Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [31]
Much has been written about Churchill’s prudence in declining to reinforce defeat by dispatching further fighter squadrons to France in 1940. The contrary misjudgement is often passed over. Alan Brooke understood the prime minister’s motive—to demonstrate to the French that the British Army was still committed to the fight. But he rightly deplored its futility. If Dunkirk represented a miracle, it was scarcely a lesser one that two weeks later it proved possible to evacuate almost all of Brooke’s force to Britain through the northwestern French ports. There were, in effect, two Dunkirks, though the latter is much less noticed by history. Churchill was able to escape the potentially brutal consequences of his last rash gesture to Reynaud, because of Brooke’s resolution and the Germans’ preoccupation with completing the destruction of the French army. Had not providence been merciful, all Brooke’s men might have been lost, a shattering blow to the British Army’s prospects of reconstitution.
On June 15, at Churchill’s behest Dill telephoned Brooke on a weak, crackling line, and told him to delay evacuation of the 52nd Division from Cherbourg. In London, there were renewed hopes of clinging to a foothold in France, though these had no visible foundation in reality. The French anyway discounted all such British aspirations. Brooke was exasperated. He told the CIGS: “It is a desperate job being faced94 with over 150,000 men and a mass of material, ammunition, petrol, supplies etc, to try to evacuate or dispose of, and nothing to cover this operation except the crumbling French army … We are wasting shipping and precious hours.” The next day, London grudgingly agreed that the 52nd Division could continue returning to Britain. Yet administrative confusion persisted. Some troops were embarked at Le Havre for Portsmouth, only to be off-loaded at Cherbourg and entrained for Rennes. A ship arrived at Brest on the morning of June 18, bearing artillery and ammunition from England. At a dozen northwest French ports, tens of thousands of British troops milled in chaos, many of them lacking orders and officers.
German preoccupation with the French army alone made it possible to get the men and a few heavy weapons away, amid chaos and mismanagement. There were skirmishes between British and enemy forces, but no fatal clash. Between June 14 and 25, from Brest, St.-Nazaire, Cherbourg and lesser western French ports, 144,171 British troops were successfully rescued and brought home, along with 24,352 Poles and 42,000 other Allied soldiers. There were losses, notably the sinking of the liner Lancastria at a cost of at least 3,000 lives; but these were negligible in proportion to the forces at risk, which amounted to two-thirds of the numbers brought back from Dunkirk.
It is hard to overstate the chaos of British command arrangements in France during the last three weeks of the campaign, even in areas where formations were not much threatened by the Germans. Two trainloads of invaluable and undamaged British tanks were gratuitously abandoned in Normandy. “Much equipment had been95 unnecessarily destroyed,” in the angry words of Maj. Gen. Andrew McNaughton, commanding the 1st Canadian Division. Though the war had been in progress for almost nine months, Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Karslake, commanding at Le Mans until Brooke’s arrival, wrote in a report: “The lack of previous training96 for our formations showed itself in many ways.” Men of the 52nd Division arrived in France in June with equipment issued two days earlier, never having fired their antitank guns or indeed seen a tank. Karslake was appalled by the perceived indiscipline of some regular units, even before they were engaged: “Their behaviour was terrible!”97 Far more vehicles, stores and equipment could have been evacuated but for administrative disorder prevailing at the ports, where some ships from England were still being unloaded, while, at nearby quays, units embarked for