Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  The firebombing of Rotterdam from the air frightened other Dutch cities and Holland capitulated. Curiously, a Luftwaffe officer charged with improving the camouflage of his airfield had accidentally exposed the earlier German secret plans to invade Holland and Belgium. When Erich Hoenmanns, lost in fog on his way to Köln, crash-landed on 10 January 1940 near Mechelen-sur-Meuse in Belgium, he was carrying a passenger, Major Helmuth Reinberger, with all the invasion plans in a dispatch case that he failed to destroy. The Allies thought it was only a ‘haversack ruse’; Guy Liddell of MI5 reckoned it ‘part of the scheme for the war of nerves’, and John Colville, a secretary at No. 10 Downing Street, recorded in his diary on 15 January that ‘the landing itself, the ostentatiously ineffective efforts of the pilot to burn the papers, and subsequently to commit suicide, are suspiciously like a “put-up job”.’ In fact, they were all wrong, for the case held the real plans at that time.

  When German Army Group B (two armies of five infantry corps) invaded Holland and Belgium on 10 May, it seemed like the Schlieffen Plan of 1914 again, and the British and French armies moved forward seventy-five miles to block the right hand. This was exactly what the Germans wanted them to do – charge the matador’s cloak – because their main weapon was in the other hand. The French army had believed the fortified Maginot line stretching from Switzerland to Longuyon, ‘a battleship built on land’, was impregnable; the forested terrain of the Ardennes was surely impassable to tanks. Yet it was through here that von Rundstedt’s German Army Group A – four armies, including four armoured corps in twelve divisions – delivered a body blow to France, the Sichelschnitt or sweep of the scythe round behind them.

  France was unready. Their ageing, corpulent generals had become complacently defence-minded; the dash of Maréchal Ferdinand Foch had gone. General Gamelin’s nickname was ‘Gagamelin’, and morale was low among the sullen, bored troops. Goebbels’s people, meanwhile, dropped leaflets on the French lines suggesting that Britain was ready to fight to the last Frenchman, and that les Tommies, all looters and lechers, were already busy in their homes with their wives and sweethearts. From the radio, the traitor Ferdonnet oozed contempt for the French ruling class. France’s confident front was an elaborate pâtisserie, concealing a stew of je m’en foutisme, defeatism, confused communism, and demoralisation. Churchill felt the French were ‘rotted from within before they were smitten from without’.

  The Schwerpunkt or concentration point of the German attack was at Sedan, 120 miles north-east of Paris. An RAF reconnaissance Spitfire saw the columns of enemy vehicles stretching back for miles. The German armoured divisions punched through, crossed the Meuse and the Oise, and drove a ‘Panzer corridor’ towards the French coast, along the Somme, through the British rear. Marc Bloch, the medieval historian who later died a hero of the French resistance, tortured and shot by the Gestapo in June 1944, believed that the ‘strange defeat’ of France in 1940 was in part intellectual. The French high command simply could not conceive of a new kind of war, waged by Germans with ‘methodical opportunism’ and an utterly different rhythm and faster tempo. ‘It was much more terrifying to find ourselves suddenly at grips with a section of tanks in open country. The Germans took no account of roads. They were everywhere.’ Bloch noted how the Germans ‘relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we had always behaved.’

  Apart from aircraft, the Germans did not have superiority in numbers of men or vehicles, but violence and speed in their use won the day. Because the shocked and dazed French did not counter-attack, the BEF became cut off from its reserves, and had to bend its line backwards as it was squeezed and pushed towards the coast of northern France. Fighting a rearguard action towards the Channel ports, making use of successive rivers and canals, now became the BEF’s only option. The stubborn retreat towards the ‘defensive perimeter’ of Dunkirk began.

  Meanwhile, Dudley Clarke was having a busy war. He had already accomplished a four-month-long trip to Africa, reconnoitring the entire 3,000-mile overland route from Kenya to Egypt as the supply line to reinforce the Middle East should Italy enter the war and choke off sea lanes. He was just back from two missions to wintry Norway in three weeks, when he was suddenly given a new job at the War Office in May 1940. Three days before, German Panzers had reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme, and the tip of the Sichelschnitt scythe was now moving up the coast towards Boulogne and Calais, preparing to cut the BEF to pieces. Boulogne was hastily defended by the 20th Guards Brigade and then mostly evacuated by the Royal Navy.

  Calais was a different story. On 22 and 23 May a small British force disembarked there, ill-equipped and with conflicting orders from different sources. It soon became clear what the 30th Infantry Brigade had to do: sacrifice themselves to save others. Dudley Clarke passed on the dismal signal to Brigadier Claude Nicholson and his beleaguered garrison of 3,000 English riflemen and 800 French soldiers. He dictated the message on the red phone to the Duty Captain at the Admiralty; it was flashed from a mast on Horse Guards Parade to a destroyer in the English Channel; and from there to Nicholson’s signallers at Calais. It told them that they were to hold the citadel of Calais ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’ and to help the rest of the BEF get safely to Dunkirk, where they were going to be evacuated.

  Nicholson’s men, already short of food, water and ammunition, denied the chance of evacuation themselves yet refusing to surrender, courageously fought off aeroplanes, tanks, artillery and infantry for three more days. Only 440 men from the garrison managed to escape death or capture, the last four dozen getting out on the British minesweeper Gulzar. Second Lieutenant Airey Neave was already wounded by the end:

  The last stand was made among the wagons-lits and in the sand-dunes. A man shot himself with his own rifle in an archway which housed the regimental aid post; beside me a young soldier was crying quietly. A field-grey figure appeared shouting and waving a revolver. Then a huge man in German uniform and a Red Cross armband put me gently on a stretcher. I was a prisoner of war.

  Next, Dudley Clarke undertook a hush-hush mission to Eire, which was determinedly neutral but anxious not to be annexed and ‘protected’ by the Nazis. (This mission, from 24–27 May 1940, is so elliptically described in Clarke’s censored book that his biographer David Mure thought the country might have been Spain.) In his first message to US President Roosevelt on 15 May, Churchill had written that ‘we have many reports of possible German parachute or air-borne descents in Ireland’. Dudley Clarke flew out from Hendon aerodrome in plain clothes, accompanying two Irishmen, a civil servant, Joseph Walshe, and a military intelligence officer, Colonel Liam Archer, in the twin-engined Flamingo (which had an armchair with a huge ashtray) often used by Churchill. They landed at Belfast in Northern Ireland, and travelled, separately, by train, the next day to Dublin. At the Shelbourne Hotel a mysterious man went through all of Clarke’s kit removing anything that might incriminate him if anyone furtively searched his luggage. Then Clarke was driven to an evening meeting in an underground conference room with men who did not shake hands or introduce themselves, but who included the Irish politician, Frank Aiken, and the Irish chief of staff, General McKenna. Clarke informed them that General Huddleston, General Officer Commanding, Northern Ireland, had a mobile column standing by, ready to travel south into the Republic to help the Irish if the Germans invaded. There were more conferences the following day, with visits to the docks, Phoenix Park and Baldonnel aerodrome, where ways of stopping paratroopers and gliders were discussed, as well as the British anxieties that the IRA (which had been conducting a bombing campaign in England since 1939) could become a German Fifth Column.

  The Flamingo quietly returned Clarke from Belfast to London on Monday, 27 May. Behind him, the Irish army was being reinforced and placed on a war footing, the Army Reserve and the Volunteers called up, and a National Defence Council established. Within days, in an imaginative, bold gesture, Churchill offered de Valer
a a United Ireland as the prize of joining the war on the Allied side. But Eamon de Valera wanted neutrality more than unity; Northern Ireland could see nothing beyond itself, and the historic opportunity passed.

  On the steps of the War Office, back in uniform, Clarke bumped into General Haining, who told him that another of Clarke’s former bosses, Sir John Dill, had just become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), and Clarke was now in the ‘Head Office’ team. Clarke had liked Dill at the Staff College and in Palestine, and knew him to be energetic and intellectual. Dill had achieved his lifetime’s ambition in becoming Britain’s top soldier, but he was doing so at a dark hour in the nation’s military history, with the Royal Navy about to evacuate the British Army from France. The winning chalice felt poisoned. There are two views on Dill. Some say he was an exhausted has-been and that Churchill’s nickname for him, ‘Dilly-Dally’, was appropriate. However, the historian Alex Danchev has argued persuasively that John Dill was a good man who paved the way for the next CIGS, Alan Brooke, to stand up to Churchill in his bullying mode, and that he firmly cemented Anglo-American relations when he went to Washington DC as head of the Joint Staff Mission and senior British member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where he died in post.

  Clarke was appointed chief staff officer of Dill’s personal staff, warding off unnecessary business from his harassed chief. That night a telephone line was established from the War Office to the BEF’s new GHQ, which was situated on the beach of La Panne, just inside Belgium, east of Bray Dunes and Dunkirk, within the perimeter where the BEF was either going to resist, surrender or evacuate. This was where Lord Gort, the commander-in-chief of the BEF, had received the news on 27 May that King Leopold of Belgium had capitulated to the Germans without telling his government or his allies. The German air force was bombing the oil tanks and docks at Dunkirk and a pall of black smoke was visible for miles. That day over 7,500 men were evacuated from the harbour, and on the 28th over 25,000 from the beaches as well. Clarke spent much of 29 May on the telephone, because one of his duties was to listen to all conversations between Dill and Gort in order to record decisions and notify them to the operations staff and other departments. Clarke lived the war by proxy, imagining the perimeter shrinking in on the retreating army whose next job would likely be to defend England itself.

  The epic of Dunkirk and ‘Operation Dynamo’, organised by Rear Admiral Bertram Ramsey, the miraculous evacuation of a British army by the Royal Navy between 27 May and 4 June 1940, while the RAF fought off enemy planes above, still makes Britons blink with pride. ‘Knowing some of the difficulties,’ wrote John Masefield in The Nine Days Wonder, ‘I should say that the Operation was the greatest thing this nation has ever done.’ But like Corunna and Gallipoli, it was also a debacle, defeat on an enormous scale. ‘Wars are not won by evacuations,’ Churchill warned the House of Commons on 4 June. ‘What has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.’

  King George VI sent Gort a message: ‘The hearts of every one of us at home are with you and your magnificent troops in this hour of peril.’ Gort asked for more fighters to keep the German bombers and dive-bombers off the ports and beaches. Then German artillery began to shell Dunkirk. Soon there were reports of unruly French units retreating from Belgium, and the roads to the coast piling up with transport and marching men.

  Among them, not ten miles away, was my grandfather, Major Geoffrey Page, DSO, who had been in the retreat from Mons and Le Cateau in 1914. He was now a brigade major in a car with two motorcycles, moving slowly along the south side of the Canal de Bergues, on a narrow road clogged with French horse-drawn carts and vehicles. Where needed, the officers ordered men to push cars and lorries into the canal. At the guarded bridge, the only wheeled vehicles being allowed over and inside the British perimeter were staff cars like theirs, and artillery guns. Dunkirk, six miles off, was marked by an enormous mushroom of smoke. 46th Divisional HQ ordered Page’s brigade to hold the line of the Canal de Moeres from Teteghem to Dunkirk:

  Our first job was to collect our brigade from the mass of British troops of all arms who, without transport or organization, were flocking down towards Dunkirk. The B.E.F. had started the war with a mania for incognito and in the crowds of men in battledress it was impossible to recognise our troops. I stood at the road fork near Teteghem shouting ‘138 Brigade, to the right’. I remember a crowd of about 200 men led by a Chaplain, who was shouting ‘Which is the way to Dunkirk?’

  On 30 May, Churchill wrote out an order to Gort, telling him to continue to defend the perimeter, the ‘Corunna line’. He knew that Gort was likely to stay until the last man had left, so Churchill instructed him to hand over to a corps commander and return home ‘when your effective force does not exceed the equivalence of three divisions … It would be a needless triumph to the enemy to capture you.’

  When Gort rang back to protest and found that Dill had gone to a meeting with Churchill, he asked for his call to be transferred. Clarke walked over to the Admiralty to make the connection, and was shown into the War Room where the chiefs of staff were gathered with several cabinet ministers. The Prime Minister was striding up and down, wreathed in cigar smoke, and the atmosphere was tense. Clarke explained his mission and was waved to a red telephone on a desk in the window. Gort was put through to Dill. Every so often Dill turned to repeat the news over his shoulder: the figures of men clear from the beaches, now over 120,000, the number of those waiting, around 80,000, the weather, the perimeter. Then Dill and Gort discussed the rearguard: it was agreed that Major General Harold Alexander and 1st Corps would stay to the end. When the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, took over the telephone to talk naval matters to Gort, Dill stepped back, suddenly pale.

  Mr Churchill noticed it instantly, and interrupted the pacing to step to his side. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked; and the answer came very quietly: ‘My son is with the 1st Corps.’ Nothing more was said. The Prime Minister took the CIGS by the arm in an impulsive gesture of sympathy that was better than any words, and in a moment he was himself again.

  Eventually General Dill picked up the receiver again. Gort was protesting at his recall, but the Prime Minister was insistent. ‘Tell him from me that he is to return according to instructions. That is an Order, and it is not to be questioned – an Order of His Majesty’s Government!’ Later, Churchill took the seat by the red telephone, and gave such a sympathetic message of encouragement to General Gort that Clarke wished it had been recorded for future inspiration.

  The PM began speaking guardedly to Gort about future cooperation with the French. Next day he was in fact planning to fly to Paris to meet the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud. Clarke knew the skies were not safe from the Luftwaffe, yet here was Winston Churchill saying, on a not wholly secure cross-Channel telephone line, ‘I am going to fly with the CIGS to…’ Dudley Clarke therefore put out his hand and switched off the call. This took considerable courage. The Prime Minister looked up with that bulldog glare that Karsh of Ottawa later caught in his famous photo-portrait by daring to snatch Churchill’s cigar away. ‘Please, Sir, it is not safe to speak of these plans on the telephone,’ said Clarke. Churchill stared at him, then Dill intervened and Gort was soon back on the line. ‘There’s somebody here who tells me I mustn’t say what I was going to say,’ the Prime Minister grumbled, with a twinkle, and the conversation continued more discreetly.

  And so they came, sailing across the English Channel to Dunkirk in France, the ‘Mosquito Armada’ of nearly 900 big and little ships – barges and beach-boats, coasters and corvettes, dinghies and destroyers; luggers, minesweepers, oyster-dredgers, skiffs, schuits, sloops, smacks; trawlers and tugs, whalers and wherries, yachts and yawls – to pluck the British soldiers and the French poilus off the broken mole and the bombed beaches and get them back safely to England.

  At 6 p.m. on Friday, 31 May, General Gort was taken off the beach a mile west of La Panne and out to the minesweeper Hebe. During the heaviest Luftwaff
e air raid of the day, the General sat calmly in a corner of the bridge in a borrowed tin hat looking through binoculars at the wrecked and burning beach. Men were shouting, bombs exploding in the water, the 4-inch high-altitude gun on the fo’c’sle just below the bridge was banging away noisily. ‘Won’t you go below and take cover, Sir?’ ‘No, thank you, I’m quite happy where I am.’

  Major Geoffrey Page reached the sands of Malo-les-Bains on the Saturday night. Burning vehicles lit up a long column of troops, six or seven abreast, stretching out into the darkness towards the mole. In front was the sea, and out to sea faint lights. The 46th Division men decided to try their luck there and walked into the water, first to their waists, and then up to their chests. There was a swell and some of the men were beginning to get mouthfuls of brine when out of the dark appeared the first rowing boats. Aboard a paddle steamer, Major Page was plied with whisky and sandwiches, had his clothes dried in the engine room and was delivered to Harwich at noon on Sunday, 2 June, the twenty-first birthday of his only child, my mother. Five days later, my father, Captain Rankin, was evacuated from Harstad in Norway.

  Dunkirk would be put to brilliant propaganda use. ‘What began as a miserable blunder,’ J. B. Priestley said on the wireless the following Wednesday, ‘a catalogue of misfortunes and miscalculations, ended as an epic of gallantry. We have a queer habit – and you can see it running through our history – of conjuring up such transformations.’ Priestley’s talk focused on the little pleasure boats and paddle steamers that were called away from the ‘innocent foolish world’ of British seaside holidays ‘to sail into the inferno … to rescue our soldiers’.