The King's Speech - Mark Logue [78]
The British fury at Léopold’s capitulation was due in large part to the damaging effect it had on the Allied Forces, whose left flank was now entirely exposed and who now had to fall back to the Channel coast. The only solution was to mount a rescue – and what was to be one of the most dramatic episodes of the war. On 27 May the first of a flotilla of around 700 merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and Royal National Lifeboats began to evacuate British and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. By the ninth day, a total of 338,226 soldiers (198,229 British and 139,997 French) had been rescued.
On 4 June, the final day of the evacuation, Churchill made one of the most memorable speeches of the war – or, indeed, of all time. ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,’ he told the House of Commons, going on famously to vow to ‘fight on the beaches’.
In her diary the next day, Myrtle noted simply: ‘All our men off. God be praised. Have met some of the nurses, they have a story to tell which will live forever.’ There were some more immediate worries too: on 1 June, in the midst of the evacuation, she heard that Laurie, their eldest son, had joined the army. Already into his thirties, and with a wife and baby, he was not among the first to be called. At the end of March he received his call-up papers and when Myrtle heard the news, she and Jo had ‘a little weep’.
For many ordinary people, what became known as the Dunkirk spirit perfectly described the tendency of Britons to pull together at times of national emergency and adversity. Yet, however great the heroism and however remarkable some of the escapes, there was no disguising the fact that this was no victory. In private, Churchill told his junior ministers that Dunkirk was ‘the greatest British military defeat for many centuries’.
The bad news kept on coming. On 14 June Paris was occupied by the German Wehrmacht and then, three days later, Marshal Philippe Pétain (appointed head of state with extraordinary powers) announced that France would ask Germany for an armistice. ‘This is the blackest day we have ever known,’ wrote Myrtle in her war diary. She heard news of Pétain’s announcement from a disgusted bus driver who ‘proclaimed to the entire world what he would do to the entire French nation . . . Surely now, there is nobody left who can rat on us. We are all really alone, and if our government gives up there will be a revolution, and I am in it.’
Things were about to get even blacker. Late in the afternoon of 7 September, 364 German bombers, escorted by a further 515 aircraft, carried out air raids on London, with another 133 attacking that night. Their target was the Port of London, but many of the bombs fell on residential areas, killing 436 Londoners and injuring more than 1,600. The Blitz had begun. For the next seventy-five consecutive nights, the bombers targeted London repeatedly. Other important military and industrial centres such as Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester were also hit. By May the following year, when the campaign ended, more than 43,000 civilians, half of them in the capital, had been killed and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed in the London area alone.
Buckingham Palace was also hit several times that September during a daring daylight raid, when both the King and Queen were working there. The bombs caused considerable damage to the Royal Chapel and the inner quadrangle – prompting the Queen famously to declare, ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ Logue wrote to the King to express his ‘thankfulness and gratitude to the Most High’ at his narrow escape from what he called ‘a dastardly attempt on your life’. He added, ‘It did not seem possible that even the Germans would descend to such depths of infamy.’
Tommy Lascelles wrote