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that the British always fought with one eye on their escape route to the Channel ports. The British, in their turn, despaired at French defeatism; Weygand was thus far right, that Gort believed his allies hopelessly inert, and was now set upon salvaging the BEF from the wreck of the campaign. Later on that bleak night of 21 May, Billotte was fatally injured in a car crash, and two days elapsed before a successor was appointed as Northern Army commander. Meanwhile, the breakdown of Allied command communications became comprehensive. After a meeting with the French army group commander the previous day, British CIGS Sir Edmund Ironside wrote: ‘I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.’ Gort told King Leopold on the evening of the 21st: ‘It’s a bad job.’ At 1900, Weygand left Dunkirk by torpedo boat in the midst of an air raid, eventually regaining his headquarters at 1000 next morning. Throughout every hour of his futile wanderings across northern France, German tanks, guns and men continued to stream north and west through the great hole in the Allied line.

The supreme commander now succumbed to fantasy: reporting to Reynaud on the morning of 22 May, he seemed in almost jaunty mood. ‘So many mistakes have been made,’ he said, ‘that they give me confidence. I believe that in future we shall make less.’ He assured France’s prime minister that both the BEF and Blanchard’s army were in fine fighting trim. He outlined his planned counter-attack, and concluded equivocally: ‘It will either give us victory or it will save our honour.’ At a meeting in Paris on 22 May with Churchill and Reynaud, Weygand exuded optimism, claiming that a new army of almost twenty divisions would conduct the French counter-attack from the south to restore the link with the BEF. Both the army and the attack, however, were figments of his imagination.

On the night of the 23rd, Gort withdrew his forces from the salient they held at Arras. This caused the French to assert that the British were repeating their selfish and pusillanimous behaviour of 1914. Gort’s decision represented only a recognition of reality, but Reynaud failed to tell Weygand that the British were preparing to evacuate the BEF. Gort told Admiral Jean-Marie Abrial, commanding the Dunkirk perimeter, that three British divisions would help to screen the French withdrawal. After Gort’s departure for England, however, his successor in command, Maj. Gen. Harold Alexander, declined to make good on this commitment. Abrial said: ‘Your decision dishonours Britain.’ Defeat prompted a welter of such inter-Allied recriminations: Weygand, told of the Belgian surrender on 28 May, expostulated furiously: ‘That king! What a pig! What an abominable pig!’

The Last Phase of the 1940 French Campaign

The British, meanwhile, had begun to evacuate the BEF from the port and beaches of Dunkirk. ‘It was evident to one and all that a monumental military disaster was in progress,’ Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall wrote with weary resignation. ‘Therefore we could take refuge in history, knowing that this was not only to be expected but actually the commonplace experience of our army when tossed recklessly by our politicians into European war.’ Sergeant L.D. Pexton was one of more than 40,000 British soldiers taken prisoner, after a rearguard action near Cambrai in which his unit was overrun: ‘I remember the order “Cease Fire” and that the time was 12 o’clock,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Stood up and put my hands up. My God how few of us stood up. I expected my last moments had come and lit a fag.’

The Dunkirk evacuation was announced to the British public on 29 May, when civilian volunteers from the Small Boat Pool joined warships rescuing men from the beaches and harbour. The Royal Navy’s achievement during the week that followed became the stuff of legend. Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, operating from an underground headquarters at Dover, directed the movements of almost nine hundred ships and small craft with extraordinary calm and skill. The removal