Churchill was aware of the danger. On the Sunday before his flight to Vincennes, Ironside had warned him that the BEF might soon be cut off from the French, in which case they could only be supplied through Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. Now all three had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe the previous night. Dunkirk could not be used; ships sunk by the Nazis blocked its entrance. On Tuesday, Boulogne, directly in the path of the panzers, was reinforced by the 20th Guards Brigade and the Irish and Welsh Guards, the last available army units still in England. It was in vain; the German armored columns were irresistible; on Wednesday, while Churchill was being introduced to Weygand, evacuations were under way there. In his diary, Ironside wrote: “4 p.m. Boulogne was definitely gone…. So goes all the people in Boulogne, including the two Guards battalions. A rotten ending indeed.” He added: “Gort is very nearly surrounded…. I don’t see that we have much hope of getting the B.E.F. out.” But the following evening he noted: “The German mobile columns have definitely been halted for some reason or other.”55
Although no one realized it at the time, this was one of the turning points in the war. The “Halt Order” (Haltordnung), as it came to be known, has been endlessly debated. Had the panzers continued to advance, evacuation of the BEF would have been impossible. Yet the reasons for the pause seem clear. Rundstedt needed time for the German infantry to catch up with his tanks. Moreover, after fourteen days of offensive action, the men were exhausted and their machines badly in need of repairs.
Hitler lengthened the halt. Two days of downpours had made the Flanders swamps virtually impassable for armored vehicles. General Heinz Guderian, the panzer leader, who had first opposed the halt, conceded that “a tank attack is pointless in the marshy country which has been completely soaked by the rain…. The infantry forces of this army are more suitable than tanks for fighting in this kind of country.”56
Moreover, the Nazis’ chief enemy continued to be France, and they did not believe they had already defeated what was considered the best army in Europe. Their push toward Paris, they believed, would be long and bloody. They needed to refit for that. Finally, they did not know that they had trapped 400,000 French, Belgian, and British men in the north. Afterward, Luftwaffe general Albert Kesselring said: “Even 100,000 would have struck us as greatly exaggerated.”57
Leaders in both Paris and London continued to debate impractical plans. On Friday, May 24, Weygand bitterly complained that “the British Army has carried out, on its own initiative, a retreat of forty kilometers towards the ports when our troops moving up from the south are gaining ground towards the north, where they were to meet their allies.” In another sharp telegram to London, Reynaud commented that the British action “has naturally compelled General Weygand to modify his arrangements” and that he has been forced to abandon “any idea” of uniting the Allied armies. His Majesty’s Government was disconcerted. Ironside wrote: “Why Gort has done this I don’t know. He has never told us what he was going to do or even when he had done it.” In his reply to Reynaud, Churchill said that “no doubt the action was forced on Lord Gort.” This was “no time for recriminations,” he said, though he conceded that Gort should have kept him informed and that he did not doubt that the French “had grounds for complaint.”58
They had none. Weygand’s troops still weren’t advancing, and Gort had not retreated. However, with each passing hour the commander of the BEF realized that he would have to do something, and soon. His army—the only army Britain had—was in mortal danger, nearly encircled, trapped in a pocket seventy miles from the sea and only fifteen to twenty-five miles across. Their lines of communications had been cut. Their only allies were the Belgians and the remnants of the First French Army. The ports through which the BEF’s two hundred thousand men were supplied were either bombed out or already in enemy hands. The Tommies were down to a four-day supply of ammunition and rations. Panzers were in Gravelines, barely ten miles from Dunkirk, the BEF’s last remaining port of escape. The panzers were closing in, and the Belgians were on the verge of surrender; already their last link with General Alan Brooke’s corps, northeast of Menin, had been broken, creating a breach between which the Nazis would pour once they found it.
Of the Channel ports, only Calais and Dunkirk were still free. The army might be cut off from them at any time. In his diary Brooke wrote: “Nothing but a miracle can save the B.E.F. now, and the end cannot be far off.” The British had lost all confidence in General G. H. Billotte, the French commander in the north. Ironside, calling at Billotte’s command post on May 20, had been horrified. He wrote of him: “No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties. Très fatigué and nothing doing. I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.”59
John Standish, the 6th Viscount Gort of Limerick—“Jack” to his fellow generals—was not greatly admired by them. At best, the French said, he would be a good battalion commander. He lacked intellect, said the British staff officers (Gamelin’s intellect had been much admired in London, and even in Berlin). But Gort’s courage was extraordinary. As a Guards officer in the last war, he had won the Victoria Cross, three Distinguished Service Orders, and the Military Cross. He was, if anything, an overdisciplined soldier, and now he faced an excruciating decision. He had heard nothing from Weygand for four days. Ironside had brought him orders from the War Cabinet, specifically forbidding a withdrawal to the sea, telling him, instead, to attack southward. But now he knew that only annihilation awaited him there. In Berlin, Germany’s foreign minister Ribbentrop had already told the press: “The French army will be destroyed and the English on the Continent will be made prisoners of war.” Rommel wrote in his diary: “Now the hunt is up against sixty encircled British, French and Belgian divisions.”
During the afternoon of Saturday, May 25, Gort received a distress signal from Brooke: “I am convinced that the Belgian army is closing down and will have stopped fighting by this time tomorrow. This, of course, entirely exposes our left flank.” Lieutenant General Sir Ronald Adam, the army’s other corps commander, confirmed Brooke. Gort’s reserves were gone. The only British soldiers not engaged with the enemy were two divisions, the 5th and the 50th, which were awaiting orders to open the southern attack the next day. In his command post at Prémesques, he spent most of that afternoon staring at wall maps of northern France and the Channel ports. At 6:30 P.M. he canceled the offensive and dispatched the 5th Division to plug the gap on Brooke’s flank. Then he wired Eden, telling him what he had done and why he had done it.
The telegram was delayed. At 10:30 that evening, before it could arrive, Churchill independently reached the same conclusion. After consulting Reynaud, he instructed Eden to telegraph Gort: “It is clear… that it will not be possible for French to deliver attack in the south…. You are now authorized to operate towards coast forthwith in conjunction with the French and Belgian armies.” The formal evacuation order reached Prémesques the next day, Monday, May 27.
A week earlier, King Leopold had informed the British through Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes that should his troops lose contact with the French and British, “capitulation would be inevitable.” Leopold also personally warned his fellow monarch George VI of Belgium’s “imminent surrender” the same day Brooke wrote to Gort. Still, the shock was great in Paris and London when, on Tuesday afternoon, the twenty-eighth, King Leopold, without informing his allies or consulting his advisers, surrendered the entire 274,000-man Belgian army, opening a twenty-mile gap between Brooke’s corps and the coast near Nieuport.60
Lord Halifax, HMG’s tall, ectomorphic foreign secretary, thought this was an excellent time to negotiate a peace with Hitler. On the twenty-seventh, Halifax—the last of the major appeasers to fall from favor (if not from office)—told the War Cabinet that “it is not so much now a question of imposing a complete defeat upon Germany, but of safeguarding the independence of our own Empire.” The Italian ambassad
or to Britain, he reported, had approached him with “fresh proposals” for a peace conference, and he thought they should seize this opportunity. Churchill replied that, yes, peace could be achieved “under a German domination of Europe,” but, no, that was a condition “we could never accept.”61
Exasperated, Halifax argued that if Il Duce offered terms “which do not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them.” Provided Britain’s independence were not in jeopardy, he held, it would be proper for Britain, confronted with two or three months of air raids, “to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster.” Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under secretary in the Foreign Office and a minor appeaser, thought the prime minister’s defiant reply “too rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental. Old Neville still the best of the lot.” To Halifax’s horror, Churchill said that if France surrendered, Britain would go it alone. The foreign secretary persisted. The following day he dominated the War Cabinet’s afternoon meeting, proposing an Anglo-French approach to Mussolini, suggesting that he “might be persuaded to act as mediator.” Attlee replied sharply, pointing out that this would amount to asking Il Duce “to intercede to obtain peace terms for us.” Churchill, jaw outthrust, growled that it would “ruin the integrity of our fighting position in this country…. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.”62
As the meeting broke up, Halifax told Cadogan he was going to resign, saying, “I can’t work with Winston any longer.” That evening he wrote in his diary: “I thought Winston talked the most frightful rot…. It does drive one to despair when he works himself up into a passion of emotion when he ought to make his brain think and reason.” However, the foreign secretary changed his mind after Cadogan, a Foreign Office mandarin of the first order, replied: “Nonsense: his rodomontades probably bore me as much as they do you, but don’t do anything silly under the stress of that.”63
But patriotic ardor was stirring in England. In the 1930s, Churchill had been denounced as a “warmonger.” Now his critics were branded “defeatists.” A short service of intercession and prayer was held in Westminster Abbey; it was crowded with men who had cheered Munich only twenty months ago. Churchill wrote: “The English are loth [sic] to expose their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.”64
Now that the war edged closer to their homes and hearths, the British public began to learn the truth. Until the final week of May, Britons had been largely optimistic. The wakening came slowly because they had been told so little. As late as May 24, the Times asked, in a headline, ARE WE REALLY AT WAR? Hotels and theaters were crowded, the story reported; idle young men cloistered around amusement parks; holidays were being observed; in London’s West End unemployed miners sang for coppers as though Britain and her empire were still at peace.65
The press, aided and abetted by military censors, bore much responsibility for this tranquillity. On May 13, a Times headline announced, BEF SWEEPS ON. On Tuesday, May 14, the day after Guderian’s panzers began pouring across the Meuse, a Times analyst told readers: “In general, it may be said that the Germans have not made contact with the bulk of the French and Belgian forces.” Other newspapers followed the same line. War news was reaching Englishmen in a promiscuous rush. Vital information was there, if you knew where to look, but it was buried beneath dispatches claiming RAF victories, accounts of French troops forming for a mighty counteroffensive, denials of German communiqués, and such predictions of enemy defeats as “GERMAN MOTORISED UNITS DRIVING INTO FRANCE BELIEVED TO FACE DESTRUCTION.” Suddenly on May 22, Britons were told that the Nazis were at Abbéville, 140 miles behind the Allied lines in Belgium and heading for the Channel ports. For the next week the papers were full of contradictory stories about fighting in Flanders. Finally, on May 30, the British public were told: “ALLIES TRYING TO FIGHT WAY TO FRENCH COAST IN DIRECTION OF DUNKERQUE.” Harold Nicolson wrote Vita Sackville-West, “Oh my dear, my dearest, that we should come to this!” Stanley Baldwin’s wife wrote the Times, urging churches to fly the Cross of St. George as a sign that England was fighting for Christianity against evil. “It is a daily inspiration to myself,” she wrote, “to look out of my window and see that our parish church is bearing the Red Cross of St. George on its tower night and day.” The piety of Lady Baldwin was unsurprising. But the crisis brought the war effort some unlikely converts. Bertrand Russell wrote Kingsley Martin that he had renounced pacifism, declaring that if he were young enough to fight, he would enlist. On that desperate Tuesday when the Belgian king surrendered, George Orwell wrote in his diary: “Horrible as it is, I hope the B.E.F. is cut to pieces rather than capitulate.”66
Gort, having withdrawn his 5th Division from the impossible southern adventure and flung it into the gap left by the Belgians, felt the full fury of the Nazi attack. A vanguard of 85,000 Germans, supported by reserves and, now, by refitted tanks, fell upon famed regiments: the 3rd Grenadiers, the 2nd North Staffordshire, the 2nd Sherwood Foresters, the Royal Inskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the 6th Seaforth Highlanders, and the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry. They held until the 42nd and 50th Divisions could move up to the line. The battle there, between Warneton and Ypres, raged throughout the withdrawal, with very heavy losses.
The greatest sacrifice was made by the Calais garrison: the 229th Antitank Battery; battalions from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Tank Regiment, and the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, supported by a thousand brave French soldiers. British destroyers lay off Calais, ready to save the men. Instead, Churchill decided, they must be abandoned. It was essential, he told Ironside, that they fight to the last man, holding the enemy in check; otherwise, Ironside wrote, “it would have been impossible to have used Dunkirk as a point from which to evacuate the B.E.F. and the 1st French Army,” because the vast German divisions would have reached the beach and cut them off. The “grim decision,” Ismay called it, was made on the night of May 26. Ironside, Ismay, and Eden were with the prime minister at the time.67
It was Eden’s lot to telegraph this order to Brigadier C. N. Nicholson, commanding the Rifle Brigade that he must fight to the destruction of his command: “The eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais, and H.M. Government are confident that you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.” Shortly before midnight, he again wired him: “Every hour you continue to fight is of greatest help to the B.E.F…. Have greatest admiration for your splendid stand.” Churchill was uncharacteristically mute during dinner. Later he wrote, “One has to eat and drink in war, but I could not help feeling sick as we afterwards sat silent eating at the table.”68
Now the two hundred thousand men of the BEF cut off in the north and the remnants of the First French Army, outnumbered three or four to one, fell back down the narrow corridor leading to the sea, fighting by day and retreating at night, with every step contested by the Germans. The 1st Coldstream Guards held the line for thirty hours before disengaging. The 2nd Gloucestershire and the 4th Royal Sussex regiments outflanked a German column. The 2nd Buffs broke the momentum of a German wheeling movement. The 1st Cameroons, reduced to forty survivors, nevertheless counterattacked and drove the enemy back across the Canal de la Lawe. Surrounded, a battalion of the Welch Fusiliers fought their way back to the Lys. Strung out between Ypres and the Warneton-Comines Canal for nine miles, the 6th Black Watch, the 13/18th Hussars, the 3rd Grenadier Guards, the 2nd North Staffordshire, and the 2nd Sherwood Foresters counterattacked, flinging back the claw of a German pincer movement. The 2nd Buffs were reduced to the strength of a weak company but blocked a penetration near Godewaersvelde.
Like all soldiers, they fought best when they had learned to hate, and the enemy they faced, which prided itself on its use of terrorism, g
ave them strong reasons for rage. After the SS Totenkopf division had captured a hundred men of the 2nd Royal Norfolk, many of them wounded, the SS lined their prisoners up against a barn wall and machine-gunned them, shooting or bayoneting those who still showed signs of life. Two Tommies, hidden by the bodies, crawled away to tell the tale. Alan Brooke was deeply shocked. In the first war he had fought Germans, but these were Nazis.
Late on May 26, Brooke himself narrowly escaped capture. Sleepless, he was driven from one command post to another, his driver honking his way through demoralized refugees, including the inmates from an insane asylum, who stood by the side of the road wearing inane smiles and waving at the mass of troops and refugees. Brooke commanded by word of mouth—the army’s signals communications had broken down—issuing fresh orders to commanders as the situation changed, transferring battalions to other divisions, directing Montgomery to make a dangerous night flank march across the front of the attack. Immediately after he had crossed one bridge over the canal, it blew up behind him. Near Ypres he lay under a cottage fence, having hastily abandoned his car at the approach of thirty-six Luftwaffe bombers. When he tried to take a two-hour nap in a stone hut, he was blown out of bed.69
There are a thousand reasons why the withdrawal to the coast shouldn’t have worked, but it did. To be sure, the cut-off army paid a dreadful price—68,710 casualties, nearly a third of its strength—but the majority of these were wounded who would fight again. Much of the achievement may be credited to the military traditions of the Empire, which gave Britain skilled professional officers and highly disciplined regular soldiers, the grandsons of Kipling’s red-coated Mulvaneys. The very names of their regiments and battalions evoke ghosts of past glory, infantry of the line and cavalry troopers loyal to King and Country, the legacy of imperial armies that had given Britain’s soldiers a small island for their birth and the whole world for their grave, regiments in one of which, the 4th Hussars, handsome young Winston Churchill had served as a lieutenant.70