for us in this campaign,’ said the German 4th Army’s war diary on 25 May.
The RAF fighter pilots lacked the range to spend much time patrolling over the beaches and there were times when the Germans had the air to themselves. For the most part the RAF tried to intercept the German bombers before they reached Dunkirk. The Allied soldiers fighting a brave rearguard action in the streets, and the infantry patiently lining up on the mole from which most were rescued, seldom saw the RAF. Neither did the men dug into holes on the beaches, or scrambling across beached ships or over lines of vehicles that had been run into the sea to make piers. They were more apt to remember the enemy bombers that got through time and again, and the German fighters that came roaring out of the haze with their machine-guns blazing. The survivors of Dunkirk did not emerge as admirers of the RAF fliers who had fought to give them air cover. On the contrary, in the English summer of 1940 many men in light blue uniforms were singled out for abuse by angry soldiers with vivid memories of the Luftwaffe’s successes.
One RAF Flying Training School commanding officer felt so anxious about the growing hostility that he contacted the nearby army commander in North Wales about the bad effect of BEF troops hissing newsreel pictures of the RAF in local cinemas. He also sent a signal, classified Secret, on the subject to his Group HQ. Churchill was also aware of the problem. Addressing Parliament he gave special emphasis to the contribution the RAF made to the sea evacuation despite the fact that they were above the clouds and out of sight.13
In the ports and harbours of southern England yachtsmen and fishermen of all ages were asked to help evacuate the British army from France. Some declined, but many civilians crossed the Channel to help with the rescue. The small boats could not carry many men but they played a vital role in repeatedly ferrying the soldiers out to the larger boats. The Seasalter, a smack arriving back from dredging the oyster beds near Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, was asked to go and help. The skipper said:
The soldiers were coming off the beach clinging to bits of wood and wreckage and anything that would float. As we got close enough we began to pick them up. We saw a row-boat coming off loaded right down with troops. And with this we went to and fro, bringing as many as it would dare hold, and in the meantime we went round picking up as many as we could. When we got a load we would take them off to one of the ships lying off in the deep water.14
All that was good and everything that was bad about men could be found on the Dunkirk beaches. It was a sense of fair play that made men wait their turn, even when it looked as if their turn would never come. But it was a time of cowardice and lies as well as selfless heroism. Allies were deceived, comrades abandoned. Officers trying to organize unruly crowds of weary soldiers sometimes had to draw their pistols. Looting and rape were not unknown. Some men died unheroic deaths. But all in all the Dunkirk evacuation worked because heroism, discipline, self-sacrifice and common sense prevailed. It became the sort of heroic failure that the British cherish, and celebrate for longer than their victories.
Soldiers arrived in England at the same south coast resorts that many of them knew from peacetime holidays. At Dover, Deal, Folkestone, Margate, Sheerness and Ramsgate there was tea and biscuits, apples and oranges, cigarettes and matches, doctors and nurses, coaches and trains. Crowds gathered at the London railway terminals to watch the arrival of subdued, tired and dirty men. A few arrived complete with packs and rifles, some brandished souvenirs, most had only the barest clothes. By 4 June 338,226 had been rescued and of these 123,095 were French. On this day Churchill told the House:
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Portentously he added: ‘in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old’.15
The significance of Operation Dynamo cannot be overemphasized. Although almost all the French rescued went back to fight for a still undefeated France, the British survivors provided the cadre of a new and better army. Had a quarter of a million British men languished in German captivity, it is hard to believe that public opinion would have been in favour of continuing the war.
As the British departed from the Continent, there remained a vast scrapyard of military equipment, the more so since the British Expeditionary Force had been a mechanized army. A German officer16 wrote home saying:
Just before La Panne we passed the first collecting point for wrecked vehicles. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of cars, trucks, armoured vehicles of all sizes. Almost all of them were burnt out, because the British and French had put fire to all the vehicles they had to abandon. In La Panne itself, a harbour which had served for embarkations, there was merely a vast amount of war matériel, all useless. Anti-aircraft guns, machine-guns, motor bicycles, anti-tank guns, etc. From the place where we stopped on the beach we could see a sunken British warship.
Gort was sent to become inspector-general to the forces for training. It was an inappropriate job for a man brimming over with courage who had already demonstrated that training for modern war was not something he understood. One of his subordinates, Alan Brooke, who had not enjoyed being subordinated to Gort in France, became Commander in Chief Home Forces. His version of the events of May 1940 was that he had shown exemplary skill in covering the withdrawal to Dunkirk while Gort had been found wanting. In December 1941 Brooke’s striding energy and sincere ambition gained for him Dill’s post of CIGS. Gort, Ironside and Dill had held the job in quick succession, but now it had been given to a man who would never let go. Sir Arthur Bryant, a distinguished writer, used Brooke’s war diaries and autobiographical notes to write a history of the war. As proof that the pen can be mightier than the sword, Field Marshal The Viscount Alanbrooke ended up widely regarded as the man who’d won the war almost single-handed. Gort faded into military oblivion.
The end of France
On 5 June the regrouped German armies launched a concerted offensive southwards. Weygand, the new French commander, tried to hold a front to the north of Paris, but by 8 June had begun to retreat to the River Seine. Two days later the French government fled Paris, and on that same day Italy declared war on Britain and France. ‘A great day in the history of the German Army!’ said General Franz Halder, chief of the army general staff, on 14 June. ‘German troops have been marching into Paris since nine o’clock this morning.’17
Now the German drive southwards fanned out both east and west. A week later 32 Italian divisions attacked the six Alpine divisions that manned the French south-east frontier. This was Mussolini’s last-minute bid for a seat at the peace conference and a share of the spoils.
Many French units fought hard and well but as Telford Taylor an American military historian, summed it up: ‘The trouble was that those who fought were woefully hampered by those who did not, and fatally handicapped by those who failed to prepare.18 Soon the Germans had the French armies pinned against the rear of their Maginot Line, while other spearheads reached the Spanish border.
On 16 June, Marshal Pétain, the 84-year-old hero of Verdun, the war minister whose decisions had played an important part in creating the Maginot Line and the disaster that now befell the French army, came forward to negotiate with the Germans. Hitler simply dictated terms to him, and with a childish and vindictive sense of theatre arranged for the armistice to be signed in the same railway coach in which the Germans had been made to sign the armistice of 1918.19
Success always wins friends, and Hitler was not lacking in admirers. Casting aside his feelings about freedom, in the Indian newspaper Harijan on 22 June, Mahatma Gandhi wrote: ‘Germans of future generations will honour Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more.’ In Moscow Foreign Minister Molotov cast aside his feelings about Fascism and summoned the German ambassador to convey ‘the warmest congratulations of the Soviet government on the splendid success of the German armed forces’. The democratically elected government of Denmark, which the Germans had kept in place, allowed gratitude to overcome its respect for democracy and announced: ‘The great German victories, which have caused astonishment and admiration all over the world, have brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in a political and economic sense, under the leadership of Germany.’ The Aga Khan cast aside his feelings about alcohol and promised to drink a bottle of champagne ‘when the Führer sleeps in Windsor Castle’.20
Peace feelers
Hitler and his generals had never anticipated the Dunkirk evacuation, principally because they were men of a continental land power. For them the coast was the end of the road. For the British, with their ‘island mentality’, the sea was an open door. The poor impression Hitler had formed of Chamberlain made him confident that the British cabinet would come to him seeking peace terms.
Such an opinion was not without foundation. Lord Halifax, who had so nearly become prime minister in May, certainly did not rule out talks with Hitler. As France collapsed, Halifax was hinting to the still neutral Italians that Britain would be interested in the prospect of a conference to decide the fate of Europe.
Britain, like France and many other European countries, was subject to the influence of aristocrats and land-owning gentry who worried about the spread of Communism, and the social upheaval that a major European war would bring. They even feared a British victory: Germany weakened by war would open the floodgates to a tide of Soviet expansion. For such people, appeasement of Hitler had been the only sensible prewar policy. Even after war began, there were a great many men of influence who thought that Britain should admit its error and quickly come to terms with the Nazis. So did those in the Foreign Office and the Treasury who anxiously watched the steady depletion of their country’s financial resources.
During the period of the ‘phoney war’ contacts with prewar personal British friends convinced highly placed Nazis that the British were irresolute. German diplomats and secret agents were alerted to the possibility of making peace with Britain. The armistice sought by Marshal Pétain on 16 June 1940 gave new urgency to British peace feelers, which were now being extended in Spain, Switzerland and Sweden.
There is no known verbatim record of the conversation that took place when on 17 June 1940 R. A. B. Butler (Halifax’s deputy) met Björn Prytz, Sweden’s minister in London. But long after the war Prytz published the telegram he sent to Stockholm as a result of that meeting.’21 According to Swedish records, Butler told Prytz that ‘no opportunity of reaching a compromise peace would be neglected if the possibility were offered on reasonable conditions’.22 Butler was seeking peace terms on behalf of his boss, and in an unmistakable reference to Churchill and his supporters he added that Lord Halifax specifically promised that ‘no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way’.
Churchill was unable to attend a meeting of the war cabinet at 12.30 pm the following day. One item has since been deleted from the official minutes of that cabinet meeting but the diary notes of Alexander Cadogan, head of the Foreign Office, who was present, provide a tantalizing clue to what the closely guarded secret might be. ‘Winston not there – writing his speech. No reply from Germans.’23 It seems that Churchill’s authority was flouted by men determined to sue for peace.
Halifax and Butler were not alone in their quest. Lloyd George, who had been prime minister in the First World War, had seen little chance of a British victory in the Second. The Americans would not enter the war, he said, and he made no secret of his readiness to take over his nation in defeat, as Pétain had now taken over France.24 How many others were of like mind can only be guessed. The Duke of Windsor – who as Edward VIII abdicated from the throne in 1936 – and his wife, the infamous Mrs Wallis Simpson, were outspoken admirers of Hitler and his Third Reich, Bitterly divided from his family on account of his marriage, there are suggestions that Edward hoped to assume the throne of a defeated Britain with Hitler’s blessing.
But nothing came of the peace feelers. At 9 pm on 17 June Churchill spoke on the radio for two minutes before the evening’s news bulletin. In a hastily prepared response to the French collapse he told the world: ‘The news from France is very bad, and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.’ He went on: ‘We shall defend our island, and, with the British Empire around us, we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of men. We are sure that in the end all will be well.’25
At 3.45 the following afternoon, while the Germans were still considering how to react to the hints, questions and off-the-record conversations, channelled through their ambassadors in neutral capitals, Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and delivered the speech that he had been writing when he was absent from the cabinet:
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war … if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’26
It was one of Churchill’s finest hours too. At that time there were no recording or broadcast facilities in the House of Commons, and so the prime minister was prevailed upon to deliver the speech again over the radio at 9 pm before that evening’s BBC news bulletin. The radio performance did not communicate the Churchill fire that a live audience had produced in the afternoon. Some of his colleagues thought his voice sounded unusual over the air and put it down to emotion, or the imperfections of broadcasting. Less charitably, the publisher Cecil King wondered if he was drunk. Harold Nicolson at the Ministry of Information remarked that a speech that sounded magnificent in the House of Commons ‘sounded ghastly on the wireless’.
John Martin, private secretary to the prime minister, said that Churchill’s ‘halting delivery at the start seems to have struck people and we had a letter from someone saying that evidently something had gone wrong with his heart and he ought to work in the recumbent position. The fact was, I gather, that he spoke with a cigar in his mouth.’27
In recent years an elaborate myth has grown up around speculation that maybe the 18 June speech was not broadcast by Churchill at all. The rumours spread when the BBC repertory actor Norman Shelley, who played Winnie the Pooh and Toad of Toad Hall in the BBC Children’s Hour, revealed that, with the prime minister’s permission, he had recorded Churchill’s speeches for American audiences. But there is no real evidence to support the view that Shelley had imitated Churchill’s voice on the BBC in June 1940.28
In the face of Churchill’s fiery rhetoric, the Germans decided that Lord Halifax, Butler and their many peace-seeking friends were no match for him and shelved their hopes of total victory. Hitler’s prewar experience with Chamberlain was no longer a guide to Britain’s mood. Winston Churchill had brought a psychological change to Britain that could never have taken place under his predecessor’s direction.
A ‘successful landing’
The tragedy, comedy and confusion that reigned on both sides is illustrated by what happened to Britain’s Channel Islands in this summer of 1940. These small islands, part of Great Britain but not of the United Kingdom, are self-governing communities under the British crown. They are all near to France, and by 19 June 1940 Whitehall had decided that they should be demilitarized and declared ‘open towns’. However with that reticence for which bureaucrats are noted, the men in Whitehall did not announce this decision, probably because the humiliation of publicly yielding British territory could not be faced.
To test whether they were being defended the Germans sent aircraft to fly very low across the islands. As one roared across St Peter Port on Guernsey, someone aboard the Southern Railway steamer Isle of Sark, sailing from Jersey to Southampton, fired ancient twin-mounted Lewis machine-guns at it. The Germans decided that there was a military force on the islands. As a result Heinkel He 111 bombers bombed and machine-gunned the two principal towns of St Helier in Jersey and St Peter Port, Guernsey, on the evening of 28 June. There were many casualties, and only after this did Whitehall announce that the islands had been demilitarized.
FIGURE 19: Heinkel He 111 bomber
The German monitoring service missed the demilitarization announcement put out by the BBC, and it was the United States ambassador in Paris who made sure the Germans knew of it. The commander of the German naval forces in northern France was engaged in a conference on the subject of the Channel Islands when he received the news by telephone. It was decided that occupation would be a propaganda coup. Luftflotte 3 assigned ten Junkers Ju 52 transport planes as well as fighter, bomber and reconnaissance units to the task. Army Group B were to provide soldiers, and naval craft were prepared for the assault on the beaches. Most importantly film camera-men, photographers and writers were sent to Cherbourg and attached to all the participating units.
