Dunkirk Page 9

  He knew what he was doing: he was leading me into a trap, trying to make me fly under some high tension cables over the river. He pulled up to see whether I’d crashed – I hadn’t. That was his mistake. I was able to catch up with him, give him a burst and, to the best of my knowledge, I forced him to crash land.

  With its generous pay and dashing uniform, the air force had clear social advantages over the army – and it attracted a wide range of personalities. Vivian Snell moved to France with 98 Squadron in April 1940. He spent evenings in Reims, where he ordered a great deal of champagne at a fraction of the London price. A particular friend was Freddie Snell, an unrelated namesake who loved to ‘whoop it up’.

  Vivian Snell recalls Freddie passing an eventful weekend in a Reims hotel where the front door was locked every night at 11 p.m. Freddie did not appreciate this rule. ‘If you lock the door,’ he warned the staff, ‘I’ll open it.’ Sure enough, that night, he shot the door open with his revolver. And when, the next day, the lounge pianist played on too long, Freddie lodged two bullets in his piano. But his grand gesture was still to come.

  Freddie was supposed to return to the squadron on the Monday morning. Hours later, the squadron adjutant appeared in an attempt to lure him home. ‘Come on Freddie!’ he said. ‘You know you should have been back this morning!’

  ‘I can’t come back! I’m dancing! Can’t you see?’ said Freddie, who was engaged with several girls at once. ‘Why don’t you dance too?’ And, drawing his revolver, he fired at the ground all around the adjutant. Who did indeed begin to dance.

  Freddie Snell was court-martialled. The Royal Air Force was known as a tolerant service – but it had its limits. And the fact was that an enormous number of crimes were taking place elsewhere. Almost as soon as the British Expeditionary Force landed in France, they began. From a smash and grab raid on a jeweller’s to the theft of Rennes’ only police car, the shadier members of the BEF went to work. The most common crime, however, was theft of army supplies. An organised chain developed; goods were stolen from the British depots, from the ports at either end, from the supply ships, from the French depots, from the trains, from the lorries, and from the eventual recipients. There was barely a secure moment in the life of any supply item, and the black market on both sides of the Channel was well supplied.

  In September 1939, as I Corps Headquarters disembarked at Cherbourg, so many supplies were disappearing that every staff car had to be removed from the docks and kept under guard. Nothing was too big or too small to be stolen. Chief Inspector George Hatherill of Scotland Yard was sent to France, and his report was damning. ‘At almost every port, railway siding and depot I visited it was the same story,’ he wrote, ‘vast quantities of all kinds of disposable commodities were disappearing, often within hours of being landed.’ With immediate effect, five hundred army volunteers with police experience were withdrawn from their units to become supply escorts. Hatherill also recommended the creation of a Special Investigations Branch (SIB) within the Military Police (and within the navy and air force). As a result, fifty-eight officers and NCOs were recruited from Scotland Yard to work as military detectives. The SIB would become a large and effective organisation.

  Theft, it should be noted, had been a way of life in the army since time immemorial. ‘They’d pinch the milk out of a blind man’s tea,’ says a signaller, recalling how his knife and cap were taken – leaving him no option but to pinch someone else’s. But beyond the widespread pilfering (and despite the best efforts of the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps) there seems to have been relatively little serious crime committed by the BEF in France. Examining court-martial figures for a random period in early March 1940, the most common offence was drunkenness – followed by violence against a superior, and theft. The prevalence of drunkenness seems unsurprising given that beer, wine and spirits were cheap, especially with the strength of the pound against the franc (£1 was worth 176.5 francs).

  While not usually serious in itself, drunkenness could sometimes lead to graver offences. It probably played a major part in the murder committed by Lance Corporal Goulding, and it could certainly sour relations between soldiers and local people. But it could also compromise the army’s ability to do its job. A company commander of the East Yorkshire Regiment was so drunk on the night of 9 May 1940 that he was rendered unfit for duty on the day the BEF finally advanced into Belgium. One assumes that this captain was not the only actor missing his entrance on 10 May. But such behaviour was one thing in a soldier, it was another thing altogether in an officer.

  British army officers were expected to know how to behave. They had clear standards to uphold and responsibilities to fulfil, in return for which they were granted power over others and a more comfortable life. This, at least, was the theory. The novelist Anthony Powell, a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment, writes of commanding a platoon that ‘Thirty men are merely a responsibility without the least compensatory feeling of power. They only need everlasting looking after.’ Perhaps – but it was also true that not every officer fulfilled his responsibility.

  Some were vindictive. When a promising young Gordon Highlander turned down the chance to become a major’s batman, explaining that he would rather remain with his friends, he was immediately sentenced to seven days confined to barracks. The slighted major had accused him of being improperly dressed; a bootlace could be seen poking from under his gaiter.

  Others were negligent. In February 1940, four officers of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were convicted of mutiny and unauthorised absence. The court martial concerned the drowning of a private during an assault boat exercise. All four officers were sentenced leniently: two majors were issued severe reprimands, and two second lieutenants reprimands. The battalion commander, meanwhile, was relieved of his position. These four officers – and the commanding officer – failed in their responsibilities. They had not looked after their men.

  Given the manner in which the story of the Dunkirk evacuation is usually told, it can often appear that the entire British army was in France. This, of course, was not the case. There were conscripts and volunteers in Britain – and Mass Observation was keen to monitor their thoughts and attitudes. One recent conscript to the Royal Air Force reported regularly to the organisation. He revealed that while his colleagues were not ‘deeply in love’ with the RAF, they much preferred it to the army. Soldiers, he said, were generally acknowledged to have the worst lives.

  He also noted that his colleagues were much less likely to underestimate the Germans than most civilians, who still thought the war would be quickly won. ‘It is realised,’ he said, ‘that we have a tough nut to crack.’ While Hitler was regularly described as a bastard, he did not hear a great deal of hatred expressed against the Germans, and he seldom heard political discussions, even though – or perhaps because – there were communists, socialists, and an ex-fascist among the conscripts. He noted that ‘they like democracy but they know damn well that all we are fighting for is British capital.’ Such cynicism is interesting, given that the conscripts’ favourite member of the government was Winston Churchill – a politician who considered the war a fight for liberty and democracy.

  The group’s attitudes towards conscientious objectors were divided. Some dismissed them as ‘unnatural and meet to be shot’ while a surprisingly large number agreed that ‘it requires a good deal of guts to be a conscientious objector and that we have taken the easy way out by following the crowd.’

  Some conscientious objectors could never be accused of taking the easy way out. R. J. Porcas, from Norbury in south London, was a convinced pacifist who viewed conscription as training for the murder of his fellow human beings. Yet he refused to register as an objector – on the grounds that no tribunal had a moral right to judge him on a matter of conscience. The situation was similar, he believed, to medieval inquisitions judging a man for his religious beliefs.

  Porcas was aware of the possible consequences of his action. In a letter to the Minister of
Labour, he wrote that he was prepared ‘to be handed over to the Military Authorities for them to see if they can break me’. Ultimately, however, Porcas did not have to play the part of martyr. He was acknowledged as a conscientious objector without having to appear before the tribunal, or even having to register. Such an enlightened decision (and the effort spent reaching it) reflects the gulf between First and Second World War attitudes to moral objection.

  As a number of high-profile pacifists (such as A. A. Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh) modified their views and began supporting the war, others remained stubbornly committed to unilateral peace. Asked by an audience member at a public meeting whether he agreed with Hitler, Labour MP Rhys John Davies answered that he hated Hitler – as did the German people. He went on to argue that this would be the last war Britain would ever fight as a great power. In future, he claimed, ‘we should be a sort of vassal state of America.’ An appalling judge of the present, Davies demonstrated notable prescience.

  You did not have to be a pacifist to avoid conscription during the phoney war. You could be medically unfit for service. Or you could pretend to be. Jack Brack, a young Londoner suffering from heart disease, was rejected by a medical board in October 1939. Shortly afterwards, he became the central figure in an organised fraud, beginning when Maurice Kravis, the governor of a Brick Lane snooker hall, offered Brack money to impersonate him at his medical board. Brack duly appeared claiming to be Kravis – and gained him an exemption. There were plenty of other people keen to avoid service, and Brack was soon submitting to regular examinations under different names. Care was taken not to appear before the same board twice, but once Brack’s face became known, the venture was doomed. Sure enough, he was arrested, along with everyone he had impersonated. Found guilty of conspiring to defeat the provisions of the National Service Act, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

  In Burton-on-Trent, meanwhile, twenty-six-year-old Raymond Gould was sent to prison for failing to register for national service. The reason, according to his mother, was that he was too lazy to join up. Giving evidence in the case, a Ministry of Labour inspector alleged he had been forced to wait twenty minutes before speaking to Gould while his mother and sister persuaded him to get out of bed. Throughout the trial, Gould refused to speak; but the court was informed that he could speak, as he had recently been convicted of using indecent language at Derby Police Court.

  Yet while people were avoiding service for many reasons, there was at least one man breaking the law in a desperate attempt to get into the army. Twenty-one-year-old north Londoner Samuel Martin was accused, at the Old Bailey, of sabotage at the factory where he made parts for submarines.

  Martin was desperate to leave the factory to join the army – but his bosses refused. The following day, he assembled a pistol (an electrical device controlling the detonation of a torpedo) incorrectly, telling the foreman that he had lost interest in his work. The next day, he assembled a pistol with a crucial part missing. And then he made a mistake that, according to an expert witness, could not possibly have been made accidentally. Found guilty, and facing a severe sentence (sabotage was not far short of treason), Martin was bound over by the judge so that he could join up.

  But as the months passed, the people of Britain, who had been expecting an Allied attack since the autumn, were beginning to wonder why nothing had happened. According to a Mass Observation report compiled shortly before the German offensive of 10 May, eight and a half months of inactivity had begun to demoralise the British people. Their previous confidence had declined, to be replaced by a range of attitudes to Hitler – varying from grudging respect to hatred of ‘a sort of ultra-human devil, born to curse our days’.

  And once the Germans attacked, their success both reinforced these attitudes and led to new ones: Hitler was clearly a military genius, a large section of the population now believed, and his war machine was invincible. Yet in reality, the Allies fielded a million more men than the Germans, and the French alone had more tanks and front-line aircraft. The legendary armoured divisions, those caravans of Nazi invincibility, actually constituted a small percentage of the army’s overall strength, and contained mostly captured Czech and inferior training tanks. As for belief in Hitler’s genius, nobody held this conviction with greater sincerity than Hitler himself, with disastrous future consequences for his armed forces.

  But just as Germany’s strength was becoming accepted wisdom in Britain, so was the weakness of the French Maginot line, and the foolishness of France’s strategy. ‘They sat pretty in their positions and waited for anything to happen,’ says Peter Barclay, an officer of the Norfolk Regiment. Barclay visited the line, and came away critical of its effect on the troops’ willingness to fight; it made them, he felt, far too defensive-minded. Other British soldiers who visited the line described it – in hindsight – as a mistake and a white elephant.

  In fact, the Maginot line fully served its purpose; it was never breached. More significant, given subsequent events, are the myriad British officers and men who have related, in interviews and memoirs, withering appraisals of the French army itself.

  Many of these memories may, of course, represent wisdom after the event, but some ring true. Captain Henry Faure Walker observed a lack of discipline and training among French soldiers while taking part in manoeuvres in 1939. He remembers a group of newly arrived reservists who, called to attention by an officer, began shouting, swearing and shaking their fists at him. The officer (a battalion commander) simply turned to Walker and shrugged his shoulders. Walker remained friendly with French officers throughout the phoney war; one of them told him, in the spring of 1940, that the morale of his men had sunk so low they would probably no longer fight. They had been keen enough in 1939, he said, but underpaid, bored and disillusioned for too long, they were now ‘militarily useless’.

  Given both that his officers were nervous about the possible performance of the French army, and that he was unlikely to be fully informed of developments by the French leadership, Lord Gort faced a difficult task; he must organise his own forces as efficiently as possible, and keep in regular and meaningful contact with the French. Otherwise danger lay ahead.

  In the event, the Germans attacked on 10 May. Bemused citizens of the tiny state of Luxembourg watched columns of artillery, armoured vehicles, cars and tanks hurrying past on their way towards the Belgian frontier. A young German tank officer, Hauptmann Carganico, was making good progress until he reached a mined area at Bodange, just inside Belgium, where he and the rest of the column had to wait until a path could be cleared. The following day, he carried on, struck by the contrast between the Luxembourgers, well-fed and affluent, and the Belgians, poor and miserable.

  After a while, a message came through on the radio warning of mines and enemy motorcycle troops ahead. Again the column stopped, until the commander of the lead platoon decided to fire at a number of mines lying visible on the road surface. Carganico heard a series of explosions, and the column was soon on the move again.

  Tanks preferred to avoid towns, and so, a few miles further on, the column skirted around the edges of Neufchâteau. Reaching the top of a ridge, Carganico could see the village of Petitvoir in the valley below, its whitewashed little houses gleaming in the sun. Some firing came, first from the village and then from a wood to the left. Both died away. Belgian gunners could be seen on the slope beyond Petitvoir, trying to bring their artillery into action – but they were hit by machine-gun fire; some of them fell, the others ran away. All the while, a dense column of soldiers could be seen in the distance moving west, trying to escape the Germans’ advance.

  Carganico radioed to the brigade asking for fuel, and for troops to secure the flanks of the territory already captured, and then moved on. Suddenly, he heard the commanding officer shout, ‘Halt!’ His driver engaged the brakes, and Carganico realised that the tank was inches from tumbling into a pit nearly thirty feet deep, its edges overgrown with foliage. Having avoided a literal pitfall
, he raced on, scattering some enemy light armoured vehicles on the way.

  Shortly before sunset, the column reached the village of Rochehaut, and began looking for a bridge to cross the River Semois. Early the next morning, the river bank to the south was explored, but enemy troops high on the opposite bank opened fire with a machine gun, so it was decided to head north and try to cross at Mouzaive. The column came under artillery fire, but it arrived, unscathed, at a fordable section of river. Its anti-aircraft guns fired at French aircraft overhead, while its motorcycle troops crossed along a narrow bridge. The river was just a little over two feet deep at this point, and the tanks were able to drive through the water.

  The column headed south again to Ban d’Alle, and soon it had entered the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest. Passing abandoned equipment and immobilised vehicles, it seemed clear that enemy troops had run terrified into the undergrowth at the approach of the Germans. Along a winding road, the column approached the French border. It had covered 137 miles since leaving Germany, and it now reached a sign pointing to Sedan. The first great German objective was close – and Carganico and his colleagues were confident.

  The phoney war was over for the British troops. As John Williams later said:

  The Phoney War was a dream time. I don’t know what we expected. We were in an innocent state. We were doing what we were told, and we had our officers, and we knew all our lads, and we thought all was right with the world. When I look back now, I shudder. I could almost burst into tears.

  Four

  High Hopes

  William L. Shirer, an American journalist in Berlin, was an observer of the everyday workings of Nazi Germany. In the days leading to Blitzkrieg, he noted a radio broadcast by Bernard Rust, the Nazi Minister of Education, preparing German schoolchildren for the coming attack: ‘The German people under Hitler did not take to arms to break into foreign lands and make other people serve them. They were forced to take to arms by states which blocked their way to bread and union.’