The Totenkopf was still part of Panzer Corps Hoth, but no longer subordinated to Generalmajor Rommel, whose 7th Panzer was pushing a wedge between the British 42nd Division – where novice infantryman Sid Nuttall was still fighting – and the French First Army to the northwest of Lille. Early that morning they had blocked the arterial road that led to Dunkirk – so Prioux’s men would have had to fight their way north anyway. Hauptmann Hans von Luck had still barely stopped moving since 10 May, despite being wounded in the hand a week earlier. Having worn a sling for a few days, he had carried on regardless and by now was managing with just a bandage. He and his men were filthy – covered, as were their vehicles, in thick dust. It gave them the feeling that they were chewing dried biscuits all the time.
Hans and his men had just paused to have some breakfast when a runner arrived ordering Hans to go to Rommel’s command post immediately. He hurried there as artillery shells began falling around them, not from the French, but from their own side – they had now almost linked up with the Sixth Army in Army Group B. Hans found Rommel at the edge of the town brushing dust from his uniform. Nearby, in front of a house lay a body, which Hans now saw was that of his commanding officer, Major Erdmann. The general looked upset.
‘Von Luck,’ he said, ‘you will take over command of Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 37 at once. You will receive fresh orders immediately.’
‘General,’ Hans replied, ‘some of the company commanders are older than me. Does your decision stand in spite of that?’
‘You’re in charge, full stop. If the company commanders obstruct your orders, I will replace them.’ Rommel had had plenty of opportunity to see Hans’s mettle and liked what he saw, but, nonetheless, it was a big responsibility for a young captain to become a battalion commander. For Rommel, however, performance counted for more than seniority – and Hans had clearly performed.
In the north, Army Group B was also pressing forward, but with the sudden and dramatic collapse of the Belgians the German Eighteenth Army had to clear away the half a million prisoners and then move forward again, something that took time. In 56th Division, Unteroffizier Hellmuth Damm and his machine-gun platoon reached Dixmunde, still some dozen miles to the east of the Dunkirk perimeter. Hordes of Belgian companies were surrendering, wandering towards them in loose groups with their hands in the air, all of whom had to be cleared and corralled. Later that day they reached the old battlefields of the last war. ‘We could still see some remains,’ noted Hellmuth. Still, they would not be attacking the British that day. The next day, though, 29 May, Hellmuth and his men would be attacking them for the first time. The net was closing in. Gort had been right: for the BEF, there was not a moment to lose.
Back in Britain, there was, as planned, still no mention of the evacuation, although the newspapers were in no doubt about the gravity of the situation. ‘BEF FIGHT HEROIC BATTLE FOR COAST’ ran the headline in the Daily Express, ‘300 men with rifles hold off 100 Nazi armoured units. Fate of Calais uncertain.’ Of course, by then, Calais’s fate had become all too certain; it had been in German hands for two days.
In London, the grievous split between Churchill and Halifax had yet to be resolved. The morning Cabinet had been taken up, again, with the capitulation of Belgium and the implications of King Leopold’s surrender. Churchill’s magnanimity again came to the fore. In France, the finger of blame was being pointed squarely at King Leopold for deserting his allies, but the British Prime Minister refused to pass judgement on the Belgian monarch.
After the Cabinet, Churchill asked Chamberlain for a private talk. An opportunity for Churchill to show his loyalty to Chamberlain had conveniently arisen. Lloyd George, Prime Minister for much of the last war and the longest-serving MP in the House of Commons, had written to Churchill asking to be part of the Government, and Churchill now asked Chamberlain what he thought of the idea. Both men knew that Lloyd George was defeatist, admired Hitler, and hated Chamberlain. ‘I replied that it was best to be frank,’ Chamberlain noted. ‘If he thought Ll. G would be more useful to him than I he had only to say so and I would gladly retire. But I could not work with him.’ Churchill immediately replied that Chamberlain was of far more help to him than Lloyd George; there was no comparison. ‘Winston and I were serving together,’ added Chamberlain, ‘and we would go down together.’
This renewed mutual commitment would be important for the next War Cabinet, although first Churchill attempted to shore up resolve by making a brief statement to the House about the fall of Belgium. There was no mention of the evacuation – he would put the House in the picture once the results of the present intense struggle were known. ‘I have only one thing to add,’ he concluded, ‘that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have avowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.’
It was typically stirring stuff, but was, of course, precisely the kind of rhetoric Halifax and the Tory diehards despaired about – that still spoke of Britain having a moral duty to the world when logic suggested an opportunity to get out of their current dire fix should be grabbed with two hands. Nonetheless, when a Liberal member suggested the PM’s words reflected the feelings of the whole House, no-one else demurred, even if no Conservative openly concurred.
The next War Cabinet met soon after in a room at the Commons, and it was then that the argument between Halifax and Churchill was reopened. Chamberlain felt it was a ‘rather steamy discussion’. Certainly, Halifax and Churchill repeated their same arguments for and against mediation.
‘The French are trying to get us on to the slippery slope,’ said Churchill. ‘The position will be entirely different when Germany has made an unsuccessful attempt to invade this country.’
‘We must not ignore the fact,’ Halifax replied, ‘that we might get better terms before France went out of the war and our aircraft factories were bombed, than we might get in three months’ time.’ So it went on, back and forth, neither giving ground until, at 5 p.m., Churchill asked for an adjournment and to meet back again at 7 p.m. This was because he had already arranged to address the entire Cabinet – those not in the War Cabinet – in his rooms at the Commons.
A crucial moment had now arrived, for during his address to these senior ministers Churchill hoped to kill Halifax’s proposals once and for all.
*
On his head, Captain Bill Tennant now wore a tin helmet with the letters ‘SNO’ cut out from the tinfoil of a cigarette packet and stuck on with sardine oil. It was makeshift, but then that was very much going to be the name of the game at Dunkirk. Indeed, it was this makeshift approach that had, by dawn on the 28th, given Operation DYNAMO a faint glimmer of hope.
Soon after arriving in Dunkirk the previous evening, he had signalled back to Dover asking for every available craft to head to the beaches east of the port, but it had been clear that taking soldiers to ships waiting offshore in rowing boats and other small craft was an extremely slow and laborious process. Then, at around 10 p.m. the previous evening, Bill had noticed something significant. The Luftwaffe had pounded the harbour and port facilities relentlessly, but not the two long moles that extended some 1,600 yards out into the sea. The western mole would be hard to get to but the eastern mole, running out from the seawall that linked the harbour entrance to Malo-les-Bains, was still easily accessible. Made of latticed concrete piles and topped with a narrow wooden walkway, it was, like its neighbour, a breakwater, rather than a quay suitable for mooring ships against. But what if it could be used in that way?
Taking two of his officers with him, he hurried over to conduct a quick survey. It felt sturdy enough, but whether it would take the strain of a large ship slapping into it with a three-knot tidal current behind it was another matter. Well, there was only one way to find out. Signalling to Wolfhound, which was now handling communic
ations offshore, he asked her to send a personnel ship to the eastern mole to embark a thousand men. Wolfhound called for Queen of the Channel, in peacetime a cross-Channel steamer, and now offshore at Malo-les-Bains. She immediately hurried over, and eased her bow in at around six knots. Gently nudging first her stern against concrete piles, she slithered alongside. The mole had taken the strain without any difficulty at all. Tennant could breathe a sigh of relief – perhaps the east mole might offer the kind of lifeline they so desperately needed.
Less than an hour later, the Queen of the Channel was loaded with 904 men, and the captain was preparing to cast off. How many more could she take, someone shouted from the mole. ‘It’s not a question of how many more,’ her skipper called back, ‘but whether we can get away with what we already have.’ The skipper’s sixth sense was right. At 4.15 a.m., as dawn was breaking and halfway across the Channel, the Queen of the Channel was attacked by a lone enemy aircraft and bombs straddled the ship, breaking her back and main propeller shaft. By a stroke of good fortune, however, another ship en route to Dunkirk was able to stop and lift off all the troops before the Queen sank.
The Queen of the Channel might have been lost but the mole worked and that was an incredible fillip for Bill Tennant and all those trying to make it back to safety. At 4.36 a.m., Bill signalled asking for all vessels to go alongside the east pier rather than off the beaches. At 4.45 a.m., a second ship left the mole; at 9.55 a.m., a third ship cast off, packed with men. By mid-morning, the pier was crammed with men and the Luftwaffe were once again overhead, but offshore, the guns of destroyers were blasting into the sky. Furthermore, the burning oil tanks ashore were casting a vast pall overhead, which was being added to as houses within Dunkirk were hit and caught fire. Huge clouds of thick, dark smoke were unfurling over the town, which was making life difficult for the German bombers. The situation was still undeniably dire, but perhaps just a little less dire than it had seemed the previous evening. Even so, as more and more men began falling back on the town and long dunes and beaches spreading east of the port, the gargantuan task facing the navy began to hit home. ‘There are at present 2,000 men on a Dunkirk beach,’ signalled Bill Tennant at 9.35 a.m., his desperation all too clear, ‘7,000 men on a dune for which I have no boats available. They are now in need of water which army cannot supply. Unlimited numbers are falling back on this area and situation in present circumstances will shortly become desperate.’ These figures would soon seem like small fry. Tens of thousands of men were now heading towards the beaches, and all were struggling with the dire shortages of food and especially water.
What were needed were more boats – ships of all sizes: large ones that could moor alongside the mole and smaller ones that could pull troops off the beaches. Even with little boats, the more that could make the trip across the Channel, the better. The problem was that because of the secrecy of the operation, the only ships that could be called upon were those of the navy, personnel and fishing vessels, barges and a number of Dutch skoots that had been brought back by the Royal Navy before the Dutch surrender. Private vessels could still not be drawn into the effort.
But those ships that could go were now heading to Dunkirk. The Royal Navy’s reach was considerable, with Naval Commands in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Far East, so obviously none of those ships could be called upon. The British Isles were protected by five Naval Commands: Nore, Portsmouth, Western Approaches, Rosyth, and Orkneys and Shetlands, which were then divided into Sub-Commands. Dover was a Sub-Command in Nore. The ships operating in these Commands were the navy’s largest force, the Home Fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, although the C-in-C’s forces were already hugely stretched thanks to the continuing Narvik operation, the operations at Boulogne and Calais, in carrying out coastal patrols and across the North Sea, and in protecting Atlantic convoys. Nonetheless, the Admiralty was quick to direct a considerable proportion of the Home Fleet under Ramsay’s charge.
One of the thirty-nine destroyers steaming towards Dunkirk was HMS Icarus, an ‘Intrepid’ class four-year-old destroyer. She had been in Plymouth, loading up with mines for a mine-lay when the orders were countermanded. ‘And we dashed off to Dover,’ says Andrew Begg, one of the ship’s engine room artificers (ERAs), ‘tearing up the Channel as fast as we could make it.’ And it was pretty fast: Andrew and his fellows in the engine room could get 35 knots out of Icarus. ‘She was exceptionally well built,’ he says. ‘The engine room was beautifully laid out and everything was handy. You could stand at one point in front of the controls and could read every gauge by doing a 360-degree turn. We had no trouble mechanically with her.’ And that was despite the abuse such ships suffered at sea and despite already having had a very active war.
Very little might have happened in the air and on land before the Norwegian campaign, but at sea it had been a different matter: the Royal Navy had been busy from the outset and Icarus had been in the thick of it. She had helped sink a German U-boat back in November, had rescued survivors from a Norwegian ship in December, and then had been refitted as a minelayer, joining the 20th Destroyer (Minelaying Flotilla) in February. Throughout March, she had carried out minelaying operations in the North Sea and Moray Firth and then, in April, had been sent to Norway, originally to lay mines but then, when the Germans invaded, as a destroyer against enemy shipping. She and her crew acquitted themselves well, capturing a German supply ship, the Alster, of 8,500 tons. Andrew had witnessed that. He’d been off watch and up on deck when the Alster had been spotted. It was dark, around a quarter to midnight, but there was usually enough light on the sea to spot the silhouette of a ship. They dashed towards it, pulling in alongside and the boarding party leaping across as the for’ard decks were about the same height. Someone started firing and then there was a burst of machine-gun fire from Icarus’s bridge which brought the shooting to a stop. Suddenly, however, there was a loud explosion. The enemy had dropped a demolition charge over the side and blasted a hole in the side of the Alster.
‘To us lot on board Icarus,’ says Andrew, ‘it was obvious that the German ship was starting to heel.’ However, the boarding party had secured the ship and began towing her back to their oiling base in one of the fjords, albeit at only five knots. By seven the following morning, they had reached their fuel base and largely repaired the hole in the Altser so that it was once again floating on an even keel. It was a big prize, although they had no time to rest on their laurels, as they were immediately sent to the aid of a cruiser that had dashed itself on a submerged rock. They made it in time after a three-hour dash and rescued the crew.
After that episode, they had sunk an iron-ore ship and taken part in the Second Battle of Narvik on 13 April, which ended in the destruction of eight German destroyers and one U-boat. She landed British troops at Andalsnes and then carried out further minelaying duties at Trondheim. Barely had she made it back to Plymouth when the latest urgent call for her services was received.
Andrew Begg had volunteered for the Royal Navy Reserve back in March 1939. He had always intended to go to sea as a marine engineer, but wanted to learn his trade first and so had found work in a Glasgow shipyard near his home. But when conscription was first introduced, Andrew realized he was in the first group to be called and since he had a terror of being a soldier decided he should think about going to sea sooner rather than later, and so signed for the navy right away. In June, he was sent to Devonport, where he had to prove he was a competent fitter and turner, then pass a rigorous physical. He passed both and after basic training was posted to HMS Victory at Portsmouth before being posted to Icarus.
Andrew and the other ERAs and stokers took pride in keeping the engine room immaculate. There were three boiler rooms, each in its own watertight compartment. ‘I don’t think upper deck people envied us,’ admits Andrew, ‘but I found the job extremely absorbing.’ The only thing that really worried him was the two huge steam pipes above his head. The pressure gauge showed that the steam in the pipes was
3,000 lb per square inch – or 675 degrees Fahrenheit. ‘In any action,’ says Andrew, ‘I hoped nothing would come through the side and hit one of those.’ Icarus had certainly been under fire before, but nothing like the degree she and her crew would face at Dunkirk. For men like Andrew, it was best to put such thoughts out of mind.
While HMS Icarus was speeding along the south coast of Britain, Winston Churchill was addressing his Cabinet – some twenty-five men from different parties, and all highly experienced parliamentary men. Churchill gave them a frank account of what had happened during the past fortnight and admitted the BEF was now being evacuated. He expected 50,000 to be lifted, although told them 100,000 would be a magnificent effort. The public needed to be prepared for bad tidings and what was happening in northern France was truthfully the greatest British military defeat for many centuries. Soon, the war would be turned against their island and they needed to prepare themselves for that. Nonetheless, an invasion would be an immensely difficult thing for the Germans to carry out. There was no point, he added, thinking Britain would get better terms from Germany if they tried to make peace rather than if they fought it out. Hitler would demand their fleet, naval bases and much else besides. A puppet government would be no doubt set up under someone like Mosley. On the other hand they had plenty of reserves, a strong navy, air defences that were easier to manage from home, and waters amply mined. ‘We shall go on and we shall fight it out,’ he told them, ‘here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.’ There was a murmur of approval, and not one expression of dissent.
Churchill now had the support of his wider Cabinet, and, crucially, of Chamberlain. When the War Cabinet reconvened, Churchill recounted what had just happened and stressed the response. ‘I cannot recall having ever before heard a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life,’ he told them, ‘express themselves so emphatically.’ At this, Halifax mentioned Reynaud’s proposed appeal to President Roosevelt and whether it should be a joint message; he said nothing more of an appeal to Mussolini. Churchill now dismissed even an American appeal out of hand. And that was that – no more was ever said on the matter.
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