The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [36]
only with the personal help of Hitler. There was a channel from Arras to Dunkirk. I had already crossed this channel and my troops occupied the heights which jutted out over Flanders. Therefore, my panzer group had complete control of Dunkirk and the area in which the British were trapped. The fact of the matter is that the English would have been unable to get into Dunkirk because I had them covered. Then Hitler personally ordered that I should withdraw my troops from these heights.31
Kleist was underestimating Rundstedt’s important role in the initial decision-making, but with Hitler willing to take the ultimate glory for the campaign, he must also take the ultimate blame for not allowing Kleist to scoop up the BEF outside Dunkirk. When Kleist met Hitler on the airfield at Cambrai a few days later he had the courage to remark that a great opportunity had been lost at Dunkirk. Hitler replied: ‘That may be so. But I did not want to send the tanks into the Flanders marshes – and the British won’t come back in this war.’32 Another excuse Hitler gave elsewhere was that mechanical failures, and the subsequent offensive against the rest of the French Army, had meant that he wanted to build up strength before passing on.
Flying over Dunkirk in September 1944, Churchill told André de Staerke, private secretary to the Prince Regent of Belgium, ‘I shall never understand why the German Army did not finish the British Army at Dunkirk.’33 The answer might be that by the morning of 24 May the troops had fought continuously for nearly a fortnight, and from his own time in the trenches in the Great War Hitler knew how exhausting that could be. Moreover the ground around the Dunkirk pocket was not ideal for tanks. The infantry needed time to catch up, considering the startling amount of ground the tanks had crossed since Sedan, and as Franz Halder wrote in his diary: ‘The Führer is terribly nervous. Afraid to take any chances.’ Too much had been achieved already to take the risk of falling into an Allied trap at that late stage, and there were still large French forces and reserves to deal with south of the Somme and Aisne rivers. Street fighting in Warsaw had also shown the vulnerability of tanks in built-up areas, such as Dunkirk was. Furthermore, Hermann Göring was confidently promising that the Luftwaffe could destroy the pocket without any need for the Wehrmacht to do much more than conduct mopping-up operations afterwards.
‘He was mistrusting of his generals,’ Jodl’s deputy General Walter Warlimont recalled years later of Hitler:
thus at Dunkirk he delayed the main aim of the whole campaign, which was reaching and closing the Channel coast before any other considerations. This time he was frightened that the clay plains of Flanders with their many streams and channels… according to his memories of World War One would endanger and possibly inflict heavy losses on the Panzer divisions. Hitler failed to follow up the overwhelming success of the first part of the campaign, and instead initiated the steps for the second part before the first had been accomplished.34
Rundstedt himself, who was credited with issuing the Halt Order that the Führer later rubber-stamped, vehemently denied having done so. ‘If I had had my way the English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk,’ he later recalled with bitterness:
But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move. I recommended to the Supreme Command that my five Panzer Divisions be immediately sent into the town and thereby completely destroy the retreating English. But I received definite orders from the Führer that under no circumstances was I to attack, and I was expressly forbidden to send any of my troops closer than ten kilometres from Dunkirk… This incredible blunder was due to Hitler’s idea of generalship.35
This claim can be safely disregarded, since the order was given by Hitler at a meeting at Army Group A