DE day: remembering Dunkirk
An extract from a work in progress
My father was very reluctant to talk about his experience of war and it’s been nearly thirty years now since he died. But here’s what I could reconstruct from the official histories and the memory of his memories.
Private 5385412 Brown carried to the war an edition of Aristotle as well as Goethe’s Faust. He was a scholarly young man in round-rimmed spectacles (reading had made him almost blind without them), sharing a tent with farm boys, who would piss into the boots by their cots when they came back from the pub rather then take the trouble to go outside.
The winter of 1939-40 was unusually cold. In Swanbourne, Marjorie noted in her diary that in France there had been 50 days of continuous sub-zero temperatures. In the grey coal mining country south of Lille, where the fourth Battalion of the Oxford and Buckingham light infantry was stationed, the troops slept in straw in the barns of a large farmhouse, where ice formed on the stew when it was carried from the kitchen across the farmyard to the waiting men. When the radiator of an officer’s car was topped up with cold water it froze solid at once and could not be warmed enough to start for two hours.
The battalion built pillboxes, and trenches, all guarded with barbed wire along the French side of the Belgian frontier: Belgium was officially neutral, but everyone expected that the Germans would invade it as they had done at the opening of the First World War, 25 years earlier. When they did, the British Army would get in their lorries, dash forwards to the banks of the Dyle river, about 20 miles east of Brussels, and stop the Germans there. The plan worked well enough on paper.
They waited until early May for the war to begin in earnest and by then the weather was wonderfully hot and bright. The German blitzkrieg broke into Holland and Belgium on the tenth. Private Brown’s battalion were pushed forward on the fourteenth when the front line had already fallen back towards them from the old border almost to Brussels.
In the first Belgian villages civilians threw flowers at the soldiers and offered food and drink to the slow-moving convoy, but then the traffic thickened. Almost all the cars on the road were heading against the troops and away from the front. The regimental chaplain, an Etonian, noted with disapproval “large, wealthy limousines, filled almost invariably with Jews and Jewesses, many of them quite young.”
Most of the refugees, though, were on foot. The narrow streets of towns were clogged with them and over everything rose the wailing of air raid sirens. When the sirens were silent, the drone of enemy aircraft seemed constant; though the convoy was not bombed a few fighters did dive down to machine gun them. The men fired back exuberantly with bren guns, and even rifles. Very few had been to war before.
On the evening of the fourteenth they reached the old battlefield of Waterloo, now a small town south of Brussels. They spent the night digging trenches in the beech forest between Brussels and Waterloo; the Germans had broken the first defensive line, 30km to the East on the River Dyle and so in the morning the long lines of civilian refugees who passed through their positions were joined by retreating troops: the Belgians among them seemed beaten and demoralised; the British troops, exhausted but still in good heart. The battalion was set to digging fresh trenches after working all night. They were being shelled and strafed from the air, but shops were still open in the town of Waterloo; trams still ran along the main road.
But there was to be no sleep after a night and day of work. At three in the morning the battalion was ordered to retreat without defending their position. The French troops on their right had already retreated, leaving a gap for German tanks to fill. In fact the French lines were collapsing everywhere although the British troops had no idea of this.
Churchill flew to Paris and back that day, to bolster the panicking French government. Tony Bartley was among the Spitfire pilots escorting his plane. The real war still seemed a safe distance away so he filled one of the ammunition compartments in his wings with bottles of brandy instead. The flight landed in England, unscathed, but before Tony could stop them, his armourer opened the compartments and the bottles crashed and smashed to the ground in front of everyone. Court martial loomed. But Churchill had seen what had happened. He walked over to Tony, and produced from his topcoat two more bottles, which he gave him. “Smart thinking, young man”, he said. “It was the last chance either of us are going to get.”
At the top of the British Army in Belgium, General Michael Barker, was cracking under the strain. His plan was now to fight on the banks of the rivers and canals which run northwards through Belgium to the sea; and as each successive river was overwhelmed, to fall back on the next one to the east.
At the very foot of the chain of command, Private Brown had no plans. He just marched. The first night march – after a day and a night of hard manual labour – was 26km, with each man carrying 25 to 30 kilos of equipment. Brigade headquarters still had lorries to ride but arrangements for feeding them had largely broken down; the official history records that the officers of one company had one egg each for breakfast, washed down with a shared bottle of whisky. It does not mention what the other ranks ate, if anything.
The troops were roused again at three the next morning to march another forty kilometres back to a village on the river Ath, where they had been promised rest and shelter. Reaching the village they learned the Germans were too close on their heels for rest. They must dig themselves trenches instead. By the end of the day, the half-starved men were too tired even to eat. The chaplain found one party slumped in a farmhouse kitchen, with tubs of butter and eggs around them, unable to rouse themselves to feed.
The German army was close on their heels. That night, the Germans shelled their positions, while patrols on the other bank of the river shot at them. There was a rumour that more German troops had got behind them. At half past eleven at night new orders came through: they were ordered to leave at two in the morning, and to march another eight kilometres to a rendezvous with their lorries; but when they reached the point agreed, they learned the lorries had been delayed by bombing on the way, and they must march another six to meet them.
In the lorries themselves they were packed standing up; the main road was choked with retreating French troops, and in the narrow streets of the little towns all traffic came to a standstill. One such jam was bombed in the little town of Leuze, Two of the packed troop-carrying lorries, and two loaded ammunition trucks were hit. When the explosions were over and the fires had died down, half of “A” company – 48 men – were missing, and perhaps twice that many had been killed in all. So a quarter of the battalion’s men had been killed before they had had any chance to fire at the enemy.
The battalion struggled on until they reached Bléharies, a village against the French frontier a little south of Tournai on the River Scheldt. Their retreat had brought them on foot through four days and nights of blood and chaos to a place not ten miles away from the villages where they had started in lorries to the front. The villagers then had lined the streets to give them food and flowers as they set off to the war on a blazing spring day.
The survivors of “A” Company guarded the river bridge. Behind them, orchards and market gardens stretched up the hill; later the Germans were to watch these closely and shoot anyone who emerged into the cabbage patches. A continual stream of refugees passed through the British lines, until a party of sappers blew up the bridge they’d used.
They should have dug more trenches but they were too tired to manage more than scraped declivities in the earth. The moon that night was full and by its light they could see the arriving Germans moving on the far bank.
The next afternoon there were rumours of paratroop landings behind them, and of infantry crossing the canal. Their village was heavily shelled; the firing continues all night from both sides and some men collapsed under the strain. The chaplain records two badly shellshocked men who “lay together chattering with fright and occasionally pitifully hugging each other” in the casualty clearing station. He himself was kept busy burying the dead.
By the 22nd of May food was running out, and the village houses were looted of all that could be found in them. That night, the men could hear battles all up and down the river, but their own sector was fairly quiet. Still the retreat must continue. At two in the morning the troops were marched for another four hours back into France, where they were deployed to a line of blockhouses, with no fortifications against tanks.
The wireless told them that “small, isolated parties of Germans, with a limited number of tanks”, were being rapidly surrounded and mopped up to the south. In fact, the German Panzer divisions had smashed the French army and destroyed its will to resist. The panzers were by then swinging north to the coast, behind the British forces, to cut them off from the rest of France.
After a day in their new position, the battalion was relieved by French troops at 11 that night and marched through the night for another eight hours to the town of Nomain, where they expected to be properly rested. They were given breakfast at eight and all asleep half an hour later. After 90 minutes of sleep the exhausted men were roused and told they must board busses 10:30 to join in the defence of Calais. It was only now that they understood the magnitude of the German triumph.
The promised buses to Calais never arrived. The men slept as they could all through the day and at 10pm new orders came through. The situation in Calais was already hopeless. The battalion must instead defend Cassel, a town on a lonely hill 10 miles south of Dunkirk1. From there they could retreat no further. They must fight “to the last man and the last round” to protect the evacuation from the beaches and Dunkirk behind them.
All night they rode north through the blacked out, terrified, chaotic country.
When their buses reached Cassel 4:30 the next morning there was no bread and very little else to eat. The town had been heavily bombed; corpses of men and animals littered the streets. A low-flying reconnaissance plane circled above the town, tracing out a black swastika in smoke to demoralise them while they dug themselves in against the German artillery fire.
After two days of sporadic fighting and raids Cassel was almost surrounded. On the third day the tanks and infantry attacked together. The battle lasted until eight in the evening. The defences in the outlying villages were overrun; one mortar was rescued for reuse after all its crew were killed; but the end was clearly in sight. The shelling was continuous and the concussion of the shells put out the flames of the petrol cookers that the army used, so the food, already inadequate, could no longer be heated at all.
The following day the attacks were fewer but now ammunition as well as food was running out. Two lorries carrying troops from another regiment towards Dunkirk paused in the main square – by now it was expected that the exhausted drivers would drop over their wheels asleep as soon as they stopped. But these now formed a stationary target so they were immediately bombed and everyone in them killed.
Enemy aircraft dropped leaflets telling the men they were surrounded and urging surrender.
Shelling resumed on the fifth day. Denys was attached to the battalion headquarters, where a shell burst against the outside wall and killed the major who’d been sitting beside the chaplain. From the town the defenders could see enemy tanks manoeuvring below them, and infantry preparing an attack and they realised there was now no way out by road. In the afternoon the order came through to destroy everything that could not be carried, and to escape that night on a route that was supposed to be clear. The recommendations for decorations (many posthumous) were radioed back, and all the papers burned.
When night came the survivors set out to march the ten miles to Dunkirk. They could not use the roads they had been ordered to, because the Germans had fired farms and houses along the road to illuminate targets for the tanks hiding in the woods. So they picked their way in pitch darkness through the woods and fields, on a compass bearing.
But the Germans were everywhere between them and safety. “Some enemy opposition may be encountered which will be swept aside with the bayonet,” their orders had read. After an hour or so, the back half of the column lost contact with the rest. The planned route ran east towards the Belgian frontier for a few miles, then due north to the beaches but at the village where the route swung north the leading party ran into German infantry. They charged them with their bayonets, as ordered, and so cleared the way for the rest, although the officer leading the charge was killed.
As the night wore on, the two main bodies were separately surrounded and forced to surrender. A few small parties continued to struggle towards Dunkirk. Private Brown had lost his spectacles. He was leading no more than ten of his comrades the next morning when he misread the map, ran into a German patrol, and was captured when he got stuck trying to dive through a hedge. He was lucky to have survived the annihilation of his battalion.
Eight hundred and ten men had had set off through cheering crowds to the front at Waterloo. Only five front line troops survived the retreat to reach Dunkirk.
By this time they were so tired and confused that when my father told me the story of his capture he said they’d been headed for Boulogne. But the official history says Calais.