by Sean Longden
Those men, the ones we left behind,
Those beaches would not see,
Those men to whom fate was unkind,
Had set their comrades free.
Those other men who would not see
The safety of our shores,
For five more years would not be free,
But prisoners of war.
Frederick Foster,
Royal West Kent Regiment1
Surely it was a miracle. Under the very eyes of the mighty German Army the beleaguered British Army had somehow returned home. Day after day, night after night, the evacuation had continued. Their decks crowded with the exhausted remnants of a battered and bloody army, the ships slipped quietly back across the dark waters of the Channel. Even if the waters had parted, like the Red Sea before Moses, to allow the soldiers to walk home, the watching world could hardly have been more surprised.
It was an exodus that seemed impossible, yet it had happened. All across Britain people celebrated – from the soldiers who reached the sanctuary of home, to the mothers, wives and lovers who awaited their safe return. As a nation rejoiced, the reality of what had happened was obscured. A disastrous defeat was somehow turned into a great victory. Yet as in all victories, it had come at a price – the surrender of the truth to a myth that has survived longer than most of the soldiers involved.
At first the evacuation had remained a secret. Newspapers were quite simply forbidden from reporting the events in France. Although the BEF had suffered a crushing defeat, the British people were not to be told of its humiliation. The fact that the BEF had been routed on the battlefield and driven back to the coast was not for public consumption. There was no choice but for the army to withdraw to England to lick its wounds. What followed was indeed a miracle. For an entire week the Royal Navy, and latterly the legendary ‘little ships’, transported 338,226 British, French and Belgian soldiers back across twenty miles of sea.
As the troopships, destroyers, barges, trawlers, ferries and pleasure boats disgorged the vanquished army it soon became clear that the defeat could be concealed no longer. So the news was released and the story turned upside down, with the humiliation of defeat reported as a victorious escape. Even three days in, on 31 May, the first BBC report on the evacuation stressed that the British Army was returning home ‘undefeated’. This was far from the truth, but the public knew no different. Indeed no one – not the journalists, politicians nor generals – wanted them to know different. The news was bleak, but for the people of an increasingly isolated nation this was something to celebrate – their sons had come home.
While wounded, sick and dejected troops were hidden from sight, the British press heralded the men who had returned with a smile on their faces. Those who came home waving from train carriages, clutching their souvenirs, giving the thumbs-up and kissing the women who handed out tea and buns at railway stations became a thing of legend.
News spread across the world that Britain stood alone yet defiant. A haven for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and royal families of Europe’s defeated nations, Great Britain used the escape from Dunkirk as a clarion call for the fight against tyranny. In the skilful hands of Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, the BEF’s return became a propaganda triumph. As he told the world: ‘The battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’
Churchill’s belligerent spirit helped raise the nation. Britain had not folded like its European allies; instead the army had come home. The nation had rallied and was ready to fight another day. Germany’s inability to crush the British forces on the sands of Dunkirk was a turning point in their fortunes. A failure to extract those troops from the beaches would have left Britain defenceless. With no army left to fight, Britain would have been forced to sue for peace or have been an easy target for a Nazi invasion.
Yet this never happened. They had lived to fight another day and Dunkirk had become the springboard to victory. Although there would be no quick win – the battle in France may have been lost but one battle does not make a war – from Dunkirk grew the legend of the plucky British Army, outclassed on the battlefield, withdrawing against all the odds but sailing home across the Channel. It was the classic tale of the British underdog. The ‘little ships’ that ferried the soldiers home grew to symbolize a spirit of improvisation. The Nazis may have created a powerful, modern mechanized army but even all the iron and steel of its war machine could not crush the spirit of the British nation.
The emerging legend was perfectly suited to the mood of defiance that swept the country that summer: 1940 was Winston Churchill’s year – the year of Dunkirk; the rush to volunteer for the Home Guard; the glamour and excitement of the legendary ‘Few’ who defended the skies during the Battle of Britain and the enduring Blitz spirit. This was the year that Churchill and the British people raised two defiant fingers to their enemies across the Channel. In the nation’s moment of peril there was no time to dwell on defeat – or on the defeated.
Yet hidden beneath this tale was an untold story. As time passed, historians revisited the Dunkirk story many times but the public had not yet learnt how the army had been unceremoniously defeated. They did not hear of the failure of BEF officers at all levels. Nor did they read the details of drunken soldiers who refused calls to leave the cellars of Dunkirk and proceed for embarkation. In the mythology there was no room for tales of the failure of a poorly trained army, nor for stories of men scrambling to board boats being shot or forced away at gunpoint. Nor was the full story revealed of how the figures for the miraculous Dunkirk evacuation only talked of men who escaped via one port. Forgotten were more than 100,000 men whose escape to the UK came via a host of other coastal towns, from Normandy to the Bay of Biscay.
It would be many years before the real story of the evacuation even began to be told. Richard Collier’s 1961 book The Sands of Dunkirk was one of the first to reveal much of the chaos, indiscipline and terror that had been obscured by the myth. Later works like Walter Lord’s The Miracle of Dunkirk and Nicholas Harman’s Dunkirk – The Necessary Myth further helped to balance the story.
However, even in all these works one detail has remained missing. These stories ended with the final evacuations from the beaches of Dunkirk, drawing a veil over the desperate fate of those left behind.
As the boats sailed off they had abandoned 2,472 guns, nearly 65,000 vehicles and 20,000 motorcycles. In the chaos of retreat they had also left behind 416,000 tons of stores, over 75,000 tons of much-needed ammunition and 162,000 tons of petrol.
More shocking than all this, however, was a single chilling statistic – 68,111 men of the BEF did not return home across the Channel at all. Thousands were the dead, wounded or missing but almost 40,000 British soldiers were alive and already being marched off into a captivity that would last for five long years.
However, back at home in Britain, rather than mourning for the defeated or lost, people felt they had something to celebrate. There was a genuine outpouring of excitement and relief that the majority of the army had come home safely and were ready to defend Britain’s shores from its enemies. In homes the length and breadth of Great Britain families rejoiced when they heard the news that their sons had returned. The war may not have been over but their loved ones had survived to fight another day. For the moment, that was enough.
At the Reeves family home in Reigate, a mother, father and siblings celebrated the safe return of their eldest son, Les, from France. For them, the nation’s collective relief had been a very personal one – their boy had survived. The joyous mood in the house continued for a few days until a lone voice cut through the celebrations. It was Ivy, the soldier’s sister. She had been thinking and had suddenly realized something was missing. Finally she asked the question that had been troubling her: ‘But hang on a minute, didn’t our Eric go to France as well? Where’s he?’
In all the excitement their younger son had been forgotten. As they spoke, nineteen-year-old Eric Reeves was trudg
ing forlornly along the roads of northern France, destined for a German prisoner of war camp. It would be five years before he would return home to tell his story. Like almost 40,000 of his comrades, he was one of Dunkirk’s forgotten heroes – one of the men they left behind.
CHAPTER ONE
Missing the Boat
The truth of the last day will never be published.
Major R.L. Barclay, 44th Division
RASC, writing to his wife in June 1940
following his return from France1
Looming high above the fields of Flanders, this seemed to be an obvious vantage point. Like some wooded island crowned with a medieval monastery, the Mont des Cats gave its occupiers a vast and unrivalled panorama both eastwards into Belgium and westwards across the landscape of France. But as the month of May 1940 drew to a close there was only one view that really mattered. Twenty miles to the north-east plumes of smoke were rolling skywards – rising above the flames of Dunkirk.
A few days previously this had been a depot for the British Army, a dump for vehicles and stores. But with the spearpoint of the German blitzkrieg plunging through Belgium, pushing back the Allied armies ever westwards, the Mont des Cats was no longer a rear echelon sanctuary. Instead it had become a hastily improvised strongpoint. With his troops forced back into France, Major-General Edmund Archibald Osborne, commanding officer of the 44th Infantry Division, had assembled them on the only available high ground. Originally an officer in the Royal Engineers, who had served with honour in the fields of Flanders during the Great War, Osborne was the very picture of the old-fashioned British general. With his service dress, riding breeches and boots, grey hair and clipped military moustache he seemed to epitomize just how out of date the British Army had become. In the era of blitzkrieg, of air support, carrier-borne infantry, paratroopers and tanks, Osborne seemed to reflect the days of the static trench warfare of his first conflict.
To the senior officers of the British Expeditionary Force, men like Major-General Osborne, this was the textbook defensive position. It had everything they needed, a commanding view of the lands around, plenty of cover for the troops and, most importantly, it sat immediately in the face of the enemy advance.
For others that was exactly the problem. Footsore and weary after days of fighting and retreating in the face of the advancing ‘lightning war’, the men of the 4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment were less impressed by the sight. Certainly this was a fine defensive position – any fool could see that – but there was something far more important to them. Sitting high upon the only hill for miles around, they were conspicuous – they were a target. For twenty-two-year-old Private Bill Holmes it was a relief not to be marching, but war had entered his life swiftly and viciously and it was about to get worse. As he would later describe it, with the deliberate understatement so common to the British infantryman: ‘We really had a dose there. The British Army really did some silly things – for one thing, we were right on the top of the hill. So the Germans just kept bombing it! It was the most stupid thing they could have planned.’
These were strong words for such an inexperienced soldier. Just nine months earlier Holmes had been working on his father’s farm in East Sussex. His had been a simple life, one so common in the countryside of pre-war Britain. There were few luxuries, he worked hard from dawn till dusk, tending the animals and maintaining the orchards that provided the family with its income. But along with the hard work came a slow pace of life that made the long hours tolerable. In many ways it was an idyllic existence, one which none in the village had realized would soon be over. In these final days before war, horses still worked the land, many homes were still without electricity or relied on pumped water. Through the spring and summer of 1939, as war had approached, the young men inhabiting this world were slowly caught up in political machinations that seemed so far removed from their own world. When Holmes and his mates went to the cinema in nearby Haywards Heath, they saw newsreels revealing what was going on in Europe, but still it all seemed so distant. What did the Sudentenland, the Munich crisis or Hitler’s insistent sabre rattling mean to them?
Then in summer 1939, with war seemingly inevitable, the outside world finally took a grasp of the towns and villages of Britain. The government’s announcement that it was to form a militia from more than 200,000 men, aged twenty and twenty-one, was a firm declaration of intent. It may not have been a full-scale mobilization, but it was one more step on the road to war. Each man called up to the militia was told he would serve just six months and then be released back into civilian life as a trained infantryman, ready to be called up in the event of war. Like all his mates, Bill Holmes had registered for the militia in July. Now he was certain war would come. This knowledge could not help but affect their lives: ‘I had a summer of freedom, but in the back of my mind I knew what was going to happen.’ It was the calm before the storm.
When his call-up papers had arrived, falling ominously on to the doormat of the family cottage, Holmes’ father had made him a stark offer. He could apply for his son to be excused service, to register as an essential worker, since farming could be classed as a reserved occupation. The youngster had considered the offer but realized he could never accept. Quite simply, he knew that to remain at home would seem like a betrayal of his mates, all of whom would themselves be going to war. It was a decision that would trouble him many times in the five long years that followed.
Sitting atop the Mont des Cats, with shells bursting around him and machine-gun fire raking the hillside, it was easy for these thoughts to return to his mind. Just eight months before, he had said goodbye to his mates and headed off to the barracks at Chichester. Life in the army was a shock to most of the new recruits, but for those from quiet villages it made all the more impact upon their lives. ‘Suddenly nothing was private any more – like showering with other people. That took a bit of getting used to, but in the end you were as bad as everyone else. The others were nearly all London lads – a rough old bunch, but a good bunch. You couldn’t be a weakling among them.’
These new soldiers may have learned to live together but they had still not learned all the skills of the infantryman. Compared to the well-trained forces heading towards them the British soldiers were, in the most part, mere novices. That said, they were not fools.
In the world of the tacticians and military theorist, of the generals and staff officers with their grandiose plans and years of experience, the views of novice soldiers like Bill Holmes were ridiculously simple. Such men did not understand the art of war. And yet he was right when he pondered the wisdom of their positions on the Mont des Cats. Every German gunner could range his shells on to the hill. Every Luftwaffe pilot could spot the monastery or the windmill and unload his deadly cargo with hardly a chance of missing. And every soldier of the Wehrmacht, from the lowliest private to the mightiest general, knew the British Army would occupy the hill.
As Holmes and his comrades in the 44th Division awaited the German assault on their positions, they had a brief moment to look back on all that had happened in the previous weeks. The British Army had been engaged in a valiant attempt to stall the German advance. They had held hideously exposed positions on the riverbanks and canalsides that crisscrossed the low-lying fields of Belgium and northern France. As a review of the campaign commissioned by the War Office later revealed, defensive positions on canals and rivers caused immense problems for the defenders: they could not patrol, did not hold the high ground, were unable to camouflage their positions competently and could not counterattack. All they could do was dig trenches, blow bridges, fortify houses and pray they might hold off the rampaging force that had launched itself across the Low Countries.
Britain’s almost total lack of preparedness seemed reflected in the situation experienced at the Mont des Cats. Just a few short months earlier, this vast new army of regular soldiers, reservists, Territorials, new recruits and conscripts to the British Army had laughed at their situation. Following the
declaration of war, thousands of new soldiers had arrived at barrack rooms and drill halls across Britain only to be issued with uniforms, weapons and equipment that seemed like museum pieces. Many had started their military careers in uniforms little changed since the last great conflict: boots that had been date-stamped ‘1920’ and packed in grease for nearly twenty years; rifles that had last seen service in their fathers’ hands back in the Great War; ‘pisspot’ helmets; cloth puttees – all relics of some long forgotten era of warfare. As they stumbled across the parade grounds and agonized over polishing brasses, boots and buttons, they had taken some comfort in the constant claims that war would last no more than a few months. All could laugh at ill-fitting uniforms and the caps that seemed to litter the parade ground every time the drill-sergeants shouted instructions.
Yet there was a sober fact behind this comic spectacle. Following the Great War the British Army had been allowed to run down to a state in which it was hardly equipped for modern warfare. Only in 1932, after more than ten years of neglect, had the government admitted that something needed to be done. Even so, it took two further years of talking before any real changes began to be made. As the British government discussed rearmament, its potential enemies had pushed forward with modernizing their fighting forces. Even after rapid expansion and investment in the armies following the Munich crisis, the British Army had still been left lagging far behind its enemies. As Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF, wrote in a report about the territorial units under his command: ‘The standard of training is low and in my opinion, against a first-class enemy they are as yet fit only for static warfare.’ He was blunt in his assessment that they ‘possessed little more than token equipment’.2
