The World War II Collection

by Walter Lord

  Fear of Fifth Columnists spread like an epidemic. Everyone had his favorite story of German paratroopers dressed as priests and nuns. The men of one Royal Signals maintenance unit told how two “monks” visited their quarters just before a heavy bombing attack. Others warned of enemy agents, disguised as Military Police, deliberately misdirecting convoys. There were countless tales of talented “farmers” who cut signs in corn and wheat fields pointing to choice targets. Usually the device was an arrow; sometimes a heart; and in one instance the III Corps fig leaf emblem.

  The Signals unit attached to II Corps headquarters had been warned that the Germans were dropping spies dressed as nuns, clergy, and students, so they were especially on their guard as they pulled off the main road for a little rest one dark night during the retreat. Dawn was just breaking when they were awakened by the sentry’s shouts. He reported a figure trailing a parachute lurking among some trees. After two challenges got no response, the section sergeant ordered the sentry and Signalman E. A. Salisbury to open fire. The figure crumpled, and the two men ran up to see what they had hit. It turned out to be a civilian in a gray velvet suit, clutching not a parachute but an ordinary white blanket. He had died instantly and carried no identification.

  The sergeant muttered something about one less Boche in the world, and the unit was soon on the road again. It was only later that Salisbury learned the truth: an insane asylum at Louvain had just released all its inmates, and one of them was the man he had shot. The incident left Salisbury heartsick, and forty years later he still worried about it.

  There were, of course, cases of real Fifth Column activity. Both the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Gloucesters, for instance, were harassed by sniper fire. But for the most part the “nuns” were really nuns, and the priests were genuine clerics whose odd behavior could be explained by pure fright. Usually the Military Police who misdirected traffic were equally genuine—just a little mixed up in their work.

  Yet who could know this at the time? Everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and Bombardier Arthur May found that life could be deadly dangerous for a straggler. He and two mates had been separated from their howitzer battery. They heard it had pulled back to the Belgian town of Tournai on the Escaut, and now they were trying to catch up with it. As they drove the company truck along various back roads, they were stopped and interrogated again and again by the British rear guard, all of whom seemed to have itchy trigger-fingers.

  Finally they did reach Tournai, but their troubles weren’t over. A sergeant and two privates, bayonets fixed, made them destroy their truck. Then they were escorted across the last remaining bridge over the Escaut, put in the charge of three more tough-talking riflemen, and marched to a farmhouse on the edge of town. Here they were split up and put through still another interrogation.

  Cleared at last, the three men searched two more hours before they finally found their battery. Nobody wanted to tell them anything, and the few directions they pried loose were intentionally misleading. May found it hard to believe that all these unfriendly chaps were his own comrades-in-arms.

  But it was so; and more than that, these grim, suspicious rear-guard units were all that stood between the confused mass of retreating troops and the advancing Germans. Some, like the Coldstream and the Grenadiers, were Guards regiments of legendary discipline. Others, like the 5th Northamptons and the 2nd Hampshires, were less famous but no less professional. The standard routine was to dig in behind some canal or river, usually overnight, hold off the German advance during the day with artillery and machine guns, then pull back to the next canal or river and repeat the formula.

  They were as efficient as machines, but no machines could be so tired. Digging, fighting, falling back; day after day there was never time to sleep. The 1st East Surreys finally invented a way to doze a little on the march. By linking arms, two outside men could walk a man between them as he slept. From time to time they’d switch places with one another.

  When Lieutenant James M. Langley of the 2nd Coldstream was put in charge of the bridge across the Escaut at Pecq, the Company commander, Major Angus McCorquodale, ordered a sergeant to stand by and shoot Langley if he ever tried to sit or lie down. Langley’s job was to blow the bridge when the Germans arrived, and McCorquodale explained to him, “The moment you sit or lie down, you will go to sleep, and that you are not going to do.”

  The enemy advance was often no more than ten or fifteen minutes away, but by May 23 most of the troops somehow got back to the French frontier, the starting point of their optimistic plunge into Belgium only two weeks earlier. The first emotion was relief, but close behind came shame. They all remembered the cheers, the flowers, the wine that had greeted them; now they dreaded the reproachful stares as they scrambled back through the rubble of each burned-out town.

  With the 1st East Surrey’s return to France, 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Taylor was ordered to go to Lille to pick up some stores. Lille lay far to the rear of the battalion’s position, and Taylor expected to find the assignment a peaceful change from the hell he had been through in Belgium. To his amazement, the farther back he drove, the heavier grew the sound of battle. It finally dawned on him that the Germans lay not only to the east of the BEF, but to the south and west as well. They were practically surrounded.

  The scratch forces that General Gort had thrown together to cover his exposed flank and rear were desperately hanging on. South of Arras, the inexperienced 23rd Division faced General Major Erwin Rommel’s tanks without a single antitank gun. At Saint Pol a mobile bath unit struggled to hold off the 6th Panzer Division. At Steenbecque the 9th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers grimly bided their time. A scantily trained Territorial battalion, they had been building an airfield near Lille when “the balloon went up.” Now they were part of an improvised defense unit called POLFORCE. They had no instructions, only knew that their commanding officer had vanished.

  At this point Captain Tufton Beamish, the only regular army officer in the battalion, assumed command. Somehow he rallied the men, dug them into good positions, placed his guns well, and managed to hold off the Germans for 48 important hours.

  Things were usually not that tidy. Private Bill Stratton, serving in a troop-carrying unit, felt he was aimlessly driving all over northeastern France. One evening the lorries were parked in a tree-lined field just outside the town of Saint-Omer. Suddenly some excited Frenchmen came pouring down the road shouting “Les Boches! Les Boches!” A hastily dispatched patrol returned with the disquieting news that German tanks were approaching, about ten minutes away.

  The men stood to, armed only with a few Boyes antitank rifles. This weapon did little against tanks but had such a kick it was said to have dislocated the shoulder of the inventor. Orders were not to fire until the word was given.

  Anxious moments, then the unmistakable rumble of engines and treads. Louder and louder, until—unbelievably—there they were, a column of tanks and motorized infantry clanking along the road right by the field where Stratton crouched. The trees apparently screened the lorries, for the tanks took no notice of them, and the British never attracted attention by opening fire. Finally they were gone; the rumbling died away; and the troop-carrier commander began studying his map, searching for some route back that might avoid another such heart-stopping experience.

  It was so easy to be cut off, lost—or forgotten. Sapper Joe Coles belonged to an engineering company that normally serviced concrete mixers but was now stuffed into MACFORCE east of Arras. They had no rations or water and were trying to milk some cows when Coles was posted off with a sergeant to repair a pumping station near the town of Orchies.

  By the following evening the two men had the pumps going again and decided to go into Orchies, since they still had no rations, nor even a blanket. The place turned out to be a ghost town—citizens, defending garrison, everybody had vanished.

  They did find a supply depot of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute. British servicemen always regarded NAAFI as the ministering
angel for all their needs, but even in his wildest dreams Coles never imagined anything like this. Here, too, all the staff was gone, but the shelves were packed with every conceivable delicacy.

  A stretcher was found and loaded with cigarettes, whisky, gin, and two deck chairs. Back at the pumping station, Coles and the sergeant mixed themselves a couple of generous drinks and settled down in the deck chairs for their best sleep in days.

  Next morning, still no orders; still no traffic on the roads. It was now clear that they had been left behind and forgotten. Later in the day they spotted four French soldiers wandering around the farm next door. The poilus had lost their unit too, and on the strength of this bond, Coles dipped into his NAAFI hoard and gave them a 50-pack of cigarettes. Overwhelmed, they reciprocated with a small cooked chicken. For Coles and the sergeant it was their first meal in days, and although they didn’t know it yet, it would also be their last in France.

  At the moment they thought only about getting away from the pumping station. The disappearance of everybody could only mean they were in no-man’s-land. By agreement, Coles went down to the main road and began waiting on the off-chance that some rear-guard vehicle might happen by. It was a long shot, but it paid off when a lone British Tommy on a motorcycle came boiling along. Coles flagged him down, and the Tommy promised to get help from a nearby engineering unit, also lost and forgotten. Within twenty minutes a truck swerved into the pumping station yard, scooped up Coles and his companion, and sped north toward relative safety and the hope, at least, of better communications.

  The communications breakdown was worst in the west—an inevitable result of slapping together those makeshift defense units—but the problem was acute everywhere. From the start of the war the French high command had rejected wireless. Anybody could pick signals out of the air, the argument ran. The telephone was secure. This meant stringing miles and miles of cable, and often depending on overloaded civilian circuits—but at least the Boches wouldn’t be listening.

  Lord Gort cheerfully went along. Once again, the French were the masters of war; they had studied it all out, and if they said the telephone was best, the BEF would comply. Besides, the French had 90 divisions; he had only ten.

  Then May, and the test of battle itself. Some telephone lines were quickly chewed up by Rundstedt’s tanks. Others were inadvertently cut by Allied units moving here and there. Other breaks occurred as various headquarters moved about. Gort’s Command Post alone shifted seven times in ten days. The exhausted signalmen couldn’t possibly string lines fast enough.

  After May 17 Gort no longer had any direct link with Belgian headquarters on his left, with French First Army on his right, or with his immediate superior General Georges to the rear. Nor were orders getting through to most of his own commanders down the line. At Arras his acting Operations Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel the Viscount Bridgeman, soon decided it was hopeless to rely on GHQ. Living on a diet of chocolate and whisky, he simply did what he thought was best.

  The only reliable way to communicate was by personal visit or by using dispatch riders on motorcycle. Driving through the countryside, the jaunty commander of 3rd Division, Major-General Bernard Montgomery, would jam a message on the end of his walking stick and hold it out the car window. Here it would be plucked off by his bodyguard, Sergeant Arthur Elkin, riding up on a motorcycle.

  Elkin would then scoot off to find the addressee. But it was a tricky business, driving along strange roads looking for units constantly on the move. Once he rode up to three soldiers sitting on a curb, hoping to get some directions. As he approached, one of the soldiers put on his helmet, and Elkin realized just in time that they were German.

  To Gort, the communications breakdown was one more item in a growing catalogue of complaints against the French. Gamelin was a forlorn cipher. General Georges seemed in a daze. General Gaston Billotte, commanding the French First Army Group, was meant to coordinate but didn’t. Gort had received no written instructions from him since the campaign began.

  The French troops along the coast and to the south seemed totally demoralized. Their horse-drawn artillery and transport cluttered the roads, causing huge traffic jams and angry exchanges. More than one confrontation was settled at pistol-point. Perhaps because he had gone along with the French so loyally for so long, Gort was now doubly disillusioned.

  It’s hard to say when the idea of evacuation dawned on him, but the moment may well have come around midnight, May 18. This was when General Billotte finally paid his first visit to Gort’s Command Post, currently in Wahagnies, a small French town south of Lille. Normally a big, bluff, hearty man, Billotte seemed weary and deflated as he unfolded a map showing the latest French estimate of the situation. Nine panzer divisions had been identified sweeping west toward Amiens and Abbeville—with no French units blocking their way.

  Billotte talked about taking countermeasures, but it was easy to see that his heart was not in it, and he left his hosts convinced that French resistance was collapsing. Since the enemy now blocked any retreat to the west or south, it appeared that the only alternative was to head north for the English Channel.

  At 6:00 a.m., May 19, six of Gort’s senior officers met to begin planning the retreat. It turned out that the Deputy Chief of Staff, Brigadier Sir Oliver Leese, had already been doing some thinking; he had roughed out a scheme for the entire BEF to form a hollow square and move en masse to Dunkirk, the nearest French port.

  But this assumed that the army was already surrounded, and it hadn’t come to that. What was needed was a general pulling back, and as a first step GHQ at Arras closed down, with part of the staff going to Boulogne on the coast and the rest to Hazebrouck, 33 miles closer to the sea. For the moment the Command Post would remain at Wahagnies.

  At 11:30 the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General H. R. Pownall, telephoned the War Office in London and broke the news to the Director of Military Operations and Plans, Major-General R. H. Dewing. If the French could not stabilize the front south of the BEF, Pownall warned, Gort had decided to pull back toward Dunkirk.

  In London it was a serenely beautiful Sunday, and the elegant Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, was about to join Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax for a quiet lunch, when he received an urgent call to see General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside, a hulking, heavy-footed man (inevitably nicknamed “Tiny”), was appalled by Gort’s proposed move to Dunkirk. It would be a trap, he declared.

  Ironside’s consternation was evident when at 1:15 p.m. a new call came in from Pownall. Dewing, again on the London end of the line, suggested that Gort was too gloomy, that the French might not be as badly off as he feared. In any case, why not head for Boulogne or Calais, where air cover would be better, instead of Dunkirk? “It’s a case of the hare and the tortoise,” Pownall answered dryly, “and a very simple calculation will show that the hare would win the race.”

  Dewing now put forward Ironside’s pet solution: the BEF should turn around and fight its way south to the Somme. It was a theory that totally overlooked the fact that most of the British Army was locked in combat with the German forces to the east and couldn’t possibly disengage, but Pownall didn’t belabor the point. Instead he soothingly reassured Dewing—again and again—that the Dunkirk move was “merely a project in the mind of the C-in-C” … that it was just an idea mentioned only to keep London informed of Headquarters’ thinking … that any decision depended on whether the French could restore their front. Since he was already on record as saying that the French were “melting away,” London was understandably not mollified.

  Dewing took another tack: Did Pownall realize that evacuation through Dunkirk was impossible and that maintaining any force there was bound to be precarious? Yes, Pownall answered, he knew that, but heading south would be fatal. The conversation ended with Pownall feeling that Dewing was “singularly stupid and unhelpful,” and with the War Office convinced that Gort was about to bottle himself up.

  Iron
side urged that the War Cabinet be convened at once. Messages went out recalling Churchill and Chamberlain, who had each gone off for a quiet Sunday in the country, and at 4:30 p.m. the Cabinet assembled in what Churchill liked to call “the fish room” of the Admiralty—a chamber festooned with carved dolphins leaping playfully around.

  Churchill agreed with Ironside completely: the only hope was to drive south and rejoin the French on the Somme. The others present fell in line. They decided that Ironside should personally go to Gort—this very night—and hand him the War Cabinet’s instructions.

  At 9:00 p.m. Ironside caught a special train at Victoria Station. … At 2:00 a.m. on the 20th he was in Boulogne … and at 6:00 he came barging into Gort’s Command Post at Wahagnies. With the War Cabinet’s order backing him up, he told Gort that his only chance was to turn the army around and head south for Amiens. If Gort agreed, he’d issue the necessary orders at once.

  But Gort didn’t agree. For some moments, he silently pondered the matter, then explained that the BEF was too tightly locked in combat with the Germans to the east. It simply couldn’t turn around and go the other way. If he tried, the enemy would immediately pounce on his rear and tear him to bits.

  Then, asked Ironside, would Gort at least spare his two reserve divisions for a push south which might link up with a French force pushing north? Gort thought this might be possible, but first they must coordinate the effort with General Billotte, the overall commander for the area.

  Taking Pownall in tow, Ironside now rushed down to French headquarters at Lens. He found Billotte with General Blanchard of the French First Army—both in a state of near collapse. Trembling and shouting at each other, neither had any plans at all. It was too much for the volcanic Ironside. Seizing Billotte by the buttons on his tunic, he literally tried to shake some spirit into the man.

  Ultimately it was agreed that some French light mechanized units would join Gort’s two reserve divisions in an attack tomorrow south of Arras. They would then meet up with other French forces pushing north. A command change at the very highest level should help: the placid Gamelin had finally been replaced by General Maxime Weygand. He was 73, but said to be full of fire and spirit.