by Iain Gale
The colonel came pushing through the crowd and clapped Lamb on the back. ‘Excellent stuff. According to the Captain we’ve got off a good 1,500 British and 900 Frogs. Not bad for a night’s work.’
‘Not bad at all, sir. Well done. Where’s your souvenir?’
‘In irons in the hold. Where he belongs. Well done, Lamb. Couldn’t have done it without you. We’re going to need men like you and these chaps here to rebuild this army.’
‘But we’ve lost the Division, sir.’
‘Not the whole Division. We’ve taken off almost a brigade here, and Stanley-Clarke’s embarking Arkforce. Besides, you can’t destroy a division. As far as I’m concerned it’s a victory.’
Mays interrupted: ‘Sorry, sir, but there’s someone who needs to speak to you urgently.’
Lamb turned to see Madeleine, standing wrapped in a dark blue naval blanket. Beside her was Crawford, his right arm bandaged in a sling, his head encased above the eye-line with bandages. His face looked horribly sallow and Lamb could only guess what he had been through – but he was smiling: ‘Lamb. What the devil took you so long? We’ve been waiting here for ages. Of course I’ve had the very best medical attention. Your girl here . . .’
‘I thought I’d told you, once and for all . . .’
But then he saw Madeleine’s face and he knew he could not lie any more. He looked at the men around them on the deck – men who had come through hell with him and who lived to fight again. As the destroyer drew ever closer to the English coast he knew, too, that he had accomplished at least in some small way what the colonel had asked of him: a retreat to victory. And for himself, most importantly of all, there would be a new beginning.
Historical Note
The campaign in France in 1940 was one of the bitterest ever fought by a British army. Outgunned and outnumbered by the Germans, the BEF did its best to hold off the enemy offensives, but ultimately, as is well known, was forced to retreat. The story of Dunkirk is the stuff of legend. That of St Valéry however is less well known.
The 51st Highland Division had landed at le Havre in January 1940 and then moved to Belgium where it was attached to the French on the Maginot Line. In May 1940 when Hitler invaded it held the area of the Saar. Then, on May 22nd it was ordered south west in trucks and trains and arrived on May 31st on the lower Somme where it was placed in a reserve line from the coast down to South East of Abbeville.
The divisional commander, Major General Victor Fortune, was fifty-six at the time and enormously respected. Fortune had commanded 1st Black Watch in the First World War and had earned a DSO. The problem for the Highlanders in this new war though was that this time Fortune was answerable to the French.
The 51st had orders to hold the German advance south until General Sir Alan Brooke was able to cross the channel to Le Havre with reinforcements. Of course these reinforcements did not arrive in time and the Highlanders were left isolated.
The Somme here was difficult terrain; a meandering river and a canal with bluffs rising above it, which was soon to be easily defended by the Germans.
For although the 51st was meant to be in defensive role, the French were determined to counter-attack the German bridgehead at Abbeville. Two such attacks were mounted and while the Scots did well, the French were beaten off forcing the Highlanders to retreat. In one day the Highland Division lost twenty officers and five hundred and forty-three other ranks.
On 5th June the Germans themselves counter-attacked in great force and despite resistance drove the Division back to the River Bresle. Communications were down and the battalions could only hold strong-points and were continually bombed and strafed. At one point the 4th Camerons were dive bombed near Martainville by Stukas and could only lie down in clover fields for cover. There, so exhausted were they, that they fell asleep, even though under attack.
By the end of that day a further twenty-three officers and five hundred other ranks had been killed or wounded or were missing.
The latter days of the French campaign were all about confusion in the high command of both allied armies and a lack of clear orders. Fortune’s men could have escaped had they been given the right orders in time and this of course is what Lamb tries so desperately to enable them do.
The French by this stage were all for falling back towards Rouen, away from the sea, intent on defending Paris. Fortune was reluctant but felt obliged to obey them. In his own mind however, he now nurtured the idea of an evacuation from Le Havre, along the lines of Dunkirk.
The French of course would hear nothing of it and eventually, seeing that if he followed the French plan his Division would be taken prisoner, Fortune went over General Altmayer’s head. On June 9th he ordered a fighting withdrawal to Le Havre. However, as he was still under French orders the actual movement could not be carried out before the 13th. And by then it was too late for the Highlanders.
By that time the Division had had no rest since May 30th. The 1st Black Watch for example had held the river bank on the Varenne at Martigny for five hours, under constant attack.
It is vital to realise that the ‘Highland’ Division was not only composed of Highlanders. Fortune’s command also included seven regiments from the Royal Artillery and Royal Horse Artillery, four companies of Royal Engineers, the 2nd/7th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, Princess Louise’s Kensington regiment, 7th Battalion the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, pioneers from the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Norfolk Regiment and sections of the RAOC and RASC.
It is thus quite feasible for Lamb, with his platoon of Black Jackals and the various ‘odds and sods’, to have come under the umbrella of the 51st at this stage in the break up of what was left of the BEF.
Fortune had also created Ark Force, under fifty-three year old Brigadier Arthur Stanley-Clarke, in an attempt to hold a line of evacuation around Le Havre. Included in its ranks were elements from the Border Regiment, the Sherwood Foresters and the fictitious Jackals’ real sister Kentish regiment, the Buffs (Royal East Kents).
On June 10th however, Ark Force was cut off from the rest of the Division by the German advance and it became clear to Fortune that his only plan now was to evacuate from the small fishing port of St Valéry.
The Royal Navy came in to the little harbour on the 11th, providing nine destroyers offshore to take off the Division and tried time and again to get close enough to do so. But by this time the Germans had positioned their powerful 88mm cannon on the cliffs and several ships were lost.
In the end a number of the Highlanders did escape, as Lamb and his men do, further down coast at Veules les Roses, four miles east, where they were taken off by the destroyer Restigouches. In total though only one thousand three hundred and fifty British and nine hundred and thirty French soldiers got away in this way. Ark Force fared rather better, managing to have some four thousand men evacuated from Le Havre over the nights of June 11th and 12th.
Early on the 12th the Germans sent in envoys asking for Fortune’s unconditional surrender. They were rejected and Fortune issued the order ‘every man for himself’. The French had already surrendered but Fortune ordered their white flags to be cut down. But defeat was a foregone conclusion and finally at 10 a.m. on June 12th Fortune took the decision to surrender.
Around eight thousand men from 152 and 153 brigades along with ancillary troops were captured, along with Fortune himself and his staff.
The rank and file were marched off as slave labour to the Nazis’s salt mines in Silesia. Many of them died either there or on the way. Exact figures for those who never returned are hard to find but probably run into thousands. Their officers were sent to Oflag VII-C in Laufennear Salzburg, where to stave off the boredom they famously composed the reel of 51st Division, still a favourite at Highland balls.
St Valéry was one of the greatest disasters ever experienced by the British Army. Far greater than the Charge of the Light Brigade or the First Afghan War. But it has been largely and perhaps deliberately forgotten.
A recent
book by Saul David considers the possibility that Churchill might have been directly to blame for the loss of a division and certainly it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Prime Minister might have been behind such an idea. Churchill, who had served with Scots on the front line in the Great War, was well aware of the special relationship between the Scots and the French that had been nurtured in that conflict and might have reasoned that that if he ‘gave the Scots away’ the French would take this as a pledge of loyalty. He might have considered this necessary as some of the French commanders saw the ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk as a betrayal in which on Churchill’s express orders, ninety percent of the troops evacuated had been British.
Writing later in his account of the war (Their Finest Hour, Second World War, vol ii) Churchill himself declared that his concern was that the 51st might be driven back to Le Havre and thus separated from the other (French) armies. It is a muddled passage. He blames the French: ‘It was a case of gross mismanagement for this very danger was visible a full three days before.’
There can be no doubt that Churchill was determined to support France as long as possible.
Even after Dunkirk he planned a second front and on June 12th, long after the end of the Dunkirk evacuation and the very day on which the 51st surrendered, he eventually sent Alan Brooke with the 52nd Division to Cherbourg as the 2nd BEF. They stayed just four days before being returned home.
Why else too would Churchill’s famous speech made on June 4th, the day after the end of the Dunkirk evacuations, contain the words ‘We shall fight in France, [my italics] 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 . . .’?
Churchill apparently believed that given a show of support, the French would continue the struggle from their colonies, giving Britain enough time before the USA eventually joined in the war.
Churchill might also have thought that the French would order a general retreat before they did so. But if this was the case, then he really was gambling with a Division.
The facts are clear enough. In the early hours of June 8th, the War Office was sent word from the front that unless the 51st Division was given orders to retreat from the River Bresle, it would be surrounded. The War Office sent no order and a vital day was lost before the French agreed to the British withdrawal. Had Churchill at least placed Fortune in command or at least under British orders rather than French, the retreat could have begun immediately and the British being motorized, would have arrived at the embarkation points much sooner than their French allies. This though was something Churchill could not countenance in the face of French fury over what had happened at Dunkirk and so once again the finger points at him.
As late as June 10th, the War Office was still telling the 51st that they could not actually evacuate without direct orders from the French. By then of course it was too late.
While Colonel ‘R’ is a fictitious character, it seems possible that certain inspired and forward-thinking officers of his sort would have operated outside the aegis of the War Office at a time when the Intelligence service was in some turmoil before the establishment of SOE by Churchill and Hugh Dalton in July 1940.
Certainly on occasion it was possible for the generals to exert influence over the Ministers. On the evening of June 14th, Alan Brooke, commander of the 2nd BEF then at Cherbourg, told Churchill in no uncertain terms in a half hour telephone conversation, that it was imperative to evacuate all remaining British forces from France, an idea which up till then the PM had not been willing to contemplate. Brooke recorded in his notes: ‘Churchill told me . . . I had been sent to France to make the French feel that we were supporting them. I replied that it was impossible to make a corpse feel, and that the French Army was, to all intents and purposes, dead . . . He insisted that we should make them feel that we were supporting them, and I insisted that this . . . would only result in throwing away good troops to no avail.’
Surely, here is Churchill using the same argument he had with the 51st Division, even after their loss? This suggestion is strengthened by the fact that even though after their conversation Brooke believed he had been given permission to evacuate the 2nd BEF immediately, he was told the very next day by the War Office that it could not in fact be evacuated and should remain in France ‘for political reasons.’ It was only the following day that he was finally given the go ahead in another counter-counter order from the War Office.
What further proof is needed of Churchill’s capability of using British troops as bargaining tools?
The situation also mirrors that before the Dunkirk evacuation when Lord Gort, commander of the BEF, having decided to evacuate, spoke to the CIGS General Ironside. Ironside was appalled by the idea and advised a withdrawal south to Amiens. Churchill, likewise dumb-founded, far from approving any Dunkirk plan vetoed it and told Ironside to order Gort down to Amiens. It was only on May 25th, when the politicians back in Britain had no alternative but to face the facts, that Churchill agreed to the evacuation from Dunkirk, a ‘miracle’ for which he would later take much of the credit.
It seemed to many that the 51st must be finished after St Valéry. It had after all ceased to exist. But as Colonel ‘R’ tells Lamb, you cannot kill a division.
So it was that the 9th Highland reserve Division then back in Britain was renumbered 51 and its brigades changed from 26, 27 and 28 to 152, 153 and 154. It also incorporated elements of the original 154 brigade which had escaped from St Valéry, notably men of the Argylls and 4th Black Watch.
With Fortune in captivity, the new 51st Highland Division came under the successive commands of Generals Cunningham, Ritchie and Stanley-Clarke. Ultimately though it was General Douglas Wimberley, a Highlander himself, who remade the 51st Division. Known to his soldiers as Tartan Tam, Wimberley had tartan and the new Divisional cipher, HD in red inside a red circle, put on the mens’ shoulders and painted just about everywhere else so that the Division soon became known as the ‘Household Decorators’. By the end of 1941 it was battle-ready and shipped off to Egypt.
Famously, at El Alamein in October 1942, the new 51st Division went forward into the attack with the bagpipes playing and under crossed searchlights which seemed to many like a Scottish saltire of white on blue. The battle was a chance for the Division to take revenge for St Valéry and this they did in full measure.
Two years later, in June ’44, shortly after ‘D’ Day, elements of the 51st retook the Normandy port and five of the original Highlanders who had escaped capture there in 1940 played their pipes in the town square.
As senior British officer in captivity Victor Fortune worked constantly to improve the conditions of his fellow POWs. He suffered a stroke in 1944 but refused repatriation and made KBE shortly after his liberation in 1945. He died in Scotland in 1949.
Colonel George Honeyman was captured at St Valéry. He was awarded the DSO in 1945 and died in Scotland in 1962.
The massacre by the SS Totenkopf Division of ninety-eight civilians and a small garrison of British troops on May 21st 1940 at Aubigny-en-artois is well recorded. The names of the dead are inscribed on a memorial in the village.
The holding action on the bridge at Essars is well known as having been carried off with much bravery by the Royal Irish Fusiliers and in particular by 2nd Lieutenant Mike Horsfall. To avoid any confusion and potential embarrassment concerning the entirely fictitious Captain Campbell, I have changed the names and the regiment to the invented ‘Borderers’. That notwithstanding, Lamb’s run-in with the Captain and his subsequent response are not dissimilar from recorded incidents which took place across northern France during the retreat when command structure and morale broke down. I hope that the reader will forgive this use of author’s licence in order to paint an evocative picture of one of the most troubled moments in the history of the British Army, which nevertheless was distinguis
hed by numerous episodes of extreme heroism, courage and self-sacrifice.
About the Author
IAIN GALE lives in Edinburgh with his wife, children and dogs. He has long been interested in the history of men at war and his most recent novel is Alamein. The Black Jackals is the first of a series featuring Peter Lamb and his men.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
By the same author
Four Days in June
Man of Honour
Rules of War
Brothers in Arms
Alamein
Copyright
Copyright © Iain Gale 2011
Iain Gale asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 0 00 727864 0
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007415786
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The incidents and some of the character’s portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
Map © John Gilkes
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
