The Second World War (22 page)

Eden did not know that an increasingly harassed Reynaud had been ambushed by Marshal Pétain and General Weygand. Pétain had been in touch with Pierre Laval, a politician who loathed the British and was awaiting his chance to replace Reynaud. Laval had made contact with an Italian diplomat to sound out the possibility of negotiating with Hitler through Mussolini. Weygand, the commander-in-chief, blamed the politicians for a
‘criminal lack of prudence
’ in going to war in the first place. Supported by Pétain, he demanded that France’s guarantee not to seek a separate peace should be withdrawn. Their priority was to preserve the army to maintain order. Reynaud agreed to fly to London the next day to consult with the British government.

Weygand’s hope that Mussolini could be persuaded to stay out of the war through the promise of more colonies, and that he might negotiate a peace, was completely misplaced. Hitler’s claim that he had achieved victory provoked a hesitant Mussolini into telling the Germans and his
own general staff that Italy would enter the war soon after 5 June. Both he and his generals knew that Italy was incapable of any effective offensive action. They did, however, consider an attack on Malta, but then decided that it was unnecessary since they could take over the island as soon as Britain collapsed. During the following days, Mussolini is supposed to have said: ‘
This time I’ll declare war
, but I won’t wage it.’ The chief victims of this disastrous attempt at sleight of hand were to be his woefully under-equipped stage armies. Bismarck had once remarked, with one of his pithy comments, that Italy had a large appetite but poor teeth. It would prove disastrously true in the Second World War.

On the morning of Sunday, 26 May, as British troops pulled back towards Dunkirk under a heavy storm–‘
thunderclaps mingled
with the booming of the artillery’–the War Cabinet met in London unaware of Mussolini’s intentions. Lord Halifax raised the possibility that the government should consider approaching the Duce to find out what terms Hitler might be prepared to accept for peace. He had even met the Italian ambassador privately the previous afternoon to sound him out. Halifax was convinced that, with no prospect of assistance from the United States in the near future, Britain was not strong enough to resist Hitler alone.

Churchill replied that British liberty and independence were paramount. He had used a paper prepared by the chiefs of staff entitled ‘
British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality
’–a euphemism for French surrender. This discussion paper envisaged British options for fighting on alone. Some aspects were unduly pessimistic as things turned out. The report assumed that most of the BEF would be lost in France. The Admiralty did not expect to get off more than 45,000 men, and the chiefs of staff feared that the Luftwaffe would destroy the aircraft factories in the Midlands. Other assumptions were over-optimistic: for example, the chiefs of staff predicted that Germany’s war economy would be weakened by a shortage of raw materials–a strange assumption if Germany were to control most of western and central Europe. But the main conclusion was that Britain could probably hold out against invasion, providing the RAF and the Royal Navy remained intact. This was the vital point to support Churchill’s argument against Halifax.

Churchill went off to Admiralty House to have lunch with Reynaud, who had just flown over to London. It was clear from what Reynaud said that General Weygand’s wildly favourable view of the situation just a couple of days previously had now swung to outright defeatism. The French were already contemplating the loss of Paris. Reynaud even said that, although he would never sign a separate peace, he might be replaced by somebody who would. He was already under pressure to persuade the
British–‘
in order to reduce proportionately
our own contribution’–to hand over Gibraltar and Suez to the Italians.

When Churchill returned to the War Cabinet and reported this conversation, Halifax revived his suggestion of approaching the Italian government. Churchill had to play his cards carefully. He could not risk an open breach with Halifax, who commanded the loyalty of too many Conservatives, while his own position was unsecured. Fortunately, Chamberlain started to come round to support Churchill, who had treated him with great respect and magnanimity despite their previous antagonism.

Churchill argued that Britain should not be linked to France if it sought terms. ‘
We must not get entangled
in a position of that kind before we had been involved in any serious fighting.’ No decision should be taken until it was clear how much of the BEF could be saved. In any case, Hitler’s terms would certainly prevent Britain from ‘completing our re-armament’. Churchill rightly assumed that Hitler would offer far more lenient terms to France than he would to Britain. But the foreign secretary was determined not to give up the idea of negotiations. ‘If we got to the point of discussing the terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them.’ Again Churchill had to imply that he acceded to the idea of an approach to Italy, but in fact he was playing for time. If the bulk of the BEF were saved, his own position as well as the country’s would be immeasurably strengthened.

That evening, Anthony Eden sent a signal to Gort confirming that he should ‘
fall back upon the coast
… in conjunction with French and Belgian armies’. That same evening, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay in Dover was ordered to launch Operation Dynamo, the evacuation by sea of the BEF. Unfortunately, Churchill’s message to Weygand confirming the retreat to the Channel ports did not spell out the evacuation plan. It was unwisely assumed that this was self-evident in the circumstances. The consequences for Britain’s deteriorating relationship with the French would be grave.

The halting of the panzer divisions had given Gort’s staff the chance to prepare a new defensive perimeter based on a line of fortified villages while the bulk of the BEF retired. But the French commanders in Flanders were incensed when they discovered that the British were planning to evacuate. Gort had assumed that London had informed General Weygand at the same time as he had received his instructions to pull back to the coast. He also believed that the French had received instructions to embark too and was horrified to find that this was not the case.

From 27 May, the 2nd Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment and a battalion of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry defended Cassel to the south of Dunkirk. Platoons occupied outlying farms, in some
cases for three days against vastly superior forces. To their south, the British 2nd Division, which had been moved to defend the Canal Line from La Bassée up to Aire, suffered very heavy attacks. Having run out of anti-tank ammunition, soldiers of the exhausted and badly depleted 2nd Royal Norfolk Regiment were reduced to dashing out with hand-grenades to drop them into the tracks of the panzers. The remnants of the battalion were surrounded by the SS
Totenkopf
and taken prisoner. That night, the SS massacred ninety-seven of them. On the Belgian sector that day, the German 255th Division avenged their losses near the village of Vinkt by executing seventy-eight civilians, falsely claiming that some of them had been armed. The next day, a group of the SS
Leibstandarte
commanded by Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke at Wormhout killed nearly ninety British prisoners, mainly from the Royal Warwicks who were also acting as rearguard. Thus the murderous war against Poland produced a few echoes on the supposedly civilized western front.

South of the Somme, the British
1st Armoured Division
mounted a counter-attack against a German bridgehead. Once again French artillery and air support did not materialize, and the 10th Hussars and the Queen’s Bays lost sixty-five tanks, mainly to German anti-tank guns. A more effective counter-attack was launched by de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured Division against the German bridgehead near Abbeville, but this too was repulsed.

In London, on 27 May, the War Cabinet met again three times. The second meeting, in the afternoon, perhaps encapsulated the most critical moment of the war, when Nazi Germany might have won. This was when the developing clash between Halifax and Churchill came out into the open. Halifax was even more determined to use Mussolini as a mediator to discover what terms Hitler might offer to France and Britain. He believed that, if they delayed, the terms offered would be even worse.

Churchill argued strongly against such weakening, and insisted that they should fight on. ‘
Even if we were beaten
,’ he said, ‘we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.’ He understood that once they started to negotiate, they would be ‘unable to turn back’ and revive a spirit of defiance in the population. Churchill at least had the implicit support of Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, the two Labour leaders, and also of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader. Chamberlain too was convinced by Churchill’s key argument. During this stormy meeting, Halifax made it clear to Churchill that he would resign if his views were ignored, but Churchill afterwards managed to calm him.

Another blow fell that evening. After the Belgian line on the River Lys had been breached, King Leopold decided to capitulate. The following day, he surrendered unconditionally to the Sixth Army. Generaloberst von
Reichenau and his chief of staff Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus dictated the terms at their headquarters. The next surrender which Paulus would conduct would be his own at Stalingrad two years and eight months later.

The French government was outwardly scathing about the ‘betrayal’ of King Leopold, yet in private rejoiced. One of the
capitulards
expressed the mood when he said: ‘
Finally, we have a scapegoat
!’ The British, however, were hardly surprised by the Belgian collapse. Gort, on General Brooke’s advice, had wisely taken precautions by moving his own troops in behind the Belgian lines to prevent a German breakthrough between Ypres and Comines on the eastern flank.

General Weygand, now officially informed that the British had decided to pull out, was furious at the lack of frankness. Unfortunately, he did not give the order to his own units to evacuate until the following day, and as a result French troops reached the beaches well after the British. Marshal Pétain argued that the lack of British support should lead to the revision of Reynaud’s agreement signed in March not to seek a separate peace.

On the afternoon of 28 May, the War Cabinet met again, but this time at the House of Commons at the prime minister’s request. The battle between Halifax and Churchill broke out anew, with Churchill taking an even more resolute line against any form of negotiation. Even if the British were to get up and leave the conference table, he argued, ‘
we should find that all
the forces of resolution which were now at our disposal would have vanished’.

As soon as the War Cabinet meeting ended, Churchill called a meeting of the whole Cabinet. He told them that he had considered negotiations with Hitler, but he was convinced that Hitler’s terms would reduce Britain to a ‘
slave-state
’ ruled by a puppet government. Their support could hardly have been more emphatic. Halifax had been decisively outmanoeuvred. Britain would fight on to the end.

Hitler, not wanting to use up his depleted panzer forces, limited them in their new advance towards Dunkirk. They were to halt as soon as their artillery regiments were within range of the port. The shelling and bombing of the town began in earnest, but it was insufficient to prevent Operation Dynamo, the evacuation. Luftwaffe bombers, often still flying from bases back in Germany, lacked effective fighter support and were frequently intercepted by Spitfire squadrons taking off from much closer airfields in Kent.

The hapless British troops crowding the sand dunes and town as they waited their turn for embarkation cursed the RAF, not realizing that its fighters were engaging the German bombers inland. The Luftwaffe, despite Göring’s boast that he would eliminate the British, inflicted
comparatively few casualties. The lethal effect of the bombs and shells was reduced greatly by the soft sand dunes. More Allied soldiers were killed on the beaches by strafing attacks than by bombs.

By the time the German advance had resumed with infantry, the strong defence by both British and French troops had prevented a German breakthrough. The few who escaped from the defended villages were exhausted, hungry, thirsty and in many cases injured. The more severely wounded had had to be left behind. With Germans all around them, it was a nerve-racking retreat, never knowing when they were going to bump into an enemy force.

The evacuation had started on 19 May, when wounded and rear troops were taken off, but the main effort began only on the night of 26 May. Following an appeal over the BBC, the Admiralty contacted the volunteer owners of small vessels, such as yachts, river launches and cabin cruisers. They were told to rendezvous, first off Sheerness, then off Ramsgate. Some 600 were used in the course of Operation Dynamo, almost all crewed by ‘weekend sailors’, to augment the force of over 200 Royal Navy vessels.

Dunkirk was easy to identify at a great distance, both from the sea and from the landward side. Columns of smoke rose into the sky from the burning town attacked by German bombers. Oil tanks blazed fiercely with thick, black billowing clouds. Every road leading into the town was jammed with abandoned and destroyed army vehicles.

Relations between senior British and French officers, especially the staff of Admiral Jean Abrial, commander of northern naval forces, became increasingly acrimonious. The situation was not helped by both British and French troops looting in Dunkirk, with each side blaming the other. Many were drunk, having tried to quench their thirst with wine, beer and spirits as the mains water was no longer working.

The beaches and the port were packed with troops queueing for embarkation. Each time a Luftwaffe attack came in, with Stuka sirens screaming as they dived ‘
like a flock of huge infernal seagulls
’, men scattered for their lives. The noise was deafening, with all the anti-aircraft pom-poms of the destroyers off the mole firing flat out. Then, once it was over, the soldiers dashed back, afraid to lose their place in the queue. Some cracked up under the strain. There was little that could be done for casualties of combat fatigue.