Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [24]
We were told that there would be lots of boats and that the embarkation of the troops would all be organised … That was what all the little shore boats were being brought over from England for … One can only come to the conclusion that the civilians and small boats packed up and went home with a few chaps instead of staying there to ferry to the big ships which was their proper job. As for the shore organisation, it simply did not exist … It makes one a bit sick when one hears the organisers of the beach show being cracked up to the skies on the wireless and having DSOs showered upon them, because a more disgraceful muddle and lack of organisation I have never seen … If a few officers had been put ashore with a couple of hundred sailors … the beach evacuation would have been a different thing … When the boats were finally hoisted I found that I was very tired and very hoarse as well as soaking wet. So I had a drink and then changed. I had an artillery officer in my cabin who was very interesting. They all seem to have been very impressed by the dive bombers and the vast number of them, and by the general efficiency of the German forces. The soldiers are not very encouraging, but they were very tired which always makes one pessimistic, and they had been out of touch for a long time. This officer did not even know that Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as Premier.
Pownall arrived in London from France to describe to the Defence Committee on May 30 Gort’s plans for holding the Dunkirk perimeter. “No one in the room,”79 wrote Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet Secretariat, “imagined that they could be successful if the German armoured divisions supported by the Luftwaffe pressed their attack.” It was, of course, a decisive mercy that no such attack was “pressed.” In the course of the Second World War, victorious German armies displayed a far more consistent commitment to completing the destruction of their enemies when opportunity offered than did the Allies in similarly advantageous circumstances. Dunkirk was an exception. Most of the BEF escaped not as a consequence of Hitler’s forbearance, but through a miscellany of fortuities and misjudgements. Success beyond German imagination created huge problems of its own. Commanders’ attention was fixed upon completing the defeat of Weygand’s forces, of which large elements remained intact. The broken country around Dunkirk was well-suited to defence. The French First Army, south of the port, engaged important German forces through the critical period for the BEF’s escape, a stand which received less credit from the British than it deserved.
On May 24 Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, ordered his panzers, badly in need of a logistical pause, not to cross the Aa Canal and entangle themselves with British “remnants,” as Gort’s army was now perceived. Hitler supported his decision. He was amenable to Hermann Göring’s eagerness to show that his aircraft could complete the destruction of the BEF. Yet, in the words of the most authoritative German history, “the Luftwaffe, badly weakened80 by earlier operations, was unable to meet the demands made on it.” In the course of May, Göring’s force lost 1,044 aircraft, a quarter of them fighters. Thanks to the efforts of the RAF’s Fighter Command over Dunkirk, the German Fourth Army’s war diary recorded on May 25: “The enemy has had air superiority. This is something new for us in this campaign.” On June 3, the German air effort was diverted from Dunkirk to increase pressure on the French by bombing targets around Paris.
Almost the entire RAF Air Striking Force was reduced to charred wreckage, strewn the length of northern France. It scarcely seemed to the Germans to matter if a few thousand British troops escaped in salt-stained battle dress, when they left behind every tool of a modern army—tanks, guns, trucks, machine guns and equipment. Hitler’s failure to complete the demolition of the BEF represented a historic blunder, but an unsurprising