Tennant asked how long he would have for the job. The answer was not encouraging: “24 to 36 hours.” After that, the Germans would probably be in Dunkirk. With this gloomy assessment, at 7:58 p.m. he sent his first signal to Dover as Senior Naval Officer:
Please send every available craft East of Dunkirk immediately. Evacuation tomorrow night is problematical.
At 8:05 he sent another message, elaborating slightly:
Port continually bombed all day and on fire. Embarkation possible only from beaches east of harbour. … Send all ships and passenger ships there. Am ordering Wolfhound to anchor there, load and sail.
In Dover, the Dynamo Room burst into action as the staff rushed to divert the rescue fleet from Dunkirk to the ten-mile stretch of sand east of the port. …
9:01, Maid of Orleans not to enter Dunkirk but anchor close inshore between Malo-les-Bains and Zuydcoote to embark troops from beach. …
9:27, Grafton and Polish destroyer Blyskawicz to close beach at La Panne at 0100/28 and embark all possible British troops in own boats. This is our last chance of saving them. …
9:42, Gallant [plus five other destroyers and cruiser Calcutta] to close beach one to three miles east of Dunkirk with utmost despatch and embark all possible British troops. This is our last chance of saving them.
Within an hour the Dynamo Room managed to shift to the beaches all the vessels in service at the moment: a cruiser, 9 destroyers, 2 transports, 4 minesweepers, 4 skoots, and 17 drifters—37 ships altogether.
In Dunkirk, Captain Tennant’s naval party went to work rounding up the scattered troops and sending them to the nearest beach at Malo-les-Bains. Here they were divided by Commander Richardson into packets of 30 to 50 men. In most cases the soldiers were pathetically eager to obey anybody who seemed to know what he was doing. “Thank God we’ve got a Navy,” remarked one soldier to Seaman Fletcher.
Most of the troops were found crowded in the port’s cellars, taking cover from the bombs. Second Lieutenant Arthur Rhodes managed to get his men into a basement liberally stocked with champagne and foie gras, which became their staple diet for some time. But this did not mean they were enjoying the good life. Some 60 men, two civilian women, and assorted stray dogs were packed in together. The atmosphere was heavy … made even heavier when one of the soldiers fed some foie gras to one of the dogs, and it promptly threw up.
Some of the men took to the champagne, and drunken shouts soon mingled with the crash of bombs and falling masonry that came from above. From time to time Rhodes ventured outside trying to find a better cellar, but they all were crowded and he finally gave up. Toward evening he heard a cry for “officers.” Going up, he learned that the Royal Navy had arrived. He was to take his men to the beaches; ships would try to lift them that night.
Cellars couldn’t hold all the men now pouring into Dunkirk. Some, looking desperately for cover, headed for the sturdy old French fortifications that lay between the harbor and the beaches east of town. Bastion 32 was here, with its small quota of British staff officers, but the French units holed up in the area were not inclined to admit any more visitors.
Terrified and leaderless, one group of British stragglers wasn’t about to turn back. They had no officers, but they did have rifles. During the evening of the 27th they approached Bastion 32, brandishing their guns and demanding to be let in. Two Royal Navy officers came out unarmed and parlayed with them. It was still touch and go when one of Tennant’s shore parties arrived. The sailors quickly restored order, and this particular crisis was over.
Seaman G. F. Nixon, attached to one of these naval parties, later recalled how quickly the troops responded to almost any show of firm authority. “It was amazing what a two-badge sailor with a fixed bayonet and a loud voice did to those lads.”
Captain Tennant, making his first inspection of the beaches as SNO, personally addressed several jittery groups. He urged them to keep calm and stay under cover as much as possible. He assured them that plenty of ships were coming, and that they would all get safely back to England.
He was invariably successful, partly because the ordinary Tommy had such blind faith in the Royal Navy, but also because Tennant looked like an officer. Owing to the modern fashion of dressing all soldiers alike, the army officers didn’t stand out even when present, but there was no doubt about Tennant. In his well-cut navy blues, with its brass buttons and four gold stripes, he had authority written all over him.
And in Tennant’s case, there was an extra touch. During a snack at Bastion 32 his signal officer, Commander Michael Ellwood, cut the letters “S-N-O” from the silver foil of a cigarette pack, then glued them to the Captain’s helmet with thick pea soup.
Unfortunately no amount of discipline could change the basic arithmetic of Dunkirk. Far too few men were being lifted from the beaches. Tennant estimated he could do the job five or six times faster if he could use the docks. Yet one glance at Dunkirk’s blazing waterfront proved that was out of the question.
But he did notice a peculiar thing. Although the Luftwaffe was pounding the piers and quays, it completely ignored the two long breakwaters or moles that formed the entrance to Dunkirk’s harbor. Like a pair of protective arms, these moles ran toward each other—one from the west and one from the east—with just enough room for a ship to pass in between. It was the eastern mole that attracted Tennant’s special attention. Made of concrete piling topped by a wooden walkway, it ran some 1,400 yards out to sea. If ships could be brought alongside, it would speed up the evacuation enormously.
The big drawback: the mole was never built to be used as a pier. Could it take the pounding it would get, as the swift tidal current—running as high as three knots—slammed ships against the flimsy wooden planking? There were posts here and there, but they were meant only for occasional harbor craft. Could large vessels tie up without yanking the posts loose? The walkway was just ten feet wide, barely room for four men walking abreast. Would this lead to impossible traffic jams?
All these difficulties were aggravated by a fifteen-foot tidal drop. Transferring the troops at low or high water was bound to be a tricky and dangerous business.
Still, it was the only hope. At 10:30 p.m. Tennant signaled Wolfhound, now handling communications offshore, to send a personnel ship to the mole “to embark 1,000 men.” The assignment went to Queen of the Channel, formerly a crack steamer on the cross-Channel run. At the moment she was lifting troops from the beach at Malo-les-Bains, and like everyone else, her crew found it slow going. She quickly shifted to the mole and began loading up. She had no trouble, and the anxious naval party heaved a collective sigh of relief.
By 4:15 a.m. some 950 men crammed the Queen’s decks. Dawn was breaking, when a voice called out from the mole asking how many more she could take. “It’s not a case of how many more,” her skipper shouted back, “but whether we can get away with what we already have.”
He was right. Less than halfway across the Channel a single German plane dropped a stick of bombs just astern of the Queen, breaking her back. Except for a few soldiers who jumped overboard, everyone behaved with amazing calm. Seaman George Bartlett even considered briefly whether he should go below for a new pair of shoes he had left in his locker. He wisely thought better of it, for the ship was now sinking fast. He and the rest stood quietly on the sloping decks, until a rescue ship, the Dorrien Rose, nudged alongside and transferred them all.
The Queen of the Channel was lost, but the day was saved. The mole worked! The timbers did not collapse; the tide did not interfere; the troops did not panic. There was plenty of room for a steady procession of ships. The story might be different once the Germans caught on, but clouds of smoke hung low over the harbor. Visibility was at a minimum.
“SNO requires all vessels alongside east pier,” the destroyer Wakeful radioed Ramsay from Dunkirk at 4:36 a.m. on the 28th. Once again the staff in the Dynamo Room swung into action. They had spent the early part of the night diverting the rescue fleet from the harb
or to the beaches; now they went to work shifting it back again. On the beach at Malo-les-Bains Commander Richardson got the word too and began sending the troops back to Dunkirk in batches of 500.
But even as the loading problem was being solved, a whole new crisis arose. Critical moments at Dunkirk had a way of alternating between the sea and the land, and this time, appropriately enough, the setting once again reverted to the battle-scarred fields of Flanders.
At 4 a.m.—just as the Queen of the Channel was proving that the mole would work—Leopold III, King of the Belgians, formally laid down his arms. The result left a twenty-mile gap in the eastern wall of the escape corridor. Unless it could be closed at once, the Germans would pour in, cut the French and British off from the sea, and put an abrupt end to the evacuation.
6
The Gap
GENERAL GORT HEARD THE news by chance. Hoping to confer with General Blanchard about the evacuation, he had driven to Bastion 32 around 11 o’clock on the night of May 27. No sign of Blanchard, but General Koeltz from Weygand’s headquarters was there, and casually asked whether Gort had heard that King Leopold was seeking an armistice.
Gort was amazed. He felt sure that the Belgians weren’t capable of prolonged resistance, but he didn’t expect them to crumble so soon. “I now found myself suddenly faced with an open gap of 20 miles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armoured forces might reach the beaches.”
General Weygand was even more astonished. He got the word during a conference at Vincennes, when somebody handed him a telegram from his liaison officer with the Belgians. “The news came like a thunderclap, as nothing had enabled me to foresee such a decision, no warning, not a hint of it.”
Even Winston Churchill, who had his own special man, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, at Leopold’s headquarters, seems to have been caught off-guard. “Suddenly,” the Prime Minister told a hushed House of Commons a few days later, “without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers, and upon his own personal act, he sent a plenipotentiary to the German command, surrendered his Army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat.”
The mystery is why they were so surprised. As early as May 25 Leopold had telegraphed King George VI that Belgian resistance was on the point of being crushed, “and so the assistance which we can give to the Allies will come to an end if our Army is surrounded.” He added that he considered it his duty to remain with his people and not set up a government in exile.
On the 26th and 27th both Gort and the War Office received from their Belgian liaison contacts seven separate messages warning that the end was near, unless the British could counterattack—which was clearly impossible. In addition, Admiral Keyes telephoned Churchill on the morning of May 27 that “he did not think that the Belgian army’s resistance could be maintained much longer.” Keyes then wired Gort that Leopold
fears a moment is rapidly approaching when he can no longer rely upon his troops to fight or be of any further use to the BEF. He wishes you to realize that he will be obliged to surrender before a debacle.
Leopold, on the other hand, had been told nothing about Allied intentions. Although Gort felt that an active, fighting Belgian Army was “essential for our extraction,” its leaders were never consulted, and not one ship was allocated for the use of Belgian troops.
Finally, after a nudge from Eden, Churchill telegraphed Gort on the morning of May 27, “It is now necessary to tell the Belgians. …” He then included a personal message for Admiral Keyes, spelling out the approach to take with Leopold: “Impart following to your friend. Presume he knows that British and French are fighting their way to coast. …” Thus London explained away its failure to inform the King by simply “presuming” that he already knew.
Churchill’s message also urged Keyes to make sure that Leopold left the country and ended with a vague offer to include Belgian troops whenever the BEF returned to France.
The message never reached Keyes, but it didn’t matter By now Leopold had other ideas. Never an attractive personality—a haughty, aloof man who made his ministers stand in his presence—the King nevertheless had a strong sense of duty. On the mistaken assumption that he would continue to have influence under German occupation, he decided to surrender and remain with his people.
At 5:00 p.m. on the 27th a trusted staff officer, Major-General Derousseau, set out with a white flag for the German lines. Any hopes he had for favorable terms were quickly dashed. The Fuehrer insisted on unconditional surrender. Leopold agreed, and at 4:00 a.m. on May 28 Belgium formally laid down her arms.
Here and there a few fought on. After an exhausting day of retreat, Captain Georges Truffaut of the 16th Infantry Division was sleeping in the great hall of the chateau at Ruddervoorde when he woke up with a start at 4:30 a.m. The lights were on, and people were moving about. “The army has capitulated,” somebody explained.
“What?”
“The liaison officer attached to Corps headquarters has just brought the order.”
“Then I’m deserting.” Truffaut, a member of Parliament and one of the young leaders of the Walloon Socialist Party, was no man for blind obedience to military orders.
He “borrowed” a staff car and was soon on his way to Dunkirk. Coming to a French outpost, he learned that staying in the war would be no easy matter. Enraged by the Belgian surrender, the officer in charge called him a traitor, a coward, and warned that the guard would start shooting if he came any closer.
Turned back, Truffaut now tried another road farther south … and ran head-on into a German column. Racing north again, he reached the sea at Coxyde. Here he cautiously approached a British officer and carefully explained he was no traitor. Could he enter the lines?
“I’m afraid it’s impossible, sir. Sorry.”
On to Nieuport, which he found full of Belgian soldiers, some as frustrated as himself. Here Truffaut and a few others appropriated a fishing smack lying in the fairway. They had trouble with the engine, with the sail, and with a lone German plane that swooped down and buzzed them. It apparently decided they weren’t worth the ammunition, for it flew off and they safely reached the open sea.
It was now dark, and to attract attention they lit rags soaked in petrol. There were plenty of ships, but no one wanted to stop in these dangerous waters. Finally a British destroyer did pick them up, and once again Truffant faced a hostile reception.
This time he managed to sell his case. In fact, the destroyer was on its way to Dunkirk and could use these sturdy Belgians with their boat. It had been a long, hard day, but Georges Truffant was at last back in the war.
There were not many like him. Private W.C.P. Nye of the 4th Royal Sussex was on sentry duty at the Courtrai airfield when he saw a mass of men coming down the road away from the front. Hundreds of Belgian soldiers on bicycles swept by, shouting that the war was over. Tramping toward the coast from the River Lys, the men of the 2nd North Staffordshire passed swarms of disarmed Belgians standing by the roadside watching the retreat. Some looked ashamed, but many shouted insults and shook their fists at the weary Tommies. At Bulscamp a plump gendarme appeared at British headquarters, announced that Belgium had surrendered and he had been ordered to confiscate all British weapons. There is no record of the language used in reply.
All over the countryside white bedsheets blossomed from windows and doorways. At Watou Lieutenant Ramsay of the 2nd Dorsets started to enter an empty house to get a bit of rest. A woman who lived nearby rushed up crying, “Non, non, non!”
“C’est la guerre,” explained Ramsay, using the time-honored expression that had served so well in two world wars to explain any necessary inconvenience.
“C’est la guerre, oui, mais pas pour nous!” she retorted.
To most Belgians it was now indeed somebody else’s war, and they were relieved to be out of it. Many felt their country had become just a doormat, to be stamped on by larger, stronger neighbors in an apparently endless struggle for po
wer. “Les anglais, les allemands, toute la même chose,” as one weary peasant woman put it.
Technically, the Belgian surrender suddenly created a huge gap at the northeastern end of the Allied escape corridor. Actually, the gap had been steadily growing as Belgian resistance crumbled, and for the past 48 hours Lieutenant-General Brooke, the II Corps commander defending the line, had been juggling his forces, trying to fill it. He worked miracles, but on the afternoon of May 27 (just when Leopold was tossing in his hand) there were still no Allied troops between the British 50th Division near Ypres and some French on the coast at Nieuport—a gap of over twenty miles.
All Brooke had left was Major-General Montgomery’s 3rd Division down by Roubaix near the bottom of the pocket. To do any good, it would have to pull out from its position near the right end of the line … move north for 25 miles across the rear of three other divisions … then slide back into place on the far left. The shift would be that most difficult of military maneuvers: a giant side-step by 13,000 men, made at night along back lanes and unfamiliar roads, often within 4,000 yards of the enemy. And it all had to be completed by daylight, when the moving column would make a prime target for the Luftwaffe.
Montgomery wasn’t in the least fazed by the assignment. Although virtually unknown to the public, he was probably the most discussed division commander in the BEF. Cocky, conceited, abrasive, theatrical, he had few friends but many admirers in the army. Whatever they thought of him, all agreed that he was technically a superb soldier and a master at training and inspiring troops. All winter his men had practiced this sort of night march. They had drilled and drilled, until every detail was down pat, every contingency foreseen. Now “Monty” was sure he could pull it off.
Late afternoon, his machine gunners and armored cars went ahead as a light advance force. Then at last light the red-capped Military Police moved out to mark the way and keep the traffic properly spaced. Finally, after dark, the main body—2,000 vans, lorries, pick-ups, staff cars, and troop carriers. There were, of course, no regular lights. Every driver had to watch the rear axle of the vehicle in front of him. It was painted white, faintly illuminated by a small shielded lamp. Monty himself was riding in his regular Humber staff car, with his bodyguard Sergeant Elkin close by on his motorcycle. On their right the front, running parallel, was marked by the constant flicker of guns. On their left some British artillery kept up a lively fire from Mont Kemmel. Shells and tracers were passing overhead in both directions, forming a weird archway for the moving troops. Once a British battery, positioned by the roadside, let loose just as Monty was passing. It practically blew the Humber off the road, but the General didn’t bat an eye.