The World War II Collection

by Walter Lord

  Ironside now returned to London, convinced that once the two forces joined, the way would finally be opened for the BEF to turn around and head south—still his pet solution for everything. Gort remained unconvinced, but he was a good soldier and would try.

  At 2:00 p.m., May 21, a scratch force under Major-General H. E. Franklyn began moving south from Arras. If all went well, he should meet the French troops heading north in a couple of days at Cambrai. But all didn’t go well. Most of the infantry that Franklyn had on paper were tied up elsewhere. Instead of two divisions he had only two battalions. His 76 tanks were worn out and began to break down. The French support on his left was a day late. The new French armies supposedly moving up from the Somme never materialized. The Germans were tougher than expected. By the end of the day Franklyn’s attack had petered out.

  This was no surprise to General Gort. He had never had any faith in a drive south. Midafternoon, even before Franklyn ran into trouble, Gort was giving his corps commanders a gloomy picture of the overall situation. Franklyn’s attack was brushed off as “a desperate remedy in an attempt to put heart in the French.”

  Meanwhile, at another meeting of staff officers, Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Gort’s Adjutant-General, ordered rear GHQ to move from Boulogne to Dunkirk; medical personnel, transport troops, construction battalions, and other “useless mouths” were to head there at once. Later, at still another meeting, a set of neat, precise instructions was issued for the evacuation of these troops: “As vehicles arrive at various evacuation ports, drivers and lorries must be kept, and local transport staffs will have to make arrangements for parking. …”

  But neither Gort nor anyone from his staff attended the most important conference held this hectic afternoon. The new Supreme Commander General Weygand had flown up from Paris and was now at Ypres, explaining his plan to the commanders of the trapped armies, including Leopold III, King of the Belgians. But Gort couldn’t be located. He had once again shifted his Command Post—this time to Prémesques, just west of Lille—and by the time he and Pownall arrived at Ypres, it was too late. Weygand had gone home.

  This meant that Gort had to learn about Weygand’s plan secondhand from Billotte, which was unfortunate, since the British were to play a crucial role. The BEF was to spearhead still another drive south, linking up with a new French army group driving north. If the French and Belgians could take over part of his line, Gort agreed to contribute three divisions—but not before May 26.

  He agreed, but that didn’t make him a true believer. Once back in Prémesques, Pownall immediately summoned the acting Operations Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bridgeman. The purpose, it turned out, was not to get Bridgeman working on the drive south. Rather, he was to draw up a plan for retiring north … for withdrawing the whole BEF to the coast for evacuation.

  Bridgeman worked on it all night. Starting with the premise that an evacuation could take place anywhere between Calais and Ostend, he had to find the stretch of coast that could most easily be reached and defended by the three corps that made up the BEF. Which had the best roads leading to it? Which had the best port facilities? Which offered the best chance for air cover? Which had the best terrain for defense? Were there canals that could be used to protect the flanks? Towns that could serve as strong-points? Dykes that could be opened to flood the land and stop those German tanks?

  Poring over his maps, he gradually decided that the best bet was the 27-mile stretch of coast between Dunkirk and the Belgian town of Ostend. By the morning of May 22 he had covered every detail he could think of. Each corps was allocated the routes it would use, the stretch of coast it would hold.

  This same morning Winston Churchill again flew to Paris, hoping to get a clearer picture of the military situation. Reynaud met him at the airport and whisked him to Grand Quartier Général at Vincennes, where the oriental rugs and Moroccan sentries lent an air of unreality that reminded Churchill’s military adviser, General Sir Hastings Ismay, of a scene from Beau Geste.

  Here the Prime Minister met for the first time Maxime Weygand. Like everyone else, Churchill was impressed by the new commander’s energy and bounce (like an India rubber ball, Ismay decided). Best of all, his military thinking seemed to parallel Churchill’s own. As he understood it, the Weygand Plan in its latest refinement called for eight divisions from the BEF and the French First Army, with the Belgian cavalry on the right, to strike southwest the very next day. This force would “join hands” with the new French army group driving north from Amiens. That evening Churchill wired Gort his enthusiastic approval.

  “The man’s mad,” was Pownall’s reaction when the wire reached Gort’s Command Post next morning, the 23rd. The military situation was worse than ever: in the west, Rundstedt’s Army Group A was closing in on Boulogne, Calais, and Arras; to the east, Bock’s Army Group B was pushing the lines back to the French frontier. Churchill, Ironside—all of them—clearly had no conception of the actual situation. Eight divisions couldn’t possibly disengage … the French First Army was a shambles … the Belgian cavalry was nonexistent—or seemed so.

  Worse, Billotte had just been killed in a traffic accident, and he was the only man with firsthand knowledge of Weygand’s plans. His successor, General Blanchard, seemed a hopeless pedant, lacking any drive or power of command. With all coordination gone, troops from three different countries couldn’t conceivably be thrown into battle on a few hours’ notice.

  London and Paris dreamed on. After the meeting with Churchill, Weygand issued a stirring “Operation Order No. 1.” In it he called on the northern armies to keep the Germans from reaching the sea—ignoring the fact that they were already there. On May 24 he announced that a newly formed French Seventh Army was advancing north and had already retaken Péronne, Albert, and Amiens. It was all imaginary.

  Churchill too lived in a world of fantasy. On the 24th he fired a barrage of questions at General Ismay. Why couldn’t the British troops isolated at Calais simply knife through the German lines and join Gort? Or why didn’t Gort join them? Why were British tanks no match for German guns, but British guns no match for German tanks? The Prime Minister remained sold on the Weygand Plan, and a wire from Eden urged Gort to cooperate.

  The General was doing his best. The attack south—his part of the Weygand Plan—was still on, although the BEF contribution had been cut from three to two divisions. The German pressure in the east left no other course. As an extra precaution, Colonel Bridgeman had also been told to bring his evacuation plan up to date, and the Colonel produced a “second edition” on the morning of the 24th. Finally, Gort asked London to send over the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir John Dill. Until April, Dill had been Gort’s I Corps Commander. He was more likely to understand. If he could see for himself how bad things were, he might take back a little sanity to London.

  “There is no blinking the seriousness of situation in Northern Area,” Dill reported an hour and ten minutes after his arrival on the morning of May 25. His wire went on to describe the latest German advances. He assured London that the Allied drive south was still on, but added, “In above circumstances, attack referred to above cannot be important affair.”

  At this point General Blanchard appeared. In a rare moment of optimism he said the French could contribute two or three divisions and 200 tanks to the drive. Dill returned to London in a hopeful mood—he had more faith than Gort in French figures.

  This was the last good news of the day. Starting around 7:00 a.m., reports began coming in from the east that the Belgian line was cracking just where it joined the British near Courtrai. If this happened, Bock’s Army Group B would soon link up with Rundstedt’s Army Group A to the west, and the BEF would be completely cut off from the sea.

  There were no Belgian reserves. If anyone were to stop the Germans, it would have to be the British. Yet they too were spread dangerously thin. When Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, commanding the endangered sector, appealed to head
quarters, the most that Gort could spare was a brigade.

  Not enough. The news grew worse. The usually reliable 12th Lancers reported that the enemy had punched through the Belgian line on the River Lys. A liaison officer from the 4th Division said that the Belgians on his front had stopped fighting completely; they were just sitting around in cafés.

  By 5:00 p.m. Gort had heard enough. He retired alone to his office in Prémesques to ponder the most important decision of his professional career. All he had left were the two divisions he had promised for the attack south tomorrow. If he sent them north to plug the gap in the Belgian line, he would be ignoring his orders; he would be reneging on his understanding with Blanchard; he would be junking not only the Weygand Plan but the thinking of Churchill, Ironside, and all the rest; he would be committing the BEF to a course that could only lead to the coast and a risky evacuation.

  On the other hand, if he sent these two divisions south as promised, he would be cut off from the coast and completely encircled. His only chance then would be a last-minute rescue by the French south of the Somme, and he had no faith in that.

  His decision: send the troops north. At 6:00 p.m. he canceled the attack south and issued new orders: one of the divisions would join Brooke immediately; the other would follow shortly. Considering Gort’s utter lack of faith in the French, it was a decision that should have required perhaps less than the hour it took. The explanation lay in Gort’s character. Obedience, duty, loyalty to the team were the mainsprings of his life. To go off on his own this way was an awesome venture.

  If anything were needed to steel his resolve, it came in the form of a leather wallet stuffed with papers and a small bootjack, which had been found in a German staff car shot up by a British patrol. Brooke brought the wallet with him when he arrived at the Command Post for a conference shortly after Gort made his big decision. While he and Gort conferred, the intelligence staff examined the documents in the wallet. These included plans for a major attack at Ypres—confirming the wisdom of Gort’s decision to call off the drive south and shift the troops north.

  There was only one worry. Could the papers be a “plant”? No, Brooke decided, the bootjack meant they were genuine. Not even Hitler’s brightest intelligence agents would have thought of that touch. Far more likely, the wallet belonged to some real staff officer whose boots were too tight.

  Gort’s decision might not have been so difficult had he known that London was also going through some soul searching. Dill had returned, and his assessment finally convinced the War Office that Gort’s plight was truly desperate. Reports from liaison officers indicated that the French along the Somme couldn’t possibly help; the new armies were just beginning to assemble. Later that evening the three service ministers and their chiefs of staff met, and at 4:10 a.m., May 26, War Secretary Eden telegraphed Gort that he now faced a situation in which the safety of the BEF must come first.

  In such conditions only course open to you may be to fight your way back to west where all beaches and ports east of Gravelines will be used for embarkation. Navy would provide fleet of ships and small boats and RAF would give full support. … Prime Minister is seeing M. Reynaud tomorrow afternoon when whole situation will be clarified, including attitude of French to the possible move. In meantime it is obvious that you should not discuss the possibility of the move with French or Belgians.

  Gort didn’t need to be told. When he received Eden’s telegram he had just returned from a morning meeting with General Blanchard. There he reviewed his decision to cancel the attack south; he won French approval for a joint withdrawal north; he worked out with Blanchard the lines of retreat, a timetable, a new defense line along the River Lys—but never said a word about evacuation. In fact, as Blanchard saw things, there would be no further retreat. The Lys would be a new defense line covering Dunkirk, giving the Allies a permanent foothold in Flanders.

  For Gort, Dunkirk was no foothold; it was a springboard for getting the BEF home. His views were confirmed by a new wire from Eden that arrived late in the afternoon. It declared that there was “no course open to you but to fall back upon the coast. … You are now authorized to operate towards the coast forthwith in conjunction with French and Belgian armies.”

  So evacuation it was to be, but now a new question arose: Could they evacuate? By May 26 the BEF and the French First Army were squeezed into a long, narrow corridor running inland from the sea—60 miles deep and only 15 to 25 miles wide. Most of the British were concentrated around Lille, 43 miles from Dunkirk; the French were still farther south.

  On the eastern side of the corridor the trapped Allied forces faced Bock’s massive Army Group B; on the western side they faced the tanks and motorized divisions of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. His panzers had reached Bourbourg, only ten miles west of Dunkirk. It seemed almost a mathematical certainty that the Germans would get there first.

  “Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now,” General Brooke noted in his diary as the pocket took shape on May 23.

  “We shall have lost practically all our trained soldiers by the next few days—unless a miracle appears to help us,” General Ironside wrote on the 25th.

  “I must not conceal from you,” Gort wired Anthony Eden on the 26th, “that a great part of the BEF and its equipment will inevitably be lost even in the best circumstances.”

  Winston Churchill thought that only 20,000 or 30,000 men might be rescued. But the Prime Minister also had a streak of pugnacious optimism. In happier days he and Eden had once met at Cannes and won at roulette by playing No. 17. Now, as the War Cabinet met on one particularly grim occasion, he suddenly turned to Eden and observed, “About time No. 17 turned up, isn’t it?”

  * This book uses the geographical names that were most common at the time. Today the River Escaut is generally known as the Scheldt; the town of La Panne has become De Panne.

  2

  No. 17 Turns Up

  THE MEN OF THE 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions would have been the first to agree with the British estimates—only a miracle could save the BEF. They had reached Abbeville so quickly that the bewildered French civilians in the villages along the way thought that these blond, dusty warriors must be Dutch or English. So quickly that OKW, the German high command, hadn’t planned what to do next—head south for the Seine and Paris, or north for the Allied armies trapped in Flanders.

  North was the decision. At 8:00 a.m., May 22, OKW flashed the code words, “Abmarsch Nord.” The tanks and motorized infantry of Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A were once again on the march.

  The 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions, soon to be joined by the 10th, formed the left wing of the advance. Together, they made up General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Corps, and their mission was in keeping with Guderian’s reputation as Germany’s greatest expert in tank warfare. They were to seize the Channel ports, sealing off any chance of Allied escape. The 2nd Panzer would head for Boulogne; the 10th for Calais; and the 1st for Dunkirk—farthest away but the busiest and most important of the three ports. On this first day they covered 40 miles.

  At 10:50 a.m. on the 23rd General Lieutenant Friedrich Kirchner’s 1st Division tanks started out from the old fortified town of Desvres. Dunkirk lay 38 miles to the northeast. The way things were going, they should be there tomorrow, or the next day.

  By noon the tanks were in Rinxent—33 miles to go. At 1:15 they reached Guînes—only 25 more miles. Around 6:00 they rumbled into Les Attaques—now the distance was down to 20 miles.

  Here they had to cross the Calais–Saint-Omer canal, and anticipating that the Allies had blown the bridge, General Kirchner ordered up a company of engineers. They weren’t needed. Someone had forgotten, and the bridge was still intact. The tanks rolled across … and on into the Flanders evening, now bearing east.

  At 8:00 p.m. Kirchner’s advance units reached the Aa Canal—at its mouth, only twelve miles from Dunkirk. The Aa formed a crucial part of the “Canal Line” the British were trying to set up to guard their right
flank, but few troops had yet arrived. Around midnight the 1st Panzer stormed across, establishing a bridgehead at Saint Pierre-Brouck. By the morning of the 24th three more bridgeheads were in hand, and one battle group had pushed on to the outskirts of Bourbourg—just ten miles from Dunkirk.

  Spirits were sky-high. Prisoners poured in, and the spoils of war piled up. An elated entry in the division’s war diary observed, “It’s easier to take prisoners and booty than to get rid of them!”

  Higher up there was less elation. The Panzer Group commander General Ewald von Kleist fretted about tank losses—there was no chance for maintenance, and he estimated that he was down to 50% of his strength. The Fourth Army commander General Colonel Guenther Hans von Kluge felt that the tanks were getting too far ahead of their supporting troops. Everybody was worried about the thin, exposed flanks; and the faster and further they marched, the more exposed they became. The British sortie from Arras had been repulsed, but it caused a scare.

  No one could understand why the Allies didn’t keep attacking these flanks. To commanders brought up on World War I—where successes were measured in yards rather than scores of miles—it was incomprehensible. Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill had very little in common, but in this respect they were as one. Neither appreciated the paralyzing effect of the new tactics developed by Guderian and his disciples.

  It was the same at army group and army levels. At 4:40 p.m. on the 23rd, as the 1st Panzer Division rolled unchecked toward Dunkirk, the Fourth Army commander General von Kluge phoned General von Rundstedt at Army Group A headquarters in Charleville. Kluge, an old-school artilleryman, voiced his fears that the tanks had gotten too far ahead; “the troops would welcome an opportunity to close up tomorrow.” Rundstedt agreed, and the word was passed down the line. The panzers would halt on the 24th, but no one regarded the pause as more than a temporary measure—a chance to catch their breath.