by John Harris
‘They’ll need everybody they can get,’ he said aloud.
Unknown to Kenny Pepper, the same view exactly was held by the vice-admiral in command at Dover.
He was a man of medium size, quiet, and so unemotional he was considered by some to be rather a cold fish. Before the war he’d been regarded as a failure because, having disagreed with his last chief, he’d thrown up his appointment and had been on the retired list when the demands of the time and his unquestioned ability had brought him back. Appointed to Dover, he’d reported a devastating neglect and said coldly that the place had gone to seed, with the harbour silted up, the facilities inadequate, and the defences and communications deplorable.
His face was grave as he went about his work. The British Government had been faced with the hardest of decisions in the last few days but for the first time, under its dynamic new leader, Churchill, it was dithering no longer. Already there was a new confidence about the signals coming from London, and even the propaganda hand-outs seemed to be recognising that the British people had sufficient intelligence to face facts. The battle in France was finally being spoken of as a major disaster and the government was at last accepting its responsibilities.
Naval headquarters were set up in deep galleries hewn by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, in the cliffs below Dover Castle. The admiral’s office ended in an embrasure at the cliff face and small rooms nearby housed his secretary, flag lieutenant, chief of staff, and the staff itself. The large room beyond, which had once been used to hold an auxiliary electric plant was known as the Dynamo Room.
On that early Sunday morning, as Kenny Pepper made his decision, these offices were full of grim-faced men trying to bring some order out of the chaos. As the situation across the Channel had begun to develop, thoughts had turned naturally to removing the allied troops as the Royal Navy had done in countless earlier campaigns, from one point of contact to another. Up to four days ago nobody had been considering a panic evacuation, and Lord Gort had given instructions to his staff only to get rid of the ‘useless mouths’ of the army who filled the ground between his fighting regiments and the coast. Now, however, with the distant rumble of gunfire audible from Calais, the men in those offices at Dover all knew that this plan had already been terminated.
‘We can no longer expect an orderly evacuation,’ the admiral commented dryly. ‘We must plan for emergencies. What ships are available?’
The chief of staff began to turn over papers and no one spoke because they all knew there were already less than there had been.
‘Keith and Vimy both hit at Boulogne,’ the chief of staff was saying. ‘Both captains killed. Venetia hit. We don’t know yet about damage. On the other hand, Vimiera brought out one thousand four hundred, which seems pretty good considering all cargo handling’s ceased. The French lost Orage, Frondeur and Chacal, with Fougueux damaged.’
The admiral’s face was expressionless. His experience of war went back to 1903 and he was not the type to be dismayed by losses. ‘And at Calais?’ he asked.
The chief of staff frowned. ‘At Calais,’ he said, ‘we lost Wessex, with Vimiera and Burza damaged.’
The admiral studied the papers in front of him. His chief problem at that moment was to secure the area through which the merchantmen moving across the Channel to evacuate the troops would pass. It was going to be difficult because the Germans could already bring guns to bear on a lot of it, and they had light craft operating from Flushing, while he only had a bare flotilla of destroyers to guard the east, cover the routes, establish a protective counter-bombardment and anti-aircraft protection, and sweep the approach channels and the area round Dunkirk itself.
‘Isn’t Vital at Portsmouth?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. Undergoing repairs.’
The admiral nodded. ‘Draft a signal,’ he said. ‘We’ll need her.’
As the admiral’s signal started on its way, Vital was already struggling to get to sea, and her officers, aware of what was coming and conscious that perhaps it was their last chance for a drink, were toasting their chances in the wardroom. Nothing official had been said, and though the newspapers were still admitting nothing beyond the fact that a battle was being fought in France, in Portsmouth, with its antennae reaching out to the Admiralty, it was well known that the British army had suffered a major defeat and was now waiting for the navy to lift it off, as it had at the Dardanelles and a dozen similar operations before.
Vital was small, weighing only just over 1,000 tons, and her armament consisted of four 4-inch guns and six torpedo tubes. She was supposed to be capable of thirty-nine knots but could do only thirty-two because she was long past her prime, and she had just returned from an up-Channel escort voyage limping badly with condenser trouble.
What was of more importance to Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant James Barry Hatton, however, was that she was thin-skinned, and not even on her bridge, where it was his duty to station himself, was there much in the way of protection.
Hatton glanced round him at the rest of the men in the wardroom – the captain, Lieutenant-Commander Neville George Hough – pronounced Huff – the torpedo officer, the navigating officer, the gunnery officer and all the others. They were all regulars except the navigating officer – who wore the twisted braid of the Reserve and came from the Merchant Service – and Hatton was the only man among them who’d not previously followed the sea for a living.
At that moment the chief engineer was making his report to the captain. Despite the gin in his hand it was urgent and forceful. ‘We’ve fixed the condenser, sir,’ he was saying, ‘but there’s a bearing that’s running warm that we ought to look at. If it got really hot, we’d have to stop engines.’
Hatton studied the chief, a square, hairy Scot called MacGillicuddy who’d come up from the ranks. His speech was thick and at meals the way he held his knife and fork wasn’t the way Hatton had been taught. Hough seemed indifferent to such faults, however, and Hatton knew it was because the chief, whatever else he might lack, had a thorough knowledge of his job.
Which was something Hatton did not possess.
Before the war he’d worked for the Kent Messenger at Dover but, with an adoring girlfriend on The East Kent News who had a flat, and well-organised to avoid too much work, he’d been stupid enough to throw it all up for a job on a big and bouncy national in London where, in September, 1939, everything had suddenly come to a full stop, and Hatton had found himself without a job.
For a grim fortnight he’d allowed himself to be employed by the Greater London Air Raid Precautions Authority as a telephonist, sitting in a cellar at Islington reading paperbacks, and it was his loathing for the job rather than any sense of patriotism which had driven him to the navy recruiting office to insist that they take him under their wing. With the background of a minor public school and a father who was a Church of England parson, he’d done a quick trip in an armed merchant cruiser before being given a commission as a captain’s secretary. He’d now been in Vital for a matter of one week, still conscious of being an amateur in a wardroom full of professionals.
He glanced towards the captain again. Hough was having to make his decision and he did so without any trace of being aware of the responsibility it entailed.
‘I think we’ll have to chance it, Chief,’ he was saying. ‘I’ve just been warned there are a few soldiers in a bit of trouble near Dunkirk and that we might be needed.’
The chief engineer nodded, downed his gin and disappeared, and Hough turned back to the others. Hatton watched him, his mind full of envy. Very early in his sea-going career he’d decided to write a vast novel about the navy which would expose all the time wasted on parade grounds learning to salute properly, present arms and come to a halt without falling over himself. In recent weeks, however, he’d taken to thinking about it again and was slowly beginning to see that those early weeks had done more than that. They’d taught him instant obedience and – in action with the enemy, he suspected – the habit of not discussing eve
rything first was what won a battle. When the time for action came, he imagined, life or death would depend on one thing only – the decision of Neville George Hough, who, despite his youth, had been trained ever since school to know exactly what the navy expected of him.
As he thought about it, Sub-Lieutenant Hatton realised that within a matter of days – perhaps even hours – he was going to have to face up to the climax of his life, and he wondered if he’d been good enough in terms of honesty and decency to fit him for the demands it might make. He had a feeling he ought to be communing with some inner spirit, steeling himself for the ordeal he knew was about to come. But, try as he might, that Sunday afternoon, the only thing that would come into his mind was the memory of the shabby way he’d treated Nora Hart when he’d left Dover that spring morning in 1939 to catch the train that took him to London. He wondered uneasily if she’d ever forgiven him and, suddenly, unexpectedly, if she were still in Dover.
While Sub-Lieutenant Hatton struggled with his conscience and his memories in Portsmouth, a man, who, in effect, was his counterpart on the opposite side was staring at a dead man near Asquellines in France. To Walter Boner Scharroo, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, it had seemed at first to be a privileged position to be accompanying the German land forces as a representative of United Associated Press. Now, wracked by weariness, his face burnt bright-red by the sun, he wasn’t so sure.
Attached to a propaganda company hitched to a reconnaissance squadron, he’d considered himself a very lucky man. It was not the practice to allow foreign correspondents to be so far up at the front, but Walter Boner Scharroo had a cousin with the ear of the German Propaganda Minister himself and he was following close behind the spearheads of the German army.
He had got the job not only because his cousin knew Goebbels but also because he spoke German like a native. His father had been a Belgian from Kontrijk who’d emigrated to America. His mother’s name had not been Boner but Böner, and she’d come from Hamburg. Because she was the dominant member of the family and his father had died young, they’d spoken German in the home rather than Flemish or French or even English, and he’d associated with German-Americans rather than any other ethnic group.
Uninvolved, untouched by emotion, he’d found the speed and efficiency of the Germans incredible. This, he’d felt, was how the Americans would do the job. Hitler’s war machine worked on oiled wheels. The French machine, rusted and neglected, had fallen apart at the first sign of strain, and their defeat was caused less by the weight of German arms than by the moral degradation of a nation long since undermined by her outdated political system, and years of distrust and contempt for governmental authority.
He’d followed the panzer tracks through the Ardennes, and for a fortnight now had watched the dusty streams of defeated French soldiers heading heavy-footed to imprisonment. He’d firmly expected the same thing to happen with the British, but somehow in the north things had been different. The Dutch and Belgians had resisted fiercely, opening their dykes and flooding their land before the panzers, and jolting in his little Opel, his mouth parched, his eyes gritty with the dust from the thundering wheels of the Führer’s mechanical might, Scharroo had felt the first twinges of uneasiness about Germany. In the eyes of the man in Berlin, victory would not stop in France, and he tried to imagine what it would be like to see these grey uniformed jack-booted figures strutting through Milwaukee.
Suddenly the column halted so abruptly he almost ran into the lorry in front. As he slammed on the brakes, he saw soldiers jumping out of the back and waving him away, and almost at once he heard the tearing sound of a Schmeisser machine gun, like the ripping of cloth.
Leaving the car with its rear tucked into a hedge, he began to run down the lane in the heat of the afternoon sun. From up ahead there was another spattering of fire but the Germans seemed untroubled by it and were standing behind their vehicles, sticking helmeted heads out in the hope of seeing where it came from.
‘Was ist denn da drüben los?’ he asked. ‘What’s all the fuss?’ The young German in front of him was leaning against the tailboard of a lorry, a young blond god with two days’ growth of beard on his cheeks, his clothes layered with white dust.
‘The Tommies,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon polish them off.’
He was eating from a mess-tin full of cherries he and his friends had rifled from an orchard in one of the hot little valleys behind them. His face was brown and his teeth were white like his eyes with the brilliant whiteness of youth.
Like the young German, Scharroo didn’t expect the resistance to last long. The advance had gone exactly according to plan. They’d known all the way just where the dumps of petrol and water would be, where the food would be, where to obtain the local maps, the condition of the roads, and how many refugees there were in front. It had been a triumph of organisation, though Scharroo realised it probably involved some treachery too.
While he waited, he heard the harsh grate of a radio and the shrilling of whistles. Almost immediately, another spattering of firing broke out and this time he knew it was not German. Then he heard the thump of a gun, and the screech of a shell whistling overhead and decided it was time to head for the ditch. Several of the Germans went with him, but most of them stayed where they were, merely ducking their heads and laughing at their friends’ nervousness. Up ahead he heard a muffled explosion and saw a column of smoke rise into the air.
‘They’ve hit one of the lorries,’ someone said – indignantly, as though the enemy weren’t playing the game – then Scharroo saw men running forward, their equipment bouncing on their backs, among them the blond young god, still cramming cherries into his mouth as he ran.
The firing ahead was growing stronger now and a sergeant came running along the column, shouting, ‘Get those lorries away! Get them away!’
The drivers ran to the cabs, and the vehicles started to back and fill as they turned in the narrow road. For a moment there were all the signs of panic and Scharroo saw another lorry burst into flames and the driver running from it, beating with his hands at the flames springing from his jacket. Other vehicles – lorries, scout cars, motor cycles – came through the smoke, and the men who had moved forward so arrogantly appeared to be having second thoughts about their invincibility.
The lorries had vanished behind a bend in the road now, with the exception of two up ahead, which were slewed slantwise across the tarmacadam – one of them in the hedge. They were burning furiously, and suddenly the air seemed full of flying pieces of metal as Scharroo crawled back to where he’d left his car. The din was terrific with the chatter of machine guns and the steady pop-pop of rifles, and above it the thump of the hidden gun ahead.
Gingerly raising his head, Scharroo saw two or three figures lying in the dust, one of them without a leg and apparently trying to bite the ground in its agony. The chattering of the guns went on and he saw leaves drifting down through the sunlight as they were snipped from the branches above his head. Nearby an officer, his head well down, was shouting into a radio microphone, and just alongside Scharroo a sergeant was cursing furiously in steady gusts at the men ahead.
It seemed humiliating to crouch there in the afternoon sun and Scharroo was beginning to think they’d be there for the night when he heard the roar of engines and the clatter of tank tracks.
‘Here are the panzers,’ the sergeant yelled, his grin reappearmg.
The tanks rumbled round the corner where the lorries had vanished, the grey snouts of the guns poking forward, and the sergeant went wriggling along the ditch to where they waited. The tank commander seemed to be trying to pin-point his enemy and Scharroo saw the gun swing. The crash of the shot jarred his teeth and made him jump, and lifting his head, he saw it had torn aside part of the hedge.
Then the second tank fired, the hedge burst into flames, and the Germans jumped from the ditch and began to run. The rattle of machine pistols and tommy guns started again. Then it was all over and everything was silent except for
the crackle of flames and the distant drone of an aeroplane high overhead. The officer was walking forward now, his pistol in his hand, and Scharroo saw the sergeant shove a man in khaki uniform through the hedge. He fell on his knees in the ditch, then rose slowly, his hands in the air. Several more men followed and stood in a group in the dusty road, their hands on their heads.
The Germans were surrounding the Englishmen now, their grins reappearing, their confidence returned. One of them gestured derisively at the weary captives and at the still shapes sprawled under the hedge, and there was a gust of laughter. There was something cold-hearted in it that chilled Scharroo. Even in war there seemed room for compassion and he suddenly had a feeling that these ardent young Nazis had had it drilled out of them, as efficiency had been drilled in.
The officer was telling off three men to escort the English soldiers to the rear now and the sergeant was moving among the German dead, getting their names from their identity discs.
‘Four,’ he announced.
‘Leave ’em,’ the officer ordered. ‘And get the wounded sent to the rear. It’s time we moved on.’
Shouts sent the soldiers running back to the lorries. Scharroo followed them, but the front of his Opel was crushed, as though one of the tanks had caught it as it had turned. The lorries were beginning to move again now, stirring the dust in the afternoon sunlight, and as they jerked forward they crossed a trail of blood where one of the wounded had dragged himself from the road to safety.
The Englishmen were stumbling to the rear now, pushed into line by their guards, and the German dead had been laid in a neat row at the side of the road for the labour battalions following behind to collect. As he passed them, Scharron noticed that one had golden hair and that his mouth was stained with the red juice of cherries.
While Scharroo was still staring at the dead German, Lieu-tenant Basil Allerton, temporarily attached to the Field Security Branch of Intelligence in the Third Division of the BEF, found himself near the village of St André just to the north of Armentières. After nine months on active service during which the war had seemed only a bore, he was beginning to wake up to the fact that it was instead a dead weight of disaster.
