The World War II Collection

by Lord, Walter;

  But this May 29 saw an important change in the composition of the German forces. Once again the tanks were gone—pulled out this time on the urging of the panzer generals themselves. Guderian summed up the reasons in a report he submitted on the evening of the 28th after a personal tour of the front: the armored divisions were down to 50% of strength … time was needed to prepare for new operations … the marshy terrain was unsuitable for tanks … the Belgian surrender had released plenty of infantry—far more effective troops for this kind of country.

  Added to these very practical arguments was perhaps an intangible factor. Guderian and the other panzer commanders were simply not temperamentally suited to the static warfare that was developing. Theirs was a world of slashing thrusts, breakthroughs, long rolling advances. Once the battle had turned into a siege, they lost interest. By the evening of the 28th Guderian was already poring over his maps of the lower Seine.

  In any event, OKH agreed. At 10:00 a.m. on May 29 General Gustav von Wietersheim’s motorized infantry took over from Guderian, and later in the day General Reinhardt’s tanks were also pulled out. But this didn’t mean that the battered Allied troops were home free. On the contrary, ten German divisions—mostly tough, experienced infantry—now pressed against the 35-mile Dunkirk perimeter.

  At the western end, the 37th Panzer Engineers hoisted a swastika flag over Fort Philippe around noon, and the port of Gravelines fell soon afterward. All the way east the 56th Division was marching on Furnes. About 3:30 p.m. Bicycle Squadron 25 reached the east gate of the old walled town. Here they ran into a French column trying to get into the perimeter. After a brief fire-fight, Captain Neugart of the 25th forced the Frenchmen to surrender.

  Then along came two French tanks, so unsuspecting that their turrets were open. Corporal Gruenvogel of the bicyclists jumped on one of them, pointed his pistol down through the open turret, and ordered the crew to surrender. They complied … as did the crew of the second tank, even without such urging.

  Captain Neugart now sent a captured French major along with two of his own men into Furnes to demand that the whole town surrender. But audacity has its limits, and this time he got only a scornful reply from the Allied troops now barricading the streets.

  On the beaches no one knew how long the troops manning the perimeter could keep the Germans out. At Bray-Dunes Commander Thomas Kerr half-expected to see them burst onto the sands any minute. He and Commander Richardson continued loading the troops into boats; but they arranged for a boat of their own to lie off Bray, ready to rescue the naval shore party, “just in case.” This gave them some confidence, but talking quietly together that night, they agreed they’d probably end up in some German prison camp.

  Dover and London knew even less. At one point on the 28th the Admiralty actually told Tennant to report “every hour” the number of people to be embarked—orders that could only have come from someone who hadn’t the remotest picture of the situation. Tennant patiently replied, “Am doing my best to keep you informed, but shall be unable to report for hours.”

  But even at a distance one thing was clear: all too often the ships weren’t where they were needed the most. Sometimes there were plenty of vessels at the mole, but no troops on hand. Other times there were troops but no ships. The same was true at the beaches. Someone was needed offshore to control the flow of shipping, the same way Captain Tennant was directing the flow of men between the mole and the beaches.

  Rear-Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker got the nod. Fifty-two years old, Wake-Walker was known as an exceptionally keen organizer, and a good seaman too. His last command had been the battleship Revenge—a sure sign of talent, for the Royal Navy gave the battleships to only its most promising officers. At the moment, he held down a staff job at the Admiralty; he was readily available for temporary assignment.

  Returning to his office from lunch on Wednesday, May 29, Wake-Walker learned that he was wanted by Rear-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff. Phillips asked him if he would like to go to Dunkirk and “try and get some organization into the embarkation there.” Wake-Walker said that he’d be “delighted,” and the appointment was worked out. It was important that he should not seem to be superseding Tennant. The Captain would still be SNO on shore; Wake-Walker in charge of everything afloat.

  An hour later he was on his way by car to Dover. Arriving about 6:00 p.m., he went directly to Ramsay’s casemate for a quick briefing. In the Dynamo Room he was shown a map, depicting the coast east of Dunkirk. The three beaches—Malo, Bray, and La Panne—had been optimistically numbered, with each beach in turn divided into three sections. The BEF would be coming down to these particular beaches, while certain others west of Malo were reserved for the French.

  This neat map, with its careful delineations, little prepared him for the chaos he found when he arrived off Bray on the destroyer Esk at 4:00 the following morning, May 30. Transferring to the minesweeper Hebe, Wake-Walker soon learned about the “real war” from Captain Eric Bush, who had been filling in until he got there. At dawn Wake-Walker could see for himself the dark masses of men on the beaches, the long lines that curled into the sea, the men standing waist-deep in the water … waiting and waiting.

  “The crux of the matter was boats, boat crews, and towage,” the Admiral later recalled. At 6:30 a.m. he radioed Dover that small boats were urgently needed, and at 7:30 he asked for more ships, and again stressed the need for small boats.

  It was a familiar refrain, growing in volume these past few hours. At 12:10 a.m. Brigadier Oliver Leese of Gort’s staff had telephoned the War Office, stressing that the perimeter could only be held for a limited time. Send as many boats as possible—quickly. At 4:00 the War Office called back with the welcome word that Admiral Ramsay was “going to get as much small craft as possible across as soon as he can.”

  But nothing came. At 4:15 the destroyer Vanquisher, lying off Malo, radioed, “More ships and boats urgently required off west beach.” At 6:40 the destroyer Vivacious echoed the plea: “Essential to have more ships and boats.”

  By 12:45 pm.Brigadier Leese was on the phone again, this time with General Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. No ships yet, he complained. Off La Panne, Admiral Wake-Walker was getting desperate. He now sent Captain Bush back to Dover in the Hebe, to explain in person the vital necessity of sending out boats and crews.

  By 3:00 p.m. Gort himself was trying. He first phoned Admiral Pound, then General Dill, pointing out that there were still no ships. Every hour counted, he stressed.

  Headquarters could at least complain to somebody. The troops waiting on the beaches didn’t even have that satisfaction. After a restless night curled up in the sand, Captain John Dodd of the Royal Artillery looked out to sea in the first light of dawn and saw—nothing. “No ships in sight,” he noted in his diary. “Something must have gone wrong.”

  At Bray-Dunes Sapper Joe Coles felt “terrible disappointment” and resigned himself to a day of troubled sleep in the Dunes. At Malo Chaplain Kenneth Meiklejohn couldn’t understand it. There had been no air attacks, yet no one seemed to have embarked all night. A dreadful thought crossed his mind: “Has the Navy given us up?”

  9

  The Little Ships

  LIEUTENANT IAN COX, FIRST Lieutenant of the destroyer Malcolm, could hardly believe his eyes. There, coming over the horizon toward him, was a mass of dots that filled the sea. The Malcolm was bringing her third load of troops back to Dover. The dots were all heading the other way—toward Dunkirk. It was Thursday evening, the 30th of May.

  As he watched, the dots materialized into vessels. Here and there were respectable steamers, like the Portsmouth-Isle of Wight car ferry, but mostly they were little ships of every conceivable type—fishing smacks … drifters … excursion boats … glittering white yachts … mud-spattered hoppers … open motor launches … tugs towing ship’s lifeboats … Thames sailing barges with their distinctive brown sails … cabin cruisers, their bright work gleaming … dre
dges, trawlers, and rust-streaked scows … the Admiral Superintendent’s barge from Portsmouth with its fancy tassels and rope-work.

  Cox felt a sudden surge of pride. Being here was no longer just a duty; it was an honor and a privilege. Turning to a somewhat startled chief boatswain’s mate standing beside him, he burst into the Saint Crispin’s Day passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V:

  And Gentlemen in England, now abed

  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

  The efforts of the Small Vessels Pool and the Ministry of Shipping were at last paying off. The trickle of little ships that began in Tough’s boatyard was turning into a deluge. There was still no public announcement of the evacuation, but England is a small place. In one way or another, the word reached those who were needed.

  It was a midnight phone call from the Admiralty that alerted Basil A. Smith, a London accountant and owner of the 24-foot cabin cruiser Constant Nymph. Would Smith confirm that his boat was ready for sea and could sail on four hours’ notice? Early next morning, May 27, the summons came: take her down to Sheerness at once.

  Captain Lemon Webb was nursing the Ipswich spritsailing barge Tollesbury up the Thames on an ordinary cargo run. Then a motorboat eased alongside, and a naval officer ordered him to a nearby jetty. There a tug took her in tow, and Tollesbury was on her way to Sheerness, too.

  The crew of the Margate lifeboat Lord Southborough were playing darts at their favorite pub when their turn came. A cryptic message said report to the boathouse at once. Within hours they were heading direct for Dunkirk—no stop at Sheerness for them. For Coxswain Edward D. Parker it was almost a family outing. His brother and nephew were in his crew; a son had already gone over with the Margate pilot boat; another son was one of Commander Clouston’s men on the mole.

  The cockle boat fleet of Leigh-on-Sea lay peacefully at anchor on May 30 when the call came for them. Bearing imposing names like Defender, Endeavour, Resolute, and Renown, they sounded like dreadnoughts; actually they were only 40 feet long with a 2 ½-foot draft. Normally they were engaged in the humblest of tasks—gathering in the cockle shellfish found in the mud flats of the Thames estuary. The crew were all civilians, but every man volunteered. Seventeen-year-old Ken Horner was considered too young and left behind, but he wasn’t about to buy that. He ran home, got his mother’s permission, and bicycled off in pursuit of the fleet. He caught up with his boat at Southend.

  These vessels came with their crews, but that did not always happen. In the race against time, yachts were often commandeered before their owners could be located. Other weekend sailors just couldn’t drop everything and sign up in the Navy for a month—the standard requirement. As the little ships converged on Sheerness and Ramsgate, the main staging points, Admiral Preston’s Small Vessels Pool looked around for substitute crews.

  Shipwright A. W. Elliott was working in Johnson & Jago’s boatyard at Leigh-on-Sea when a bobby pedaled up on a bicycle. He announced that volunteers were needed to get “some chaps” off the French coast. Elliott needed no urging.

  At Lowestoft on the east coast the Small Vessels Pool commandeered taxis to bring down a contingent of commercial fishermen. In London, Commander Garrett of the Pool spent three straight nights calling up various clubs … rounding up yachtsman members … packing them off in Admiralty cars to Sheerness and Ramsgate.

  It was during these hectic days that Sub-Lieutenant Moran Capiat arrived in London for a few days’ leave. An actor and yachtsman in peacetime, he was currently serving on a naval trawler in the North Sea, but the ship was being refitted, and for the moment he was free. He was aware that Dunkirk was coming to a boil, but felt it was no concern of his.

  Going to the Royal Ocean Racing Club for breakfast, he was surprised to find nobody there. Even the steward was gone. He finally located the steward’s wife, who explained that everyone had vanished after a call from the Admiralty a day or so ago. Mildly mystified, he settled down in a chair to relax alone.

  The phone rang, and he answered. It was the Admiralty. A voice said they wanted “still more hands” and asked who he was. Capiat identified himself, and the voice said, “You’re just what we need.” He was then told to go to Sheerness immediately. Still baffled, he caught a train at Waterloo Station within an hour.

  Five minutes’ walk from the Royal Ocean Racing Club was the ship chandlers shop of Captain O. M. Watts on Albemarle Street. Downstairs the Captain cheerfully dispensed a hodgepodge of charts and nautical gear; upstairs he gave navigation lessons to young gentlemen who hoped for a commission in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. They were mostly professional men: solicitors, brokers, actors, bankers from the City, and such. Few knew much about the sea; some had never been out of sight of land.

  John Fernald was a young American theatrical director attending the Captain’s classes every Thursday evening. Usually the session was blackboard work, but not on Thursday, May 30. When he arrived with his friend David Homan, a scenery designer, Watts took them aside for a private chat. Quietly he explained there would be no regular class tonight; the Navy needed volunteers immediately for a “hazardous job.”

  Neither Fernald nor Homan liked the prospect of moving from navigational theory to practice so abruptly, but they couldn’t see any graceful way out; so they volunteered. Captain Watts told them to grab what gear they could and report immediately to the Port of London Authority down by the Tower.

  Fernald rushed back to his flat, picked up an old pea jacket, and hurried down to Tower Hill, as directed. Most of the others were already there. Some didn’t even have time to change their clothes and were still wearing the cutaways and striped trousers of the City. Stockbroker Raphael de Sola, however, was resplendent in the jacket of the Royal London Yacht Club, blue trousers to match, a visored cap, and a greatcoat worthy of the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.

  Along with Captain Watts’s scholars, there were a number of more obviously waterfront types: lightermen, dock workers, deckhands, barge men. High and low together, they milled around the lobby of the Port Authority building, still not knowing what they were to do.

  Then a Royal Navy commander appeared and gave them a quick briefing. They were to man ship’s lifeboats collected from vessels lying at the London docks. These would be towed down the river and across the Channel, where they would be used to help rescue the BEF.

  A bus now took the group to Tilbury, where the lifeboats were waiting. The rule was four men to a boat; twelve boats to a tow. Fernald and Homan managed to stick together, and soon after midnight they were on their way. In the quiet of the night, broken only by the water rushing by and the throb of the tug up ahead, Fernald wondered at the incredible change in his life that had snatched him from a humdrum existence in London and put him in an open boat racing through the dark.

  First stop was Sheerness. This bustling harbor on the Thames estuary had become the collecting point for all the little ships streaming down the river. Here they were sorted out and put into shape under the watchful eye of Commodore A. H. Taylor, a retired Rear-Admiral who could normally be found shuffling paper in the Economic Warfare Division of the Admiralty.

  Engines were the big problem. Many of the boats had been laid up for the winter and were hard to get running again. Others had idiosyncrasies apparently known only to their absent owners. The Thames excursion steamers had boilers that couldn’t use salt water. It was a miracle that Captain T. E. Docksey and his engineers managed to get more than 100 boats in good enough shape to cross the Channel.

  Every ship also needed someone on board who could keep the engine running. By now there were plenty of weekend-sailor volunteers, but few of these bankers and shopkeepers really understood machinery. The Shipping Federation, an organization of operators, was asked to help and issued a call for volunteers. About 350 marine engineers responded.

  From Sheerness most of the little ships moved on to Ramsgate. Here fuel tanks were topped off, provisions loaded, and convoys made up. Many of the cr
aft had no compass, and some of the skippers had never been out of sight of land. Lieutenant-Commander Raymond Grundage, the Routing Officer, issued more than 1,000 charts, 600 with routes lined off for neophyte navigators.

  Problems could be enormous—or exasperatingly minute. Robert Hilton, a physical education specialist, and Ted Shaw, a red-headed cinema manager, had teamed up to bring the motorboat Ryegate II down the river. They expected to pick up supplies at Ramsgate, but all they received were two cans of water. Otherwise the boat was bare—not even a tumbler for the water. The naval supply depot at Ramsgate seemed unable to cope; they finally went to a pub, had a drink, and pocketed the glasses.

  Each little ship had its own tale of troubles, but at the start they all suffered from one common problem: none of them were armed. Lieutenant C. D. Richards carefully hoarded his stockpile of 105 Lewis machine guns, doling them out only to the tugs and escort vessels.

  Later the crews would scavenge the beaches, gathering a plentiful supply of discarded Bren guns; and sometimes a BEF gunner might even attach himself to a vessel, but at first they were defenseless. It was enough to make a member of the crew feel a bit uneasy. “Even a record of the 1812 Overture would be better than nothing,” observed one skipper.

  It was 10:00 p.m., May 29, when the first convoy of little ships set out from Ramsgate on the long trip across the Channel. None of the eight launches in the group had any navigating instruments. Nevertheless, Lieutenant R. H. Irving, skipper of the escorting motorboat Triton, was confident. Unlike most, he knew these waters well. Waiting outside Ramsgate breakwater, he shouted to the other ships to close up and follow him. Three of the boats developed engine trouble and had to turn back, but the others stuck to Triton and arrived safely off La Panne at dawn.

  At 1:00 a.m. on the 30th another convoy left Ramsgate—this time, nineteen launches led by the Belgian ferry Yser—and from then on the flow steadily increased. By late afternoon it was hard to tell where one convoy ended and the next began. All that night, and the 31st too, the little ships poured across the Channel.