Dunkirk 1940: 'Whereabouts Unknown' E-Book

Tim Lynch

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

They called it 'the slaughter of the innocents'. The barely trained and poorly equipped men of the Labour Divisions were never meant to fight, but when the German blitzkreig sliced through the Allied armies they were all that stood in the way of the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force. Paying with their lives they bought precious time as the army fell back towards Dunkirk, and long after the last of the little ships reached home, the men of the Labour Divisions fought on. Dunkirk 1940: Whereabouts Unknown uses official reports, diaries and personal accounts to tell the story of the chaos, terror and heroism of the amateur soldiers of 137th Infantry Brigade during the fall of France.

Leseprobe

In memory of 4604110 Private Philip Smith, 9th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, 1903–1982

And the forgotten men of the battle for France.

Acknowledgements

This book began as an attempt to find out about the experiences of my grandfather in the defence of Arras in 1940. He had not spoken of it when I was a child and died a few months before I returned from the Falklands, having perhaps learned the questions I should have asked. The records of the 9th seem to have been lost in the battle and the Battalion disbanded soon after its return to England. No-one seems to have thought it necessary to record its part in the war and so far I have found only a few tantalising references, a letter on an internet auction site and a scattering of misfiled lists in other war diaries. The search, however, led me to reading of the 2/5th Battalion of the Regiment and from there to the history of 137 Brigade whose unsung experiences encapsulate all that was good and bad about the army sent to France in 1939. This book is dedicated to all those who served the lines of communication. I would like to thank Shaun Barrington of Spellmount at The History Press for recognising that this was a story worth telling.

In researching the book, I have had the pleasure of getting to know a wide variety of people whose passion for their subject and willingness to share what they know has added a depth to the story I could never have managed alone. Hugh Sebag-Montefiore was kind and courteous enough to make efforts on my behalf to track down information about the 9th. Martin Marix Evans shared his new-found details about the impact of the geography and geology of the Dunkirk area on the German attack plans.

Adrian Noble, whose father served with the Tyneside Scottish, sent me his files on the battle at Ficheux and Jeremy Moor his father’s own diary of the events around Robecq. These were subsequently to form the basis of the official account given by Major Parks in his 1941 article but included insights that were later dropped. Both added the vital element of remembering that this is not ancient history.

I owe a very great debt of gratitude to Kim James, whose own excellent book The Greater Share ofHonour (Troubador Books, 2007) is a moving account of what these events meant to real people. Kim’s friendship is something to treasure and he has been generosity personified in sharing the fruits of his years of research, including a number of war diaries and personal accounts. It was he who produced Rex Flower’s unpublished story that forms an important part of this book. It was also through Kim that it was possible to access the papers of Archibald Bentley Beauman, courtesy of his daughter, Lavender Scaramanga. Beauman deserves far greater recognition than he ever received.

Other accounts were gathered from the collections of the Imperial War Museum and the BBC WW2 People’s War, an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar.

Finally, as ever, my thanks go to my wife, Jacqueline and daughter Bethany for letting me get on with writing. My son, Joshua, was supportive in the way only a five-year-old can be. Had he been in France in 1940, his help for Beauman et al would have been worth another division – to the Germans. All three help keep me sane by driving me mad. Thanks.

Tim Lynch

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

‘A specified dimension within a specified time’

The BEF Destroyed and Rebuilt, 1919–1939

Chapter Two

Wagging the Dog

The Expansion of the Logistical ‘Tail’

Chapter Three

‘You are no longer Saturday night soldiers’

The Mobilisation of the Territorial Army, 1939

Chapter Four

Leaving Much to be Desired

The Deployment of the ‘Digging Divisions’, April 1940

Chapter Five

Seeing the Wood for the Trees

The British High Command and the Allied Plan, 1940

Chapter Six

The Matador’s Cloak and the Revolving Door

Fall Gelb, the German Invasion Plans

Chapter Seven

‘More gallantly than advisedly’

Committing the Digging Divisions, May 1940

Chapter Eight

‘Very brave, but very, very stupid’

The Slaughter of the Innocents, 20 May

Chapter Nine

‘We happen to be going that way’

The 2/5th Yorkshires and the Road to Dunkirk

Chapter Ten

‘Heroic but thoroughly unsound’

The Stranding of 137 Brigade, 20 May

Chapter Eleven

The Sixth Wheel

Losing Command and Control in Normandy, June 1940

Chapter Twelve

‘Houses covered in rambler roses’

The 2/6th Dukes and the Highland Division, St Valery

Chapter Thirteen

‘Non-swimmers stay back!’

Crossing the Seine, the 2/7th Dukes at Les Andelys

Chapter Fourteen

‘I was never a boy any more’

The 2/4th KOYLI and the battle for Pont de L’Arche

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Homecomings, 1940–1945

Bibliography

Copyright

Chapter One

‘A specified dimension within a specified time’

On 11 October 1939 Minister for War Leslie Hore-Belisha announced to the Commons that he was:

… able to inform the House that we have fulfilled – and more than fulfilled – our undertaking recently given to France to dispatch to that country in the event of war a British Expeditionary Force of a specified dimension within a specified time … Within six weeks of the outbreak of war in 1914, we had transported to France 148,000 men. Within five weeks of the outbreak of this war we had transported to France 158,000 men. During this period we have also created our base and lines of communication organisation so as to assure the regular flow of supplies and munitions of every kind and to receive further contingents as and when we may decide to send them.

Further, he said, 25,000 vehicles of some 50 different types, ‘some of them of enormous dimensions and weighing 15 tons apiece or more’, had been delivered via harbours with specialist equipment.1

This, he said, was not the ‘light army’ that had gone to France twenty-five years before:

Nearly sixty per cent of the fighting troops in 1914 were infantrymen, relying on their rifles and bayonets and two machine-guns per battalion. Now only twenty per cent of the fighting troops are infantrymen, with fifty Bren guns and twenty-two anti-tank rifles, and other weapons as well with each battalion. It will be seen from this one example how much more effectively armed with fire-power is the present Expeditionary Force.

‘He might have added’, wrote one observer, ‘that even in 1914 the Kaiser’s generals were astounded at the firepower of the British line; they could not believe that the men were armed only with rifles and not machine-guns, so rapid and accurate was their fire.’2

‘Knowing the precise situation regarding the British Field Army in France in general, and in particular in my own division’, wrote Bernard Montgomery, then a Major-General in command of 3rd Division:

I was amazed to read in a newspaper one day in France in October 1939, the speech of the Secretary of State for War in Parliament when he was announcing the arrival of the BEF in France. He gave Parliament and the British people to understand that the Army we had just sent to France was equipped ‘in the finest possible manner which could not be excelled. Our Army is as well if not better equipped than any similar Army.’3

In fact, Montgomery claimed, the Army was ‘totally unfit to fight a first class war on the continent of Europe … Indeed, the Regular Army was unfit to take part in a realistic exercise.’4

Twenty-five years on, there was much about the men arriving in France in 1939 that was familiar to the veterans of their fathers’ war. Despite the introduction of new battledress and webbing equipment in 1937, many men still wore the same uniforms and equipment and carried the same basic weapons as the previous generation. Crucially, though, the men arriving in 1939 differed most from those of 1914 in their ability to make use of the firepower Hore-Belisha so admired. His emphasis on the greater number of machine guns, for example, glossed over the fact that there were now only a third the number of men available to fire them. According to his statement, 60 per cent of the 1914 BEF – 88,000 men – had been infantry soldiers able to man positions along the front. Now, even heavily armed, only 20 per cent – 31,600 – were available to do the same job.

In 1914, every soldier of the small but highly professional army prided himself in his ability to use the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle to maximum effect. Every year, each soldier completed a weapons training test in which he fired 250 rounds at ranges of 100–600 yards, followed by a ‘mad minute’ in which he fired 15 rounds at a target 300 yards away. Part III of the test involved firing 50 rounds at various ranges. He scored four points for each ‘bull’ (a 24-inch wide target), three for an inner and two for an outer. To qualify as a marksman with an extra sixpence a day pay, a soldier had to score a minimum of 130 points out of a maximum 200. To be assessed as a ‘first class shot’, he needed 105 points and 70 to become a second class shot. Any commanding officer of an infantry unit with fewer that 50 per cent of his men qualified as marksmen after the test would be required to face a very embarrassing interview with his brigadier. As a result, the initial German attacks of the First World War faltered in the face of heavy rifle fire and any enemy showing himself within 600 yards of a British soldier would be very lucky to live long enough to learn from the experience.5

In marked contrast, in 1939 many men would arrive with their unused weapons still packed in greased crates having never had the opportunity to fire them. Others arrived having fired their weapons only once to complete their basic training. Inspecting a Regular Army machine gun battalion under his command in November, II Corps Commander Lieutenant General Alan Brooke noted, ‘It would be sheer massacre to commit it to battle in its present state.’6

Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War, May 1937–January 1940.

Twenty years earlier, in 1918, Britain had the largest navy in the world, a newly created Royal Air Force and fielded the biggest, most experienced and well equipped army it had ever known. That year had seen it defeat the bulk of its main enemy in a continental war for the first time in its history, yet the victories and the lessons they brought were soon forgotten and in the popular imagination the First World War became the story of mud, blood and stalemate it remains today. At the highest level, Lloyd George’s hatred of the Western Front, and of Haig in particular, meant he tried to ignore the successes that had finally come from it. Disenchantment among veterans and the emergence of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ attitude towards the conduct of the war focused on the failures, not the victories. ‘By robbing Haig and his army of their laurels’, wrote historian John Terraine, ‘the lessons they had so painfully learned were wasted, and this augured ill for the conduct of the next war. It also made it more certain that there would be a next war.’7 Having defeated the German Army in the field, logistical problems had prevented the Allies from entering Germany and the only troops to parade through the streets of Berlin were Germans, proudly wearing oak leaves in their helmets and already proclaiming that they had not been defeated in battle, instead they had been betrayed by ‘communists and Jews’ at home. It was a legend the Nazis would trade heavily on.

For the British and French, exhausted economically, socially and psychologically by the enormous costs of the past four years, the problem was what to do with their huge forces now that the war was over. In March 1919, Parliament debated the annual army estimate and agreed that ‘a number of Land Forces, not exceeding 2,500,000, all ranks, be maintained for the Service of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at Home and Abroad, excluding His Majesty’s Indian Possessions, during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1920’ and that ‘a sum not exceeding £125,000,000 be granted to His Majesty on account for or towards defraying the charges for Army Services.’8 Soon after, it agreed a budget of ‘a further sum, not exceeding £50,000,000, be granted to His Majesty on account for defraying the Charges for Army Services, which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1920.’9 At the same time, the navy would be provided with £120,000,00010 and the Air Force another £45,000,000.11

Heavy taxation to pay for the war had combined with a decline in overseas trade and particularly in Britain’s traditional exports of textiles and coal. In the chaotic reorganisation of the economy after the war, rather than adapt to the new emerging industries, the narrow view prevailed that economic problems must stem from poor management of public money. In 1921 the Anti-Waste League was formed by Lord Rothermere to campaign against what they considered wasteful government expenditure and in August Sir Auckland Geddes was appointed to chair a committee to consider sweeping cuts to public expenditure with a brief to:

… make recommendations to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for effecting forthwith all possible reductions in the National Expenditure on Supply Services, having regard especially to the present and prospective position of the Revenue. Insofar as questions of policy are involved in the expenditure under discussion, these will remain for the exclusive consideration of the Cabinet; but it will be open to the Committee to review the expenditure and to indicate the economies which might be effected if particular policies were either adopted, abandoned or modified.12

‘The tendency to waste must be reckoned as an element of original sin’ wrote Henry Higgs in his report on the committee in 1922, ‘and it is better to be dead than a “waster” or wastrel’.13 Social spending on education, health and housing were all targeted under what would become known as the ‘Geddes Axe’ and budgets were slashed mercilessly. With peace in Europe seemingly assured, the armed forces were obvious candidates for cutbacks and a defence spending fell from £766 million in 1919–20 to £189 million in 1921–22.14

By that time the Government had adopted a policy known as the ‘Ten Year Rule’ which ordered that from 15 August 1919 ‘it should be assumed for framing revised estimates that the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for that purpose.’15 Now, the Geddes Axe fell on the Army with a vengeance. After the creation of the Irish Free State, 5 Irish infantry regiments were disbanded in their entirety followed by another 22 infantry battalions of various regiments whilst the cavalry were cut from 28 to 20 regiments and 7 battalions were withdrawn from overseas garrisons. Meanwhile, the Territorial Army establishment was cut from 216,041 in 1922–23 to 184,161 by 1925–26.16

The cuts were supported by the agreements reached at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22 – the first international disarmament meeting to be held under the auspices of the League of Nations – which decided there should be parity between the British and American navies but set a lower quota of battleships for the Japanese, French and Italian navies along with a ten-year moratorium on the building of warships. It also set down the maximum size of battleships, cruisers and aircraft carriers and limited the size of the gun armament on existing ships. For Britain, dependent on maintaining its naval power in order to protect its overseas trade, the decision was a potentially dangerous one but based on the belief that further conferences would address air and land forces it was deemed an acceptable risk. In 1927, however, a further conference in Geneva failed on the problem of reaching agreement on the number and size of cruisers needed by Britain for trade defence.

Despite this, in 1928 Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, fought off doubters and succeeded in making the Ten Year Rule permanent. Whereas previously it had been reviewed on an annual basis, now each year the ten-year clock would automatically be reset back to year one and the armed forces would never get any closer than a decade away from a state of readiness for war. Initially, as well as diverting defence spending into the peacetime economy, the concept had been designed to allow equipment programmes to be smoothed out over the medium-term, with an aim of having the armed forces ready in ten years. Now, with the rule reset year by year, the forces stagnated because the government had decreed there was no need to spend money on modernising them for at least another decade. The Treasury was satisfied but the armed forces were deeply worried.

In 1930 the London Naval Conference extended the terms of the Washington Conference to last until 1936 and Britain agreed to reduce its fleet of cruisers to 50 – much against the wishes of the Admiralty. The cutbacks had already had a serious impact on the economy with the shipbuilding, steel and engineering industries and specialist manufacturers of guns, ammunition and naval equipment all being badly hit.

In April 1931 the First Sea Lord, Sir Frederick Field, claimed in a report to the Committee of Imperial Defence that the Royal Navy had declined not only in relative strength compared to other Great Powers but that ‘owing to the operation of the “ten-year-decision” and the claimant need for economy, our absolute strength also has … been so diminished as to render the fleet incapable, in the event of war, of efficiently affording protection to our trade.’17 Field also claimed that the Royal Navy was below the standard required for keeping open Britain’s sea communications during wartime; that if the Navy moved to the East to protect the Empire there would not be enough ships to protect the British Isles and its trade from attack and even that no port in the entire British Empire was ‘adequately defended.’

It has been said that the road to Dunkirk began in Manchuria. A few months after Field’s report, Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, commander of the Japanese garrison at Kwantung in Southern Manchuria was instrumental in manufacturing the ‘Mukden Incident’ of 18 September by sabotaging the South Manchurian Railway. Having provoked a confrontation with the Chinese, the Kwantung force used the incident to provide a pretext for its invasion. In London, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald quickly recognised the potential threat to Britain’s Far East empire and tried to have the Ten Year Rule abolished because he thought the international situation meant it was no longer justified. This was bitterly opposed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson who succeeded in keeping the rule in place for the time being.18

By then, the annual Navy estimate – £120 million in 1919–20 – had fallen to an agreement that ‘a sum, not exceeding £32,529,300, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933, for Expenditure in respect of the Navy Services.’19 Air Force spending had dropped to £17,400,000:

… down by no less a figure than £700,000 [from the previous year], a particularly heavy decline on the comparatively small total expenditure of an expanding and developing Service … As the House will realise, to effect so large an economy with a minimum of injury to the Service has been a difficult task, and one to which the Air Council have devoted long and anxious thought. That has only been achieved by a variety of expedients, many of them admittedly makeshift measures which it will not be possible to repeat another year.20

In a climate of fierce inter-service rivalry, the army had come off worst. Planning for the future envisaged no more than a minor role – if any – for land forces in Europe and they were primarily seen as having reverted to their nineteenth-century function as an imperial police force. To that end, its establishment fell from 2,500,000 in 1919–20 to an order that ‘a number of Land Forces, not exceeding 148,700, all ranks, be maintained for the Service of the United Kingdom at Home and abroad, excluding His Majesty’s Indian Possessions (other than Aden), during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933.’ The entire Army was now no larger than the Expeditionary Force sent to France in the first months of war in 1914. The Commons vote agreed that ‘a sum, not exceeding £9,039,000, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Expense of the Pay, etc., of His Majesty’s Army at Home and abroad, excluding His Majesty’s Indian Possessions (other than Aden), which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933.’21

Faced with the growing threat to the Far East, the Committee for Imperial Defence (CID) recommended an end to the Ten Year Rule and the Cabinet finally revoked it on 23 March 1932 but with the proviso that, ‘this must not be taken to justify an expanding expenditure by the Defence Services without regard to the very serious financial and economic situation’ which the country was in.22 Without committing itself to increasing defence expenditure and instead pinning its hopes on the wide ranging British-led General Disarmament Conference which had opened in Geneva the previous month and which would run until 1934, the government hoped that they might be spared the need to rearm.

On 10 November 1932, Sir Stanley Baldwin, acting as Lord President of the Council and leader of the Conservative Party, addressed the Commons to attack Clement Attlee’s proposal ‘that the British Government should give clear and unequivocal support to an immediate, universal, and substantial reduction of armaments on the basis of equality of status for all nations, and should maintain the principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations by supporting the findings of the Lytton Commission on the Sino-Japanese dispute.’ Even before the Lytton Report had been completed, the Japanese had unilaterally withdrawn from the League of Nations with the increasingly militaristic Japanese Government proclaiming Manchuria a puppet state and thereby showing the League of Nations to be toothless. With what appeared to be a growing threat in the Far East, the risk of another war seemed to be growing. In Britain, the Zeppelin and Gotha raids during the First World War had had a profound effect on thinking about the use of strategic air power and Baldwin’s speech would deeply affect the development of British military policy over the coming years. To a hushed house, he said:

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through, and it is very easy to understand that if you realize the area of space. Take any large town you like on this island or on the Continent within reach of an aerodrome. For the defence of that town and its suburbs you have to split up the air into sectors for defence. Calculate that the bombing aeroplanes will be at least 20,000ft. high in the air, and perhaps higher, and it is a matter of mathematical calculation that you will have sectors of from ten to hundreds of cubic miles.

Imagine 100 cubic miles covered with cloud and fog, and you can calculate how many aeroplanes you would have to throw into that to have much chance of catching odd aeroplanes as they fly through it. It cannot be done, and there is no expert in Europe who will say that it can. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realize what is waiting for them when the next war comes.23

As the government adjusted to the situation in the Far East and the growing fear of air attack, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany in January 1933 gave the Chiefs of Staff still more reason to press for a strong defence policy. On 14 October, they produced their annual review prepared, as usual, with assistance from the Foreign Office. In it they warned that Germany would surely rearm to the point where, in a few years, it could start a war in Europe. Two days later, almost as if in response, Germany withdrew from both the League of Nations and the ongoing Geneva Disarmament Conference. Hitler’s unilateral blow to ventures in which Britain had invested heavily forced the CID and Cabinet to agree in November 1933, some twenty months after having abandoned the Ten Year Rule, to establish the Defence Requirements Committee (DRC) to examine the country’s defences with the aim not of preparing for war, but rather to ‘prepare a programme for meeting our worst deficiencies’ and basing its recommendations for the time being on prioritising ‘the defence of our possessions and interests in the Far East; European commitments; the defence of India.’ Furthermore, ‘no expenditure should for the present be incurred on measures of defence required to provide exclusively against attack by the United States, France or Italy.’24 Simply put, the British needed to consider the strategic threats posed by Germany and Japan but could not afford to contemplate any other hypothetical dangers.

The DRC report of 28 February 1934 signalled the start of a fundamental change in British policy. Having previously ruled out the likelihood of war for a decade to come it now was forced to assume that one was probable in just five years. In October 1933, the CID had prepared a memorandum on the danger from Germany and the DRC report now reinforced their view. Although the committee did not consider Japan’s activities in Manchuria an immediate danger to British imperial interests, it did propose strengthening its Far Eastern defences in case of emergency and attempting to regain Japan’s respect and friendship by reducing Britain’s ‘subservience to the United States’ in order to minimise the risk that ‘Japan might yield to the sudden temptation of a favourable opportunity arising from complications elsewhere.’ The ‘elsewhere’ meant Europe where Germany was identified as ‘the ultimate potential enemy against whom our “long-range” defence policy must be directed.’ Not yet seen as ‘a serious menace’ to Britain, it was felt Germany would become one ‘within a few years’.25

The report was not recommending a full rearmament programme, but rather attempting to rectify the damage to the forces’ normal development programmes caused by the Ten Year Rule. Even this, they suggested, would not be politically popular with a public ‘morally disarmed’ in the wake of the First World War. Throughout the 1920s the economic slump had undermined the government’s ‘land fit for heroes’ promise to its troops. From pride in their accomplishment, the prevailing attitude had begun to drift towards a sense of betrayal of veterans by generals and politicians alike. In a worldwide economic slump, the diversion of large amounts of funding towards the military would be difficult to put into action. With limited resources, the problem became one of deciding how best to prioritise the money available. It was clear that even if Britain could afford to keep pace with the shipbuilding quotas agreed at the Naval Conferences in Washington in 1922 and London in 1930, the loss of logistical facilities since 1919 would mean that in the event of deployment to the Far East it would not arrive in the Pacific in any state to fight.

The underlying belief that air power alone could be a war-winning strategy was brought into sharp focus by the DRC report’s observation that a German occupation of the Low Countries would bring their bombers within range of British cities and they would be in a position to deal a potential knockout blow before Britain could mobilise forces against them. Consequently, they said, an essential requirement was to develop the capacity to mobilise a ‘Regular Expeditionary Force’ of four infantry divisions, one cavalry division, two air defence brigades and a tank brigade within a month of the outbreak of war and supported by up to twelve divisions of the Territorial Army – ‘a matter which will require consideration when the urgent needs of the Regular Army have been met.’

Alongside this, the Royal Air Force should be expanded to the 52 squadrons first approved back in 1923. Although not seen as one of the ‘worst deficiencies’, it was suggested that at least another 25 squadrons would be necessary for home defence and other tasks, especially if Germany should rapidly expand its air forces. The DRC estimated the cost of the whole program (apart from naval construction) at about £82 million over eight or nine years; of the £71 million for the first five years, £40 million would go to the Army, £21 million to the Royal Navy, and £10 million to the Royal Air Force.

If war came in the Far East, it was assumed the Navy would have the lead role. In the event of war in Europe, it was expected that Britain would be allied to France and that the roles of the forces ‘would not differ very much in kind from those that they filled in the last war’. The Navy, they presumed, would protect the mainland British coast and all maritime communications whilst the Army would provide the land defence of ports, naval bases and the shoreline as well as providing anti-aircraft defence and, if required, an expeditionary force to be sent to Europe. To that end, in 1935 responsibility for the anti-aircraft defence of the UK was given entirely to the Territorial Army and between the formation of the TA Anti-Aircraft Division in January 1936 and April 1939, its strength grew from just 2,000 men to 96,000 – on paper at least.26 The Royal Air Force, meanwhile, would be responsible for defence against air attack and liaison with the Royal Navy and Army as well as for the provision of an air force to accompany the expeditionary force. Although they acknowledged that a European war might either lead to or coincide with a threat in the Far East and India, the DRC did not give much thought to the possibility of fighting a two-front war. Instead, it assumed that preparing the Royal Navy for a war in the Far East would enable it to accomplish its mission in any European war, and that by strengthening the Army and Royal Air Force for use in Europe would equally serve if they were deployed to India.

British troops in the Saarland, 1934. Sent in to police the area during the plebiscite, the French decision to deploy African soldiers in the German territory was seen by many in Britain as vindictive and insulting, leading to widespread sympathy for the Germans.

In late 1937, a relieved DRC under Sir Thomas Inskip had reported that ‘France no longer looks to us in the event of war to supply expeditionary forces on the scale hitherto proposed, in addition to our all-important co-operation on the sea and in the air.’ In fact, it claimed, ‘co-operation in the defence of the territory of any allies we may have in war’ was the lowest of all army priorities and far behind those of anti-aircraft duties and of garrisoning the empire, although they recognised that the government would be heavily criticised should a major European war mean that France was threatened and Britain forced to ‘improvise an army to assist her’.27 Despite the still very evident risks, on the basis that there would now be no need to significantly increase the size of the army to fulfil its expected role in any future conflict, the DRC initially recommended an increase in the defence budget of no more than £50 million by 1939.28 Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 changed things. Suddenly, the threat of war increased enormously.

Even by early 1938, though, it had already become clear to British planners that the defence of France mattered a great deal to Britain even if neutral Belgium fell. As Cabinet Secretary Lord Hankey put it in a letter to Prime Minister Chamberlain on 28 April 1938, ‘It would be a nuisance to have the Germans in Belgium again, but better in Belgian ports than in French ports.’ Britain, he argued, should therefore concentrate on France alone. Ideally, Hankey suggested, Britain should encourage France to extend its Maginot Line defences from Longuyon on the Luxemburg border – where the fortifications currently ended – to the Channel coast. It would not be possible to build the heavy forts of the Maginot Line in the lowland areas along the Franco-Belgian border, but other types of defences were considered possible. Since the size and effectiveness of the French defence line would have a direct impact on the need to prepare and deploy a British Expeditionary Force, the stronger the line, the less Britain would need to contribute. The groundwork for the later claims and counterclaims of the respective failures of each nation was laid in the political wrangling over cost. ‘All our co-operation with France,’ Hankey wrote:

whether by air or sea and eventually by land, will be very much less effective if the Germans get the [French] channel ports. It is therefore a strong French interest to cover them by an extension of the Maginot Line [to the coast] … Incidentally it is a strong British interest, but it would be advisable not to say so or else the French might ask us to pay!29

The political cost of France’s militarising its border with neutral Belgium was too high to bear. Just as the British worried about bombing, the French needed to keep the Germans as far away as possible from their industrial heartlands of northern France and hoped to fight their war on Belgian soil. To build defences along the Belgian border would be a clear signal that they would abandon their potential allies to the north at a time when there was still an expectation that the Belgian’s own forts along the Albert Canal – including the apparently impregnable state-of-the-art defences of Eben Emael – would serve to delay any attacking army long enough for a combined Allied army to rush to their support. It was widely believed by the French High Command that the coming war could be fought primarily around the Gembloux Gap in eastern Belgium and the Maginot Line was intended not to be France’s first line of defence but as a deterrent to a costly frontal assault that would channel any German attack through the Low Countries for this very reason.

Neville Chamberlain, who was widely condemned for his policy of appeasement. Chamberlain was constrained as much by an awareness that Britain could offer no resistance to Hitler as by his pacifist beliefs.

In the wake of Munich and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, British concerns for French security – or more accurately for the ability of the French to keep German bombers out of range of the UK – further increased. Britain was now prepared to discuss the alliance France had tried for nearly twenty years to achieve. In February 1939, the Chiefs of Staff reported that ‘It is difficult … to say how the security of the United Kingdom could be maintained if France were forced to capitulate.’30 Despite this, some measure of the importance Britain still placed on assisting the French can be seen in the fact that in February 1939, when planning began under the direction of Brigadier L.A. Hawes for the deployment of the BEF to France, Hawes was unable to find a single up-to-date map of France held by the War Office or the Foreign Office. His team worked from maps produced from a survey completed before the Franco-Prussian war seventy years earlier.31

Having controversially succeeded the popular Alfred Duff Cooper as Secretary of State for War in 1937, Leslie Hore-Belisha had made a number of attempts to modernise the British armed forces and to boost recruitment by introducing improved pay, pension and promotion prospects. He also sought to make the army a more attractive career choice for ordinary soldiers with better barrack conditions including, for example, installing showers and recreation facilities and giving married soldiers the right to live with their families on or near their bases. The reduction in the size of the army over the previous two decades had left a glut of senior officers who were by now largely redundant and simply biding their time until retirement in unnecessary posts with little or nothing to do. The new ‘youth at the helm’ policy pushed these men into what they, of course, considered premature retirement to make room for up and coming junior officers. Almost overnight, men who had waited years to reach the next rung of the promotion ladder found themselves granted the ranks a stagnated army had not been able to afford to give them.

British infantryman and equipment, 1939.

An anti-aircraft Bren gun team. Hore-Belisha spoke of how much better armed the modern BEF was compared to its 1914 predecessor, with 50 of these light machine guns per battalion. In reality, many battalions held just a handful.

Hore-Belisha’s policies were attacked by both the army and Parliament but frequently not because of any inherent fault in the logic behind them. Many of the men in senior army posts in the late thirties had never led formations of troops in combat and had instead been promoted on the strength of administrative or political skills and for them, the purge hit close to home. Men like Generals John Dill and John Gort – whose suitability for high rank in a wartime army was the subject of much private debate as war loomed – were alienated to the point that it was said Gort could not bear to be in the same room with the minister.

Chief among Hore-Belisha’s critics was Archibald Ramsay of the Conservative Party. Elected to the House of Commons in 1931, Ramsay had developed extreme right-wing political views and had become convinced that the Russian Revolution was the start of an international Communist plot to take over the world. In 1935, two German agents established an anti-Semitic group in the UK known as the White Knights of Britain or the Hooded Men – later to become the Nordic League. The Nordic League was primarily an upper-middle class association far removed from the working class British Union of Fascists but sharing the same ideas. Having introduced his Private Members’ ‘Aliens Restriction (Blasphemy) Bill’ in June 1938, Ramsay now turned his attention to Hore-Belisha and began a campaign to have him sacked as Secretary of War. In one speech on 27 April he warned that Hore-Belisha ‘will lead us to war with our blood-brothers of the Nordic race in order to make way for a Bolshevised Europe.’32 His efforts to, in his words, ‘clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence’ would continue into 1940 but even after his eventual arrest and imprisonment he was influential enough to be able to submit questions to Parliament about Jews serving in the British Army and to have MPs prepared to demand his release.

Facing such opposition, Hore-Belisha continued to press ahead with plans to develop the armed forces. One of the effects of the First World War had been to create a decline in the birth rate between 1915 and 1919 that now showed itself as a shortage of men aged 21–26 – the prime age for fighting troops – and normal recruitment could not meet this gap. Conscription legislation put in place to supply manpower for the First World War had lapsed in 1920 and there had been no need to reconsider it but now, for the first time in its history, Britain was forced to put plans in place for the introduction of peacetime conscription. The initial plans put forward in 1938 were blocked by Chamberlain, who refused to allow any increase in defence spending beyond that already agreed and who still believed that appeasement could work, but the rapidly deteriorating international situation after Czechoslovakia changed things.

Prime Minister Chamberlain returns from Munich.

With the increasing German threat after Munich, Britain’s plans had to be quickly reconsidered. The initial plan, based on that outlined by the DRC back in the early 1930s, envisaged sending only two advance divisions before a declaration of war followed by up to ten more to be sent in two batches, one sixty days after the outbreak and the next about six months into the war.

Perhaps not surprisingly given its frontline position in any war, France was clearly unhappy about Britain’s proposed level of commitment to European defence. British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps had reported to London in September 1938 that ‘all that is best in France is against war, almost at any price’ and that they were being opposed only by a ‘small, but noisy and corrupt, war group’.33 He went on to say that the small size of the projected British Expeditionary Force had convinced some French observers that ‘France can only rely on Great Britain to fight to the last Frenchman.’34 As French General Henri-Fernand Dentz put it, ‘France does not intend to allow England to fight her battles with French soldiers.’35 Reinforcing this belief, French statistics apparently showed that the British government was only preparing to mobilise at no more than one-fifth of the rate France planned to, a claim angrily rejected by the British in bilateral discussions. General Edmund Ironside, who would be appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in September, noted that:

When Reynaud was recently in England he had complained that whereas one man in eight was mobilized in France, only one in forty was mobilized in England; but, on going into his figures, it was found that Reynaud had included police, railway and dock workers, etc., in the French mobilisation who were not included in the British figures. When these were eliminated, the proportions were much about the same.36

Phipps’s damning assessment of France’s lack of willingness or even its ability to go to war with Germany in 1938 had already created major doubts in London about the value of France as an ally but for their part, the French regarded Britain’s strategy for another long, defensive war of attrition to be a real danger to them. France could not afford such a luxury if it was to emerge from the coming war with its economy in any fit state to rebuild itself. As a result, it became clear that France wanted help in the short term rather than the promised long-haul approach the British were offering and Charles Corbin, the highly experienced ambassador in London, recommended to Daladier in January 1939 that he should remind the British as often as possible about ‘the inequality of sacrifice to which our two populations would have to consent in time of war’.37

With the situation across Europe rapidly deteriorating France’s resolve seemed to be faltering. Guided by Phipps’ comments, Britain now sought to reassure France of its full support in order to prevent it seeking any sort of accommodation with Hitler and so, on 8 March 1939, during the Parliamentary debate on the Army Estimates for the following financial year, Hore-Belisha announced:

It will now be convenient to appraise the dimensions of the field force [to be sent to France in the event of war]. The whole, or any part of it, will be used, of course, as and how the future may require, but this is the size of the instrument our plans are shaping: Regular, four infantry divisions and two armoured divisions; Territorial, nine infantry divisions, three motorised divisions and an armoured division. In addition, there are two Territorial cavalry brigades, and a number of unbrigaded units, Regular and Territorial – making more than nineteen divisions in all. Mr Haldane projected a field force of six Regular divisions and one cavalry division only. He had not equipped the Territorial force for a European war. Our Territorial Army will be so equipped.38

The French were delighted by the implied promise of nineteen divisions whilst the German military attaché ‘listening in the diplomats’ gallery, was observed to be completely stunned, which is not surprising’.39 Although plans had already been discussed the previous week with the CID for an eventual commitment of 32 divisions or even as many as 55, Hore-Belisha’s apparent offer of 19 divisions in the short term was seen by senior commanders as little more than a political gambit.40 General Henry Pownall, who would become Chief of Staff to Lord Gort when war broke out, noted in his diary in April that it may be ‘Better late than never, but late it is, for it will take at least eighteen months more … before this paper army is an army in the flesh.’41 General Ironside argued that it would take another year for Britain to provide even fifteen combat-ready divisions.

On 27 April 1939, Hore-Belisha secured the agreement of the Cabinet to allow restricted conscription on a temporary basis and on 26 May Royal Assent was given to a Military Training Act that would apply to males aged 20 and 21 years old.42 They were to be called up for six months full-time military training before being transferred to the Army Reserve and released from service. The Act was intended to be temporary for a period of three years unless an Order in Council declared it was no longer necessary before the Act expired.

By 1918, there had been four British armies made up, in Richard Holmes’ phrase, of the ‘old, new, borrowed and blue’. The remnants of the old, pre-war professional army were still figures of influence but had been joined in 1915 by the ‘borrowed’ men of the Territorial Army, whose terms of service did not require them to serve overseas unless they chose to do so. In 1916 came the ‘new’ army of men who had answered Kitchener’s call and, after the horrors of the Somme, came the first of the ‘blue’ – conscripts enlisted involuntarily by new legislation to fill the gaps in the ranks of the old, new and Territorial Armies. This time, it was decided, there would be an integrated army from the outset. By using the time available to create and train a reserve force, Britain would, like its European neighbours, have a ready made pool of trained soldiers if and when it needed them.

As staff talks between British and French commanders progressed in four phases between late March and late August 1939 markedly divergent views on the deployment of the BEF in France quickly emerged. The British concentrated on planning for the medium and long term so as to allow time to create, train and deploy the later echelons of the big ‘Belisha army’ as a complete fighting force. Gamelin, in contrast, had a much more short-term agenda. He prioritised first and foremost the move to France of the limited forces actually available in 1939: five regular divisions and the first four divisions of Territorials. For his part Lord Gort – at that time Chief of the Imperial General Staff – shared the view that Britain should quickly deploy whatever it had available. Opposing them, and by now accused by his critics of assuming the role of a latter day Kitchener, Hore-Belisha was said to be less concerned with the best interests of the strategic military situation than with calculating the political good for his own ministerial career of being seen as the father of the revitalised British Army.

Churchill, like the French High Command, cared mainly about numbers. For him, the prospect of being able – albeit not until at least 1941 – to put a large army into the field alongside the French salved at least some of the humiliation of the failure of appeasement. In Paris for the Bastille Day parade of 14 July 1939, Pownall reported hearing Churchill mutter ‘Thank God we’ve got conscription or we wouldn’t be able to look these people in the face.’43 Later, he would write, ‘Britain’s introduction of conscription … did not give us an army … It was, however, a symbolic gesture of the utmost consequence to France and Poland.’44

By August, amicable agreements were reached about the size and speed of the deployment of the BEF, with Pownall announcing that the first two divisions were now expected to arrive nineteen days after mobilisation and the whole Regular Army contingent in thirty-four days.45 Compared to France’s 117 available divisions of varying quality or even to the 10 Dutch divisions or the 22 divisions ‘little Belgium’ was able to field (despite its declared neutrality), the BEF was little more than a gesture but it was recognised as representing the best that Britain had available at the time.46 This tiny contribution forced BEF commanders to defer to the French High Command on matters of policy and in particular to their commander-in-chief General Maurice Gamelin, who freely admitted that he was relying on any future war being confined initially to the east before spreading westwards, in order to buy time for mobilisation.

When war came on 3 September, as agreed, the BEF began to mobilise and advance elements arrived in France to organise the lines of communication and set up base areas. In 1914, the original BEF had been in action against the advancing Germans just sixteen days after war was declared. This time, with Germany occupied in subduing the Poles, it would take nineteen days before the first combat troops even reached French shores. By the time the first British infantrymen reached their assigned positions in northern France, the first – and only – French offensive of the war had already ended.

The Franco-Polish military convention held that when war came the French Army would immediately begin preparations for a major offensive and on the fifteenth day after mobilisation began they were to launch a full-scale assault on Germany itself. Pre-emptive mobilisation was declared in France on 26 August and full mobilisation began on 1 September. Four days after war was declared, a French offensive pushed into the Rhine valley. With the Wehrmacht fully engaged in Poland, Germany had just 22 divisions along the French border and no armoured forces of any kind, but instead of pushing home their huge numerical advantage, the French advanced along a 32-kilometre line in the Saarbrücken area against weak German opposition and penetrated about eight kilometres into Germany. They captured approximately 20 abandoned villages before stalling after the Anglo-French Supreme War Council gathered for the first time at Abbeville on 12 September and agreed that all offensive actions were to be halted immediately.

The Phoney War had begun.

NOTES

1 Hammerton, Sir John. The Second Great War Vol 1 London: Waverley c.1941 p208–211

2 Ibid p212

3 Montgomery, B.L. The Memoirs of Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, KG London: Companion Books 1958 p44

4 Ibid p43

5 HMSO The NCOs Musketry Small Book London: 1915 pp3, 103 quoted in Holmes, R. Tommy London: HarperCollins, 2004 p345

6 Bryant, A. The Turn of the Tide 1939–43 London: Collins 1957 p67

7 Terraine, J. To Win a War: 1918 The Year of Victory London: Macmillan 1978 p14

8 Hansard House of Commons Debate 03 March 1919 vol 113 cc69–184

9 HC Deb 07 July 1919 vol 117 cc1567–70

10 HC Deb 11 December 1919 vol 122 cc1743–58

11 HC Deb 15 December 1919 vol 123 cc87–147

12 Henry Higgs, ‘The Geddes Reports and the Budget’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 32, No. 126. (Jun., 1922), p253

13 Ibid ‘Introduction’

14 Barnett, C., The Collapse of British Power London: Eyre Methuen, 1972 p297

15 National Army Museum. Against All Odds London: National Army Museum 1990 p6

16 Ibid

17 Barnett, op cit. p. 301

18 Paul Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy (Fontana, 1981) p231

19 HC Deb 06 July 1932 vol 268 cc515–9

20 HC Deb 10 March 1932 vol 262 cc2007–73

21 HC Deb 15 March 1932 vol 263 cc241–2

22 Kennedy, P. The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Penguin, 2004), p285

23 Reported in The Times, 11 November 1932, p7

24 DRC report (DRC 14), 28 February 1934, CAB 4/23 in Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934–1937 Gaines Post Jr Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1993 p32

25 Ibid. p33

26 Hammerton, op cit p135

27 Inskip. Defence Expenditure in Future Years, Interim Report By The Minister For Co-Ordination of Defence, C.P. 316(37), Cab. 24/273 quoted in Sebastian Cox ‘British Military Planning and the Origins of the Second World War’ in B.J.C. Coercer & Roch Legault. Military Planning and the Origins of the Second World War in Europe Westport CT: Praeger, 2001 p117

28 McKersher, B.J.C. ‘The Limitations of the Politician-Strategist: Winston Churchill and the German Threat 1933–1939’ in Michael I. Handel, John H. Maurer (eds) Churchill and Strategic Dilemmas Before the World Wars: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel London: Routledge, 2003 p105

29 Hankey to Prime Minister, 28 April 1938, in CAB 21, 554 14/4/13, PRO. Emphases and exclamation original.

30 Howard, M. 1972 The Continental commitment: The dilemma of British defense policy in the era of two world wars London:Temple Smith p127

31 Hawes, L.A. ‘The Story of the “W Plan”: The Move of Our Forces to France in 1939.’ Army Quarterly 101 (1970–71): 445–56

32http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRramsayA2.htm

33 Adamthwaite, A. France and the coming of the Second World War, 1936–39 London: Frank Cass 1977, p177

34 Phipps to Halifax, 16 November 1938, FO 371 21600 C 14025/55/17, PRO

35 Adamthwaite 1977, p246

36 Gates, E.M. The end of the affair: The collapse of the Anglo-French alliance, 1939–40 London: George Allen and Unwin 1981, p29 Ironside quote from MacLeod, R & Kelly, D (Eds) Time Unguarded: The Ironside Diaries, 1937–1940. New York: D. McKay 1963 p162

37Corbin to Daladier, 26 Jan. 1939, in Etat-Major de L’Armée: 2e Bureau – Grande- Bretagne, Carton 7N 2816, SHAT

38 Hansard H.C. Deb 08 March 1939 vol 344 cc2161–302

39 Blaxland, G. Destination Dunkirk: The Story of Gort’s Army London Military Book Society 1973 p23

40 ‘Committee for Imperial Defense Strategical Appreciation Sub-committee Procedure for Meeting to be held on the 1st March, 1939,’ section 6, FO 371 22923 C2751/281/17, PRO. For the Hore-Belisha statement, see also Adamthwaite, 1977, Op cit. p253.

41 Bond, B. (Ed)