Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued cooperation with France. The eyes of the Empire are on the defence of Calais, and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.

  Only on the night of 26 May was Nicholson told that the defence of Calais was required to buy time at Dunkirk, and exhorted that ‘every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF’. In his memoirs, Churchill was adamant that this stand alone paved the way for the whole of Operation Dynamo:

  It was painful thus to sacrifice these splendid, trained troops, of which we had so few, for the doubtful advantage of gaining two or three days … Calais was the crux. Many other causes might have prevented the deliverance of Dunkirk, but it is certain that the three days gained by the defence of Calais enabled the Gravelines waterline to be held, and that without this, even in spite of Hitler’s vacillations and Rundstedt’s orders, all would have been cut off and lost.

  Yet this is untrue. The Germans committed just one armoured division out of seven against Calais, 10 Panzer, which had trailed behind other formations, and could not have reached the Dunkirk perimeter line along the Aa Canal before Hitler issued his infamous halt order at 11.24 am on 24 May. The German attack was not resumed until the morning of 27 May, by which time Calais had fallen, while even then 10 Panzer were sent in the opposite direction, to guard the coast between Calais and Audresselles. By the time Guderian decided to send 10 Panzer east towards Dunkirk, the port had been encircled by six other German armoured divisions. Nicholson died while a prisoner of war, haunted by a mistaken belief that he had failed his country. Yet as Guderian confirmed in his memoir Panzer Leader:

  As the commander on the spot I am able definitely to state that the heroic defence of Calais, although worthy of the highest praise, had no influence on the development of events outside Dunkirk.

  In some respects, the needless sacrifice of the garrison at Calais palls beside the almost total loss of the 51st (Highland) Division sixteen days later. As part of IX Corps under General Victor Fortune, the Division was initially sent to man French defences on the Maginot Line, and subsequently found itself cut off from the rest of the BEF by the rapid German advance. After being placed under direct French command the 51st was committed to the defence of the line of the River Somme, but as the situation deteriorated found itself trapped. Although the Division could have escaped by making for Le Havre or Dieppe, Fortune was denied permission by the French commander, Weygand, and finally found himself hemmed into the small harbour of St Valéry-en-Caux. According to Churchill, the loss of the 51st was down to ‘gross mis-management’ by the French:

  I was vexed that the French had not allowed our Division to retire on Rouen in good time, but had kept it waiting till it could neither reach Havre nor retreat southward, and thus forced it to surrender with their own troops. The fate of the Highland Division was hard, but in after years not unavenged by these Scots who filled their places, recreated the division by merging it with the 9th Scottish, and marched across all the battlefields from Alamein to final victory beyond the Rhine.

  This interpretation is highly ingenuous. By 8 June the position of the Highland Division had become so precarious that senior British commanders suggested to Churchill that it should operate independently. Instead, as with the garrison at Calais, the Division was deliberately sacrificed by Churchill in furtherance of a misguided policy of being seen to support France come what may. More than 10,000 troops marched into captivity from St Valéry on 12 June, together with another 1,000 taken on the Somme and in the Saar. From his prison camp, Major Wattie McCulloch offered this appraisal:

  At this time France was on the verge of collapse and every effort was being made to keep her in the war. It was no doubt thought that the desertion by the Division at this point of its French comrades would be fatal to the negotiations. One is forced to conclude that it was deliberately sacrificed as a political pawn. Whether this sacrifice was worthwhile is not for me to say. In the light of after events, it seems not.

  A second BEF comprising of the 52nd (Lowland) Division and the 1st Canadian Division had been landed in France a week earlier, on 12 June, and the leading brigade also placed under French command. After just two days its reluctant commander, General Brooke, was informed by Weygand that the French were ‘no longer capable of armed resistance’. Only on 16 June did Churchill finally allow Brooke to begin re-embarking his troops, the last of them leaving only after the new French government had set about negotiating an armistice. A farcical suggestion that British troops assist in holding a ‘redoubt’ in the Brittany peninsula thankfully came to nothing, despite Churchill’s enthusiastic support.

  It is well known that the initial campaign in France and Flanders resulted in an almost total loss of British equipment: 82,000 vehicles, 2,472 guns, 8,000 Bren guns, 76,000 tons of ammunition, and almost half a million tons of stores and supplies. Astonishingly, the second BEF also managed to leave behind a vast amount of stores, including 24,000 tons of munitions. The report of the Howard Committee, delivered several months later, determined that myth and rumour had been partly responsible:

  There was a tendency, both at Headquarters and at the ports, to pay too much regard to unauthenticated reports and rumours … A robust determination not to be stampeded by unverified reports and hypothetical fears of disaster would have allowed more time for an orderly and successful evacuation.

  Although some 144,000 British personnel (mostly comprising base troops and the reformed BEF) were evacuated from France in relatively good order after Dunkirk, disaster struck on 17 June when the liner Lancastria, containing up to 9,000 men, was bombed off St Nazaire. The ship sank within fifteen minutes, and upwards of half the men on board perished, many of them RAF personnel. News of the disaster was censored, as Churchill explained in his memoirs:

  When this news came to me in the quiet Cabinet Room during the afternoon I forbade its publication, saying: ‘The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least.’ I had intended to release the news a few days later, but events crowded upon us so black and so quickly that I forgot to lift the ban, and it was some time before the knowledge of this horror became public.

  News of the loss of the Lancastria appeared in The Times only on 25 July, after American newspapers had covered the story, and like the miracle of Dunkirk was quickly mythologised. Churchill downplayed the numbers involved, estimating that only 5,000 had been on board, of whom 3,000 had perished. Whatever the true figures, at a stroke this catastrophe brought about the deaths of more than twice the estimated 2,000 fatalities caused by air attacks on shipping at Dunkirk.

  In France, the evacuation of the BEF – from Dunkirk, and from ports further west – is still seen as a betrayal rather than a miracle. Yet the unpalatable truth is that the Battle of France was lost even before war broke out. France failed to construct the vaunted Maginot Line all the way to the sea, and as the German attack developed in May, her armies – static, and geared to a defensive war – failed to provide an adequate substitute for the missing fixed line. Thanks to flawed dispositions and an inadequate command system, General Gamelin was unable to field a reserve at the critical moment. As Churchill later recalled:

  I then asked: ‘Where is the strategic reserve?’ and, breaking into French, which I used indifferently (in every sense): ‘Où est la masse de manoeuvre?’ General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of his head and a shrug, said: ‘Aucune.’

  This passage may have given rise to a myth of its own, for in 1949 Gamelin claimed he had not answered ‘There are none’ but rather, ‘There are no longer any’. Yet Gamelin had himself written of his own armies on 18 May:

  The regrettable instances of looting of which our troops have been guilty at numerous points on the front offer manifest proof of … this indiscipline … Too many failures to do their duty in battle have occurred, permitting the enemy to exploit local s
uccesses, to turn the flank of the most gallant defenders, to wreck the execution of the leaders’ concept and know-how. The rupture of our dispositions has too often been the result of an every-man-for-himself attitude at key points, local at first, then quasi-general.

  Churchill still harboured vain hopes of keeping the French, and their Fleet, in the war, and to this end was prepared to sacrifice the garrison at Calais and the Highland Division. Yet France had already lost the will to fight, and indeed among many in France the idea took root that Britain had dragged their nation into an unnecessary war, while providing inadequate and half-hearted military support. Early in July the future Vichy prime minister, Admiral Darlin, informed a group of French naval officers that the British had prepared for the withdrawal of the BEF in secret long before it became a military necessity, while the head of the French Mission to the BEF concluded that France had supported the wrong side. The French Government refused to continue the war in exile, no politician of note made their way to Britain, and thus early in July it was found necessary to disable the French fleet by force at Oran and elsewhere.

  Against this background, charges of abandonment and betrayal appear churlish. No fewer than 123,000 French troops were evacuated to Britain from Dunkirk, and 47,000 from other Channel ports. The task was not made easier by the refusal of many French troops to embark unless fully equipped, and with the rest of their unit. In the aftermath of the evacuation rumours abounded in France of French troops being forced out of boats and off the Mole, but these owed less to fact than to crude but effective German propaganda. Many French personnel were trans-shipped straight back to ports in the west of France, in the hope that they would return to the battlefield. Few did, and as many simply bolted or waited to be captured. True, some French units fought hard and well, particularly during the closing stages of the battle in June, but these proved the exception rather than the rule, which was that the bulk of the French army had no taste for the fight.

  Of those who reached Britain, few elected to remain to carry on the war. Indeed after General de Gaulle toured the vast camps at Trentham Park, Aintree, Haydock, St Albans and Harrow Park, just 7,000 officers and men rallied to the Free French cause by the end of July. Then with the Field Security Police, Malcolm Muggeridge later recalled:

  Some months later I had occasion to visit the French troops temporarily housed in Olympia. They still looked forlorn, despite a group of local girls who had gathered to stare appreciatively at them. I asked one or two about General de Gaulle, and whether they proposed to join the Free French, but they only shrugged and made non-committal remarks. Most of them, I heard later, opted for repatriation.

  Many French historians have rationalised their nation’s catastrophic defeat with tales of German tank armies opposed by riflemen alone, and swarms of unopposed Stukas diving mercilessly from the skies. Under closer scrutiny, however, each one of these myths evaporates. In 1939 France could field 2,342 tanks against Germany’s 2,171, a formidable armoured force which included the fast, well-armed Somua S35 and Char B1 models that were superior to all British and most German types. The situation was broadly similar in the air. For the invasion of France the Luftwaffe fielded a total of 2,670 aircraft, of which 1,000 were fighters, against 3,289 modern aircraft of the Armée de l’Air, including no less than 2,122 fighter types. A subsequent claim by the French air chief, General Joseph Vuillemin, that ‘our air force ran into an enemy that outnumbered it by five to one’ is patent nonsense, particularly given that between 10 May and 12 June the French took delivery of 668 new fighters, so that their combat strength in the air actually increased during the battle. Although it is commonly alleged that the RAF did next to nothing during the Battle of France and over Dunkirk, its combat losses exceeded those of the French air force.

  Why, then, did the Armée de l’Air prove so ineffective in May 1940? The simple answer is that less than a quarter of its strength was committed to the battle in the north-east. As for the remainder, early attacks by the Luftwaffe on French airfields led to undamaged aircraft being dispersed in haphazard fashion to civilian airports, reserve bases and training fields, without any proper record kept. Deliveries from factories were also diverted from front line units to areas of safety. And so it came to pass that 150 fighters could be seen parked at Tours while the battle raged 200 miles north-east, and that after the Armistice some 1,700 front line aircraft were discovered on airfields in the unoccupied zone. The Italian Control Commission, when reporting on North Africa in 1940, found no fewer than 2,648 modern French combat aircraft there, over 700 of them fighters, many brand new.

  More astonishing still is the fact that little, if any, of this equipment was put beyond use. The result, by way of shameful example, was that many of the estimated 7,000 French 75 mm weapons captured intact by Germany would be used to deadly effect against the Allies in Normandy four years later.

  4

  The Massacre That Never Was

  Among the most shameful episodes to occur on the road to Dunkirk in May 1940 were the massacres of almost 200 British prisoners of war by troops of the Waffen-SS. At Le Paradis on 27 May, 97 men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment were machine-gunned in a meadow by infantry from the Totenkopf Division, while at Wormhoudt the following day some 80 men of the Royal Warwickshire and Cheshire Regiments were herded into a barn by a detachment of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and brutally dispatched with bullets and grenades. Despite initial disbelief, both atrocities were later established as fact, and the officer responsible at Le Paradis, Fritz Knochlein, convicted and hanged in January 1949.

  Yet even these twin tragedies are tainted by myth. For in recent years a damaging falsehood has entered into circulation, namely that these massacres were provoked by the killing of a larger number of SS prisoners by men of the Durham Light Infantry near Arras several days earlier, on 21 May. The allegation, which if true would amount to a major war crime, was made by journalist Nicholas Harman in his book Dunkirk – The Necessary Myth, first published in 1980. According to Harman:

  The distasteful truth is that men of the Durham Light Infantry did murder an unknown number of Germans who had surrendered, and were legitimate prisoners of war. The DLI advanced, took prisoners and were then forced to retreat. They could not take the prisoners back with them, so they killed the SS men rather than set them free to fight again. That, at least, is how some of the surviving members of the DLI describe the event.

  Harman went on to assert that other British army units ‘paid the price in blood’ for these ‘previous murders’ a few days later, when the Totenkopf and Leibstandarte units carried out the killings at Le Paradis and Wormhoudt. Although the central charge against the DLI failed to excite much interest when it first appeared in print, the fiftieth anniversary of Operation Dynamo saw it repeated unchecked by at least two other authors, as well as by Harman in the revised edition of his own book. In Pillar of Fire – Dunkirk 1940 (1990), published in association with the Imperial War Museum, Ronald Atkin stated:

  What was presented to the world as ‘the Arras counter-attack’ had far reaching consequences … Anger and resentment among the SS at reported atrocities against their comrades taken prisoner was one of the main causes of two massacres of British captives at the end of the same week.

  Atkin also referred elsewhere to ‘rumours of ill-treatment of German prisoners’ taken at Arras, although no sources were given. In his otherwise highly regarded study The Myth of the Blitz (1991), Angus Calder also repeated the allegation:

  While SS troops did cold-bloodedly murder 170 British prisoners in two separate incidents, this was after men of the Durham Light Infantry had killed a great many (perhaps 400) SS men who were legitimate prisoners of war.

  A later essay by Brian Bond, The British Field Army in France and Belgium 1939–40, refuted Harman’s main allegation, yet still managed to lend the myth a measure of weight:

  The excuse of the SS units involved was that they were retaliating for British massacres of German p
risoners during the fighting round Arras on 21 May.

  The charge levelled by Nicholas Harman is a grave one. Yet the simple fact is that no such massacre took place in the vicinity of Arras on 21 May, either by the DLI or by any other British unit. As we shall see, at their highest Harman’s allegations were based on hearsay, coincidence and slight historical research, while sailing perilously close to the law of libel. They also stand as a textbook example of the way in which mere speculation can become ‘fact’ by virtue of simple repetition. In order to understand the origin of this myth more fully, a brief summary of the historical background is required.

  Having attacked France and the Low Countries on 10 May, German forces crossed the River Meuse at Sedan and Dinant on the 14th and 15th, and then advanced rapidly westwards. By 20 May they had reached Amiens, and also Abbeville on the Channel coast. The speed of this advance created a long and perilously narrow corridor, however, which was vulnerable to attack. Against his better judgement, Lord Gort succumbed to Churchill’s demand for a counter-attack at Arras, the traditional rallying point for the British army in France, to be carried out by the BEF’s sole tank brigade together with a mixed force of gunners, motorcycle scouts, and two Territorial battalions of the DLI. There were also elements of a depleted French light mechanised division with about 60 Somua tanks. Facing this inadequate force were elements of three German divisions: 7th Panzer, commanded by Major-General Erwin Rommel, 8th Panzer and the motorised SS-Totenkopf. Due to a total lack of air reconnaissance the strength and dispositions of the enemy were unknown to the Allies, and from the outset the Arras attack was a typically forlorn BEF venture. Both the tanks and the DLI were obliged to travel great distances to reach the start line, and arrived late and exhausted. Maps were scarce, artillery support delayed, and radio contact between units poor where it even existed. Nonetheless, at 2 pm on 21 May the mixed British force began to move south in two columns, initially on roads about three miles apart.