The Road to Dunkirk

The British Expeditionary Force and the Battle of the Ypres-Comines Canal, 1940

Charles More

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781848327337
• eBook ISBN: 9781473831605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"A detailed and fascinating account" of a little known WWII showdown in Belgium between the British Expeditionary Force and the German army ( Barnsley Chronicle).
 
This is an important reassessment of a critical period in the British Expeditionary Force's fight against the German armies invading France in 1940. On May 25, Lord Gort, the British commander, took the decision to move 5th Division north in order to plug a growing gap in his army's eastern defenses. Over the next three days the division fought a little-known engagement, the Battle of the Ypres-Comines Canal, to hold the Germans at bay while the rest of the BEF retreated toward Dunkirk.
 
The book describes the British Army of 1940 and outlines the early stages of the campaign before explaining the context of Gort's decision and why it was made. Then, using British and German sources, it shows how the British doggedly defended their line against heavy German attacks, and demonstrates that the Expeditionary Force was far more than the badly equipped and undertrained army many historians have represented it as. This fresh look at the campaign also casts new light on other aspects such as the impact of the Luftwaffe and the Dunkirk evacuation itself.
 
"This book is important for all those interested in the fighting which proceeded the general retreat to and evacuation from Dunkirk. The author has trawled numerous archival sources, which are well cited in this elegantly produced book." — Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
 

1. Armies

IN MAY 1940, AS the Allied and German armies made their preparations, each side was roughly equal in numbers. The German army in the west had 135 divisions. The French had 117 and the British thirteen, three of which were understrength labour divisions. Yet Britain’s population was larger than that of France. Why was the BEF so small?¹

Historically Britain had relied on the Royal Navy for defence. Compared with Germany and France its army had always been limited in size, relying on volunteering rather than conscription. After its huge expansion during the First World War, the old pattern reasserted itself. This seemed doubly appropriate in the 1920s and early 1930s because of the collective security provided – it was hoped – by the League of Nations and the Locarno Treaty. This was also a period when international disarmament was an active topic of discussion.²

As the 1930s advanced, the high hopes for disarmament faded. First Japan’s aggression in Manchuria in 1931, and then – much nearer to home – the rise of Adolf Hitler, turned the pacific horizons of the 1920s into war clouds. By 1935 Britain was set on a course of steady rearmament. But there was now a new competitor for military expenditure – the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was particularly attractive because even those sceptical of the effectiveness of collective security were seduced by the notion that bombing would render land warfare out of date. Hence the RAF’s emphasis on strategic bombing. Spending on the army was, therefore, slow to rise, although by 1938 it amounted to 2 per cent of national income, not much less as a proportion than total military expenditure in Britain today. Behind this expenditure lay a series of debates that attempted to define the role of the army in a future war.³

In 1934, when the rise of Hitler began to sound alarm bells, Britain had no formal alliance with France, although there was a general assumption that the French would be allies in the event of a war with Germany. If this occurred, the role of the other services, and Britain’s overall part in the alliance, seemed clear: the Navy would blockade Germany, the RAF attack it, and Britain would provide financial support for the alliance as it had in the First World War. The army was to be equipped for a limited continental role, but what that actually would be was not specified and this ‘continental commitment’ was actually downgraded in 1937.

However, 1938 was to see both the Anschluss with Austria, and Hitler’s aggressive support of the Sudeten Germans, which led in September to the Munich Agreement and Germany thereby gaining control of Czechoslovakia’s former borderlands. In spite of Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s famous 1938 statement about ‘peace for our time’, one result was an increased wariness about Germany’s intentions. By January 1939 it was also clear that the French would expect some assistance from British land forces in the event of a German attack.

In February 1939 the continental commitment was reinstated, and Hitler’s takeover in March of the rump of the Czech lands – Slovakia becoming a German client state – led to a raft of measures in Britain. Financial constraints on rearmament were loosened still further, limited conscription was introduced and the territorial army greatly enlarged. Britain and France also guaranteed Poland’s independence. The stage was set for 3 September, when Britain declared war on Germany after the latter’s invasion of Poland.⁴

In spite of the army’s rapid expansion, the core of the BEF was still provided by the prewar regular army battalions. There were forty-nine of these deployed in the ten fully equipped infantry divisions,^* out of a total of eighty-seven.⁵ Although the British army is always known by its regiments – whether famous names such as the Grenadier Guards or county regiments such as The Royal Warwickshire Regiment and the splendidly named Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (DCLI) – the system did not bring the units within a regiment together in a fighting capacity. Regiments existed for reasons of sentiment, recruitment and administration. Since the late nineteenth century county regiments had had two regular battalions, which had little knowledge of each other and did not serve together, except occasionally in wartime. A battalion – about 800 soldiers in 1940 – was the unit to which infantrymen owed allegiance.

David French has many criticisms of the training of these prewar battalions. Some of these points were also made at the time by one of the BEF’s most perceptive generals, Alan Brooke, commander of II Corps. In early November 1939, when his corps consisted mainly of regulars, he wrote: ‘We still require months of training with the necessary facilities, such as artillery and anti-tank ranges, before this Corps can be considered as fit for war’ – a view he was to reiterate.⁶

Brooke’s comments were echoed from a very different perspective by my late father-in-law, Robert (Bob) Thorne, who had joined one such county battalion, the 1st Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment, as a private in early 1933, during the depths of the Depression. By the outbreak of war he was a sergeant. He was not himself at Dunkirk, but was one of the 140,000 or so British troops who were south of the Somme and were evacuated from the western French ports in June. Subsequently he was commissioned and seconded to a newly formed tank regiment, seeing active service in it as an acting major from soon after D-day until the end of the war. He had, therefore, observed the prewar British army from the grass roots, and in his subsequent career as a tank officer gained a wider perspective. About twenty years ago I talked to him extensively about his army experiences.

He, too, was critical of the higher formation and combined arms training undertaken in the prewar army. In such training:

it was very difficult to whistle up a lot of enthusiasm for chasing around the moors of Catterick playing soldiers, as it were, because it was very unrealistic. There was no live ammunition fired anyway. You never saw such a thing as a field gun for example, as the artillery support had to be imagined because it never actually appeared at any time.

He contrasted this with post-Dunkirk training, where ‘we used to train troops to advance along a line where you fired on either side of them. Real fire down on either side of them …’ Apart from the absence of live ammunition and artillery, other misleading aspects in his view included a complete lack of training involving air support, and simplistic assumptions about the use of tanks: ‘The tanks were brought into the exercises to finish it off … It was assumed that by bringing the tanks in they could roll over everything there was.’ He was critical also of the lack of training in anti-tank gunnery.⁷

Thorne was, however, much more positive about the basic elements of an individual soldier’s training – musketry (learning how to shoot), map-reading, marching and the other basics – which he thought were well done in the prewar period. Training in small-group infantry tactics – ‘minor tactics’ – was also thorough:

In the attack, for instance, the idea would be that part of the platoon would use their weapons to produce fire to keep the enemies’ heads down whilst the other half moved … And you move as fast as possible with as much cover as possible. You had to learn to use sort of every bit of natural [cover], every fold in the ground, and that sort of thing as cover from enemy fire.

His views were more optimistic than French’s who was critical even of training in this very important department of the soldier’s job. Bob Thorne also thought that the quality of the average regular private and of the non-commissioned officers – who were recruited from the ranks – was remarkably good. Again, there are differing views, and it may be that his perspective was infuenced by the fact that he joined in the depths of the Depression, when even high-quality men found it difficult to get a job anywhere else and would be more tempted to join the army.⁸

Thorne was less sanguine about the quality of some of the officers, believing that: ‘There were far too many officers who were not up to their jobs.’ He pointed out, however, that in the period from around the end of 1936 to the outbreak of war a number of unsatisfactory officers in his battalion were quietly persuaded to leave. So clearly some attempt was made to improve officer quality. The promotion of efficient non-commissioned officers such as himself in the early part of the war was another aspect of this, even though it was also necessary because of the army’s rapid enlargement.⁹

If regulars still comprised the larger part of the BEF, the territorial battalions were a major component. Since 1907 county regiments had had battalions of territorials attached, and in 1939 the territorials had formed the basis for a massive expansion of the army. As a result, five of the BEF’s fully equipped divisions had just fifteen regular but thirty territorial infantry battalions between them. Since until only a few months before war broke out they were part-time soldiers, territorial training was much inferior to that of the regulars. There was little time for individual or tactical training in their regular training sessions, so their four weekend camps per year and fortnightly annual camp tended to be devoted to this. Combined arms training was more or less non-existent. Furthermore the territorial army had hugely expanded just before the war to accommodate the influx of new recruits when conscription was introduced in April 1939, diluting each battalion’s military skills even further. Perhaps not surprisingly as a regular, Thorne was critical of the territorials as ‘very much novice soldiers’.¹⁰

It is not known how far these weaknesses were rectified by training within the BEF during the winter of 1939/40, but historians have expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of such training. The comment by Henry Pownall, the BEF’s chief of staff, in October 1939 that digging defences on the French frontier was ‘all excellent training for the troops, much more so than if we had stayed in back areas practising battles’ has been noted as an example of a retrograde British attitude. But Pownall’s comment should be seen in the context of another one he made shortly afterwards – that the French were not digging any defences at all on that part of the front. Once the defences were dug he was certainly aware of the need for training, commenting in January that, as more British divisions came in, there was only limited space provided for them: therefore, ‘can we please have a training area south of Amiens?‘¹¹

In order to put a little flesh on what is, so far as the BEF is concerned, essentially anecdotal evidence, three war diaries were searched for information on training. One was 5th Division’s, whose commanding officer Harold Franklyn was well known for his attention to training. In December 1939, soon after the division arrived, there was movement practice, but this only applied to the HQ (headquarters). The war diary noted in January that a field-firing range had been allocated to the division and was used in the first two weeks of the month for practice on all sorts of small arms, including small mortars, grenade throwing and anti-tank rifles. In February 1940 training exercises were set for 15 Infantry Brigade – this formation was later withdrawn for service in Norway; in March for 17 Brigade; and in April for 13 Brigade. Unfortunately 13 Brigade’s diary, the second one consulted, did not record any details of its training, although clearly there were some exercises unrecorded by the division: for example, one on 2 March involving ‘defence against enemy air born attack’.

Later in April 1940 plans were underway for the entire division to move to the Picquigny area southwest of Amiens – presumably the training area that Pownall had requested in January – for six weeks of training. On 9 May this was about to start, but on 10 May Hitler put an end to 5th Division’s plans. It is not known how many divisions went through their six weeks of training, but given the time available it cannot have been many, if any at all.¹²

The very absence of evidence here shows that there was not much opportunity for higher formation training or for combined arms training with the artillery. This could only take place, except for paper exercises, in a large-scale training area, which the BEF did not have until it was too late. However one battalion war diary suggested that at battalion level there was considerable activity. This diary belonged to the 1/7th Royal Warwickshire Regiment (1/7th Warwicks), a territorial formation attached to 143 Brigade of 48th Division. The 1/7th was not chosen wholly by chance, since it played an important part in the Battle of the Ypres–Comines Canal. So its experience may not be typical, but if it was it suggests that battalions took training seriously.

A few extracts over a period give some idea of activities after the battalion’s arrival in France in early January. On the 25th and 26th of that month companies practised attack schemes; on the 30th ‘fighting patrols and small attack schemes’; and on the 31st ‘attacks on houses and imaginary pillboxes’. The last entry shows that practice without a proper training ground had some limitations. During February the battalion spent much of its energies on working parties to assist the Royal Engineers, presumably in constructing defences. A number of exercises were fitted in between these. On 12 February, for example, there was range firing; on the 13th firing of the 2-inch company mortars; and on the 15th a battalion attack scheme that included the Bren carriers.^* Also on the 12th the intelligence section was on a brigade scheme that involved the use of wireless; and on 21 and 22 February companies practised the use of assault boats. On one occasion ‘night patrol practice’ were going on ‘as usual’.¹³

Similarly in March a lot of time was expended in providing working parties for an ammunition field park company in order to unload a number of trains. But along with this went a battalion exercise in taking up a defensive position, several days of platoon training, some route marching, a night exercise involving HQ and one rifle company, and firing on ranges. In addition a number of exercises, or ‘schemes’, were carried out under brigade auspices: a battalion attack exercise; withdrawal by night; and reconnaissance and ‘fighting patrol’ work at night. In April there was a cryptically entitled ‘Corps manning exercise’ in which 143 Brigade was to put in a counterattack; this involved two fourteen-mile marches in between the attack, for which the intelligence section had laid out tapes overnight. The routine training continued, with fewer working parties to interrupt it, and on 25–26 April there was a brigade exercise to practise taking up a defensive position and a subsequent withdrawal, which included marching thirty miles in two days. It was a prescient exercise given what was to come.¹⁴

If the 1/7th Warwicks is anything to go by, battalion training was not only thorough but also involved a number of exercises that would be of real practical value in the battles ahead, even though that could not have been known at the time. Furthermore their war diary showed that a number of these exercises involved their brigade, 143, in one form or another, although only one seems to have involved I Corps to which 48th Division was attached. It can be speculated from the scattered comments reported earlier that not all of the training was realistic. The lack of any mention of artillery or tanks also suggests a paucity of inter-arms training, although that cannot be stated definitively. Clearly there is room for a more systematic survey of the BEF’s training.

Whatever the state of training, historians have also pointed to other systemic weaknesses in the prewar British army, which carried over into the BEF. The British army had always had a tendency to hierarchy and an emphasis on detailed orders, which were expected to be strictly followed. Hierarchy and detailed orders would not have mattered so much – and could have advantages in terms of co-ordination – if communications had ensured that orders were relayed quickly. But the BEF still relied largely on cable networks, even though battlefield radios originated in the First World War. Once the BEF was forced to retreat and had moved off established cable routes, easy communication broke down, and it relied increasingly on liaison officers to carry messages. This lack of rapid communication could also hinder artillery support for the infantry; by comparison German units tended to have more firepower under the direct control of the unit commander. The total artillery support available to the BEF was substantial, but it was all under the ultimate control of divisions and corps, although in practice this was ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations, Conventions and Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Armies
• 2. Case Yellow
• 3. Decision
• 4. Into Position
• 5. Crisis in the South
• 6. The Wider Battle
• 7. Counterattack in the South
• 8. Crisis in the North
• 9. Hanging On
• 10. Ypres and Withdrawal
• 11. Aftermath
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography