Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  Though there were many instances of bravery, the retreat up to the beaches that morning had a chaotic, ragged character. Many of the troops, French and British alike, were very young—in their late teens or early twenties—new to combat, and led by officers often as inexperienced as they were. The troops were hungry, tired, and frightened; and, day and night, they marched toward an unseen sea, under a sky embroidered with silvery tracers, through a flat, featureless landscape offering little protection from shell fire or air attack, in boots sodden by marsh water. Inevitably, morale fell and incidences of indiscipline rose. Returning to his headquarters in the French town of Lomme, General Brooke of the Second Corps saw the body of a French soldier lying in the street. “Who shot him?” he asked. “Oh, some of these retreating French soldiers,” his adjutant replied. “They said he was a spy, but I think the real reason was that he refused to give them cognac!” In another incident, a British officer had to draw his pistol to prevent a truck full of panicked French troops from driving his lorry off the road. In British units, acts of indiscipline were more infrequent but far from uncommon. Under the strain of exhaustion, fear, and hunger, inevitably some men broke. In one incident, an apparently shell-shocked officer refused to leave his hole, insisting he had to protect his eggs; he had no eggs. In another, a major jumped the line on the beaches and rushed a waiting boat. A naval officer shot him dead in the surf. Feeling betrayed by “the Frogs” and “the Belgies,” who had “jacked it in, [leaving them] to carry the can,” the retreating British troops pillaged shops and looted wine cellars. And, not infrequently, an officer or military policeman who challenged the looters would find a half-drunk nineteen-year-old waving a pistol in his face.

  For Patrick Turnbull, the most vivid memories of the retreat were the enormous piles of abandoned British vehicles and heavy equipment he passed on the way to the beaches. “They boarded the road, they were in ditches, scattered over the sad flat fields. They lay on their sides, stood forlornly on their wheels like lost dogs imploring adoption, were upturned, their wheels sticking up in the air like petrified limbs, twisted by bomb blasts, backed by fire, forming a seemingly unending and melancholy Guard of Dishonor.” During the final week of May, when the government men appeared in Marjory Allingham’s village to commandeer small boats for the evacuation, she thought, “Things [are] as bad as that, are they?”

  Halifax’s and Churchill’s divergent views on that question produced some very sharp exchanges during the afternoon cabinet of May 27. “At the moment,” said Churchill, who spoke first, “our prestige in Europe [is] very low. The only way we could get it back is by showing the world that Germany could not beat us. If after two or three months we could show that we were still unbeaten, our prestige would return. [Moreover,] even if we were beaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.”

  Cabinet transcripts rarely convey the emotional atmosphere of a meeting. But after Churchill said “If worse came to worst, it would not be a bad thing for this country to go down fighting for the other countries which have been overcome by Nazi tyranny,” one can almost sense Halifax’s agitation swelling until, finally, the man Hitler once called “Christ’s brother” seems to lose his composure entirely.

  The day before, Halifax reminded the Cabinet, the prime minister said that if he was “satisfied that matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected, he would be prepared to discuss terms.” Now he “seemed to suggest that under no conditions would we accept any course except fighting to a finish.” Halifax said he found this position unacceptable. He also took issue with Churchill’s statement that “two or three months would show whether we were able to stand up to the air risk.” Was the prime minister proposing to gamble “the future of the country on whether the enemy’s bombs happened to hit our aircraft factories”? He would be prepared to take that risk if “our independence was at stake,” Halifax said, “but if it were not . . . he would think it right to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster.”

  Churchill took half a step back. “If Herr Hitler were prepared to make terms on the restoration of German colonies, and the overlordship of Central Europe, that was one thing, but it was quite unlikely that he would make such an offer.”

  “Suppose Herr Hitler . . . offered terms to France and England,” Halifax said. Would the prime minister “be prepared to discuss them”? It was a trick question, and it got a trick answer. Churchill said he “would not join the French in asking for terms, but if he were told what the terms offered were, he would be prepared to discuss them.”

  Chamberlain intervened at this point to put a question to the entire cabinet: What if Hitler offered France terms, and “when the French said they had Allies, Hitler said, ‘I am here, let them send a delegate to Paris’ ”? Should Britain comply? The cabinet was unanimous: “The answer to such an offer could only be ‘No.’ ” Despite the show of support for Churchill’s no-surrender position, the two wise old elephants won the day on points. After further deliberation, the cabinet agreed to follow Chamberlain’s suggestion and go a little farther with the Italian approach “to keep the French in good temper.”

  That morning, Stanley Bruce had brought the cabinet back to common ground. In the afternoon, Franklin Roosevelt would. After a discussion of the president’s proposal to station the British fleet in “Canada or Australia,” there was general agreement; Roosevelt “seemed to be taking the view that it would be very nice of him to pick up the bits of the British Empire if this country were overrun.”

  Rumors about the afternoon cabinet began to circulate almost immediately upon its conclusion. Colville heard that Halifax had said, “Our aim can no longer be to crush Germany but rather to preserve our own integrity and independence.” Broadly correct though it was, the rumor omitted a significant detail: Halifax had played his trump card that afternoon, a resignation threat. “I can’t work with Winston any longer,” he told Cadogan when they talked a few minutes after the cabinet ended. “Nonsense,” Cadogan replied. Winston’s “rodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don’t do anything silly.” There was no danger of that; Edward Halifax was the least silly man in England. The “apologies” Churchill offered Halifax when they spoke later that evening in the Downing Street garden restored their working relationship, but did not end their policy differences—nor take Halifax’s resignation threat off the table. The foreign secretary’s diary entry for May 27 reads, “I thought Winston talked the most frightful rot”—this was probably a reference to Churchill’s “go down fighting” remark—“and Arthur Greenwood as well. I said exactly what I thought of them, adding that if that was their view . . . our ways must separate.”

  * * *

  This long, tumultuous day was still not quite over. At 10:00 p.m., Churchill told an emergency meeting of the war cabinet that Belgium had capitulated, imperiling the BEF, whose northern flank was now unguarded and vulnerable to immediate attack. Prepare yourselves for “heavy tidings,” the prime minister told his colleagues. In Paris, where the Belgian news was greeted with despair and desperation, elements in the Reynaud government argued for an approach to Mussolini independent of Britain.

  When the ten o’clock cabinet meeting concluded, Colville walked Churchill back to Admiralty House, his residence until the Chamberlains vacated Downing Street. During the walk, Churchill said he “did not think [the French] would give in and at any rate, they ought not to do so.” When he arrived at Admiralty House, Churchill was too restless to go to sleep. He read papers in his office for a while, then asked Colville to “pour me out a whiskey and soda, very weak, there’s a good boy.” Churchill was planning a surprise for the following day, but for now he was keeping it a secret.

  At the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, Joe Kennedy was also up late, composing a cable to Washington about this eventful day. “My impression of the situat
ion here is that it could not be worse. Only a miracle can save the British Expeditionary Force from being wiped out. . . . I suspect the Germans would be willing to make peace with both the French and British now—of course on their own terms, but on terms that would be a great deal better than they would be if the war continues. . . . I realize this is a terrific telegram but there is no question that it is in the air here . . . Churchill, Attlee, and others will want to fight to the death but there will be other numbers [political figures] who realize that the physical destruction of men and property in England will not be a proper offset to a loss of pride. In addition to that, the English people, while they suspect a terrible situation, really do not realize how bad it is. When they do, I don’t know which group they will follow—the do or die or the group that wants a settlement. It is critical, no matter which way you look at it.”

  * * *

  I. In the transcript of the morning cabinet on the twenty-seventh, Chamberlain’s statement—“we resolve to fight on”—is followed by a mysterious note in parentheses: “This statement would apply of course to the immediate situation arising out of the hypothetical fall of France. It would not mean if at any time terms were offered they would not be considered on their merits” [italics added]. It is unclear what the statement refers to, how it got into the transcript, or who put it there. But its placement after the declaration “we resolve to fight on” suggests that despite the decision to fight on, Britain would still be prepared to consider any terms that might be on offer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “WE WERE NO LONGER ONE”

  Early on the morning of May 28, a sultry Tuesday of low clouds, tropical temperatures, and intermittent showers, the bulk of the Belgian Army assembled in one of the last remaining unoccupied sectors of the country, a forty-eight-mile pocket that stretched westward from Menan to Cadzand, a coastal town on the Dutch-Belgian border. (There was a second pocket, around Bruges.) Many of the soldiers knew this region well. They had ridden the Ferris wheel in Dunkirk or honeymooned in Nieuport, a beach town north of Dunkirk. In the 1920s and 1930s, the coast of Belgium and northern France had been a popular resort area; now it was about to become the final resting place of the Belgian Army. Per the German surrender instructions, at first light Belgian troops had begun lining up along the puddled roads of the pocket. Once in position, hushed conversations could be heard here and there along the line, but many of the men were quietly staring at the ground, thinking of better days. This army of stumpy little chocolate makers, bakers, brewers, and ironworkers had gone to war with 1,338 artillery pieces but just 10 modern Renault tanks, 200 tank destroyers, 180 serviceable aircraft, and 42 armored cars—the legacy of King Leopold’s failed neutrality policy—and had suffered in proportion. Between May 10 and May 28, the daily Belgian casualty rate rarely fell below 1,000, and on bad days, such as May 24, the number of killed and wounded was closer to 2,000. The men standing by the road with four- and five-day beards and dazed expressions were what remained of that army.

  Around 8:00 a.m., the hazy morning mist was illuminated by what looked like the lights of a distant city. The German staff cars were followed by a Panzer column, the young tank commanders standing erect in the open turrets as if posing for a photograph for Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda magazine; next came an infantry formation; then more Panzers. The stream of men and matériel continued through the morning to the muffled sound of artillery fire: the Germans moving west toward Nieuport and Dunkirk, their faces hidden under coal scuttle helmets; the Belgians, in their French-style Adrian helmets, marching east toward an uncertain future under white flags of surrender.

  When the wireless announced the Belgian surrender later that morning, Jane Pratt, a Buckinghamshire woman, was typing a summary of the morning’s events for her diary. Jane’s first entry, an account of a dawn visit to her garden, was more a meditation on life in wartime than a report on plant life. “Rhododendrons, tulips, violets, white lilies . . . are still in flower but little else. . . . Spring came late this year. Summer is here now. Early, hesitant summer.” Later that morning, the Belgian news produced another meditation, this one on duty. During the Great War, Jane had experienced death almost daily—the death of cousins, uncles, former schoolmates, tradesmen, teachers; but then she had been armored by the resilience of youth; now she was approaching late middle age. Could she go through all that again? “I . . . see what I must do,” she wrote, “but I don’t want to do it. . . . I don’t want to do it.” Overwhelmed, Jane began to cry. “This is a very dramatic moment. Am weeping all over my typewriter. Perhaps I shan’t have to go. Shall I wait a little longer? But isn’t that what we’ve all been doing—hoping, and we and the French are all alone against the Nazis . . . and they are at our doorstep.” Jane rose from her writing desk resolved to join the Civil Nursing Reserve, but later in the day changed her mind and decided she could make a greater contribution to the war if she remained in Buckinghamshire and joined the staff of a local newspaper. That evening, Jane changed her mind again and was back where she started in the morning: hoping “something may happen to turn the tide of events and deliver me from the need of this sacrifice.”

  Because news of the surrender did not come through until late morning on the twenty-eighth, the morale reports for the day have a sketchy, anecdotal feel: “A woman weeping in a market place”; another woman describing herself as “furious” and “wildly annoyed” at King Leopold; strangers gathered around a wireless in stores and pubs, discussing the surrender. But the random observations all pointed to the same conclusion: the news had “given the British public a great shock,” though that was not immediately apparent from the morning papers. It could be argued that the lateness of the Belgian announcement—4:00 a.m. on the twenty-eighth—caught the newspaper unprepared, but given the British press’s addiction to sensationalism, that proposition could not be argued entirely convincingly. The Star, a popular London tabloid, devoted six pages to the racing results and two to the Belgian news on the twenty-eighth. The Daily Mirror’s coverage was more extensive, but sandwiching the surrender between ads for laxatives and a cartoon of “Jane,” girl spy and “Queen of the Undie World,” was tasteless. The BBC, which also wove the surrender into its usual light morning fare, got a sharp rap in the knuckles for it in the House of Commons that afternoon. “There is something wrong with the BBC today,” S. Reed, a Labour MP, told the House. Have “we fallen so low that statements of national importance . . . [are to be] followed by the most trivial trash it was possible for a man to listen to?” Among the notable exceptions to the tabloid coverage was an editorial in the Daily Express: “The news is grave. It grows graver by the hour. There can be no pretence about the serious position of the BEF.”

  For obvious reasons, the Express did not elaborate on what made the BEF’s position serious, but it was clear enough on the War Office maps. Against a determined infantry attack, the thin screen of British troops defending the twenty- to thirty-mile gap in the Allied corridor created by the Belgian surrender might be able to hold for a day—perhaps a day and a half—but no more. Then the Germans would break through the screen, set up a defensive perimeter across the corridor, and close the road to Dunkirk. “All this day of the twenty-eighth, the escape of the British army hung in the balance,” Churchill recalled in his memoirs. “It was a severe experience for me, bearing so heavy a responsibility, to watch . . . flickering glimpses [of] this drama in which control was impossible and intervention more likely to do harm than good.”

  That evening, William Shirer, CBS News’s Berlin correspondent, ended his day at the German Propaganda Ministry. The ministry was showing a new documentary, The German Triumph in the West, and as ruined town after ruined town flickered across the screen, Shirer noticed that the raspy-voiced German narrator was becoming more and more excited until finally he seemed to almost swoon at the carnage. “ ‘Look at the destruction, the houses going up in flames. . . . This is what happens to those who oppose German might!’ ”
When the screening room lights came up, Shirer was momentarily frozen in his seat. On several occasions since May 10 he had wondered: “Is Europe soon to be ruled by such a people, by such sadism?” That night the answer seemed clearer than it had been a week ago.

  * * *

  The MPs who gathered in the House on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth to hear the prime minister’s formal announcement of the surrender were expecting tales of measureless perfidy and threats to rip out Leopold’s heart. Instead, they got the somber, measured words of a statesman acquainted with the sorrows of war. “I have no intention of suggesting to the House that we should attempt at this moment to pass judgment on the king of the Belgians. . . . The [Belgian] Army has fought very bravely and has both suffered and inflicted heavy losses.” The response of the French, who shared a common border with Belgium, was less empathic. In a morning broadcast on the twenty-eight, Reynaud described the surrender as “a deed without precedent.” By late morning, thousands of Belgian refugees were being thrown into the streets by their French hosts, and thousands more were taunted and heckled at French train and bus stations or attacked because their cars bore Belgian plates. Meanwhile, across the still-unoccupied regions of northern France, the cry went up “Anywhere but here!” By late afternoon of the twenty-eighth, a “polyphonic symphony of motor horns, roaring and humming engines, the thundering of heavy lorries . . . [and] the asthmatic rattle of old Citroëns” descended upon Limoges, a town 216 miles south of Paris. “All day and all night,” said a resident, “the mechanized divisions of disaster passed by and the people in the streets stared at them; some pityingly, some with hostile contempt, some with anxiously thoughtful eyes, wondering when their turn would come to join the Great Migration to the south.”