World War: Battle to the Sea

Digging a tunnel under the English Channel from Calais to Dover (22 mi.) is a project discussed since Napoleon’s time, repeatedly vetoed by Britain* lest it bring an invader from the Continent. Last week both Britain and France might have devoutly thanked God for such a passageway had it been bombproof. After the abrupt surrender of Belgian King Leopold (see p. 32), some 600,000 survivors of the northern Allied Armies were locked in a triangular trap between the Lys River, the Artois Hills and the North Sea (see map). As 800,000 Germans on the ground and thousand more in the sky relentlessly pressed the trap’s jaws together. Allied Generalissimo Maxime Weygand with his Armies south of the Somme could do nothing but let General Georges Maurice Jean Blanchard, commanding the condemned forces, fight his way unaided to the tideline, where rescue ships waited.

The result was a scene of carnage and valor more concentrated in space & time than anything modern history ever saw: men by hundreds of thousands retreating in a desperation to live, other men by hundreds of thousands pressing forward in a desperation to surround, slaughter, annihilate. To preserve morale on both sides, and because the arithmetic was next to impossible, true figures on the loss of life were glossed over officially. But it could be guessed that not less than 500,000 men were killed, wounded or captured in seven days on a patch of earth about the size of an average U. S. county (970 sq. mi.)† Additional casualties among the millions of civilian refugees were incalculable. At least 1,000 airplanes were shot down. Every town and hamlet from Boulogne to Cambrai and north to Bruges was shattered by explosives or leveled by fire. Virtually every acre was pocked by missiles, stained with blood, strewn or piled with corpses.

Guards to the Rear. Perhaps King Leopold surrendered when and as he did because he knew or suspected that the British were about to withdraw, as they had from Norway, with their host’s Army covering their rear. Certainly his surrender forced their immediate withdrawal. But it was an orderly withdrawal with the wounded sent first; a courageous, masterful rear-guard action conducted by General Lord (“Tiger”) Gort in full cooperation with the French.

When the Belgian surrender fatally exposed their left flank, the British, who were falling back from Arras-Cambrai to Lille, crossed the Lys River to Ypres and formed the east wall of an escape corridor along the Yser Canal to the sea. The flower of their Army, the proud Guards regiments—Coldstream, Grenadier, Welsh, Irish, Scots—had to let their line fold back from the southeast while their artillery and remaining armored units covered the rear.

Hollow Squares. At the bottom of the fatal pocket, below Lille, were what was left of France’s mechanized divisions, under General Rene Jacques Adolphe Prioux, 61. The French tanks fought in hollow squares like Xenophon’s Greeks, giving ground only when holes in their ranks forced retreat to close them. Time and again they drove the Germans off the hills around Cassel and Poperinghe. The Germans thrust through between Cassel and Ypres, cutting the Allied pocket in half, but two of General Prioux’s divisions smashed through, continued up the escape corridor’s western wall toward the sea. The Germans reported capturing General Prioux & staff, who stayed behind till the end. German tanks, infantry, artillery crunched ever closer, climbing over heaps of their own dead, toward the port of Dunkirk. Just before getting there, the retreating Allies opened canal floodgates to the east and west. But German aircraft continued to lay down bombs and machine-gun slugs in devastating sheets.

Rescue Fleet. Along the French coast lay a heterogeneous Allied armada under Vice Admiral Jean Marie Charles Abrial, commanding the Dunkirk naval area. French and British warships lay off shore, protecting themselves overhead by flaming curtains of anti-aircraft fire, covering the land troops’ retreat with a flowing dome of projectiles from their heavy guns. Ashore they sent seamen, marines and engineers to construct breastworks and gun emplacements for the soldiers to fall back on, and demolition parties to blow up wharfage and fuel stores. Because the ports of Boulogne and Calais were tightly encircled by German forces, the main rescue embarkation was prepared at Dunkirk, but furious action ensued at Boulogne—point-blank fire between tanks and destroyers—and at Calais, where a British garrison held out stoutly in the citadel although water, food and ammunition had to be parachuted to them by the R. A. F. At sea, three British destroyers went down under dive-bombings and torpedoes —the Wakeful, Grafton and Grenada. The Germans claimed sinking the battleship Nelson (the British scoffed).

At Dunkirk, the spectacle was prodigious, appalling. Inside the blazing line of warships lay transports of every description, from big merchantmen and passenger steamers to channel ferries, private yachts, fishing smacks, tug-drawn coal barges. Over these craft wheeled swarms of German high bombers, down at them plunged wedge after wedge of dive-bombers. Day and night the sea air was filled with screaming gulls and bats of death, including two whole German air corps commanded by Air Generals Grauert and von Richthofen (Wolfram, 44, cousin of World War I’s “Red Knight,” the late Baron Manfred).

Dunkirk is a man-made harbor cut into a sandy tidal plain, with a mole sticking out to protect a channel leading into a network of seven ship basins. When German bombs blew up the locks which held water in the basins at low tide, Dunkirk’s inner loading piers became a muddy, smoldering shambles. Embarkation had to be carried out by shallow-draft ships at the mole or by whale boats, dories, rafts and wreckage bobbing in the surf along the flat shelf of seashore. A calm sea and bright sunshine made the rescue ships perfect bomb targets for two days, and dozens of them were smashed, burned, sunk. Britain admitted loss of 30 warships. Then a blessed fog rolled in for 48 hours, saving countless lives.

Embarkation. When the soldiers reached the sea they hid (one of them said later) “like rabbits among the dunes.” They were in smoke-grimed rags and tatters, many shoeless, some still lugging packs and rifles, others empty-handed in their underclothes after swimming canals. They were too din-deafened and inured to horror to be fully sensible of the incredible cataclysm that still raged over them. Some clutched souvenirs—a blood-soaked doll for a small daughter; a machine gun snatched from a crashed German plane with which one squad of men kept on shooting at new attackers and got two. Ambulatory wounded joined the rest in staggering into the oil-scummed waves, floundering out to reach the rescue craft amid spuming bomb-geysers. Day & night overhead the restless roar of air battle continued as depleted advance units of the Royal Air Force were reinforced by squadrons of the Coastal Command. To join this action came a game but outmatched auxiliary squadron of British businessmen, week-end fliers.

Defiants. The Boulton Paul Defiant, a stub-winged, long-snouted fighter looking so much like the R. A. F.’s snappy Hurricane that German pilots at first fatally confused them, is the latest weapon of the Coastal Command. They carry rear-seat gunners in a power-operated turret, who knock down attackers with four machine guns. Streaking across from an English headland, one twelve-ship squadron of Defiants crumpled up 38 Messerschmitts and Heinkels in a single afternoon over Dunkirk. Other squadrons shot gaps in wave after wave of assorted German bombers. At night (to conserve planes) and also by day, British bombers dumped hundreds of tons of explosives into the onflowing German avalanche with monstrous but not impeding effect. The R. A. F. covered itself with glory in those awful hours, but every survivor repeated the dirge: “If we had more planes . . . more planes . . . more planes. . . .”

Blighty. Crossing the water to Dover, Ramsgate, Sheerness was a prolongation of the stupefying nightmare. For besides the German airmadas aloft. German motorboats raced alongside firing torpedoes. Each successive boatload that came in safely seemed so precious and triumphant that British morale soared out of the jaws of death. Millions of relatives at piers and stations, watching for their own men, joined in the pitiful paean of thanks for those who were restored. Soldiers saluted R. N. sailors and said, “Thanks, mate, well done.” French (and Belgian) survivors grinned, “Merci.” A giant job well done it was. Backed partially at last by air power, the Royal Navy had stood squarely up to German air power and come off, morally at least, far ahead.

Among the Allied wounded, most talk was of getting patched up quickly and going back. The High Command received its palms for a retreat even more historic than Sir John Moore’s from Coruna, Spain in 1809.* Whatever their losses, they had given Generalissimo Weygand one more week to get his new line ready to save France (see p. 24). Even the Germans admitted that men who had been through the Retreat to Dunkirk were fighters to be respected.

But as sounds and signs of fighting in the Artois trap died, observers knew that it was not because all the Allies had left with the last boats. Rather it was like the closing of a whirlpool over the unrescued heads of a vast shipwreck’s bravest stay-behinds. Smothered under the converging German flood were the last brave thousands who died or were taken prisoner, and mountains of precious materiel. This week War Secretary Anthony Eden, speaking for the British alone, said that 80% were saved of the original B. E. F., which is now put at a low total of 175,000. Not until World War II is finished will the full cost be wholly told.

At least one British division and two French remained in the hellish strip at Dunkirk pounded now by German artillery as well as bombs, when a stocky figure in a soiled field uniform at last consented to obey orders from London and embark. Accompanied only by two staff officers, General the Viscount Gort stepped into a small boat and went home in soldierly silence. Chief of Staff General Sir John Greer Dill greeted him grimly. King George called him to Buckingham Palace to receive the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. Promised Lord Gort: “We will meet them again and the next time victory will be ours.”

-In 1882 actual digging was begun, a mile of tunnel completed at each end before Parliament canceled the work in 1883.

† The 738,000 killed at Verdun died over a period of 299 days.

* In the winter of 1808-09, hearing that part of Napoleon’s forces under General Soult were isolated in the north of Spain, Sir John Moore, though shy of men & materiel, set out through rugged country to cut Soult off. When Napoleon followed him, with his main Army, Sir John raced for the sea at Corufia. His Spanish allies failed him. French cavalry overtook him and, when his transports were two days late, so did Soult (with 20,000 men and 40 cannon to Sir John’s 15,000 men, nine cannon). A cannon ball got brave, reckless Sir John, but not before he had repulsed the French, embarked most of his men safely.