by Walter Lord
From a mobile headquarters train, hidden in a forest near the Franco-German border, General Field Marshal Hermann Göring also followed the dash of the panzers with mounting concern. But his worries had little to do with exposed flanks or mechanical breakdowns. Göring, an exceptionally vainglorious man, was Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, and he was worried that these dramatic tactics were robbing his air force of its proper share in the coming victory.
On the afternoon of May 23 he was working at a big oak table that had been set up beside his train, when an aide arrived with the latest reports on the panzers’ exploits. It looked as though Dunkirk and the whole coast might be taken in a couple of days. Slamming his fist on the table, Göring bellowed, “This is a wonderful opportunity for the Luftwaffe! I must speak to the Fuehrer at once. Get me a line!”
A call was immediately put through to Hitler at his forest headquarters near the village of Münstereifel in northwestern Germany. Göring poured out his case: This was the moment to turn the Luftwaffe loose. If the Fuehrer would order the army to stand back and give him room, he guaranteed his planes would wipe out the enemy alone. … It would be a cheap victory, and the credit would go to the air arm, associated with the new Reich of National Socialism, rather than to the army generals and old-line Prussian aristocrats.
“There goes Göring, shooting off his big mouth again,” remarked General Major Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, who was one of several staff officers hovering around Hitler during the call.
Actually, Göring knew his man very well. He struck all the right chords. And his arguments found Hitler in a most receptive mood. For days the Fuehrer had been growing ever more nervous about the safety of his armor. At OKW, Generals Keitel and Jodl had been warning him that Flanders was not good tank country, and there was always the haunting memory of 1914, when the French, apparently beaten, staged “the miracle of the Marne.”
The shadow of World War I hung over him in another way too: France was the real enemy; Paris the real target. The great French city had dangled just out of reach for four years last time—it must not happen again. Faced with the choice of using his tanks to throw nine shattered British divisions into the sea, or saving them for 65 fresh French divisions blocking the road to Paris and the south, who wouldn’t go for Göring’s easy way out?
In this state of mind, Hitler flew down to Charleville the following morning, May 24, to consult with General von Rundstedt. It was a most satisfying meeting. The conservative Rundstedt explained he had stopped the panzers so the rest could catch up, and went on to suggest the next steps to take. The infantry should continue attacking east of Arras, but the panzers should hold fast on the Aa Canal Line. Here they could simply gather in the BEF as it was driven back by Army Group B, pushing from the other side of the pocket.
It was a plan that fitted Hitler’s own thinking exactly. He immediately approved, emphasizing that the tanks must be saved for future operations. In addition, he observed, any further narrowing of the pocket would only interfere with Göring’s bombers—a consideration that would have amazed the Stuka pilots, who prided themselves on their precision bombing.
At 12:41 p.m. new orders went out, backed by the Fuehrer’s own authority. They not only confirmed Rundstedt’s “halt order” of the previous day; they made it more explicit. The General had not specified any particular line to stop on, and some panzer commanders were already sneaking forward a few extra miles. Hitler corrected this oversight by spelling out exactly where the tanks were to hold:
the forces advancing to the northwest of Arras are not to go beyond the general line Lens–Béthune–Aire–St. Omer–Gravelines. On the west wing, all mobile units are to close up and let the enemy throw himself against the above-mentioned favorable defensive line.
“We were utterly speechless,” Heinz Guderian later declared, recalling the effect the halt order had on his tank commanders and crews. By now four panzer and two motorized infantry divisions had arrived at the Aa … six bridgeheads had been planted on the other side … the advanced patrols were meeting little opposition … just over the horizon lay Dunkirk. Colonel Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, a staff officer attached to one of the most forward units, could even make out the massive square belfry of the Church of Saint Eloi. Why stop now?
General Colonel Walther von Brauchitsch, Chief of OKH—the Army’s high command—wondered about the same thing. He didn’t even hear of the order till midafternoon. It seemed an incredible step, and even more incredible to take it without consulting the Army’s top command. Summoned to Hitler’s headquarters that evening, he was prepared to argue his case.
He never had a chance. He got a chewing out instead. Hitler had learned that Brauchitsch had ordered the Fourth Army to be transferred from Army Group A to Army Group B, to put the final phase of the battle under one field command. The Fuehrer felt this was a mistake and was outraged that Brauchitsch had done it without consulting him first.
Ranting at the unfortunate General, he canceled the transfer and reconfirmed the halt order. At 8:20 p.m. Brauchitsch returned to OKH angry and humiliated. His Chief of Staff General Franz Halder was in an even worse mood. For the first time in anybody’s memory he was nearly an hour late for the OKH evening conference, and the intelligence officer Colonel Liss had never seen him in such a rage. He broke the news of the halt order, storming, “The General Staff is not guilty!”
Nor was he ready to take it lying down. After the meeting, when he had cooled off a little, he recruited his operations officer Colonel von Greiffenberg, and the two of them tried to figure out some way to get around the order. They mustn’t be too obvious, but the OKH—the normal source of all army orders—did at least give them a pipeline. Shortly after midnight they had their scheme ready: OKH issued new instructions supplementing the halt order and permitting (but not ordering) Army Group A to advance beyond the Canal Line. Under the normal chain of command, Rundstedt would pass the order on to Fourth Army, which would pass it on to Guderian’s XIX Corps, and “Fast Heinz” would get the hint.
But the normal chain of command didn’t function. The cautious Rundstedt didn’t pass along the new orders, pointing out that Hitler had delegated to him the decision on how operations were to be conducted, and he still didn’t think it was safe to lift the halt order. Besides, said Rundstedt, there wasn’t time to alert the Luftwaffe to adjust its morning targets.
Rundstedt was, of course, under OKH, and in the annals of the German Army it was unheard of for an army group commander to ignore an OKH order, but here both Halder’s and Brauchitsch’s hands were tied. Their only recourse was to run to Hitler, and everyone knew how he felt.
Nevertheless, on the morning of May 25 the two Generals went back to the Fuehrer for one more try. Prolonging the halt order, Brauchitsch argued, meant nothing less than risking certain victory. As the campaign had been planned, Army Group A was the hammer and B the anvil; now the hammer was being stopped in midair. Then Halder added his bit. Playing on the Fuehrer’s sense of history, he showed how OKH’s original plan would lead to “a little Cannae.”
Hitler would have none of it. The tanks must be saved for the future, and in the course of the discussion a new factor arose: he didn’t want the climax of the campaign to be fought on Flemish soil. He hoped to encourage a separatist movement there, and too much destruction wrought by the German war machine might be bad politics. The best way to avoid this was for Army Group B to push the British back into France.
As Brauchitsch and Halder sulked back to OKH empty-handed, others were trying to achieve the same goal by pulling strings. General von Kleist had initially favored the halt order, but no longer. During the morning of the 25th he called his good friend General Major Wolfram von Richthofen, commanding Fliegerkorps VIII, who called his good friend General Major Hans Jeschonnek, Göring’s Chief of Staff. Could he get Göring to ask Hitler to lift the halt order? Jeschonnek wasn’t about to touch such a hot potato, and the effort fell through.
&nb
sp; During the day separate appeals were made by the Fourth Army commander, General von Kluge, by General Albert Kesselring of the 2nd Air Fleet, even by General von Bock, commanding Army Group B—all turned down cold.
By the evening of the 25th there were doubts even at OKW, normally a faithful echo of the Fuehrer’s voice. Colonel Lieutenant Bernard von Lossberg, a young staff officer, buttonholed General Jodl and reminded him of the old German military maxim, Never let up on a defeated enemy. Jodl mildly brushed aside the advice, explaining, “The war is won; all that is left is to finish it. It’s not worth sacrificing a single tank, if we can do it more cheaply by using the Luftwaffe.”
Lossberg had no better luck with the Chief of OKW, General Keitel, whom he found outside headquarters, sitting on a grassy bank enjoying a cigar. Keitel said he found it easy to agree with the halt order. He knew Flanders from World War I days: the ground was marshy and tanks could easily get stuck. Let Göring do the job alone.
By the 26th even Rundstedt had doubts about the order. The Luftwaffe hadn’t lived up to Göring’s promises, and Bock’s Army Group B, advancing from the east, was bogged down. More behind-the-scenes telephone calls followed: Colonel Lieutenant von Tresckow, Army Group A operations staff, phoned his close friend Colonel Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, and urged that something be done to get the tanks moving again.
The first break came around noon. OKW phoned Halder that the Fuehrer would now allow the panzers and motorized infantry to move within artillery range of Dunkirk “in order to cut off, from the land side, the continuous flow of shipping (evacuations and arrivals).”
Another order followed at 1:30, lifting the halt order completely. At OKH fresh objectives were set, new orders cut and transmitted by 3:30. Army Group A couldn’t raise Fourth Army headquarters either by radio or telephone; so at 4:15 a special courier plane carried the good news to General von Kluge: Guderian’s tanks could roll again.
The panzer crews were alerted; fuel tanks topped off; ammunition loaded; and the columns reassembled. All this took sixteen more hours, and it wasn’t until the predawn hours of May 27 that XIX Corps finally resumed its advance.
For the Wehrmacht, three full days had been lost. For Churchill, the roulette player, No. 17 had at last come up—a lucky and totally unexpected windfall. Whether the British would be able to profit by this stroke of good fortune would largely depend on how General Gort used the time.
Curiously, neither Gort nor any of his staff attached much significance to the halt order, although it was broadcast in clear and picked up by British eavesdroppers. General Pownall was briefly elated (“Can this be the turn of the tide?” he asked his diary), but he soon turned his mind to other things. There was much to worry about: Boulogne had probably fallen; Calais was cut off; the Belgians were crumbling; Weygand and London were still clamoring for a counterattack; the list was endless.
The situation along the Canal Line was particularly desperate. By May 22 the reliable 6th Green Howards were helping the French hold Gravelines, but to the south there was practically nothing. Only 10,000 men covered a 50-mile front, and these were mostly the cooks, drivers, and company clerks who made up the various scratch units Gort had pulled together.
There was one consolation. As the eastern wall of the corridor was pushed back by Bock’s massed infantry, it became easier to shift troops to bolster the west. On the evening of the 23rd Gort began transferring three of his seven eastern divisions.
When the 2nd Division moved on the night of May 24-25, the 2nd Dorsets were trucked westward for 25 miles to Festubert, a sleepy village near the La Bassée Canal. All was quiet as 2nd Lieutenant I.F.R. Ramsay’s C Company settled into their billets. The old lady who lived next door even dropped by to see how the boys were getting along. It was rumored that the battalion had been withdrawn for a rest.
To their left and right other 2nd Division units were digging in. They too found everything quiet, although the 1st Cameron Highlanders uneasily noted a concentration of enemy tanks and transport building up across the canal. To the north, the 44th and 48th Divisions also moved in; while the French 60th Division took over the area around the coast. Here and there additional corps and headquarter units, some spare artillerymen, a Belgian machine-gun company, a few French tanks fattened up the defense.
Even so, there weren’t enough troops to man the whole Canal Line. Gort hoped to minimize the shortage by concentrating his men in towns and villages just east of the canal. These strong-points—or “stops” as he called them—were to hold up the German tanks as long as possible.
On the evening of May 25 the 2nd Gloucesters arrived in Cassel, conspicuous because it sat on the only hill for miles around. It was a good position, but 2nd Lieutenant Julian Fane still felt badly as he turned the local people out of their houses and began punching holes in the walls for his guns. Life began looking up again when a foraging party brought back a case of Moët & Chandon, ten bottles of brandy, and assorted liqueurs.
By the afternoon of May 26—about the time Hitler finally lifted the halt order—tough, seasoned troops held all the key towns on the western side of the escape corridor. On the eastern side two fresh divisions, switched from the canceled counterattack south, joined the four already in place; while all the way south, the French First Army blocked the enemy advance at Lille.
Within this long, narrow passageway the rest of the trapped forces—over 150,000 troops—swarmed north toward the coast. There were no longer separate retreats from the east and from the west. The two streams merged into one swirling, turbulent river of men.
And all the while the Stukas continued their assault. “Stand up to them. Shoot at them with a Bren gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant. …” The advice came from Brigadier Beckwith-Smith, a throwback to the glory days of the Empire. But even those who understood what he was talking about found it hard to grasp the analogy. The Stukas had an implacable ferocity all their own.
No target seemed too small. Corporal Bob Hadnett, a dispatch rider with the 48th Division, was riding his motorcycle along an exposed stretch of road when a single Stuka spotted him. Machine guns blazing, it made two passes, but missed both times as Hadnett weaved wildly from side to side on the road. Still after him, the Stuka climbed, peeled off, and dived straight at him. Again it missed, and this time the pilot misjudged his dive. He tried to pull out too late and plunged into the road just ahead, exploding in a ball of fire. Hadnett turned off the road into a field, smoked a cigarette, and carried on.
Most of the men showed less nonchalance. The drivers of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park felt compelled to run for cover when attacked, but their officer felt that only attracted attention. “The next time one of you bastards runs,” he promised, “I will shoot him down.” After that the men lay flat, but Lance Corporal Reginald Lockerby discovered a new kind of fear. As the machine-gun bullets whacked into the earth around him, he felt an almost irresistible urge to draw his legs up under his body. He was always sure they would be cut off.
Numbed by the Stuka attacks, exhausted from lack of sleep, the men lost all sense of time and place. The days merged with one another. The towns ceased to have any identity of their own. Poperinge was remembered for its tangle of trolley wires; Armentières for the cats that howled all night. Carvin was the place where 60 convent girls, killed by a bomb, lay in neat rows in the moonlight. Tournai was the spot where the traveling circus got hit—a nightmare of wounded elephants and four plunging white horses dragging an unconscious girl rider.
Few of the men knew where they were going. Private Bill Warner, headquarters clerk in the 60th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, lost his unit in the dark, and had absolutely no destination in mind. He just wandered along, following the crowd, doing what everybody else did. Private Bob Stephens, 2nd Searchlight Battalion, was one of seven men in a lorry that somehow got separated from the rest of the battalion. They simply drove along without the vaguest idea where they were heading. Trying to find which way to g
o, they would occasionally get out and examine tire tracks in the dust, like Indian fighters in the old West.
Often the “brass” was almost as uninformed. Major Charles Richardson, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General, 4th Division, gradually became aware that they were moving toward the coast, but evacuation never occurred to him. He vaguely thought that a bridgehead might be established somewhere, letting the Allies keep a foothold on the Continent.
There was no such thinking at General Gort’s headquarters in Prémesques. When Colonel Bridgeman, the acting Operations Officer, reported for duty early on the morning of May 26, General Pownall told him that evacuation was definite.
This was no surprise to Bridgeman. He had been developing his evacuation plan off and on for five days in the little operations office he shared with Colonel Philip Gregson-Ellis. The rest of his time he concentrated on shoring up the western wall of the corridor, while Gregson-Ellis took care of the east. In spare moments they would argue over who had the worst job: Gregson-Ellis, with the Belgians collapsing, or Bridgeman, with virtually no idea where his troops were or what they were good for.
But today would be no office day. With communications so bad, Bridgeman decided to tour the western sector personally to get a better idea of what needed to be done. It was a long day, which included a visit to Bastion 32, the reinforced concrete bunker that served as French headquarters at Dunkirk. Here he met General Marie B. A. Fagalde, commanding the French troops along the Aa Canal. He had once been a military attaché in London and spoke good English. It was a promising start: the Allies could at least communicate.
