Dunkirk

By Lieutenant Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. S. Bradford

After being forced back to Dunkirk by the Germans in May/June 1940 the British Expeditionary Force in France had to be evacuated from Dunkirk by all types of ships and vessels, this the story told by a both authors who served at the time is a fascinating account of what went on.

"Dunkirk" was first published in 1950 under the title "Keep The Memory Green".
It was used as inspiration for the 1958 film, Dunkirk, starring Richard Attenborough.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9788835317708

Book preview

history.

PART I

THE LONG WINTER

CHAPTER I

IT is ten years ago, now — a short time in the span of history. To a convict, serving a sentence of penal servitude, ten years may seem to be almost an eternity, to a young child it is an inconceivable space of time. The months which have passed since 1940 have seen so many great events that, to most of us, those one hundred and twenty months, at least, have been thrown out of perspective. For some people the year which saw the salvation of our Army on the beaches of Dunkirk still seems to be very close, and the time which has since gone by no more than a brief interval. For others, 1940 is a period already very remote.

Today, the children who are preparing to leave school are of that generation to whom Dunkirk can be no more than a matter of hearsay, an event of which some member of their families, almost certainly, speaks in that vein of reminiscence which, to the young, can be so irritating. Yet, most of those men who survived the Battle of France, and who, from Dunkirk, were brought home to those they loved, are still young men, as youth goes nowadays.

In the great campaigns which, at last, encompassed the defeat of our enemy, the veterans of the British Expeditionary Force earned bright stars, the symbols of their service. Medals are awarded to the men of a victorious army. For those who have lost a battle, no matter how great their sacrifice, how arduous their efforts, there are no stars. There were none for the B.E.F., and that is as it should be. For, as Mr. Winston Churchill said, speaking to the House of Commons on 4 June, 1940, when 338,000 British and Allied Troops had been brought safely back to our citadel:

We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

Although the first British soldiers to meet the enemy in all the might of his full battle array lost the opening round of the long conflict which was at last to beat that enemy to his knees there is not a man who served with that brave little force — for it was a very little force — who is not proud to have been in France in those earliest days of the war. The men who stood in the fighting line are proud with good reason. But they were not the whole of the B.E.F. No less staunch, no less true to the trust which their country reposed in them were the modest soldiers who laboured at thankless tasks along the great lines of communication which stretched from the Belgian frontier to the ports of Brittany. It is well that, ten years after the agony of the B.E.F., they, too, should be remembered.

Bravest of all that Force, perhaps, were the flyers of the Royal Air Force. The story of their sacrifice is almost forgotten now, if indeed it were ever known. Of that band of brothers, very few survived to relate the story of the days of May and June ten years ago, and it is right that this story should now be told.

What were they then, the men of that small Expeditionary Force, a mere army in one of the groups of French armies? How did they spend the months of what has been called the twilight war, and how, when the shock of battle came at last, did they withstand the blow?

The narrative which follows seeks to recapture a little the spirit which bound the soldiers and airmen of that spearhead in the war against Hitler — the British Expeditionary Force. In the fields of Flanders, at Dunkirk, and elsewhere in the quiet countryside of a France, now again peaceful and free, lie those of our comrades who did not return from that forgotten campaign. Beside them are the graves of the men of an earlier B.E.F. who made the same sacrifice so few years before, facing the same enemy. The sons were not unworthy of their fathers or of those other British soldiers who have given their blood to the thirsty soil of Flanders throughout our history. To them the weapons which we brought to France ten years ago, inadequate though they were, would have seemed formidable indeed, but they would have recognized the men who carried them.

It has become fashionable to say that chivalry is dead, yet the men who went to France in 1939 were as much the flower of our chivalry as their forefathers, who followed King Henry to Agincourt. Although humdrum divisional symbols took the place of pennants and bannerets, and bren-gunners and riflemen replaced the bowmen and pikemen of England, the British Expeditionary Force knew, nonetheless, that they were the first to be entrusted by their country with a great enterprise, and they were proud in the knowledge. They did not betray that trust. God keep their memory green.

CHAPTER II

ON a sunny day in the latter part of September, 1939, a party of youngish officers, none of them Regulars, their uniforms for the most part very new, their Sam Browne belts without that fine patina which comes only with long use and much polishing stood on a Surrey heath admiring a tank. It was a very fine-looking machine, heavy and, to the eye, immensely solid. Its gun seemed to be of reassuringly heavy calibre.

One of the officers asked a question of the seasoned soldier who was their guide.

How many of these have we got, sir? he inquired.

Since these men were embryo intelligence officers, specially selected to undergo a course of instruction, the conducting-officer returned a frank answer to this question.

As a matter of fact, he said, this is the only one there is, at the moment.

While the party was digesting this disturbing news another of its members rapped sharply on the armoured flank of the monster. A hollow, booming sound rewarded this gesture and several officers cocked inquiring eyes towards their instructor. That warrior was embarrassed.

I’m afraid, he explained, that some of that armour is only a mock-up… plywood, you know. Trouble is the Admiralty has got an absolute stranglehold on all the supplies of armour-plate. We’re lucky if we manage to scrounge a ton or two here and there…

Among those second-lieutenants were men who knew a great deal about the German Army, who had watched Hitler’s tanks enter Austria, had ridden beside them as they rolled into the Sudetenland a year before, after the Munich Agreement, had seen them clank into Prague only six months ago. As they stood among the Surrey gorse and heather that autumn afternoon Polish cavalry and infantry, already defeated, was still hurling itself with ferocious gallantry against the unyielding steel of the German armoured divisions. The young officers returned, very thoughtfully, to their quarters that evening.

Meanwhile the movement of troops and stores to France was already well under way, and 1st Corps, the spearhead of the spearhead, stood complete on French soil, three proud regular divisions. The ancestors of these men had landed in France to fight at Crécy and Agincourt, marching to naker and trumpet, the chivalry of England, bowmen and pikemen, horse and foot. In the more recent past their fathers — the First Hundred Thousand — had travelled that same road as they went to settle accounts with those same Germans who, in 1939, were again the enemies of their country and of France.

To draw comparisons between the B.E.F. of 1914 and that of 1939 would be invidious; yet one thing must be said at the outset, and the theme will, unfortunately, be heard again in the pages which follow. The Force which landed in France in the late summer of 1914 was as well equipped, both actually and in relation to the enemy which it must fight, as any which has ever left these shores. Deficient in numbers it might have been but, except for a certain shortage of machine-guns, not in weapons or equipment. By 1939 the dispatch of an expeditionary force had, however, become a matter of fearful complexity. Even a single division required, for example, an alarming number of motor-vehicles. Yet taking into account the difficulties of the great enterprise upon which they were embarked, the fact remains that the troops who landed in France were but ill-provided with the tools of modern war.

Save for a few tanks, most of them already semi-obsolete, we had no armour, nor many guns, with which to stop the sadly-plentiful armour of the enemy. The two-pounder anti-tank gun, none too liberally provided in any case, lacked the range and penetration which alone would enable it to attack any but the lightest German tank. Great hopes were placed in the Boys anti-tank rifle. This weapon, as we firmly but falsely believed, could punch a neat hole in the toughest armour-plate, whereafter the bullet, its virulence far from exhausted, would hum round inside the enemy tank like an angry hornet, to the great discomfiture of its crew. Very few of us, however, had ever fired one of these weapons, since it had, apparently, been impossible to find, in all the United Kingdom, any range on which the men who were to handle the rifle in action might accustom themselves to its use. It was darkly rumoured and widely believed though, that any poor wight who did fire the weapon might expect to have his shoulder broken by the recoil, and this caused the Boys to be looked upon with deep, though ill-merited respect.

The Bren-gun was good, we all knew that, and those of us who had spent many, many weary hours in stripping its predecessor, the Lewis-gun, heir to a multitude of complicated and maddening stoppages, were delighted with a light machine-gun which could be more or less relied upon to fire at a touch of the trigger and to go on firing until it was time to change the barrel. We liked our mortars, too.

The 25-pounder gun-howitzer was good, and it looked modern and formidable, an encouraging thing for an infantryman to have behind him. Anti-aircraft guns were relatively few and far between, and we knew it, though we were not to learn the full extent of that deficiency until later.

Yet, though these weaknesses might worry the potentates at the War Office and senior officers at G.H.Q., already temporarily established at Le Mans, they did not greatly disturb the troops who disembarked in France during those early autumn days, eleven years ago. This France of 1939, although few of us appreciated the fact, was not the country which had welcomed our fathers in 1914. Then the French Army, burning to avenge the defeat of 1871, confident of its supremacy, was hurling itself northward and eastward to attack the invader, and the B.E.F. went straight into action with them. Most of us in this later B.E.F. had forgotten, if we ever knew, the fearful bloodletting which had, almost literally, decimated the manhood of France twenty years before.

There were no cries of "À Berlin!" from the French men and women who watched 1st Corps land and move up to its assembly area near the old town of Laval. Kind they were, and welcoming, but sad. The hoardings of France displayed a poster: Nous vaincrons parce — que nous sommes les plus forts! which we were able to translate correctly as: We shall win because we are the stronger! Somehow it seemed rather a spiritless appeal.

Nor, for that matter, were we ourselves much given to easy optimism. In London theatres and from Broadcasting House singers might assure us, and those whom we had left behind at home, that we should hang up our washing on the Siegfried Line, but we did not sing that ditty in France — in fact we disliked it a great deal. Not that the troops were not confident, not that we did not know ourselves to be as good fighting men as the Germans, but we resented facile assumptions of easy victory. Many of us were acutely conscious of the smallness of our Force, when compared with the numerous divisions of our French allies, not to mention those of the enemy. Moreover, it had been dinned into the officers, at least, that in military matters we were the amateurs, the French professionals.

First Corps moved up, the fighting troops by train, their vehicles, landed separately, by road. The troops travelled to the songs of their fathers’ war — Tipperary, There’s a long, long, trail,,, That Barrel which, during a long winter, we rolled out thousands of times, had just made its appearance, and we sang Boomps a-Daisy with a will. The officers and men of Movement Control, almost all Reservists, transported 1st Corps from the ports to central France with a precision and efficiency which we hardly appreciated then. Overworked R.T.O.s (Rail Transport Officers) worked with their French colleagues, scarcely sleeping for days as the troop trains rolled north-eastward. Rations never failed and, though the transit camps of Laval and Le Mans might have made Mr. Butlin shudder, the travellers found them at least tolerable. They had not come to France for a holiday.

In the literature of the First World War a good deal of very excellent fun was poked at the Staff, and in 1939 the Staff had not forgotten it. This time, it had been decreed, there should be no flashing red tabs, no glossy field-boots and elegant breeches, to put to shame the war-stained khaki of the fighting troops. The ubiquitous battle-dress was, in itself, a protection for the shy staff-officer — everybody wore it. Only a brassard, never assumed unless to do so was absolutely essential, distinguished the staff-officer in 1939. There were no brass hats in this B.E.F.

On 26 September, 1st Corps began the long move forward to the Franco-Belgian frontier, under Lieutenant-General (afterwards Field-Marshal Sir John) Dill, to take up the sector allotted to them by General Georges, Commanding the French Front of the North-East. As the three-day march began Major-General B. L. Montgomery, who, as Monty, was to win enduring fame in this war, was already leading his 3rd Division, the first of 2nd Corps to land in France, to their assembly area near Le Mons, while Major-General Hon. H. R. L. G. Alexander, another officer with a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack, moved northwards with his 1st Division.

Some of the Force expected to find a neat defensive position already waiting for them when we reached the frontier. For weeks before the outbreak of war we had read of the famous Maginot Line, that impregnable fortress against which the Germans were to smash themselves, and many of us (for that matter many of the French also) believed that the Line ran clear of the Swiss frontier to the Channel. The men of 1st Corps who credited this fable were soon undeceived. Some defences there were — an anti-tank ditch, covered by a few concrete blockhouses lay in front of them, and with it their winter’s work. Something more formidable must be built while there was yet time.

During four months the new formations arrived, until, by the end of January, six fighting divisions stood in the line, behind them a multitude of Lines of Communication troops. But divisions are great, impersonal things, complicated, intricate, in which the individual soldier is lost. Come, then, on a visit to an infantry battalion in the line, and meet the B.E.F.

CHAPTER III

THE 2nd Battalion, the East Anglian Fusiliers, lies, on Christmas Eve, 1939, in the village of Blanchy. No matter that this actual unit nowhere appears in the Order of Battle of the B.E.F., or that you may search in vain on the map for Blanchy. Both the battalion and the village are typical. To name a real unit, a real village, would be unfair, for units and villages were so many.

The East Anglians were lucky in the name of their position. Less fortunate battalions had to deal with some tongue-twisting names, but Blanky was easy and, to some extent, apposite. It was not a beautiful village, which is scarcely surprising since between 1914 and 1918 it was reduced to rubble. The old château was never rebuilt, but the church has risen again, and near it is a large hall which now billets A Company of the battalion. The other companies are dispersed through the village, in barns and lofts. Battalion headquarters is a low, whitewashed farm-house. A fine manure-heap steams in the chill December air just outside Orderly Room, a fact which worries the Colonel and Adjutant not at all, although it outrages the Regimental Sergeant-Major’s sense of propriety and occasionally disturbs L/Cpl. Jakes, the orderly-room clerk, who is sensitive to smells.

The amenities of Blanchy are few. Madame Boisson, who, in the absence of her husband and son, both in the Maginot Line, runs, with great efficiency the single pub, is everybody’s friend. A sign announcing that AIGS & CHIPS may be had there for eight francs a portion appeared in the front window of