“You’ll have to drop your kit, Sergeant,” the brigadier sang out. Every inch of space was needed for people. With a lack of hesitation that surprised even himself, Bridges let it all go—bracelets, watches, jewelry, furs, and perhaps most important, the load on his conscience.
Pulled aboard, he took an oar, and with the brigadier steering, they gradually approached a destroyer lying not far away. Planes began strafing, and the man rowing next to Bridges was hit. They crawled on, and were almost there when an officer on the ship called out to stay clear. She was stuck on a sandbar, running her screws full speed ahead to get free.
The brigadier tried, but whether it was tide, current, suction, or plain inexperience, they were relentlessly drawn to the side of the ship. A rising swell caught Bridges’s oar against the hull, and through some play of physics he could never hope to understand, he was catapulted upward, clear out of the boat. He caught hold of a grid, which served as a ship’s ladder, and willing hands hauled him on board.
Next instant the lifeboat plunged down again and was caught under the racing screws. The boat, the brigadier, Martin, and everyone else were chewed to bits. Bridges looked back in time to catch a brief, last glimpse of Martin’s startled face as it disappeared beneath the sea.
He sank to the deck, leaning against the bulkhead. The destroyer turned out to be the Ivanhoe, and as Bridges began stripping off his wet clothes, a sailor brought him a blanket and a pack of cigarettes. He did not have much time to enjoy them. Once again the sound of aircraft engines warned of new danger from the skies.
The German bombers had arrived. Luckily, the Ivanhoe had at last wriggled free of the sandbar, and Commander P. H. Hadow was able to dodge the first attacks, delivered by level-bombing Heinkels. No such luck with the Stukas. At 7:41 a.m. two near misses bracketed the ship, and a third bomb crashed into the base of the forward funnel.
Down in the boiler room Private J. B. Claridge, who had been plucked from the sea at La Panne, was drying out his uniform when the ship gave a violent shudder, the lights went out, and a shower of burning embers fell about him. He was standing near a ladder to the deck, and he raced up through a cloud of swirling steam. He and another man were the only two to get out alive.
Sergeant Bridges watched from his resting place against the bulkhead. He was still stunned by his own ordeal, but he was alert enough to note that the Ivanhoe’s crew were beginning to take off their shoes. That could only mean they thought the ship was sinking.
He needed no better proof. Slipping off his blanket, he went over the side, naked except for his helmet, which he always managed to keep. He swam slowly away from the ship, using a sort of combination breast-and-side stroke that he especially favored. He could keep it up forever—or at least until some ship appeared that looked like a better bet than the Ivanhoe.
But the Ivanhoe was not finished. The fires were contained; the foremost magazine flooded; and the damaged boilers sealed off. Then the destroyer Havant and the minesweeper Speedwell eased alongside and removed most of the troops. As Speedwell pulled away, she picked up one more survivor swimming alone in the sea. It was Sergeant Bridges.
On the Ivanhoe the engineering officer Lieutenant Mahoney coaxed some steam out of his one remaining boiler, as the ship started back to England. Creeping along at seven knots, assisted by a tug, she made an ideal target and was twice attacked by the Heinkels. Each time, Commander Hadow waited until the first bombs fell, then lit smoke floats inside various hatches to simulate hits. The ruse worked: both times the planes flew off, apparently convinced that the destroyer was finished.
On the Havant, the troops transferred from the Ivanhoe barely had time to settle down before the Stukas pounced again. Two bombs wrecked the engine room, and a third landed just ahead of the ship, exploding as she passed over it.
The lights went out, and once again hundreds of soldiers thrashed about in the dark, trying to get topside. Havant took a heavy list, compounding the confusion. But once again help lay close at hand. The minesweeper Saltash came alongside, taking off some troops. Others transferred to a small pleasure steamer, the Narcissa, which used to make holiday cruises around Margate.
The crew of the Havant stayed on for a while, but for her there was no clever escape. The hull was ruptured, the engine room blown to bits. At 10:15a.m. Havant vanished into the sea.
“A destroyer has blown up off Dunkirk,” someone laconically observed on the bridge of the destroyer Keith lying off Bray-Dunes. Admiral Wake-Walker looked and saw a ship enveloped in smoke just off Dunkirk harbor, six miles to the west. At the time he didn’t know it was the Ivanhoe—or that she would survive. He only knew that the German bombers were back on the job, and might be coming his way next. It would be hard to miss the concentration of ships working with the Keith off Bray: the destroyer Basilisk, minesweepers Skipjack and Salamander, tugs St. Abbs and Vincia, and the skoot Hilda.
Sure enough, a compact formation of 30 to 40 Stukas appeared from the southwest. Every gun in the fleet opened up, and a curtain of fire seemed to break up the formation. But not for long. Shortly before 8:00 a.m. three Stukas came hurtling down, right at the Keith.
The ship heeled wildly. In the wheelhouse everyone was crouching down, with the helmsman steering by the bottom spokes of the wheel. Teacups skidded across the deck. Then three loud explosions, the nearest just ten yards astern. It jammed the helm, and the Keith began steering in circles.
Captain Berthon switched to manual steering, and things were beginning to get back to normal, when three more planes dived. This time Wake-Walker saw the bombs released and watched them fall, right at the ship. It was an odd sensation waiting for the explosion and knowing that he could do nothing. Then the crash … the teeth-rattling jolt … a rush of smoke and steam boiling up somewhere aft.
Surprisingly, he could see no sign of damage. It turned out that one of the bombs had gone right down the second funnel, bursting in the No. 2 boiler room far below. Power gone, plates sprung, Keith listed sharply to port.
Not far away, Lieutenant Christopher Dreyer watched the hit from his motor torpedo boat MTB 102; he hurried over to help. Wake-Walker decided he was doing no good on the crippled Keith, and quickly shifted to Dreyer’s boat. It was the Admiral’s eighth flagship in twenty-four hours.
On the Keith, now wallowing low in the water, Captain Berthon gave the order to abandon ship. Scores of men went over the side, including most of General Gort’s staff. Colonel Bridgeman was sure of only one thing: he didn’t want to swim back to La Panne. He splashed about, finally joined two sailors clinging to a piece of timber. Eventually they were picked up by the tug Vincia and taken to Ramsgate.
The Stukas were far from finished. About 8:20 they staged a third attack on the Keith, hitting her again in the engine room, and this time they saved something for the other ships nearby. The minesweeper Salamander escaped untouched, but her sistership Skipjack was a different story. The leader of the German flight scored two hits; then a second Stuka came roaring down. On the range-finder platform Leading Seaman Murdo MacLeod trained his Lewis gun on the plane and kept firing even after it released its bombs. The Stuka never came out of its dive, plunging straight into the sea.
But the damage was done—three more hits. Skipjack lurched heavily to port, and the order came to abandon ship. It was none too soon. In two more minutes Skipjack turned turtle, trapping most of the 250 to 300 troops aboard. She floated bottom-up for another twenty minutes, then finally sank.
The Keith lingered on, attended by a typically mixed assortment of small craft picking up survivors. After a fourth visit from the Stukas, the Admiralty tug St. Abbs came alongside around 8:40 and took off Captain Berthon and the last of the crew. Before leaving, Berthon signaled Salamander and Basilisk to sink the ship, lest she fall into enemy hands.
Both vessels replied that they were out of control and needed help themselves. Concentrating on his own ship, Berthon apparently didn’t see the Stukas pounding the other two. Basilisk
especially was in a bad way. A French trawler took her in tow, but she grounded on a sandbar and had to be abandoned around noon. The destroyer Whitehall picked up most of her crew, then finished her off with a couple of torpedoes.
Meanwhile the Stukas staged still another attack on the abandoned Keith—the fifth of the morning—and at 9:15 they finally sank her. The sea was now covered with fuel from sunken ships, and the surviving swimmers were a pathetic sight—coated black with oil, half-blind, choking and vomiting as they tried to stay afloat.
The tug St. Abbs poked about picking them up, twisting and turning, using every trick in the book to shake off the Stukas. Besides survivors from the sunken ships, she took aboard Major R.B.R. Colvin and a boatload of Grenadier Guards trying to row back to England. About 130 men jammed the tug’s deck—some dreadfully wounded, others unhurt but sobbing with fright. An army doctor and chaplain passed among them, dispensing first aid and comfort. As the bombs continued to rain down, the padre told Major Colvin, “I have never prayed so hard before.”
Eventually the Stukas moved off, and St. Abbs steamed briefly in peace. Then at 9:30 a single level-bomber passed overhead, dropping a stick of four delayed-action bombs right in the tug’s path. They went off as she passed over them, tearing her bottom out.
Knocked down by the blast, Major Colvin tried to get up, but one leg was useless. Then the ship heeled over, and everything came crashing down. He felt he was falling into a bottomless pit, pushed along by rushing water, surrounded by falling coal. Next thing he knew, he was swimming in the sea some 50 yards from a lot of wreckage. St. Abbs was gone, sunk in just 30 seconds.
There were only a few survivors. Most had originally been on the Keith or Skipjack; this was their second sinking of the morning. This time they found themselves struggling against a strong tide that carried them along the coast, almost due east. They would soon be in German-held waters, but there seemed nothing they could do about it. Suddenly they saw a chance. A wrecked steamer lay directly in the way. The more agile swimmers managed to get over to her.
Passing under the stern, Major Colvin grabbed a gangway hanging in the water, and despite his bad leg, he pulled himself aboard. The wreck turned out to be the cargo liner Clan MacAlister, bombed and abandoned on May 29. She now lay partially sunk and hard aground about two miles off La Panne.
Some fifteen other survivors of St. Abbs also reached the hulk. Climbing aboard, they found themselves in a setting worthy of the legendary Mary Celeste. In the deserted deckhouse everything was still in place. Some sailors helped Major Colvin into a bunk, found him a couple of blankets and a set of dry clothes.
Midshipman H. B. Poustie of the Keith did even better. Covered with oil, he wandered into the captain’s cabin and found the perfect uniform for an eighteen-year-old midshipman: the captain’s dress blues, resplendent with four gold rings around the sleeves.
There was food too. Exploring the galley, someone came up with a light luncheon of canned pears and biscuits. To the tired and hungry survivors, it seemed like a feast.
The big question was: What next? Clearly they couldn’t stay here much longer. It was ebb tide, and the Clan MacAlister now stood high out of the water on an even keel. From the air she looked undamaged, and the planes bombed her vigorously. Soon, the enemy artillery would be in La Panne, a stone’s throw away.
One of the ship’s boats still hung in the davits, and Captain Berthon—late of the Keith and senior officer present—ordered it loaded with provisions and lowered. With luck, they could row to England.
They were just about to start when a Thames lighter hove into view. She looked like a far better bet, and the castaways attracted her attention with yells and pistol shots. The lighter transferred them to a cement carrier so lowly she had no name—just Sheerness Yard Craft No. 63. She was, however, staunch enough to get them home.
On the beach west of La Panne, the 1st Suffolks had a grandstand view of the Stuka attack on the Basilisk. Still farther west, on a dune near Zuydcoote, the staff of the 3rd Grenadier Guards watched the Keith’s ordeal. All the way west, the sailors on the mole saw another swarm of Stukas sink the French destroyer Foudroyant in less than a minute. Captain Tennant himself watched the assault on the Ivanhoe and Havant.
There was something distant and unreal about it all—especially the battles in the sky that erupted from time to time. Any number of separate vignettes were frozen in the men’s minds, like snapshots in an album: the thunderclap of a fighter and bomber colliding … a plane’s wing fluttering to earth … the flash of flame as a Heinkel caught fire … the power dive of an Me 109, right into the sea … parachutes floating down … tracers ripping into the parachutes. It was hard to believe that all this was actually happening, and not just the familiar scenes from some old war film.
To Squadron Leader Brian Lane and the fighter pilots of No. 19 Squadron it was very real indeed. On June 1 their working day began at 3:15 a.m. at Hornchurch, a small field east of London. Still half-asleep, they gulped down tea and biscuits and hurried out onto the tarmac, where the Spitfires were already warming up. The roar of the engines rose and fell as the mechanics made final adjustments, and the exhaust flames still burned bright blue in the first light of the new day.
Lane climbed aboard his plane, checked his radio and oxygen, made sure that the others were ready, and waved his hand over his head—the signal to take off. Once airborne, he listened for the double thump that meant his wheels were up, and cast a practiced eye over the various dials and gauges that made up his instrument panel. It looked as though he had been doing this all his life; actually he had been a civilian making electric light bulbs until a short time before the war.
In fifteen minutes he was crossing the English coast, heading out over the North Sea. A glance at his mirror showed the other planes of the squadron, properly spaced behind him, and behind them were three more squadrons—48 Spitfires altogether—roaring eastward toward the sunrise and Dunkirk.
Ten more minutes, and they were over the beaches, bearing left toward Nieuport, the eastern limit of the patrol. It was 5:00 a.m. now, light enough to see the crowds waiting on the sand, the variety of vessels lying offshore. From 5,000 feet it looked like Blackpool on a bank holiday.
Suddenly the Spitfires no longer had the sky to themselves. Ahead and slightly to the right, flying toward Nieuport on a converging course, twelve twin-engine planes appeared. Lane flicked on his radio: “Twelve Me 110’s straight ahead.”
The Germans saw them coming. On both sides the neatly spaced formations vanished, replaced by the general melee that so reminded the men on the ground of something concocted by Hollywood. Lane got on the tail of a Messerschmitt, watched it drift into his sights, and pressed the firing button that controlled his eight machine guns. Eight streams of tracer homed in on the 110. Its port engine stopped. Then, as it turned to get away, he got in another burst, this time knocking out the starboard engine. He hung around long enough to watch it crash.
That job done, Lane searched for more targets, but could find nothing. His tanks only had enough petrol for 40 minutes over the beaches, and now he was getting low. Flying close to the water, he headed back across the Channel and home to Hornchurch. One by one the other members of the squadron came in too, until finally all were present and accounted for.
As they excitedly swapped experiences on the tarmac, the squadron intelligence officer toted up the score—7 Me 110’s claimed; also 3 Me 109’s, which had apparently turned up at some point during the free-for-all. Slowly the pilots drifted into the mess. It was hard to believe, but it was still only 7:00 a.m. and they hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
It’s worth noting that this aerial battle did not follow the standard script. Usually a very few British fighters took on a very great number of German planes, but this time the Spitfires actually outnumbered the Me 110’s, four to one.
This was no coincidence. It was part of a tactical gamble. Originally Fighter Command had tried to provide continuous co
ver over the beaches, but the few planes available were spread so thin, the result was virtually no protection at all. On May 27, for instance, 22 patrols were flown, .but the average strength was only eight planes. The Luftwaffe easily smothered this effort and devastated the port of Dunkirk.
After that disaster the RAF flew fewer patrols, but those flown were much stronger. There was also extra emphasis on the hours when the beachhead seemed most vulnerable—dawn and dusk. Hence the 48-plane patrol led by Brian Lane, and he in turn was followed by another patrol of similar strength.
But the total number of planes always remained the same—Air Marshal Dowding wouldn’t give an inch on that, for he was already thinking ahead to the defense of Britain herself. As a result, there were inevitably certain periods when there was no protection at all, and on June 1 the first of these periods ran from 7:30 a.m. to 8:50 a.m.—that harrowing hour and twenty minutes when the Keith and her consorts were lost.
By 9:00 a new patrol was on the line, and the German attacks tapered off, but there were four more periods during the day when the RAF could provide no fighter cover, and the Luftwaffe cashed in on them all. Around 10:30 a.m. bombs crippled the big railway steamer Prague and turned the picturesque river gunboat Mosquito into a blazing wreck.
Then it was the Channel packet Scotia’s turn. As she slowly capsized, 2,000 French troops managed to climb the deck against the roll, ending up perched on her hull. The destroyer Esk plucked most of them to safety. No such luck with the French destroyer Foudroyant. Hit during another gap in fighter protection, she turned over and sank in seconds.
The carnage continued. During the afternoon a 500-pound bomb landed on the deck of the minesweeper Brighton Queen, killing some 300 French and Algerian troops—about half the number aboard. Later the destroyer Worcester and the minesweeper Westward Ho were badly damaged but managed to get home. Westward Ho had 900 French troops aboard, including a general and his staff. When she finally reached Margate, the general was so overjoyed, he decorated two members of the crew with the Croix de Guerre on the spot.