by Max Hennessy
They had shattered the morale of the French second-class reservists on the Meuse and were paralysing the French artillery, whose gunners stopped firing and went to ground as soon as they started their dives, while the infantry cowered in trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the bombers.
Leading the German armour, they were pile-driving their way into France and it seemed that nothing could stop them. The first attacks had been against front line positions and airfields, wiping out the opposition air strength, and, unlike the allies, the Germans were using their machines in large numbers, not scattering them all over the front. The long-cherished illusion that the Battle was a worthwhile aircraft had vanished in the attacks on the Meuse bridges when whole squadrons were wiped out without registering a single hit, and on May 13th, the Germans put 700 machines into the air over Sedan, 200 of them Stukas. The French simply threw away their rifles and ran and, after an attempt to help by attacking the bridgehead, the AASF was as good as finished.
Within days the whole front was beginning to crumble and the army was withdrawing to the line of the Escaut because the French First Army had collapsed. There was now no question in the morning of fighting to throw off the deep sleep that came with spending all day in the open air. Everybody came awake in a flash to buckle on tunic and revolver and within a week had forgotten what sleep was like.
There were reports of German spies everywhere and no one was certain where the front was because the recce machines that were sent to find out never seemed to come back. Frantic requests for more British fighters to be sent to France had been turned down by Hugh Dowding, commanding Fighter Command, whose view was that the Battle of France was already lost and that the Battle of Britain would follow shortly. There was a lot of bitterness but it was clear to anyone with intelligence that the battle in France was lost and that Dowding was right.
Diplock was already making indignant noises about wishing to return to England. He seemed satisfied that he could nail Cotton to the mast whenever he wished – and he probably could, because Cotton acknowledged nobody as his master – but Barratt refused to allow him to go. He was desperately in need of senior officers to deal with the constantly changing circumstances, and Diplock, who had never had a fierce obsession about risking his neck, had that sort of experience in abundance. His whole career in the RAF had been spent behind a desk, and he sulked about the place complaining constantly that he was of more use in England.
When the situation became so confused no one knew where the front line was, Dicken offered to find out. Flying a borrowed Hurricane, something that wasn’t easy to obtain because they were already desperately short, he was aware of the tension as he climbed into the cockpit. The faces of the fitter and rigger and the Intelligence Officer all wore bleak expressions and as the engine warmed up a Roman Catholic padre appeared.
‘I’m here to give absolution to one or two of the pilots,’ he said. ‘Some of them are Catholics and want to confess. Do you wish to?’
‘I’m not a Catholic, Padre,’ Dicken said.
‘It can never do much harm,’ the padre smiled.
He was a big man and reminded Dicken of Father O’Buhilly, the American priest he had so admired. Somehow, religious toleration went with big men, particularly in service padres who had to deal with every kind of human being imaginable, including a few of the King’s Hard Bargains, so Dicken nodded, wondering as he did so where Father O’Buhilly was at that moment and what had happened to him, because they had once shared the very uncomfortable jail of a Chinese warlord called Lee Tse-liu.
He found the front line and just had time to identify the area when he was attacked by three Messerschmitt 110s. One of them was across his route to safety so, picking the nearest, he manoeuvred on to its tail as it turned. As he fired, he was surprised to see pieces fly into the air. As he passed the stricken machine, it was still turning and he watched in fascinated horror as the turn became a spin that trailed a curling stream of smoke before the machine blew apart in a shower of debris.
Almost immediately there was a tremendous explosion in front of him and he became aware that the Hurricane was limp on the controls. Black smoke was pouring from the nose, and he could feel the blast of heat and see the flicker of flame. Pulling the pin of his parachute harness, he tried to jettison the hood but it was stuck. In a panic, by thumping at it with his fist he managed to dislodge it and, swinging the aircraft on to its back, he fell free. He was lower than he had realised because he seemed to hit the ground almost at once and almost immediately a French gendarme appeared and stuck a pistol in his face.
‘Haut les mains!’
It took a minute or two to convince the Frenchman of his nationality and immediately the gendarme became full of comradely hatred for the Germans. ‘Merde à ces cochons d’Hitler,’ he snarled. ‘We will have our work cut out.’
Dicken arrived on an RAF base just as its fighters returned, the pilots hungry, exhausted and strung up. They had been flying ever since the balloon had gone up, never changing their clothes, never sleeping in a bed, their beards days old, their hair matted by the constant wearing of their flying helmets. Sprawled on the grass under the shade of a tree, they were waiting for a petrol tanker to arrive and, wondering if it had been misdirected by some fifth columnist, were nervous about being caught on the ground. With no idea of Dicken’s rank because he had no hat and his borrowed overalls covered his badges, they were spitting out their bitterness against inefficiency in a way that reminded him of his own youth and his own hatred of the staff in the last war. They were angry because the replacement aircraft being flown from England had not had their guns harmonised and in some cases were not even fitted with sights. The previous day they had been reduced to four serviceable machines and the technical officer was in tears of fury.
They were watching a bunch of young thrushes making their first flights, their absorption hiding the tension they felt.
‘These sprog sparrows get the knack amazin’ quick,’ one of them said. ‘You never see ’em crash-land. Fine pitch and plenty of flap and off they go. Wonder if they use a link trainer.’
One of them, who had had to twist and turn through trees to throw off a gaggle of 109s, was still shaking. ‘Christ knows what state my poor bloody flogged machine’s in,’ he said.
He had lost his kit and his trousers were covered with sticky glycol that had drenched him as his engine was hit. A lot of it had got into his eyes and they were still red-rimmed and sore-looking.
‘I’m scared stiff,’ he admitted. ‘And I keep wondering if I’ve gone yellow and I’m losing my nerve. But when you see the Jerries you find there’s something to get hold of and you get a grip on yourself and everything’s all right.’
Because of the shifting of the front, wounded pilots had been sent to a hospital in Paris. The feeling was that there they would have a chance to recover, but it was already beginning to seem that the fight was lost because it was possible now to hear the thunder of guns quite clearly. Despite the impact of war, however, in the next field a French peasant was still following a harrow pulled by two huge Percherons. With him was a labourer and a small boy and, with the sky a brilliant blue, it seemed hard at that moment to believe there was a war on.
Dicken’s report was telephoned to Intelligence then, as he tried to organise transport again, the war suddenly woke up. They became aware of silver dots in the sky and the faint clatter of machine guns, then one of the dots detached itself and began to fall, spinning like a leaf, while they all watched hypnotised. It was trailing a column of smoke that curled and swerved through the sky as the machine descended. Half expecting a parachute to appear, they continued to watch, but nothing happened except for that quiet spinning lower and lower, leaving the crooked trail of smoke to mark its descent.
‘That’s one of the bastards, anyway,’ someone said.
‘Except,’ another pi
lot replied in a flat voice, ‘that it looks uncommonly like one of ours.’
Then they saw it was a Hurricane, falling against a backdrop of towering pink cumulus, and eventually it disappeared behind a hill. There was no explosion, no thump, just silence and smoke rising slowly to join the curling column that coiled down from above.
The farmer with the horses had stopped to watch and he and his son and the labourer were silhouetted against the sky. As they stared, the sound of aeroplanes grew louder and the watching pilots saw the puffballs of anti-aircraft fire appear in the sky beyond the hill.
‘There they are!’ The man with the glycol-covered trousers pointed. ‘One of them’s coming this way! I’m for the shelter!’
But nobody moved and he halted uncertainly, anxious not to show nervousness. The German aircraft vanished behind the rise, and they thought he had gone but then they heard the engine again in an increasing howl, and the next moment a Heinkel leapt over the hill. As they flung themselves flat on their faces, Dicken found himself crouching behind a lorry which seemed to bounce on its tyres with each bang. There were six explosions, one after the other, and someone yelled. ‘The stupid bugger’s blown himself up with his own bombs!’
The German pilot had dropped his salvo from too low and one of them had removed his tail surfaces so that the machine flew on in a wavery line until it vanished into a clump of trees. Everybody started running but the aeroplane had already started to burn and as they broke through the undergrowth they found themselves looking directly into its nose where two men were struggling to open the hatch. Even as they arrived, the flames roared up and the Germans’ clothes started to smoulder then caught fire and the pilot’s hair started to blaze. The faces grew redder and redder then turned black and the screaming stopped. Finally the port wing tank exploded in a shower of blazing petrol and popping ammunition.
They were still watching the blazing machine when they became aware of the farmer who had been harrowing his field stumbling towards them. His clothes were torn and he was hardly able to stand.
‘Ils sont morts,’ he croaked. ‘Mon fils! Mon fils et Alois!’
They found the bodies near a bomb crater. The boy was unrecognisable as a human being and of the labourer they found nothing but his cap and one hand. The horses lay bleeding alongside the smashed harrow and the air was full of the reek of high explosive.
The farmer stared at the bloody flesh and burst out weeping, then he lifted his fist and shook it at the air. ‘Salaud de Boche,’ he yelled. Je te casse la gueule, toi!’
Still eager to return to England, Diplock, growing more shrill and more indignant by the day, was finally given instructions to go via Paris, pick up all the wounded RAF pilots on his way, and see them safely to England.
By this time the roads were full of refugees and what had originally been a trickle from the frontier villages had now become a flood. The sky was full of smoke and the noise of engines and explosions never seemed to cease.
But the weather remained perfect and the wretched refugees could do nothing to hide as the German aeroplanes came over. Riding with a driver in a borrowed army car, trying to find out what was happening, Dicken was trapped in a small village called La Motte. There was a smell of blossom in the air and old women in black were enjoying the sunshine, but the road ahead was clogged by refugees who eddied into gardens and back streets like water from a burst dam.
There were thousands of them, all pressing against the military vehicles trying to get past. Then Dicken noticed a Fieseler recce plane hovering overhead, humming like a dragonfly in the bright blue sky, and with a sudden horrifying awareness, he realised what was going to happen. A Heinkel flew over but its bomb dropped outside the town and a soldier in a Bren gun carrier yelled his contempt. ‘They couldn’t ’it a pig in a passage,’ he roared.
It was still impossible to move because the refugees, who had bolted for the fields, had already begun to swarm back on to the road, and Dicken was just watching a line of cars loaded with people and their possessions passing ahead when he saw the Stukas arrive, 10,000 feet up, in a formation like an arrowhead. Even as he saw the point of the arrow disintegrate, the refugees started to run again.
The sky was alive with bursting shells as the leading plane dived. It came down at a terrific speed, filling the air with a maniac scream so that impulsively everybody flung themselves from their vehicles and hugged the earth. To Dicken, cowering in a ditch with his driver, it was as if he’d been singled out individually and that nothing on earth could stop the diving plane. For the first time he began to realise why the Germans had backed Udet’s dive bomber tactics.
As the first salvo of bombs struck, the ground seemed to heave as if in a heavy swell. Almost immediately a second plane came down, followed by a third and a fourth, and Dicken felt the earth moving beneath him as their bombs landed. A house collapsed with a roar and tiles sliced viciously over his head through the yellow smoke lit by tongues of flame that eddied about him.
The horror appeared to go on for a lifetime while they clawed at the earth, their mouths hanging open, their eyes blinking at every shower of debris. Dimly, they could hear the incoherent cries of women and children, then the last bomb fell only a few yards away in an ear-shattering crash and, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombing stopped and the world was full of silence, an uncanny silence. Dicken lifted his head, breathing painfully, his face blackened by dust. La Motte seemed to have been blown off the face of the earth.
There was nothing now of the village but piles of rubble and the air was filled with a wailing which rose and fell in an eerie cadence that was broken immediately by the shouts of stretcher bearers, as soldiers ran to do what they could for the injured. The black-clad old ladies had vanished beneath the debris of their houses and the road junction ahead was completely blocked by the wreckage of vehicles and human beings.
It took an hour to get past. Though it was hard to press on through the misery, it was pointless to try to help. There were already too many helpers and nowhere to put the injured. Beyond La Motte there were still more refugees, waiting limply by the roadside, exhausted and grey-faced with fear, staring mutely as if they were too tired to care at a company of Senegalese troops who were marching past with impassive faces.
They hadn’t gone more than a mile when the aeroplanes came again, strafing the road to complete the confusion. As they heard the howl of engines, the driver braked and yelled to Dicken to take cover and, as the bombs came screaming down, a wail went up from the refugees. Flinging himself down a bank into a ditch, Dicken found himself shouting at them to lie flat. But, bewildered and shocked, they simply stood gaping at the sky, and scrambling from the ditch, he went among them, pushing at them, sending them flying into the ditch one after another, then finally tossed a baby down to its mother, pushchair and all, as the bombs struck. He saw flashes and people falling like toppled ninepins then something like a huge soft fist hit him in the back and flung him into the ditch on top of the driver.
As the aeroplanes returned, he saw the Senegalese form up in a group and fire their rifles. By some miracle they hit the leading machine, which was only thirty or forty feet up, and it came lower and lower and finally hit the surface of the field ahead at an angle. It bounced once or twice, sending up showers of dust and clods of earth before finally coming to a stop.
Heads lifted from the ditch but as other machines howled past stick after stick of bombs whistled down to explode with cracking roars along the side of the road. As the scream of the engines finally faded, Dicken scrambled to the road. There had been no casualties in their immediate neigh-bourhood but up ahead they could hear piercing shrieks from a group surrounding a farm cart that lay on its side, its wheels still spinning, the horse struggling to drag itself out of the ditch, its hind legs trailing like those of a dog run over in the street. The cart had been full of children and small bodies were scattered all over t
he road.
The Heinkel which had crashed had caught fire now and the crew, struggling free, started to run. But the Senegalese soldiers started firing and, as one of them went down, the others stopped dead and raised their hands. As the Senegalese advanced on them, one of the Germans reached for a pistol. There was another fusillade of shots and he fell backwards, and the Senegalese, without a change of expression, picked up the other two by their arms and legs and tossed them into the flames of their stricken aeroplane. As their screams came, the Senegalese, with the same unmoved expression, picked up the bodies of the remaining two, and flung them after their comrades. Then they formed up again and marched back to the road to continue their westward trudge.
By this time the confusion was appalling and the air was alive with rumours of parachutists and motorcyclists across the path of the retreat. It was Dicken’s opinion that they were just rumours because most of them appeared to be hearsay and the damage was being done entirely by fear and lack of knowledge. But there was no question of standing and fighting. The French army had collapsed. Some regiments had fought to the last man but the conscription system had produced poor regiments officered by middle-aged men, and the German intelligence had been good. The Stukas had smashed a colossal hole in the French front through which their armour was now pouring en masse and, fanning out behind, were creating chaos by the spreading of alarmist stories.
Still undefeated but feeling they were surrounded, the French had fallen back to try to establish a line of the sort their generals remembered from the last war. But there was no line and they went on searching until the Germans rounded them up in groups. The British army was already pinned against the coast at Dunkirk and it was obvious they were about to get out of the Continent. But the Stukas were taking a tremendous toll of ships and there was already a horrifying loss among the destroyers.
