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  Also on May 23, Hitler summoned his service chiefs once more to demand a plan for the invasion of Britain. What exactly changed his mind is unknown, but revenge for Rommel was certainly uppermost in his ranting, bitter speech that day. Under pressure from OKH and OKW, Grand Admiral Raeder reluctantly put forward “Case Lion” for landing two complete armies—over 260,000 men, 30,000 vehicles, and 60,000 horses—on a broad front from Ramsgate to Weymouth. This was violently rejected by Hitler when Raeder (who was hoping to scotch the idea altogether) explained that it could not be mounted until September, and then only if the Luftwaffe could achieve complete air supremacy. Faced by Hitler’s demands for an alternative, OKW admitted with some embarrassment to the existence of Manstein’s “Case Smith.” On May 25, Manstein was summoned by Hitler and ordered to implement his plan, pulling his XXXVIII Army Corps out of the line to do so, while Göring was told that his new priority was to defeat Britain by bombing from the air. In London on the same day, the Chiefs of Staff Committee, chaired by the First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, advised the Prime Minister that “should the enemy succeed in establishing a force, with its vehicles, firmly ashore, the army in the United Kingdom, which is very short of equipment, has not got the offensive power to drive it out.”7

  Führer Directive 16, authorization for what was now “Case Sea Lion,” was signed by Hitler on June 1. With battles continuing in France, Belgium, and even Norway, Manstein had just over six weeks to make Sea Lion a reality, and as he soon found out, the “full powers” that Hitler had granted him only provoked hostility and resistance from others. OKW promised two fully equipped infantry divisions, the 6th Mountain Division and 17th Division. Student, his arm in a sling from a wound sustained in Rotterdam, was more than happy for his 7th Air Division and the gliders of the Airlanding Assault Regiment to take part. Indeed, Student wanted an immediate airborne landing in southern England, but with his troops still spread all over the Low Countries, this was not a practical proposition. Göring promised 750 Junkers 52 transport aircraft for July, enough to lift at least one division and keep it resupplied by air. The final element of the XXXVIII Army Corps was—at Hitler’s insistence—a reformed and renamed 7th “Rommel” Panzer Division, for which Manstein obtained the command for Colonel Model. Air support would come at first from the 2nd Air Fleet under Col. Gen. “Smiling Albert” Kesselring, joined later by the 3rd Air Fleet.

  Disaster at Dunkirk

  Also on that fateful Saturday May 25, Lord Gort took the decision that doomed the BEF. On May 21 a series of angry inter-Allied meetings had taken place at Ypres, at which the French proposed a plan not unlike the fictitious “Dynamo,” for an offensive by eight French, British, and Belgian divisions from north and south to close the Panzer corridor, starting on May 26. As if to underline that nothing was working for the Allies, Gen. Georges Billotte commanding 1st Army Group drove off from that meeting and was almost immediately killed in a car crash. Over the next three days, the French plan simply fell apart under the pressure of the German advance and mutual Allied recriminations. By Saturday all that was left of it was Gort’s promise to take part the following day, launching the 5th Infantry Division and 50th Northumbrian Division south once more.

  Meanwhile to the north, II Corps’ safety depended on the Belgians holding their line between Courtrai and the sea against the onslaughts of the German 18th Army; if they broke, Lieutenant General Brooke had nothing to plug the gap. Montgomery’s troops had captured a German map showing that, with the Netherlands out of the war, a major offensive by the 18th Army was threatening to cut the BEF off from the sea. Evacuation seemed the only option, but as Allied communications broke down, neither Gort nor Halifax thought to warn King Leopold of the British plans.

  All day, Gort sat silent at the plank trestle table in the small farmhouse that was his headquarters. He had received no advice or even contact from London, other than vague exhortations from the War Cabinet. He had been out of touch with all French commanders since the Ypres conference. Word came that Boulogne had fallen; Calais was about to fall; if the French attacked at all it would be with just one division; Martel had only two Matilda tanks left. At about 1800 he looked up and gave his order, “Send them over to Brookie!”8 Gort still gave the French every chance: rather than pulling out of the line at once to move northward to II Corps, both the 5th Infantry Division and 50th Northumbrian Division would move the following afternoon, just in case the promised French attack from the south materialized. Of course, it did not, but the French still never forgave Gort for his decision, and, as things turned out, neither did the British. Even so, from what he knew at the time, it is hard to argue that Gort was either wrong or disloyal to his allies.

  Gort followed this military decision with a political one: to make public the view that the BEF had been stabbed in the back. Mason-Macfarlane returned to London to confer with Gen. Sir John Dill, about to succeed Ironside as CIGS. On May 28, Mason-Macfarlane briefed correspondents in London on War Office orders, announcing that the BEF was about to go down fighting, betrayed by its allies and by politicians. The shock of next morning’s newspapers went around the country, and destroyed what little trust remained between the Halifax government and the army. With nothing left to hide, on May 29 the British government made public a telegram from King George VI to Gort supporting the stab-in-the-back story. “Faced by circumstances outside their control in a position of extreme difficulty,” the king’s message read, “they are displaying a gallantry that has never been surpassed in the annals of the British Army. The hearts of every one of us at home are with you and your magnificent troops in this hour of peril.”9 That evening, General Dill secured for Mason-Macfarlane a slot on BBC radio following the nine o’clock news. Speaking anonymously as “a senior BEF commander,” Mason-Macfarlane repeated the same message, that the BEF had fought hard but lost through no fault of its own. There were now those in the Halifax cabinet, perhaps the Prime Minister among them, who genuinely expected some kind of military coup.

  By May 26, while its reserves fought to hold the line together with the French, the main body of the BEF had retreated to a battlefield that its senior officers knew intimately from the First World War, the Ypres-Messines ridges. Reconnoitering personally that morning, Lieutenant General Brooke discovered a gap of some 4,000 yards between his forces and the French 60th Infantry Division to the north. Racing to BEF Headquarters, Brooke obtained immediate command of the 50th Northumbrian and 5th Infantry Divisions, ordering their brigades into the line. On the evening of May 27 the Belgian government requested a cease-fire from the Germans. Given a few hours’ warning, Brooke ordered Montgomery to seal the gap. Working largely in darkness and under fire, Montgomery pulled the 3rd Infantry Division out of line and steered it northward directly behind II Corps’ front from one end to the other, while only a few hundred yards away the Germans probed and hammered at the British positions. It was a virtuoso display of maneuvering that in other circumstances might well have saved the BEF. But it was all happening about half a day too late. As its brigades followed the 50th Northumbrian Division to block the German attack, the 5th Infantry Division was being spread too thin; it could hold off two divisions, but not three. Next morning, German infantry of the 18th Division worked their way onto Kemmel Hill, while to the north five German divisions drove unopposed along the coast toward Dunkirk.

  Even when trapped, the regular divisions of the BEF were a formidable fighting organization. Short of everything from fuel to ammunition, commanders gathered their men together with TA and French units that had attached themselves during the retreat, and prepared for the endgame. The evacuation of rear area personnel from Dunkirk had begun on May 26 (the real “Operation Dynamo”), on the same day that troops of the 2nd Panzer Division reached the port area from the southwest. Late on May 28, Montgomery’s extraordinary 3rd Infantry Division was tasked to clear a path through to the Dunkirk beaches together with the few remaining tanks of the French 2nd Light Mechanized D
ivision, with the rest of II Corps closing in behind it like a protective fantail.

  Despite Göring’s predictions, with the shorter range to southern England favoring the RAF, and Fighter Command’s new Supermarine Spitfires coming fully into play, the Luftwaffe took its heaviest daily losses of the campaign. Ordered to stay in France, the Air Component and AASF were shot out of the sky or had their airfields overrun. By the next day, the BEF had secured five miles of coastline together with about half of Dunkirk port. But it was too late to form a coherent British defensive front, there were just too many holes in the line. That afternoon the German 216th Division from the east met the 20th Motorized Division at Bevern, and the BEF was cut in two. Lord Gort died a soldier’s death when his personal headquarters was overrun by infantry of the 6th Panzer Division. There were no survivors, and there seems little doubt that his sacrifice was deliberate.

  With only partial use of Dunkirk, which was contested between the 48th South Midland Division under Maj. Gen. Andrew Thorne (aided by the French 68th Infantry Division) and the 2nd Panzer Division, the British escape was always going to be costly, especially as the ships had to come so close to shore. The cruiser HMS Ceres was sunk, together with ten destroyers, among them HMS Kelly commanded by Capt. Lord Louis Mountbatten, which blew up with all hands lost.

  No division of the BEF escaped intact, and fewer than 68,000 disorganized and demoralized men were transported back to Dover. Others continued to escape almost until the capitulation of France on June 22. In particular, the 51st Highland Division, serving on attachment with the French on the Saar, had a heroic fight clear across the country, its last stand taking place at the little port of St. Valery-en-Caux on June 10, from where the Royal Navy rescued 2,000 men.

  Over 150,000 British soldiers became prisoners, including Lieutenant General Brooke, together with Martel and five other divisional commanders. Montgomery himself left through Dunkirk on June 1. After a night’s sleep he went to the War Office, demanded to see General Dill, and started lecturing him on what had gone wrong. As famous for his tactlessness as his military skill, Montgomery might have gotten away with this in different circumstances. Instead, Dill dismissed him from command of his division and ordered him from the building.

  Eagle Day

  Göring’s real intention was never to help Manstein make Sea Lion a reality, but to demonstrate that air power by itself could defeat Britain. Nevertheless, with Hitler so committed to Sea Lion, the Luftwaffe had to maintain the pretense. The German view on bombing cities (as shown at Rotterdam) was that it was no different than long range artillery bombardment prior to a ground assault. On that basis, Göring argued, the Luftwaffe should bomb the port of London and towns in southeast England as a preliminary to Sea Lion. Over the objections of both Kesselring and Manstein, Hitler—still furious over the Freiburg incident—gave his authorization as part of Führer Directive 13 of May 24 that “the Luftwaffe is authorized to attack the English homeland in the fullest manner.”10

  For the British, June was a wasted month in which much more could have been done. Following the Dunkirk disaster, the government was briefly convinced the invasion would happen in the three-day period starting June 4. Fearing a general panic and shaken by the Mason-Macfarlane episode, Halifax, on Chamberlain’s advice, took government control of the BBC, ending transmissions except for emergencies. The result, far from dispelling rumor, led many people to turn to German propaganda radio stations in search of news. Halifax also ordered all weapons to be handed in at police stations, thus ending Eden’s plan for a rudimentary force of “Local Defense Volunteers” (otherwise known briefly as the “Home Guard”).

  Major General Thorne, one of the few senior British officers to make it back safely from Dunkirk, was promoted on June 8, to take over XII Corps defending southeast England, with his headquarters at Tunbridge Wells. General Ironside became the new commander-in-chief of the Home Forces. The troops in training almost equaled fifteen divisions (plus a Canadian division, and an Australian division arriving), but arms and equipment existed for the equivalent of just five divisions. On May 25, Ironside told the War Cabinet his plans: wherever the Germans landed they would be met by the forces in place; if they broke out, then the next defensive position was the “GHQ Line” running through Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells to Basingstoke, manned by three incomplete infantry divisions. This was all very well, but four days later Anthony Eden reported that “there is no antitank regiment nor antitank gun in the whole of the [XII] Corps area.”11 To defend Kent, the 1st London Division under Maj. Gen. C. F. Liardet had only two brigades of infantry, eleven 25-pounder field guns, and a few obsolete howitzers, no tanks or armored cars, and not even any medium machine guns. Coastal defense units were almost ludicrously underequipped. At Bexhill, Gunner Terence “Spike” Milligan (later famous as a civil rights activist in the United States) recorded that his battery’s 9.2-inch howitzers, of First World War vintage, had no ammunition, and that the crews trained by shouting “Bang” in unison.12

  Still, Halifax’s greatest concern was that people should not panic. Churchill’s idea for a Ministry of Aircraft Production was opposed by Kingsley Wood as unwarranted interference. Besides, although in early June Fighter Command had barely 320 Spitfires and Hurricanes, the problem was not aircraft but a shortage of some 360 trained pilots, particularly since Dowding refused to use airmen who had escaped from occupied countries. Meanwhile, bizarre episodes multiplied, the product of stress and fear. There were reports of German parachutists everywhere, and in a variety of improbable disguises. Farmers received visits from security officers wanting to know why they had mowed their hay to leave patterns that could be seen from the air. The talented young German-Russian émigré actor and playwright, Peter von Ustinov, serving as a private in the army, was shot dead at a police checkpoint on suspicion of being a spy.

  Britain continued to pursue a negotiated peace, with Italy among the intermediaries until Mussolini’s declaration of war on June 10. On Monday, June 17, the Swedish ambassador in London was told that “common sense and not bravado would dictate the British government’s policy.”13 But this was far short of absolute surrender, and Halifax was not politically strong enough to force through an armistice against the opposition of Churchill and Eden. Also, as Halifax well knew, the survival of his beloved British Empire depended largely upon its reputation for strength and stability. Capitulation to Nazi Germany—however disguised or finessed—would be the beginning of the end, especially for British India. On June 23, the day after the French surrender, Halifax, who was not a brilliant public speaker, told the House of Lords that future generations might consider that for the British people “this, on the whole, seems to have been their finest hour.”14 On the same day, Churchill, in the House of Commons, gave what was to be the most famous speech of his life. “The British people have not yet spoken,” he proclaimed, “so let this be the day that we say no! No to tyranny! No to slavery! No to the end of freedom for mankind!” On July 1, Chamberlain noted in his private diary, “All reports seem to point to invasion this week or next.”15

  The Luftwaffe plan to defeat the RAF was code-named “Case Eagle,” formally authorized by Führer Directive 17 of June 4. With an official start on June 16, this was a systematic attack on southern England, by day and night, culminating on July 10 in “Eagle Day.” Bombing London by day, at the limit of German fighter cover, was unattractive, particularly after July 4 (“Black Thursday” to the Luftwaffe), in which a maximum effort of 1,786 sorties cost seventy-five aircraft (exaggerated to 182 by the RAF). For night bombing, the Luftwaffe had the advantage of its Knickebein blind-bombing system of intersecting radio beams to guide bombers to their target. The British had been alerted to this since March, but believed it to be a hoax until late June, by which time Case Eagle was already under way.

  The date for Sea Lion was now set for Monday, July 15, and with every day it was becoming apparent that the XXXVIII Army Corps would not be ready. It took time to
train the recruits and fit them into the fighting teams, time to identify and prepare the airfields all over Belgium and northern France, time to stockpile supplies and ammunition for the battle, and time to repair the port facilities and canals for the barges. Despite Göring’s boasts, Kesselring’s enthusiasm, and Student’s professional commitment, neither the 7th Air Division nor the Airlanding Assault Regiment was complete, and only 538 Ju 52s were available to lift or tow them. Although the amphibious tanks and even the high-speed hydrofoils had arrived, the 7th Panzer Division was also incomplete. The two infantry divisions were in better shape, and their mountaineering skills would be needed for the famous White Cliffs of Dover. But the men, recruited from southern Bavaria, had mostly never seen the sea in their lives.