Inferno - Max Hastings [44]
On the night of the twenty-third, 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 Adm. 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!”
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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,” the 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 Adm. Bertram Ramsay, operating from an underground headquarters at Dover, directed the movements of almost 900 ships and small craft with extraordinary calm and skill. The removal of troops from the beaches in civilian launches and pleasure boats forged the romantic image of Dunkirk, but by far the larger proportion—some two-thirds—were taken off by destroyers and other large vessels, loading at the harbour mole. The navy was fortunate that, throughout Operation Dynamo, the Channel remained almost preternaturally calm.
Arthur Gwynn-Browne, a soldier, poured out in lyrical terms his gratitude for finding himself returning home from the alien hell of Dunkirk: “It was so wonderful. I was on a ship and any ship yes any ship is England. Any ship yes any ship I was on a ship and on my way to England. It was wonderful. I kept quite still and the sea breezes I swallowed them, no smoke and burning and fire and thick grey oil smoke hazes, but sea breezes. I swallowed them they were so clean and fresh and I was alive it was so wonderful.” Many men arrived in England fearful of their reception, as flotsam from one of the greatest defeats their country had ever suffered. A company quartermaster, Walter Gilding, wrote: “When we went ashore I thought everybody was going to shoot us, especially as being regular soldiers, we’d run away … But instead of that there were people cheering and clapping us as if we were heroes. Giving us mugs of tea and sandwiches. We looked a sorry sight, I think.”
John Horsfall had the same experience:
At Ramsgate we met for the first time the unbelievable feat of improvisation achieved by the armed services and civil authorities acting in concert. Here was Britannia to greet us with the wand of a fairy and her mantle of magic; here, too, was a brief flash of history. Dimly conscious of it, we were deeply