Inferno - Max Hastings [46]
Dunkirk was indeed a deliverance, from which the prime minister extracted a perverse propaganda triumph. Nella Last, of Lancashire, wrote on 5 June: “I forgot I was a middle-aged housewife who sometimes got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old—like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy rubbish … Somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.” The British Army salvaged a professional cadre around which new formations might be built, but all its arms and equipment had been lost. The BEF left behind in France 64,000 vehicles, 76,000 tons of ammunition, 2,500 guns and more than 400,000 tons of stores. Britain’s land forces were effectively disarmed: many soldiers would wait years before receiving weapons and equipment that rendered them once more fit for a battlefield.
IT IS SOMETIMES supposed that, when the BEF quit the Continent, the campaign ended, which is a travesty. In each day’s fighting between 10 May and 3 June, the Germans had suffered an average of 2,500 casualties. During the ensuing fortnight, their daily loss rate doubled to 5,000. A soldier of the French 28th Division wrote defiantly on 28 May: “It seems that the Germans have taken Arras and Lille. If this is true, the Nation must rediscover its old spirit of 1914 and 1789.” Some units remained committed to fight, some Frenchmen shrugged off the despair of their commanders. One of Brig. Charles de Gaulle’s men wrote: “In fifteen days we have carried out four attacks and we have always been successful, so we are going to pull together and we will get that pig Hitler.” A soldier wrote on 2 June: “We are really tired, but we have to be here, they shall not pass and we shall get them … I shall be proud to have participated in the Victory of which I have no doubts.” Even some foreign governments were not yet convinced of France’s final defeat. On 2 June Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, flaunted the Italian regime’s boundless cynicism when he told the French ambassador in Rome: “Have some victories and you will have us with you.”
In the last phase of the campaign, forty French infantry divisions and the remains of three armoured formations faced fifty German infantry and ten panzer divisions. Thirty-five of Weygand’s generals were sacked and replaced. The French army fought better in June 1940 than it had done in May, but it was too late to redeem the initial disasters. Constantin Joffe of the Foreign Legion expressed surprise at the manner in which the Jews of his regiment distinguished themselves:
Many of them were small tailors or peddlers from Belleville, the workman’s quarter of Paris, or from the ghetto of the Rue du Temple. No one would have anything to do with them at [the training camp of] Barcares … They spoke only Yiddish. They looked as if they were afraid of a machine-gun, they seemed to be in perpetual fear. Yet under fire, if volunteers were needed to fetch back munitions under a heavy shelling or if lines of barbed wire entanglements had to be up at night fairly in front of the enemy guns, these little men were the first to offer their service. They did it quietly without swagger, perhaps without enthusiasm; but they did it. It was always they who, up to the very last moment, brought back our arms from an abandoned post.
Wehrmacht commanders expressed admiration for the manner in which some French units fought in early June to defend their new line on the Somme. A German diarist wrote: “In these ruined villages the French resisted to the last man. Some ‘hedgehogs’ carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.” But on 6 June the front was decisively breached, and by the ninth von Rundstedt’s tanks were driving into Rouen. Next day, they broke the Aisne line as the