The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [37]
One theory that must also now be safely discarded was that Hitler did not expect or want to capture the BEF because he hoped for peace with Britain. Not only is it illogical – his chances of forcing peace on Britain would have been immensely strengthened by eliminating the BEF – but there is a piece of hitherto overlooked evidence that proves that the OKW assumed the Allied force would be destroyed despite the Halt Order. A handwritten note from Alfred Jodl, written at Führer-Headquarters and now in private hands, to the Reich Labour Minister Robert Ley and dated 28 May 1940, states:
Most esteemed Labour Führer of the Reich!
Everything that has happened since 10 May seems even to us, who had indestructible faith in our success, like a dream. In a few days 4/5 of the English Expeditionary Army and a great part of the best mobile French troops will be destroyed or captured. The next blow is ready to strike, and we can execute it at a ratio of 2:1, which has hitherto never been granted to a German field commander… You, too, Herr Labour Führer of the Reich, have contributed significantly to this greatest victory in history. Heil Hitler.37
The hubris of the letter is undeniable, especially since the BEF had started to embark from Dunkirk on 26 May, but equally there is not the slightest sense that the OKW were holding back from attempting to ‘destroy or capture’ as much of the Allied force as possible; evidently they believed total victory to be in their grasp.
Although it was Rundstedt’s initial decision to halt Kleist’s Panzers outside Dunkirk on 24 May, it took the Führer’s influence to silence the opposition from Brauchitsch, Halder, Guderian and Rommel. ‘We could have wiped out the British army completely if it weren’t for the stupid order of Hitler,’ Kleist later recalled.38 Certainly, if the BEF had been captured wholesale – more than a quarter of a million POWs in German hands – there is no telling what concessions must have been wrung out of the British Government, or whether Churchill could have survived as prime minister if he had demanded a continuation of the war. Hitler knew how to use POWs as a bargaining tool, as he was soon to prove with his 1.5 million French captives. Kleist’s belief that after the capture of the BEF ‘an invasion of England would have been a simple affair’ is harder to accept, as the RAF and Royal Navy were still undefeated, and the Germans had no advanced plans for getting men across the Channel.
Although the Allied forces were overwhelmed at Boulogne and Menin on 25 May and at Calais on the 27th, Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks.
The Halt Order was finally rescinded by dawn on 27 May and heavy fighting took place along the shrinking perimeter, as the Allied rearguard – especially the French First Army near Lille – bought precious time for the rest of the troops to embark on several hundred ships and boats. That same day ninety-seven British prisoners of war