As late as 1949 these rumours were still in circulation. On 3 March of that year the Braunschweiger Zeitung published the following letter, written by one Hellmut Kuckat of Isenbuttel:
Prien was neither drowned while bathing nor did he fail to return from an operational patrol. He died on the Wolchow in the ranks of a punishment battalion. A naval lieutenant who was a friend of Prien showed me a snapshot of his grave surmounted by a wooden cross on which his name and rank were painted. Prien and his whole crew were sent to a punishment battalion on the Russian front for making false tonnage claims of sinkings and exaggerating tonnage.
When questioned further by Frank, Kuckat elaborated thus:
I base my statements on talks with a former naval lieutenant who was in my regiment in the Russian front in the autumn of 1944, having been degraded and transferred to our unit from the said punishment battalion. Unfortunately we were separated in the subsequent retreat. I have only recently returned home from Siberia and regret that after all that has happened to me in the meantime I cannot remember his name. I am aware that my story may appear incredible, but I can only pledge my word that I have no other motive than to throw some light on these mysterious happenings in the war.
Although others claimed to have recognised or encountered Prien in various camps, this particular story is just another in the long line of ‘false death’ myths common to both world wars. During the First World War, countless dignitaries and establishment figures were rumoured to have been exposed as spies and shot at dawn, including the chief of the scouting movement, Robert Baden-Powell, pioneer aviator Claude Graham-White and Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. Conversely, a legend arose that Lord Kitchener had not perished when HMS Hampshire was mined off Orkney in June 1916, and was instead alive in a frozen case awaiting his country’s next call. The cult of the undead celebrity grew stronger after the Second World War, and extended to include Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris, Martin Bormann, Glenn Miller and Joseph Kennedy, as we shall later see.
3
The Miracle of Dunkirk
During the course of nine days between 26 May and 3 June 1940, almost 338,000 Allied troops were evacuated by sea from the port of Dunkirk and the surrounding beaches. Myth and legend shroud what was described then – as now – as a miracle, with tales of troops drilling in threes on the Mole, marking time in the surf, and demanding regulation haircuts before departing French soil. To this litany may be added countless motorcycle stunts, innumerable games of cricket on the dunes, and entire divisions lifted by the fabled armada of Little Ships.
In truth, Operation Dynamo was the final page in a chapter of disaster. Yet at the time propagandists wrote up the evacuation as ‘one of the most wonderful episodes in our history’, in which the British Expeditionary Force had ‘marched to Dunkirk to glory’s tune’. No phrase seemed too ambitious: while the BBC declared that the BEF had ‘come back in glory’, the Daily Telegraph hailed ‘DEFEAT TURNED TO VICTORY’, a reversal of fortune which the Daily Mirror in turn praised as ‘BLOODY MARVELLOUS’. The Sunday Dispatch even managed to elevate the deliverance of the BEF into a supernatural odyssey, worthy of the legend of the Angel of Mons:
The English Channel, that notoriously rough stretch of water which has brought distress to so many holiday-makers in happier times, became as calm and as smooth as a pond … and while the smooth sea was aiding our ships, a fog was shielding our troops from devastating attack by the enemy’s air strength.
It has long been accepted that the campaign fought by the Allies in Flanders and France was a débâcle, involving gross errors of strategy and tactics, as well as widespread panic, desertion and summary executions. For the French, moreover, the cherished mythology of Dunkirk was inverted to become one of abandonment and betrayal by her British ally. Within the confines of a single chapter it is impossible to fully explore the various myths and legends surrounding Operation Dynamo, and the entirety of the British campaign in May and June of 1940. Nevertheless, the following is an overview of the falsehoods and misconceptions commonly encountered.
One persistent myth is that the ill-fated BEF was a plucky little army defeated by sheer weight of numbers alone. In May 1940 the Wehrmacht was numerically inferior to the Allies, with 135 divisions and 2.7 million men deployed against an Allied – that is, French, Belgian, Dutch and British – force of 130 divisions and 3.7 million men. The French army alone was able, at least on paper, to field more tanks and front line aircraft than its German opponents. Indeed only 5 per cent of the German strength comprised armoured Panzer divisions, in which fully 90 per cent of the tanks were obsolete training models or Czech vehicles. For the BEF, however, the situation was far worse. It had no proper armoured component until 21 May, with only 24 of the tanks in theatre armed with anything heavier than a machine-gun. Anti-tank guns were in such short supply that further guns had to be purchased from the French in great haste.
Although the BEF was entirely motorised, much of its transport was made up of unreliable vehicles requisitioned from civilian firms in Britain. Most of the Territorial divisions which arrived between January and April 1940 were hastily improvised, short of regular officers, and of varying quality. Training was scant and unimaginative, leadership often mediocre, and for communications most infantry units in France depended on the seldom reliable public telephone system. Many officers were never even issued with revolvers, and the only ammunition available for many 3-inch mortars was smoke. The sub-machine-gun, first developed by Germany in 1918, was still spurned as a Chicago-style gangster weapon, fit for use only by cowards and automatons. According to the correspondent James Hodson:
The general view is that much of the German infantry is poor and will not face bayonets, but that his storm troops often wear armour from throat to waist, and, thus protected, stand upright, armed with ‘Tommy guns’ and turn these to and fro at pretty short range like a hose.
Although little remembered today, gas panics were commonplace among inexperienced troops. On 17 September 1939, exactly two weeks after the outbreak of war, the British Mission at Vauban Madelon cabled the War Office with the alarming news that ‘Germans using gas Western Front today’. The erroneous report was probably French in origin, and was not passed on to the Cabinet, despite prearranged War Office procedure. Following the German attack in May gas panics became an almost daily occurrence. A vivid description of a gas alert on a front of several miles is given by Bernard Gray in his book War Reporter. For one group of Hampshires at Bachy, the odour from an upset bottle of nail varnish fuelled suspicions that fifth columnists were spraying the area with phosgene gas. For the Coldstream Guards, on 14 May, the trigger was the sight of several lorryloads of Belgian troops driving past at ‘a panic-stricken speed’ wearing respirators; for another unit it was the ‘obscene’ appearance of an oxygen cylinder dropped from an aircraft. Tracer bullets, coal gas and ‘an enormous yellow billowy cloud’ of smoke from a burning fuel dump also caused alarms elsewhere.
Other falsehoods which gained currency on the Western Front in April and May 1940 included the canard that the German Siegfried Line had been constructed in haste from inferior concrete, and would crumble as soon as the first shell hit home. It was also said that a large proportion of German tanks were dummies constructed from wood and canvas, a legend which had first made the rounds early in 1939, after an English motorist supposedly collided with one while touring Bavaria. After the German attack on 10 May it was said that German officers had to prod their reluctant troops forward at gunpoint, and that Luftwaffe aircraft were crewed by women. Rumours also flew that other nations had declared war on Germany, including Russia, America, Italy and Finland: all, to a point, echo the celebrated legend of ‘Russians in England’ in August and September of 1914.
So far as the British public was aware, the BEF was superbly trained, and lavishly equipped with modern weapons. But as we have seen, the truth was very different. Indeed the most damning indictment of the preparedness of the British army came from Major-G
eneral Bernard Montgomery, who in 1940 commanded 3 Division, reckoned by some to be the best formation in the entire BEF:
In September 1939 the British Army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe. It had for long been considered that in the event of another war with Germany the British contribution to the defence of the West should consist mainly of the naval and air forces … In the years preceding the outbreak of war no large-scale exercises with troops had been held in England for some time. Indeed the regular army was unfit to take part in a realistic exercise … There was somewhere in France one Army tank brigade. For myself, I never saw any of its tanks during the winter or during the active operations in May. And we were the nation which had invented the tank and were the first to use it in battle, in 1916. It must be said to our shame that we sent our army into that most modern war with weapons and equipment that were quite inadequate, and we had only ourselves to blame for the disasters which early overtook us in the field when fighting began in 1940.
The situation improved little between September 1939 and May 1940. Like Montgomery, few British troops saw a single British tank in France, this despite the fact that the War Office adhered to the outmoded view that the tank was primarily an infantry support weapon, rather than a mobile spearhead. By May 1940 Britain had only 24 tanks in France armed with two-pounder (37 mm) guns, the remaining 76 ‘infantry’ tanks carrying a single machine-gun. None had proper wireless equipment, and most were destroyed during the so-called ‘counter attack’ south of Arras on 21 May. That same day the 1st Armoured Division was landed at Cherbourg, but itself lost 65 tanks on 27 May while supporting a French attack towards Abbeville.
That the Battle of France was lost in just six weeks was due largely to poor strategy and inertia on the part of the French themselves. Nevertheless, command decisions within the BEF were also flawed. On 10 May Gort’s army abandoned the fixed defences on which it had toiled for months, and rushed to advance 75 miles east into Belgium, to the line of the River Dyle. The German breakthrough at Sedan on 14 May left the BEF’s right flank fatally exposed. Gort and his staff had expected a static and slow-moving campaign, with the result that communications quickly collapsed under this unforeseen strain. Although there had been sufficient motor transport for the planned advance, this proved inadequate for an improvised retreat on roads choked with refugees. These problems were exacerbated by an acute shortage of fuel. In all respects the decision to advance into Belgium was a supremely poor one, and contributed much to the overall disaster that befell the BEF. So too did Gort’s decision to split his headquarters and intelligence staffs between Lille and Arras. Despite the fact that there were countless engagements in which British troops displayed gallantry and élan, the simple fact is that as a whole, and at all times, the BEF failed to function effectively as an army.
Accounts of how discipline cracked in some British units during May are legion, yet it would seem there were significant problems throughout the phoney war period. As soon as the BEF landed in France in September 1939, professional criminals within the ranks established contact with French receivers, and began to plunder the British supply lines to feed the French black market. Vehicles arriving from Britain were stripped of spares, tools and accessories, while cigarettes, clothing, cutlery and razor blades were ‘scrounged’ and pilfered by the lorryload. Following an alarming report prepared by a senior Scotland Yard Detective, George Hatherill, the War Office had no option but to hastily assemble a body of 500 men with police experience for immediate dispatch to France. For as Hatherill had discovered:
At almost every port, railway siding and depot I visited it was the same story. Vast quantities of all kinds of disposable commodities were disappearing, often within hours of being landed. Helped by the blackout, by inadequate precautions in buildings and compounds, and the fact that all units of the Provost-Marshal’s office and the Corps of Military Police were overworked and understaffed, thieves and black-marketeers were reaping a tremendous harvest.
With ‘nothing to see but sugar beet and rain’, drunkenness and violence earned British units a poor reputation in many billeting areas. Major D.F. Callander of the 1st Cameronians described his men as ‘very rugged indeed’, with a high incidence of venereal disease and difficult to handle when drunk. In the region of six had to be staked out each night, suspended above the ground, by way of punishment, even in extreme cold. Yet mere drinking and whoring palls beside an unpleasant fact revealed by Tom Willy, a Royal Artillery gunner:
Twice the 30th Field Regiment I was with held identification parades after girls had been raped. The girls picked out the guilty people but their pals gave them alibis and they got away with it.
An infantry officer, Lieutenant Peter Hadley, published a frank account of the retreat to Dunkirk in 1944:
The BEF of 1940 started the Flanders campaign full of a self-confidence due principally to newspaper and other propaganda emphasising the strength and preparedness of the Allied armies. But with the rapid German advance it became gradually and increasingly clear that the Allies were in fact inferior, and that self-confidence had been born of delusion. Blasted from this stronghold, morale fell back to the alternative position where it became dependent on discipline alone.
Even in 1944, this admission was strong meat, and four years earlier would certainly have been censored. Instead, in 1940, and in defeat, the BEF was eulogised as a glorious, defiant force. Witness this testimonial from The New Contemptibles, written by Daily Express war correspondent Douglas Williams:
Not one man failed in his task. Whether he was regular, militiaman or territorial, whether attached to a crack unit with a past history of battle trophies, or to a newly-formed labour unit recruited since the war, one and all fought with the magnificent gallantry that has always made the British soldier, when caught in a trap, the most dangerous of all … The disaster was, to a large extent, redeemed and dignified by innumerable individual acts of heroism and courage.
But this is mere propaganda. It has already been noted that many of the Territorial divisions lacked adequate training and equipment, and careful study reveals that no second line brigade survived its first serious contact with the enemy, or significantly delayed the German advance. Indeed during the first eleven days of the campaign the BEF sustained just 500 casualties. As early as 21 May, in the Belgian town of Wortegem, Peter Hadley described a ‘disorderly mob’ of British soldiers routed by a false report of approaching German armour:
Down the street towards us was straggling a disorderly mob of soldiers, grimy, bloodstained, and obviously badly scared, who pointed wildly up to the church behind them. ‘The Boches are up there!’ they shouted … And they hurried on, looking (if the truth be told) very much like the popular British conception of the Italian army … Then came a more remarkable sight. [We] lit upon a grey-haired captain who was participating in the inglorious cortège.
The description of a friendly-fire incident on a canal bridge near Brussels, given by Alf Hewitt of the South Lancashires, speaks volumes as to the fragile relationship between allies at the sharp end. After a passing body of Belgian troops mistook Hewitt’s section for Germans, and opened fire:
There was nothing we could do but retaliate. We weren’t a rabble like they were, we were well-trained infantry. We had two Bren guns. The action went on for about a minute and then somebody among them blew a whistle and they stopped firing and we sorted ourselves out … When we had a count-up this Belgian officer was crying like a baby … We killed 17 of them and wounded many more. It showed we were a bit more efficient than they were. It was regrettable but we were rather pleased. That was our first action at close quarters, and we had come out of it well.
One of the most disquieting aspects of the retreat to Dunkirk was the large number of executions without trial. The enthusiasm of the French authorities for summary justice has already been discussed in Chapter One, yet British units also took part – if not with the same degree of alacrity, then wi
thout marked reluctance. At Helchin the Grenadier Guards – described as ‘automatons’ by one reporter in the field – executed at least seventeen suspected fifth columnists, while the official history of the Coldstream records, in the vicinity of Coyghem:
May 22nd was likewise quiet, the only excitement being provided by Fifth Columnists among the local inhabitants, a number of whom had to be arrested and shot.
It was the Grenadiers, too, who were later obliged to shoot a number of panic-stricken servicemen at Furnes in order to stabilise the Dunkirk perimeter. This robust approach was not restricted to the Guards. An RASC driver named Cole claimed to have taken part in a firing squad at Tournai, at which eight supposed spies were executed. Driver Cole boasted of prising forth eight bullets from the corpses with his jack-knife, ‘a private memento that war was hell’. Elsewhere Major John Matthew, also of the RASC, records a distasteful scene enacted at his divisional headquarters:
At the entrance were a very tall, heavily built priest and a little elderly peasant, each of them with two soldiers with rifles cocked and fixed bayonets … They were suspected spies awaiting interrogation. Later on, as I came out of the HQ buildings in bright moonlight, the smaller one was being questioned by a French liaison officer, with a revolver pressed into his tummy, and as I passed the little man just collapsed in a heap under the strain. Shortly afterwards they were marched off under escort, whether for further interrogation or for shooting I don’t know. Probably the latter, as in a very short time the escort came back without them, one of them wearing the priest’s hat.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 6
