The Lost Band of Brothers

by Tom Keene

  One of those who had taken shelter in the sand dunes from the incessant bombing whilst awaiting his turn to get away was Geoffrey Appleyard. Crouching in one of those deep sand holes as the bombs rained down, Appleyard was suddenly sent sprawling into the sand by something hitting him hard in the middle of the back. ‘As he lay, his mouth full of sand, thinking: “Well, this is it – they’ve got me” a voice sounded in his ear: “I say, I f-feel a bl-bloody coward, how about you?”’7 It was a startling and unorthodox introduction to Capt. Gustavus March-Phillipps, Royal Artillery, a man who would shortly become his commanding officer. Crouching there in the sand dunes of Dunkirk during the long hours of fear and boredom that followed as they dodged the shells and waited for evacuation, the two officers formed a bond of friendship that was to last a lifetime.

  At its inception, Operation Dynamo had hoped to lift perhaps 30,000 British soldiers off the beaches at Dunkirk. In the event, 338,226 British and French servicemen had been saved. Amongst them were Appleyard and March-Phillipps. Had the German High Command realised just how much trouble the stuttering gunner and the Yorkshire engineer who liked writing letters home were about to cause the German war effort, they would have been justified in diverting an entire Stuka Geschwader to ensure their particular and personal destruction. But they did not.

  And so Gus March-Phillipps and his new friend Geoffrey Appleyard came home to the country they loved: England.

  Notes

  1. Dunkirk, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, 19.

  2. Geoffrey, 45.

  3. Dunkirk, 450.

  4. Ibid., 453.

  5. Ibid., 435.

  6. Ibid., 457.

  7. Geoffrey, 45.

  2

  Backs to the Wall

  Geoffrey Appleyard and his men were amongst the very last to leave the Dunkirk beaches. They returned home in a destroyer doomed to be sunk the next day and which was bombed repeatedly on their way back to England as brave surgeons worked below decks to save the lives of the wounded. Landing at Dover, Appleyard telephoned home to Yorkshire to report his safe arrival. The family immediately drove south to meet him at Tenby, South Wales: ‘There followed the happiest renion this family has ever known,’ wrote his father simply of a time of closeness made precious by the uncertainty of repetition. After brief home leave in Linton, Appleyard reported back to Aldershot where he helped in the rebuilding of his decimated unit.

  March-Phillipps also returned to his parent unit, although there remains today no trace in the records or his personal file as to his actual deployment. In France with the BEF he had served on General Brooke’s Headquarters staff at 2 Corps and subsequently 2 BEF where he ‘served with some distinction’.1 It was a distinction recognised by the award of the MBE (Military Division) although, again, no trace of the actual citation appears to exist beyond the bald facts of its promulgation in the London Gazette of 11 July 1940. (This is recorded erroneously in his own military file as 29 July 1942.)

  At 32, March-Phillipps was an Ampleforth-educated former regular soldier, commissioned into the Royal Artillery at the age of 20, but who had left the army after active service with 23 Field Battery RA on India’s North-West frontier in the 1930s. Tiring of inaction and a hill bungalow social life that looked endlessly in on itself, March-Phillipps handed in his papers in 1932, sold his kit and used the proceeds to fund his way back to England. Here he settled in the family home in Eastway House, Blandford Forum, and began pecking out a living as a novelist. Gordon Winter knew him then:

  He was very much a young man just out of the army in his manner, much more than anything else, and he had all the mannerisms which I don’t think he ever lost … impatience with anybody who was slow or dithery, the importance of getting on with something quickly, importance of doing whatever you did well, and a kind of built in dislike of any sort of slackness – these are the things which he carried on. And a great scorn of anybody who was carrying an ounce of too much weight (laughs). I can well remember that.2

  March-Phillipps was then 24. Sporting Print (1937), Storm In A Teacup (1937) and Ace High (1939) were all well received but, by the time war came, he was neither famous nor wealthy. Of light frame and medium height, he was single, aesthetic, romantic, whipcord lean and sometimes impetuous. He had protruding ears, receding light-brown hair brushed back flat from a high forehead and a small moustache grown to disguise a hardly noticeable upper-lip disfigurement, the legacy of being bitten by a horse as a child. An expert horseman, he was also afflicted by a startling stammer that became worse when he was angry or frustrated. Cursed – or perhaps blessed – with a short fuse, he had a fierce temper and forthright views. To his family, he had huge charisma. His niece, Jennifer Auld, now aged 83, remembers with great fondness the Gus March-Phillipps she knew before the war:

  My mother was his elder sister … He was a great chap and a lovely uncle. He used to take us for walks and that lovely car he had, the Vauxhall. He called it Gert and he used to tell us stories about it. ‘When I’m tired’, he used to say, ‘I’d just say: Gert, take me home’ and we always wondered – we were only young – and we used to think ‘Did it really happen? It can’t really happen like that, can it?’ He told it very convincingly. I can hear him now. He was a lovely chap; he was great. He used to take us for walks – but it was never just a walk, it was always – I don’t remember birds but it was flowers and trees and the other thing was: take you for a walk and now find your way back to Gert … there was a puzzle there; there always something a bit more to it than just a walk. He was fun; he was adventurous. He was tall and thin; athletic; a bit of a dare-devil. I remember my grandmother telling me he had broken his collarbone but he still rode in the point-to-point. He was a great sportsman. He was a sports journalist and he wrote books. When he came to our house in Goring – we weren’t very old I don’t think – and he was up in the second floor and we were told to play one side but of course we went round and he was writing one of the books and put his head out of the window and yelled at us; he was quite cross.3

  Tim Alleyn shared a cottage with him in the Thames Valley. Recalling those sunlit pre-war days: ‘My recollection is that we just had a whale of a time. Dashing around in large cars to various places with various friends, in and around the Thames Valley, Maidenhead and other places. You know, life was just one enormous party.’ But a party, it appears, with edge:

  We quarrelled. He had a violent temper. Oh, terrific, yes. He used to go off into sulks for weeks – well, that’s an exaggeration, but certainly he would sulk and he’d turn absolutely white with rage if you disagreed with him sometimes, or he stammered very badly. But of course when he was very cross it got very much worse.4

  He was also fiercely patriotic and deeply religious, a practising Roman Catholic with a devout belief in God. Appleyard recalled:

  He is the first Army officer I have met so far who kneels down by the side of his bed for ten minutes before he goes to sleep. M-P is a great worshipper and disciple of the Knights of Old, believes that the spirit of Drake and Raleigh, of Robert The Bruce and of Oliver Cromwell is the spirit that will save England today and give her a name that the world will once again look up to. And I’m sure he is right.

  Deeply religious he may have been, but March-Phillipps was no saint. Another who formed a shrewd opinion of the former officer and novelist now returned to the colours was Sir Brooks Richards, a future member of SOE who was later to become a distinguished British diplomat: ‘Gus was a really rather extraordinary man. Before the war he had had expensive tastes and slender means. He’d loved foxhunting and driving very fast cars and indulged these two tastes by becoming someone’s kennel huntsman and by being a racing driver.’5

  Nine years older than Appleyard, March-Phillipps was also a born and an inspirational leader, a man others would follow without hesitation. The late SOE historian Professor Michael Foot once described him memorably as possessing ‘a fiery, disdainful manner that left an unforgettable impression of force’.6 Wars need men
like that.

  The Britain both these officers returned to had changed, and not simply because the lisping new prime minister many still distrusted now had a growl in his voice: there was everywhere a new, hard-edged realism that seemed to shrug off the mists and obfuscations of the Chamberlain years and the phoney war. Britain was rolling up her sleeves. Despite the euphoria with which she had greeted her heroes returning from Dunkirk, a Britain now braced for invasion did not need the prime minister to tell them that wars were not won by evacuations. As the news from across the Channel deteriorated still further, there was a brief scare that Appleyard and his unit might be amongst formations earmarked for a swift return to France – at one point three-quarters of his unit’s replacement vehicles had actually been loaded onto ships in Southampton before wiser counsels prevailed and the Movement Order was cancelled.

  Even as Appleyard and his men had struggled towards Dunkirk, the Chiefs of Staff had considered a Top Secret paper entitled ‘British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality’.7 That ‘certain eventuality’ was the collapse of France. Its essential conclusion was that, if France went to the wall, Britain would indeed still have the will, the morale, to fight on – if necessary, alone: ‘The real test is whether the morale of our fighting personnel and civil population will counter-balance the numerical and material advantages which Germany enjoys. We believe it will,’ concluded the Chiefs of Staff with unequivocal, prescient courage. Now, on 4 June, with the last troops snatched back from France and the door to Europe closed, bolted and barred, Prime Minister Winston Churchill lost no time setting out his stall in what was to become one of the defining speeches of the Second World War:

  I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation … Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.8

  Churchill could have made it no plainer: the next significant battleground was likely to be the southern shores and rolling green fields of England. ‘I’d rather be fighting overseas,’ Appleyard admitted:

  There you do at least feel you are doing something to keep the ‘wolf from the door’ so to speak, but to form up in England and wait for him to come means that this country of ours will be turned into a battlefield. Still, I suppose it will at least have the advantage of making certain people in England know that we are at war, and realise what invasion really does mean. And we really shall feel that we are fighting to protect English soil.

  Despite the strength of Churchill’s soaring rhetoric on that date and his ‘finest hour’ speech to the Commons a fortnight later which together managed, for those remaining months of 1940, to excite the British population to a never-to-be-recaptured selfless nationalism and resolve, not everyone shared Appleyard’s pragmatic acceptance of the inevitably of fighting on British soil. Kingsley Amis wrote in the New Statesman that same month: ‘To talk to common people in and out of uniform is to discover that determination to defend this island is coupled with a deep and universal bitterness that we have been reduced to such a pass.’9

  †††

  As German armoured units swung south towards the French capital, the roads south of Paris filled with fleeing, panic-stricken civilians. Officials too abandoned their posts and the people they had once pledged to serve. They called it L’Exode: the Exodus. The German army entered Paris unopposed on 14 June. On that same day, in Chartres, an hour south of the capital by train, that beautiful cathedral town was abandoned by its mayor, its director of public works and its chief water engineer. Although Chartres was bombed and burning, the fire chief announced that now was the time to head south and take the town’s four fire engines to safety away from the flames.10 With him rode the town clerk. Chartres was also abandoned by its doctors, its entire force of gendarmes and by its bishop. It was a scene of shame, of fear and civic betrayal that was repeated in a hundred towns across northern France. Two days later, on 16 June, after finding himself unsupported by his own Cabinet when he suggested continuing the fight from Algeria, right-wing Republican Premier Paul Reynaud resigned. He was succeeded by the still-revered 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in 1916, who told his nation, on the radio, that it was his intention to seek an armistice with Germany. On 22 June in the same railway carriage in Compiègne forest and on the same spot where Germany had signed the armistice in 1918, Pétain signed the instrument of surrender that would take France out of the war and divide his own country in two: a German-occupied zone in the north and west and a Zone Non-occupée in the south to be known as Vichy France. Out went the discredited Third Republic with its heart-stirring Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, in came the French State of Vichy with Pétain Chef de l’État Français. It would soon prove to be a state, a government and a betrayal of shameful collaboration. The French armistice and ceasefire came into effect on 25 June 1940. France’s particular 4-year Calvary had begun. Now, at last, Britain stood alone. To many, the realisation came as a relief. For good or ill, Britain’s destiny, her very survival as a sovereign state, now lay in no one’s hands but her own.

  †††

  Already, within that beleaguered island, Britain’s combative new prime minister and soon-to-be self-appointed minister of defence, the portly, cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking former soldier of 65 who would in short measure prove himself to be exactly the man who would chart Britain’s survival and eventual victory, had begun to lean forward and think of ways in which Britain could take the fight back to the enemy. As Appleyard and his men awaited evacuation on the crowded beaches of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill had minuted his Chiefs of Staff on 3 June 1940:

  The completely defensive habit of mind, which has ruined the French, must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative. It is of the highest consequence to keep the largest numbers of German forces all along the coasts of the countries that have been conquered, and we should immediately set to work to organise raiding forces on these coasts where the populations are friendly.11

  Others, too, were already thinking along the same lines. The following evening, 4 June, Lt Col Dudley Clarke, Royal Artillery, was walking back from the War Office to his flat in Stratton Street, Mayfair. Clarke was a General Staff Officer, First Grade, and serving at that time as Military Assistant to Sir John Dill, the newly appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Aged 59, Dill had just taken over from General Sir Edmund Ironside and was now Britain’s most senior soldier. Dill was also on the Chiefs of Staff Committee and thus one of the recipients of Winston Churchill’s ‘highest consequence’ minute of the day before. As Clarke made his way home through the early evening summer twilight of sandbagged, barb-wired and barrage-balloon protected London, his thoughts were grim for, he remembered, ‘in the War Office on that night it was not easy to view the future with optimism.’ He cast his mind back to other times and other armies: what had they done when their backs were to the wall? Clarke had served in Palestine in 1936. He had seen with his own eyes what ‘a handful of ill-armed fanatics’ had been able to achieve against the regular, cumbrous British army. He remembered also South Africa, where he had been born, where mounted units of Boers, sharp-shooting farmer ‘commandos’, had successfully harried more t
han a quarter of a million British troops conventionally deployed almost half a century before. Could they – could not Britain – now create something similar? A lightly armed, lightly equipped amphibious strike force that could take the fight to the enemy anywhere and everywhere along the coastline of his vastly extended occupied territories? It was an exciting thought. Clarke hurried home and there ‘before I went to bed I tried to marshal my ideas into the outline of a plan jotted down in note form on a single sheet of … writing paper.’

  The next morning Clarke took his paper to Sir John Dill, who took it straight to Churchill. Both Clarke and Dill found themselves knocking at an open door. That very next day, 6 June 1940, perhaps as a direct result of Clarke’s ideas, Churchill was urging General Ismay:

  Enterprises must be prepared with specially trained troops of the hunter class who can develop a reign of terror first of all on the ‘butcher and bolt’ policy … I look to the Chiefs of Staff to propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German occupied coastline. Action This Day.12