Dunkirk

From Disaster to Deliverance - Testimonies of the Last Survivors

Sinclair McKay

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781312933
• eBook ISBN: 9781781313848
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

From the author of the  Sunday Times bestseller The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

When Churchill made one of the most inspiring speeches of the 20th century - 'we will fight them on the beaches' – he was giving thanks for the miracle of deliverance, the harrowing and breathless evacuation of over 338,000 troops from the beaches and harbour at Dunkirk.

Churchill was determined it shouldn’ t be labelled a victory. He was already too late. Hours later, broadcaster JB Priestley was to call it ‘ an absurd English epic’ . 

Those days of Dunkirk are still invoked now whenever the nation finds itself in any kind of crisis. But there is a wider story too that involves a very large number of civilians - from nurses to racing enthusiasts, trades union leaders to dance hall managers, novelists to seaside café owners.

And even wider yet, a story that starts in September 1939: of young civilian men being trained for a war that was already 25 years out of date; and the increasing suspense – and occasional surrealism - of the Phoney War.  The ‘ absurd epic’ of Dunkirk – told here through fresh interviews with veterans, plus unseen letters and archival material – is the story of how an old-fashioned island was brutally forced into the modernity of World War Two.

PART ONE

1

‘Would You Like to Join the Army?’

September 1939

The gathering storm had been heard some distance off. During the summer of 1939, even small children felt the foreboding. In London, on the night of 10 August, all the lights went out. The city’s population was not accustomed to pure darkness; in the 1930s, bursts of new American-style neon, glowing from cinemas and restaurants, radiating from advertising hoardings on Piccadilly and the Great West Road, had cast auroras of deep red and green and pink into the city’s thick night fogs. But on that warm summer night, the blackened streets felt clammily dead. It was a dummy run for the blackouts to come. And already, these streets – and those of other cities around Britain – were beginning to echo with a wider absence: between June 1939 and the declaration of war on Sunday 3 September, it was reckoned that an extraordinary three million people – mothers and children – had moved from the nation’s large industrial cities to other areas, other regions, that were perceived to be safer. ‘Glad they’ve gone,’ one young woman in east London was reported as saying. ‘They were a damned nuisance.’¹ There were also reports of family pets across the country being destroyed.

But there was no sense, in September 1939, of catharsis, of relief, of the storm finally arriving; the hollow booms had been heard for too long. Men in their late twenties and thirties gathering after a day’s work for quick pints in nicotine-slicked pubs discussed the call-up; they wondered when they would receive those official papers, or whether they should expedite the process and report immediately to the local recruiting office. The pubs were doing brisk business. ‘The wife…said that when she went up town last night,’ wrote one Huddersfield diarist, ‘she saw more drunk people than she had seen for a long time.’²

Almost exactly a year beforehand, it had seemed as though that mighty storm was about to break when Hitler demanded secession of the Sudetenland, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew out to Germany to try to fathom the Führer’s future aims and seek a guarantee that no further aggression would take place. While he did so, thousands in Britain volunteered for Air Raid Precautions (ARP) duties. On top of this, thousands more young men – some very young indeed – blithely signed up with their local Territorial Army units. For lads of sixteen and seventeen (some lying about their ages) this was quite often not to do with any terrific patriotic fervour, or indeed with a desire to see battle; it was more to do with finding ways to pass the long evenings. They would sometimes join simply because their friends had done so. And the idea of gaining that military training, of spending weekends in rough country learning to shoot, was attractive to boys not yet old enough to spend their time in the pub. But they were not daft; they also knew that their newly acquired skills might be tested at any moment.

Since April 1939, and after the full scale invasion of Czechoslovakia, there had been conscription in Britain, as there had been during the Great War. The left-wing Daily Mirror newspaper was initially outraged. ‘What, another big army of fine young men for idiotic and dud generals to drive to death and destruction?’ it shouted. Senior Labour politician Ernest Bevin was, according to Alan Bullock, ‘angry that the government had brought in conscription by the back door and tried to put it over on the working class’.³ But Bevin was equally enraged by far-left demands for industrial action to oppose the call-up. The Tory establishment sang a more compelling tune. ‘Conscription is the cry that leaps to all men’s mouths,’ wrote Duff Cooper in the Evening Standard; soon he was to be appointed Minister of Information. By August 1939, the call-up was accelerated, though at this stage, the very youngest were not summoned. In any case, it seemed to be widely understood that this would be a new kind of war.

For civilians, around thirty-eight million gas masks were manufactured, and distributed around the country. These masks, however, were not available for very small infants. This was not the only reason that they inspired horror; nor was the uncanny skull-like effect they evoked when worn. It was more to do with that shuddering echo of what had gone before. The thin victims of mustard gas attacks in the trenches, their lungs beyond repair, still limped Britain’s streets with haunted faces. Very few families up and down the land had not been touched by the damage – physical and psychological – wrought on the Great War battlefields of France. The issuing of gas masks had been interpreted as a chilly official declaration that in this new age of warfare, no one would be spared the horrors that the previous generation of soldiers had seen.

In September 1938, when Chamberlain held in his hand the piece of paper that signalled ‘peace in our time’, it seemed to be widely understood and accepted among the public that the state of affairs in Europe was quite the opposite; that the Nazi threat to Britain was growing. Like a patient who feels distinctly the onset of fever – the temperature, the giddiness – so too the British people seemed aware that the crisis was at hand. Even before the 1938 Munich conference – the point at which many members of the public gloomily expected an instant declaration of hostilities – Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, had stated: ‘the plain fact which cannot be obscured is that it is beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for the defence of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war.’ In other words, any conflict that involved the Germans, Italians and Japanese would be unwinnable.

Senior Foreign Office diplomat – and furious anti-appeaser – Sir Robert Vansittart had been crisper about it: there was simply too much territory for the over-stretched British to defend. ‘We’re over-landed,’ he said. None the less, Vansittart believed the British could not afford to close their ears to the increasingly ugly news from the continent or take comfort from their island status. He was particularly angry with the equivalent of today’s chattering classes, ‘people here, who, in smug insularity, refused to credit, or even to hear, those horrors…the Channel has screened the modern Pharisees from horrors’.

However, it is instructive to remember that for a long time, polls showed that the majority of British people, despite their pessimism, considered that careful diplomacy might somehow calm Hitler and keep Britain out of the war. In February 1939, a few months after the Munich agreement was signed, 74 per cent of those questioned thought it would help keep conflict at bay; only 24 per cent thought it would bring it closer.

Opinion polls are but a snapshot; they don’t measure deeper currents of unease. Yet against the thick darkness sweeping across Europe, the growing feeling of approaching menace from a German war machine that seemed pitiless and ineluctable, quotidian life in Britain continued. How could it not? The sound of those distant hollow booms had to be blocked out somehow. In the spring of 1939, courting couples trooped along in vast numbers to see the lavish (and slightly sugary) Hollywood version of Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier. The phenomenally popular Technicolor epic Gone with the Wind would open in the nation’s cinemas some months later; but in the meantime, Margaret Mitchell’s novel, upon which the film was based, was devoured throughout that year. Books were still an expensive commodity; they were borrowed from lending libraries in vast quantities rather than bought. This, though, was one of the rare exceptions.

But cinema was the truly popular art form. Other terrific hits in the weeks before the war included Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, Alexander Korda’s richly colourful imperial adventure The Four Feathers, Robert Donat and Greer Garson in the shamelessly sentimental Goodbye Mr Chips and George Formby in the comedy Trouble Brewing, in which the hapless ukulele player is up against a gang of counterfeiters. Children meanwhile smuggled themselves into cinemas for the Hollywood horror Son of Frankenstein, Boris Karloff’s final turn as the Monster. Film would remain immensely popular over the next few years. In the weeks before the war, there had been seething debate about the closure of theatres and music halls, out of fear of bombing raids. The closure of cinemas, though implemented very briefly for a few days as the war began, seems never to have been seriously considered as a long-term option – for even that brief withdrawal of entertainment drew piercing yelps of protest.

One unexpected contributor to the art of the silver screen at that time was none other than the aforementioned diplomat in chief and anti-appeaser Sir Robert Vansittart. When he was not raging about the laid-back attitude of Berlin ambassador Sir Neville Henderson towards Hitler, Vansittart was co-writing a screenplay for producer Alexander Korda: The Thief of Baghdad. In pre-war Britain, it was not unusual for politicians to have wide and rewarding hinterlands. The Korda film went into production in the summer of 1939. Interviewed by C.A. Lejeune at that time – when everyone from the Cabinet down was tensing themselves for the coming conflict – Vansittart explained his Baghdad epic quite cheerfully: ‘I was at our legation in Persia for some time,’ he said. ‘I loved the life there and I learned to speak the language…In the pre-war world,’ he added of his diplomatic career before the Great War, ‘even people in fairly busy posts had a certain amount of leisure.’ The film – a colourful tapestry of escapism – was released the following year. It is still regarded as a classic, partly because of its energetic wartime provenance.

The only other leisure activity to have commanded such a fanatical following at the time was dancing. Londoners still flocked to see the musical Me and My Girl, featuring the Lambeth Walk, in such numbers that extra buses to the Victoria Palace Theatre had been laid on. The King and Queen went to see it (and the Queen enjoyed herself so much that she went again). A year previously, a Times editorial had declared: ‘While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances – to The Lambeth Walk.’ It was indeed a continent-wide hit. Throughout 1939, people everywhere were affecting the wide, swaggering gait of the dance, set to Noel Gay’s catchy song. In the south London district of Lambeth itself (‘the sky ain’t blue, the grass ain’t green’), locals were blithely adjusting to this international fame. In the native (and drunken) version of the dance, the tougher men sometimes wore women’s clothing.

In fact, dance halls around the country in 1939 were consistently and solidly booked, while an outdoor dance held in London’s Finsbury Park attracted so many people that ‘the official arrangements broke down’ and the stomping could be heard in several districts around. The young people – including young men preparing themselves for conscription – lived for their dancing. In the West End, on Friday 31 August 1939, the owners of an illegal dancing and drinking venue, the wonderful sounding ‘Maryland Bottle Party’, were prosecuted for not holding licences either for drinking or for dancing. The undercover inspectors were especially aggrieved at having been charged eight shillings for a sandwich.

Throughout those days before the conflict, women and men also sought escape in light reading. One of the bestselling – and most borrowed – books on the weekend that war came was the latest Agatha Christie thriller, Murder Is Easy. The story featured as protagonist retired policeman Luke Fitzwilliam, a character felt by a few reviewers to be lacking the essential little grey cells of Christie’s more popular creation Hercule Poirot. There was also the new P.G. Wodehouse novel, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, the latest chapter in the saga of Blandings Castle. On the day that war was declared, the Sunday Times reviewer wrote: ‘Is this not the right moment to renew our acquaintance with Lord Emsworth…and the fifth earl of Ickenham…and their various nephews and nieces?’ Yes: this was the exact moment for such escapism. Sadly, Wodehouse’s conduct in the conflict to follow was to prove that his sunny comedy was strictly for the page, and couldn’t survive the reality of the Nazis.

The serious hit thriller of the day was Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male – a story that could not have been timed better. The British hero takes it upon himself to travel to a Germany-style mittel-European country to assassinate a brutal dictator (who bears a strong resemblance to Hitler). Indeed, the hero reaches the monster’s country residence and almost gets him within his sights. But he is foiled by a sentry, and what follows is a nightmare of torture, and then pursuit, as Nazi-esque agents remorselessly pursue the hero back to England and hunt him through Dorset. It very quickly became essential reading in the Territorial Army. For these young men, the passages where the hero seeks ingenious means of escape in the thorn thickets and ‘hollow ways’ of the Dorset landscape would have ignited their imaginations about their own roles in the coming fight. Could they learn such quick-thinking self-reliance? The novel’s fame spread further when war broke out.

The week before war was declared, on Monday 28 August 1939, the government announced that it was implementing Emergency Regulations, the list of which was so long – there were 104 of them – that they were not all reported. These ranged from compulsory evacuations of vulnerable people, to the close monitoring of homing pigeons, which could conceivably be used by enemy agents for conveying vital information. It also assumed the power to requisition large properties for war use; and the Admiralty assumed control of certain areas of merchant shipping.

In the town of Coventry, in the Midlands’ industrial heartland, there were still simmering tensions in the wake of a terrorist bomb – the ‘bicycle bomb’ – that had killed five and injured 100 the previous week. The device had been planted in the front basket of a bicycle, and it was widely assumed that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was to blame. Consequently there were many who protested at having to work alongside Irishmen. Petitions were presented to the Mayor and the Chief Constable of Coventry.

In London, meanwhile, the blackout claimed its first victim before it had even properly started: Henry Godfrey, who worked for Marylebone Borough Council, was killed by a car at Marble Arch as he painted the kerbstones white in preparation for the darkness to come.

By the middle of that last week in August – as the population of Poland put itself on a war footing – Britons followed the twists of high diplomacy between the Foreign Office and ‘Herr Hitler’ via BBC broadcasts. The streets of east London grew a little quieter; this was the start of hop season, where by way of a holiday, workers and their families would head off to Kent to take part in the hop harvest, living in corrugated iron shanty towns while they did so. Despite the electrical charge of tension in the air, these families were not to be deterred. Elsewhere saw the genesis of a new institution called the ‘Citizens Advice Bureau’. Its original purpose was to advise families in situations of war crisis; if, say, they had found themselves homeless after a bombing raid.

There appeared to be a certain amount of unofficial evacuation going on as well, particularly among those with the financial wherewithal. Some country house hotels in the greener shires came to be termed – perhaps unfairly – as ‘funk-holes’, while certain smart women from the more rarefied strata of society deemed it prudent to quit London. A few others departed the country’s shores entirely, embarking on voyages to the United States. The upmarket newspapers carried advertisements for cruise liners offering passage to America. For those who had no choice but to stay, however, officially, Britain had already been divided into three zones: ‘evacuation’, ‘reception’ and ‘neutral’.

It was easier for the young to be blithe, or offhand, or even cheerful; but their parents were filled with the dread engendered by the previous war. A year earlier, for young Arthur Taylor, living at the time in the south-west London suburb of Wimbledon, there had been the pre-war impatience to join up and get started. Out cycling one afternoon, he and his friends spotted an impromptu recruitment drive going on in the street. Mr Taylor says now, with a laugh, ‘There was an army group and they were stopping people and they stopped us and said “Would you like to join the Territorial Army?” So we said yes. The soldier asked how old we were. First of all, I said, “Sixteen.” But I was too young. So, I thought very quickly for a second then said, “Seventeen, I mean.” We were all signed up and I joined 306 Company London Electrical Engineers, Royal Engineers. Joined up that afternoon.’ During that time, the Territorial Army had quietly increased in size from thirteen divisions to twenty. A year later, though, Mr Taylor made the switch to the Royal Air Force. ‘I wanted to join as a photographer,’ he says. ‘But they gave me a job as wireless operator.’ There was a certain level of military tradition running in Mr Taylor’s family; but for other similar teenage recruits, their parents’ reaction was sometimes angry. Only twenty years before, family members had been mutilated in foul trenches; there was the pervasive fear of another generation being sent into that hell.

Perhaps this is why so very few people admitted out loud to believing that the coming conflict was inevitable. There is a great deal of denial to be heard in Mass Observation (MO) reports; a refusal to believe that political leaders could allow this to happen again. But among the young men – the Territorial reservists who by September 1939 had already been called up, and the labourers and clerks and junior managers who expected to be conscripted – one can hear in their later accounts how they had settled in their own minds what was approaching.

The startling tide of romance that washed over the nation in those hours before the war tells its own story of what people deep down were anticipating. ‘Hundreds of young couples flocked to the principal register offices in London on Saturday to give notice of marriage,’ went one report of 2 September, ‘and to try and arrange the earliest possible date for the ceremony.’

There was also an understanding, however, that war this time would not be conducted in a distant land; it would be fought in the skies directly above. The immediate assumption – from the War Office to the saloon bar of the Anchor and Crown – was that as soon as war was declared, the Germans would unleash a terrible blitzkrieg against British cities. All had seen the cinema newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War, and the nightmare rained down upon the people of Guernica. All had seen that there was virtually nothing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Selected Further Reading
• Index
• Photographs
• Copyright