The left-hand column, consisting of 6 DLI, 4 RTR and assorted anti-tank units and motorcycle scouts, set out towards Hénin via Ecurie, Achicourt, Dainville and Beaurains. The column on the right, comprising 8 DLI, 7 RTR and similar anti-tank and recce support, followed a route which wheeled round the west of Arras through Maroeuil, Warlus and Vailly to Boisleux-au-Mont. 9 DLI followed both columns as a reserve. The RTR’s total strength was some 75 tanks, although of these only 16 were heavy Mk II Matildas armed with two-pounder guns, the remainder being obsolete Mk Is armed with machine-guns, and a scattering of other light tanks. Nevertheless, on both flanks the tanks met with initial success against surprised German infantry and gunners, and in the evening held their own against 7 Panzer in a tank battle which began at about 7 pm. It was at this stage that the inexperienced infantry of Totenkopf are said to have panicked and fled from the field in large numbers, although these reports have been overplayed.
Convinced that hundreds of British tanks were advancing, Rommel took personal control of his gun batteries and succeeded in checking the British armour around Beaurains and Wailly, some three miles short of its objective. Indeed this action itself gave rise to the myth that the future Desert Fox saved the day at Arras by employing the deadly 88 mm anti-aircraft gun in an improvised anti-tank role. This is clearly false, since even these powerful guns would have been largely useless against tanks unless they had already been issued with armour-piercing shells. With the attack halted by fierce anti-tank fire and unopposed dive bomber attacks, the British force was obliged to withdraw after a single day of fighting, having lost more than half their tanks and suffering perhaps 200 infantry casualties. More a swipe than a counter-attack, the loss of so much armour made the battle a disaster. But the counter-attack had at least served to dislocate and delay the German advance by 48 hours, inflicting considerable damage in the process, and allowing four British divisions and a large part of the French 1st Army to withdraw towards the Channel ports. In addition, it caused consternation among higher German commanders, Guderian and Rundstedt included, and may have contributed to the delay in the eventual attack on Dunkirk.
Harman’s allegations concerning the massacre of an unknown – but apparently ‘large’ – number of German prisoners by both 6 and 8 DLI were based in part on ‘personal interviews’ with two former DLI men, one an officer and the other a warrant-officer. Neither has ever been identified, and in February 2002 Harman told this author that he had mislaid all relevant papers, and forgotten their names. Whether either man was an eyewitness is hard to tell, as the core of Harman’s evidence was limited to this:
There followed some incidents for which there is no satisfactory explanation. The official history of the DLI has this to say, in its account of the advance of the 8th Battalion:
‘C Company, in company with some French tanks, then attacked a cemetery near Duisans where some 100 Germans had taken refuge from the Royal Tank Regiment. When they occupied it, they found only 18 alive and the French stripped them down to the skin and made them lie face down on the road until it was time to take them away.’
The war diary of the First Army Tank Brigade (composed of the two RTR battalions) notes more vaguely: ‘At one time a large number of prisoners were taken – these were handed over to the infantry.’ The war diary of 6 DLI records that ‘large numbers of prisoners were taken.’ On the only surviving copy of this document, in the Public Record Office at Kew, the number of prisoners taken was recorded. In the process of clipping it into a file, the digit preceding the two zeros in the total has been cut out of the paper. Other sources, notably the semi-fictional Return Via Dunkirk, by Gun Buster, put the number of prisoners at 400. There is no subsequent trace of these prisoners.
Since the only specific location mentioned by Harman is Duisans, the action around the cemetery merits close examination. The ‘official history’ quoted was not official at all, but instead a book written in 1953 by David Rissik which borrowed heavily from an earlier study by two former DLI officers, Peter Lewis and Ian English. Indeed English, as the officer in charge of 8 DLI’s carrier platoon, had himself taken part in the Arras attack. Their account records:
C Company was soon in action. Supported by a few French tanks they attacked a cemetery about half a mile to the west of Duisans where over a hundred Germans had taken refuge when the British armour had passed through the village. The French tanks raked the cemetery area with machine-gun fire and when the infantry advanced they found only 18 Germans alive. The remainder had been mown down by the French gunners. The survivors were handed over to the French who stripped them to the skin and forced them to lie face downwards in the road until it was time to take them away.
This account, published in 1949, makes clear that these luckless German troops had been bottled up in the cemetery and shot up by three French tanks, and the survivors then rounded up by C Company of 8 DLI at about 4.30 pm. According to one account, some of the Germans in Duisans were howitzer crews from 8 Panzer, while it seems a number of others managed to escape from the cemetery into nearby woods. The conduct of the French armoured unit involved is arguably questionable. Lieutenant Ian Pitt, the intelligence officer with 8 DLI, was present at the scene and recalled in 1989:
We came to the cemetery at Duisans just after some French tanks had attacked German motorized infantry along the adjacent Arras-St Pol road. There were many German vehicles on fire. One German sergeant in a pitiful condition with both legs severed looked up at me and said ‘shoot me’, but I could not do it.
Some Germans who had escaped the hail of French fire had run into the cemetery and were hiding among the gravestones. Our French liaison officer came up to me and said: ‘Look, our tanks have got some Germans bottled up in the cemetery, but our men don’t want to have to get out of their tanks to flush them out. Will your men come and get them out?’ I went into the cemetery with a Frenchman. The First World War gravestones were freshly chipped with machine-gun bullets from the French tanks. There must have been 18 to 20 very frightened young Germans lying there. Brandishing my revolver, I shouted: ‘Heraus! Heraus!’
The Germans scrambled up with their hands above their heads. ‘You English?’ one man asked me. After the hammering they had taken from the French, they seemed relieved to see an English soldier. We marched them out. A French sergeant appeared and we handed the prisoners over to him. He started to push them around a bit, and made them strip to their underpants and lie down on the road. I thought all this was a bit unnecessary, though, of course, we were in the middle of a fluid battle situation and this was an effective way of making PoWs immobile. These Germans were, I believe, then passed to the rear under escort.
Another dozen or so Germans were captured by B Company in a wooded area closer to Duisans. A larger number of prisoners were taken by 4 RTR and 6 DLI on the left flank, while advancing towards Agny and Achicourt. Most of these men were from the 6th and 7th Rifle Regiments of 7 Panzer. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Harry Miller, commanding the left-hand column, the morale of these troops ‘was low and they seemed always to be quite ready to be taken prisoner’. Second Lieutenant Tom Allison, a platoon commander in C Company 6 DLI, also noted:
My platoon went after about 50 Germans hiding in a summer house. They all came out with their hands up. A sergeant and some men captured another 50 or so nearby, so in all we had about 100 prisoners. At this stage some Stukas started to make things unpleasant. It was decided that we had better get the prisoners well to the rear. I was ordered to take charge of a ten-soldier escort. The prisoners were quite cheerful, certainly in better shape than we were, and some of them said they were Austrians. We gave the prisoners cigarettes, and quite a bit of talk took place between the escort and the prisoners.
At Battalion HQ we were told to get them back to 151 Brigade HQ. This was at a place north of Arras [Vimy], about two hours’ march away. I shared a motorcycle with another man and we rode up and down the column keeping it on the move. The only hint of trouble cam
e when passing through the French villages, where civilians shouted insults at the ‘Boche’.
Other prisoners were taken by 6 DLI, including several German anti-tank gunners in the vicinity of Beaurains, and all were under guard by about 4 pm. In addition, motorcycle scouts from the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers also took another 40 prisoners at Dainville. Their numbers were further swelled by the 30 or so captured by 8 DLI on the right flank, so that the total number was probably between 150 and 200. These men were captured many hours before the Allied force was obliged to retire, and Harman was quite wrong to infer that they were executed as part of a hurried retreat by their DLI captors. Indeed en route to 151 Brigade HQ at Vimy the prisoner column was apparently seen by a Royal Artillery officer from the 368th Field Battery, Captain R.C. Austin, who published the fictionalised memoir Return Via Dunkirk later in 1940 under the pseudonym Gun Buster. By his account, at an unspecified ‘small hamlet’ just outside Achicourt on the afternoon of 21 May:
Suddenly round the corner of the road, marching in fours, appeared a column of German infantry. Prisoners. A Tommy with fixed bayonet marched in front. There were about 400 of them, a good bag for the Blankshires. They were a fine-looking lot of fellows, bronzed, fair-haired, clean shaven – in fact so fresh and clean-looking that they couldn’t have done much fighting. Probably they had been brought right up to the front line in vehicles and captured almost immediately they alighted. The bulk of them were between twenty-five and thirty, and they looked so smart in their slate-blue uniforms, their blue helmets with the gold eagle on the side, and their new black jack-boots, that they suggested the parade ground rather than the battlefield. They were headed by a short, weedy-looking German officer with a face like Goebbels. He strode along in an arrogant swagger, and was a bit of a blemish on the otherwise satisfactory procession.
Austin records that he encountered the same column again the following morning immediately south of Lens, some five to seven miles north of Achicourt. If his account is reliable, it contradicts Harman’s claim that there exists ‘no further trace’ of the DLI’s prisoners after 21 May:
After crossing the Lens-Arras road, whom should I come across but the 400 German prisoners I had seen brought into Achicourt the previous afternoon. They had been marched all the way back and were now lying asleep, dead beat, in a ditch, guarded by a few Tommies with fixed bayonets. Little groups of refugees were prowling round with decidedly hostile intentions, trying to get at the prisoners … But the Tommies guarded their prisoners like diamonds. It was a whiff of sane old England to hear one calling out:
‘Pass along, please, pass along,’ just as coolly as a London policeman breaking up a crowd after a street disturbance.
Another account published in 1950, by Lieutenant-Colonel Ewan Butler and Major Selby Bradford, purports to record the subsequent progress of the PoW column. The figure of 400 was quoted once more, as it would be again in the Official History published in 1953. According to Butler and Bradford, in The Story of Dunkirk:
They were captured on 21 May, a few miles south-east of Arras, and at last the captives were marched back through the single escape corridor when Frankforce was forced to withdraw. Back went the luckless 400, as footsore as their captors, through Ypres to Furnes, on the Dunkirk perimeter. When three days later, the 50th [Division] moved across the beaches to queue up for a trip home, they still escorted their prisoners, who were now in a very depressed frame of mind. They did not like dive-bombing, and they resented long forced marches. In this their jailers fully agreed with them, but they looked at the problem from a somewhat different viewpoint.
No source for this information about their journey to the coast is given, or for the passage that followed:
As they stood in the water, waiting for a ship, General Martel remarked to one of the guards: ‘You seem very keen to get these Huns home – why is it?’
‘Awa’ man, and use your nut,’ the soldier replied, with deplorable lack of respect, ‘we’re takin’ them back to Newcassel an’ we’ll have them marched behind us in chains up Grainger Street.’
When at last the remnants of 50th Division brought their prisoners safely back to England there was blue murder in many a northern heart as trim Military Police swept forward to convey the captives to prisoner-of-war camps. The Roman Triumph, which was to have electrified Tyneside, was indefinitely postponed.
Although both these sources were available to Harman in 1980, Gun Buster’s second sighting on 22 May was glossed over. In fairness, it should be pointed out that Austin’s account is heavily fictionalised, while the legend of Martel’s encounter on the beach is almost certainly an invention. Certainly Martel made no mention of it in his memoirs, published in 1949. Whatever the truth of the so-called Roman Triumph scenario on Tyneside, subsequent sworn statements by DLI personnel make clear that in reality the 6th and 8th Battalions parted company with their PoWs long before, during the early hours of 22 May.
In May 1940 Captain Harry Sell was the DLI’s brigade transport officer. Sell records that while he was at Brigade Headquarters at Vimy at about midnight on 21 May:
I was asked by the staff captain if transport was available for evacuation of prisoners. I advised no … The prisoners [later] being reported on the main road, I went at once and found them halted in close formation guarded by a few soldiers, who had slung rifles and no automatic weapons. The Corps of Military Police were all present and in charge. I understood that the prisoners were an amalgamation of those taken by both the 6th and 8th DLI. It was my job to see them off to 50 Division HQ, and I was advised that Captain Buckmaster, the Divisional intelligence officer, would be interrogating a selection of them.
As I walked down the column I did not hear any protest or see any signs of distress. No comments, gestures or demonstrations were made by or to them during their halt at Vimy. I explained the transport position to an NCO in charge, and he reported the prisoners all fit to march. A detachment of military police then took charge of the prisoners and I watched them march off well clear of the Brigade area. That was the end of the matter of the prisoners as far as the Brigade was concerned.
I would quote an entry from the Brigade HQ war Diary:
‘May 22nd 01.00 hours – some prisoners were brought back from 6 and 8 DLI. These were sent on to the Divisional HQ escorted by Military Police.’
This is broadly confirmed by Maurice Buckmaster, better known as the chief of SOE’s French Section from September 1941, but in May 1940 an army captain and intelligence officer for 50 Division. Buckmaster records that about 4 pm on 22 May, in the ‘area’ of Arras, he examined fourteen German prisoners from 7 Panzer, including three from the motorised 8th Rifle Regiment captured near Maroeuil, and one man from the 6th Regiment probably taken near Dainville:
They were all communicative and answered questions without reluctance. Morale seemed fairly good. There was no vindictiveness shown against England or France or resentment at being captured. The men were mostly very young … Talk of a massacre by the Durhams is nonsense.
If the account given by Austin (as Gun Buster) is truthful, he must have seen the prisoners for the first time late in the afternoon of 21 May near Achicourt, and then again the following morning outside Lens, several miles further north. Unless the column turned on its heel and retraced its steps south, it seems unlikely that at 4 pm on 22 May Buckmaster can have interrogated his fourteen prisoners anywhere very near Arras, but intelligence officers are mobile creatures, and this detail unimportant.
An obvious refutation of Harman’s allegations is to be found in verifiable German casualty lists for 21 May. The battle cost 7 Panzer 89 killed, 116 wounded and 173 missing, while the Totenkopf Division lost 19 killed, 27 wounded and 2 missing. These figures, drawn from contemporary German military records, were published in Britain as early as 1966, but were not consulted by Harman. Many of the 173 listed as missing from 7 Panzer were undoubtedly taken prisoner by 6 DLI on the left flank. If dozens, let alone hundreds, of prisoners f
rom Totenkopf were murdered in cold blood after capture, as is alleged, it is difficult to understand how they came to be absent from their unit casualty returns. Indeed no authoritative history of the Waffen-SS makes any mention of an alleged massacre anywhere in May, including Charles Sydnor’s definitive 1977 study of Totenkopf, Soldiers of Destruction. Such a massacre is also absent from the published memoirs of at least two SS generals, Felix Steiner and Paul Hausser, and was never exploited for propaganda purposes by Germany during the war years. It is also surely significant that the supposed Arras massacre was not raised by Fritz Knochlein as part of his defence at his trial for the atrocity committed at Le Paradis.
Due to the chaos prevailing in late May 1940 there are no precise figures for enemy captives returned through Dunkirk. Indeed it had never been envisaged that prisoners taken by the BEF would be sent to Britain. The figure was probably less than 100, Luftwaffe personnel included. Twelve hundred elite German paratroopers captured in Holland had already arrived in Britain in mid-May, and by the end of July most had been shipped overseas to Canada, due to fears that they might break out and link up with the dreaded fifth column. A photograph of a glum-looking party of Wehrmacht captives at Dover railway station was published by The Times on 3 June, while eyewitness accounts make clear that their presence on boats and trains was less than welcome. If some or all of the DLI’s prisoners never reached British ports from the battleground south of Arras, it is because they were handed over to the French, or simply released unharmed.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 9
