CHAPTER 5
The Phoney War ended on 10 May 1940 when the Germans launched the latest version of the much amended invasion plan 'Case Yellow'. In its final form (informally termed 'sickle-cut' or 'Sickle Stroke') this was intended to achieve a decision in the West by attacking out of the difficult terrain of the Ardennes to cut in between the Franco-British forces that the Germans knew would advance into Belgium once active hostilities began and the static Trench forces in the Maginot line. What has become known as blitzkrieg (though no such unified doctrine actually existed in the German forces at this time) sliced through the Trench positions covering the River Meuse and by 24 May the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the northern Trench forces were trapped against the Channel, principally concentrated around Dunkirk and Lille. A hastily prepared evacuation plan, known as Operation Dynamo, was devised by Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay in Dover. It included an appeal for all civilian vessels that were able to cross the Channel to help to ferry the troops from the beaches to larger ships offshore, or to evacuate them completely.
Ramsay's most optimistic forecast was that he might be able to evacuate 45,000 men, but in the event Hitler halted the advance of his armies and the Channel enjoyed unusual calm between 26 May and 4 June, during which 220,000 British and 120,000 Trench troops were evacuated to England. Nine Allied destroyers and perhaps 200 civilian vessels were lost, and the RAF suffered severe casualties covering the evacuation, unseen and unappreciated by the troops on the beaches. Starting on 5 June, the Germans swung south and Trench resistance collapsed, though not without some heavy fighting. The Italians opportunistically declared war on 10 June; Paris fell four days later while the French government fled to Bordeaux and formally capitulated on 25 June.
Despite the popular assumption that Dunkirk was Britain's last act on the continent for the time being, 51st Highland Division – in the Maginot line when the fighting started – was later forced to surrender at St Valéry on the coast, and during the final evacuation of British troops from St Nazaire on the Atlantic coast the troopship Lancastria was sunk with the loss of over 3,000 lives. Unwilling to take the risk that the French Navy would finish up in German hands and perhaps transform the war at sea, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to present French warships at Mers el-Kebir in North Africa with an ultimatum to sail to Britain or to a neutral port for internment and, when this was rejected on 3 July 1940, the French fleet was bombarded with the loss of 1,600 lives. This did much to assure America of the strength of British purpose, but both it and the evacuation from Dunkirk cast a long shadow over Franco-British relations.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Francophile British novelist
I was only twenty-five and my France was the literary France, but it was always pretty hopeless. They're anti-militarists to a man; they despise uniforms and so on and so forth, and they have been continuously invaded by the Germans but have shown no sign of wanting a piece of German territory – Alsace is a language question rather than a land question – and so they feel much put upon and really not disposed to fight for anyone else. They had this belief that really all wars were contrived by idiots who didn't know how to live, and I wonder – how wrong were they? Particularly the sort of pumpkin-eating Protestant nations like the British and the Germans, who were always worried about territorial problems, and the French just wanted to stay home and eat well and go to bed with their girlfriends.
GORDON WATERFIELD
British journalist in France
I don't think the French people themselves were defeatist. I think the defeatism and the fifth column – if you can use that term – came at the top, among the politicians. There was a very strong peace movement among certain politicians; some of them were even pro-German and wanted jobs with the Germans. When things went badly this group got larger and became more dominant and got rid of people like Prime Minister Paul Reynaud who was trying to fight. The main trouble was that in the past there had been great animosity against Jewish Prime Minister Leon Blum's government, the 1936–37 Socialist government, and there was a great division in French society. They were frightened that if they called on the people to hold back the Germans, I mean a popular uprising as they had done before in 1871, there would be Communism and revolution. They wanted to keep the civilians out of the war and they made no effort to bring them in, with the result that the civilians had nothing to do and eventually became frightened and joined the refugees.
CAPTAIN ANDRÉ BEAUFRE
French General Staff
It was a period of decay, of very deep decay, probably caused by the excess of the effort during World War One. I think generally speaking we suffered from an illness, which is not peculiar to the French, that of having been victorious and believing that we were right and very clever.
MAJOR GENERAL SIR EDWARD SPEARS
Conservative MP and Churchill's personal representative in France
The whole of the French upper and middle classes — the right, if you like – preferred the idea of the Germans to their own Communists and I think you can call that a very powerful fifth column, and it was worked to death by the Germans.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
You didn't have to walk round these streets and see 'Pourquoi? Pourquoi?' written on the walls, or the hammer and sickle, to realise that nobody was going to lift a finger, you know, and the German propaganda was jolly good. It had to be a bit unimaginative of the British not to be taken in by it – the Parisians were thoroughly taken in and so we kissed Paris goodbye.
MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT
Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations
The origins of the Sickle Stroke plan has to be attributed to General Erich von Manstein who in autumn 1939 was Chief of Staff of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group A. He was utterly opposed to the earlier plan, which was Hitler's own and which copied the strategy, the World War One Schlieffen plan, by assembling the bulk of the forces on the northern wing with the intention to conduct the main thrust through Belgium. This was the plan, with few alterations, was held up all through the dark winter of 1939–40, when the start was postponed by Hitler's orders from one week to another, altogether thirteen times because of unfavourable weather. When I returned from a visit to the Western Front and to the headquarters of Army Group A, there General Manstein interviewed me his ideas. My report on my return to Berlin, to the Chief of the Armoured Force Operations Staff and the Chief Military Adviser of Hitler, made a slight impression on him. On the next day, he informed Hitler of these plans. Hitler grasped the value of Manstein's ideas and on 17th February 1940 received the General in Berlin where he listened most attentively. Hitler's fear that the earlier plans had been made known to the enemy gave the impulse to overthrow them and prepare the way for the Sickle Stroke plan. Hitler said, 'Manstein is the only General who understands my own ideas,' already marks the beginning of his later claim that he himself had initiated the plan. Hitler for some time had insisted upon supporting the main thrust in the northern wing by an armoured group of two or three armoured divisions, which was to advance on a narrow strip of open country through Luxemburg on both sides of the Ardennes forest in the direction of Sedan. Manstein's advice had become an entirely new strategy, shifting the centre of gravity from the northern to the southern wing. By reversing these actual facts Hitler and his propaganda took care that the overwhelming success of the campaign was attributed to him as a greatest strategist of all times – this was the slogan of the German propaganda after the French campaign.
CAPTAIN BEAUFRE
The French stuck to the foremost lessons of the First World War, the belief in the defensive, the quality of the trenches against tanks. We had tanks in the First World War and we knew all the difficulties of the game while the Germans, who didn't have them, had the feeling of those who were attacked by tanks and had a sort of, let's say, fashion for tanks. And while we considered that the tanks were a little awkward and difficult to use and so on, the Germans were like nouveaux riches, you know, when they jumped to the new weapons with the appetite of the starving. That was very normal from both sides: we, having been victorious, were sure of our message; the Germans, having been defeated, copied what they had thought was useful in our methods, which we didn't really feel ourselves.
MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT
We were conscious of the French inclination of the Maginot line thinking, particularly that the French General Staff had not yet adopted military means against a new strategy advocated by British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart, which was founded on mobility and strength of offensive operations, motorised troops strongly supported by special units of the Air Force.
GORDON WATERFIELD
The Phoney War did a lot of harm to the French soldiers, the Maginot line did a lot of harm, the whole idea that this was an impregnable fortress and that all we had to do was just sit there and wait for the Germans to come and shoot them down. I visited the Maginot line and was really rather horrified by the effect it must have had on the soldiers. I visited near Strasburg and the Germans were busy the other side constructing defences on the other side of the Rhine. I said to a colonel – the colonel was very proud of his defences – I said, 'Magnificent concrete this, very good concrete', and I asked, 'Have they got such good concrete on the other side?' 'Oh, no, certainly not.' 'Do you ever think of attacking the other side and destroying their concrete?' 'No, no, that would not be a very good idea.' And then I stayed at an observation post on the Rhine watching the Germans washing and playing football, and I said to the sentry, 'Why don't you shoot them, why don't you shoot at them?' 'No', he said, 'they're behaving perfectly all right – they don't shoot at us, why should we shoot at them?' This was all very well, probably if I'd been a sentry I wouldn't have wanted to stir up trouble. But the generals should have made their men raid to keep up their morale and to test the strength of the Germans, the strength of the fortifications. But this didn't happen.
CAPTAIN BEAUFRE
The whole story was that the war wouldn't be a war of movement. It would be attrition and the result of the war would be like in the First World War, won by indirect operations on the borders, and that is how it mushroomed, all these funny ideas of action against Russia, supposed to be the weak ally, which was entirely foolish. We had a plan to attack Russia through Norway, which led to the landing at Narvik. And we had the plan to raise the Balkans with us by landing at Salonika and join the Yugoslavs, and so on. But all this was dreams and simply foolish.
COLONEL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL
Panzer troop consultant, German General Staff
We knew that the French High Command had dispersed his tanks. The French had more, better, heavier tanks than we have but we managed our Panzer Group, as its commander General Paul von Kleist said, 'Don't tap them – strike as a whole and don't disperse.' And so we went with our bulk, we had no care of our flanks and so it was possible, with the work of the Panzer Group, to go to the Channel.
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
The French High Command were beneath contempt and this was due to a fundamental dispute between generals Gamelin and Georges. The dispute between those two men was fatal to the whole of the French defence. I knew Gamelin in 1914; he was a very dapper, teasing little man, very sure of himself, and everybody thought he had a great career before him. What ruined him was politics, a desire to get on with one type of politician rather than another. That was fatal as far as he was concerned. Georges was an exceptionally fine soldier but he'd been severely damaged at the time of the 1934 assassination of King Peter of Yugoslavia in Marseilles. He was very badly hurt – the French Foreign Minister was killed and it had affected Georges very profoundly, physically. I was very fond of him but it was very painful to me to see this fall in capacity really due to that most unfortunate incident.
CAPTAIN BEAUFRE
Gamelin's choice of headquarters near Paris reveals what the man was. The enemy were not the Germans; it was the French government with which he had to deal all the time to be protected against manoeuvres to replace him and so on. This was very typical of what he, how he, understood his job. Instead of a fighting general he was a political general.
COLONEL MANTEUFFEL
I think that the French generals have very good training on paper but they have no connection with their troops. Our Air Force had destroyed all telephone cables and so it was impossible to have connection with their troops. But now in this age with motorcycles and cars it is essential to have connection with field commanders.
GORDON WATERFIELD
Well, we did get to some French HQs with only one phone, but the reason for this was that they had not expected a war of movement. They had expected to be able to sit behind the Maginot line and fight the Germans there – they were not ready with a second line of defence. So when they had to retreat to these chateaux there was no organisation of phones and they were cut off from other units and groups, and this happened almost everywhere.
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
When Gamelin came to England he was asked by Churchill where were his reserves and he said, 'I have none' – it was unbelievable. Churchill was absolutely appalled and began to look for means of going on with the war in North Africa, then in Brittany. Anything, you see, to carry on, not to give way. But the French very soon accepted the idea of defeat, really, and surrender. To them it was rather a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain number of millions and then called it a day, and started off next time hoping you would be more lucky.
MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT
The Ardennes and Sedan came to be chosen as the main points of the armoured thrust as it was possible to circumvent the Maginot line and because this way opened up a whole route towards the section of the French positions which was defended by minor forces only. So certainly there were very great difficulties of conducting the armoured troops through the Ardennes forest. They would come by the most careful preparations of the Army General Staff, which justified its claim to have played an important part in the whole plan.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
The French temperament is much more mercurial, much more given to despondency and so on than the rather phlegmatic British, and also another thing is they happen to live without the Channel between them. It's that damned Channel that's saved us over and over again. We haven't been invaded two or three times; so naturally they'd had a dose of this and didn't like it at all. Then of course the right wing had a sneaking feeling that the Germans might do it better, because the left wing was clearly going to be ruled by the Russians. All that contributed to an indecision, an enormous weakening of potential, so I suppose in the final analysis the morale of the French Army dropped entirely through indecision.
COLONEL MANTEUFFEL
The French fought in the beginning of the war, for some days, diffidently. I think this is caused by moral disarmament. The French soldiers were captured most without a struggle, and in addition to this I learned from prisoners of war that the French soldiers in the majority believed that they would have no more war on the end of the first week of this campaign.
CAPTAIN BEAUFRE
I must confess that the morale of the French High Command was very quickly broken. In fact the night when we happened to know that the front had been broken through at Sedan, at that time the feeling was that everything was lost, and as I have written in my memoirs I saw General Georges, who was commanding the north-eastern front, I saw him sobbing and saying, 'There have been some deficiencies.' You always have deficiencies like that and that's nothing new, so we made a plan to restore the situation. Then on the Somme in the beginning of June, where we had a certain superiority over the Germans because we were covering their left flank while they were attacking Dunkirk, we had given orders to attack and we achieved nothing. So that was for me the proof that the training and the mentality of the High Command was unable at that time to make an offensive which would restore the situation. From that time on I thought it was lost.
COLONEL MANTEUFFEL
The first crisis was on May 22nd when the spearhead of the Panzer Army was attacked by strong British tank units and we suffered heavy casualties. The second crisis was the halt of the German panzer troops around Dunkirk. Hitler feared his experience in First World War; the panzers needed rest and maintenance, then they will go to the second phase of the Battle of France, so Hitler stopped his advances around Dunkirk.
MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT
Nobody had and could have foreseen a success of such a totality, and that in a short time of hardly more than a month. There was a significant difference between the attitude of the military leaders on one side, in particular General Franz Halder, the Chief of Staff of the Army, and on the other side, Hitler, who joins the French campaign for the first time as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Halder, after the success of the initial operation, was entirely sure of himself and of the further course of the campaign.
SQUADRON LEADER THE HON MAX AITKEN
601 Squadron RAF, Tangmere
One interesting trip we made was to escort Winston Churchill to Paris. He went to Paris to ask the French to go with him – I think it was when he proposed that France and Britain should set up joint citizenship and that the government should move to North Africa. Our great hope was that he wasn't going to come back that night so we could have a last night in Paris – which materialised, and we weren't very fit next morning.
ANTHONY EDEN
British Secretary of State for War
On the 12th of May Winston published his first list of ministers on the formation of his government. That was Whit Sunday and that afternoon I repaired to the War Office to take over my responsibilities there. Although the Battle of France had only started two days before, it was already evident that there was some grim times ahead. And, in fact, the next four weeks were a tale of continuing defeat and disaster. Almost exactly one month later, Winston asked me to fly with him to meet the French government. We took Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with us and I can see the scene now at the table in the chateau where we met them. On the one side Winston and I and Dill; on the other side Prime Minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygand, who was the new French Commander-in-Chief, and Pétain. We discussed for three hours without really making much progress because it was soon evident that there was nothing more that the French were in a position to do.*19
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
Whether Raynaud's mistress was paid by the Germans or not I don't know – she couldn't have been more anti-British if she had been. She was completely sold on the idea that the Germans were far better than the French Communists and she did absolutely everything to thwart any little sparks of resistance that blossomed in her lover's mind. When she heard a proposal had been made to amalgamate the two countries – France and England – she dashed off on to the phone straight away to call all the people of her way of thinking in the Cabinet.
ANTHONY EDEN
The moment came for Winston to declare that whatever happened we should go on with the war, if necessary alone, and then Reynaud was quite inscrutable, Weygand was polite, perhaps slightly doubting, and Pétain was openly 'all my eye and Betty Martin'. So we knew from that moment pretty well what must await us and I say it now we've no right to reproach the French for this. None in my opinion, because our own contribution on land had been a very diminutive one, relatively. Quite true that the Air Force had been superb and relatively numerous, but even so we could hardly be called equal partners in the Battle of France.
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
Some years later in Cairo I asked Churchill what was the narrowest escape we'd had in the war so far and he said undoubtedly the fact that the French might have accepted our offer of unity. When you think of it, it couldn't have worked, it would have created a mess, it would have impeded us in our methods completely – we couldn't have done that.
JOHN COLVILLE
Assistant Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1939–43
On 19th May Lord Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, concluded that if the French armies had collapsed beyond repair then there was not the slightest chance that they were going to recover in order sufficiently to continue or maintain the existing front. He therefore instructed his people at home that they must prepare for the possibility of the evacuation of the BEF. It was not until 25th May that Lord Gort, against the orders of the French High Command and contrary to the wishes of the British War Cabinet, finally decided that the proposed attack by the BEF to the south was not feasible and that a withdrawal to the sea was the only possibility. In making this decision he saved the BEF because there can be no doubt that had he obeyed instructions and marched southwards, the entire fighting force of more than a quarter of a million men would otherwise have been killed or captured. It must be doubted whether this country could have continued to fight, Battle of Britain or no Battle of Britain, if all our trained officers and NCOs had been lost. By this single decision Gort changed the course of history.
CAPTAIN BEAUFRE
The recriminations started with the British Army whose orders were to attack near us and without warning we happened to learn the British were withdrawing. We have not the right to criticise this too much because after all we were the bosses and we lost the battle, and that is a good excuse for the British to be selfish. But anyway they were, very selfish. Let's say that also the British Army hadn't been really attacked during the battle – the French had the brunt of the German attack – so it was still in order, and they took advantage of the situation to do what they wanted and to re-embark at Dunkirk without being of any help to the French to begin with, which produced not a good feeling. At a higher level of command than where I was the discussion came from the use of the RAF, that we knew was a number of squadrons you had in Britain and we thought that you didn't support the battle as you could have supported it. I heard Churchill himself answer this question. Churchill said very clearly that he couldn't do more because he had to think of the future and save what was left to protect Britain. But we had the feeling that you were playing your game.
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
There was complete hatred of the English, wanting to blame them for their defeat, saying we hadn't sent over enough troops, that we kept our planes in England rather than engaging them in the last struggle of France for her life. We represented 'Perfidious Albion' in all its horror. They really disliked us, more than I can find an expression for even today.
SQUADRON LEADER AITKEN
We had been operating over France before that, gradually covering the retreat of the British Army towards Dunkirk. And it was very unattractive because none of the British troops knew whether you were German or whether you were British and everyone fired at you. But gradually it formalised as the Army came towards Dunkirk and our duty was much clearer to us. Our duty clearly was to stop the troops on the beach from being bombed or shot, so most of Fighter Command in the south was destined to protect the troops on the beach.
COLONEL ADOLF GALLAND
Luftwaffe Jagdgruppe 26
It is known that Hitler himself stopped the Army and the armoured division from taking Dunkirk. Goring offered that the Luftwaffe would fight the British Army in Dunkirk but it had been impossible to avoid the escape of the people. The material was kept and was destroyed, but for the first time the Luftwaffe was confronted with the whole of the British fighter planes and fighters were good, same quality and experience as we had, and technically also equal. And especially during the night time the Luftwaffe was not able to avoid the escape.
MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT
Hider's fear to take any risk and his lack of knowledge or at least acknowledge the main Sickle Stroke principles. He was mistrusting of his generals, thus at Dunkirk he delayed the main aim of the whole campaign, which was reaching and closing the Channel coast before any other considerations. This time he was frightened that the clay plains of Flanders with its many streams and channels, which according to his own memories of World War One would endanger and possibly inflict heavy losses on the panzer divisions. Hitler failed to follow up the overwhelming success of the first part of the campaign, and instead initiated the steps for the second part before the first had been accomplished. This was a great mistake in view of the German military principle to follow up success to the last gasp of men and horses. I do not believe that he allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape for political reasons and by this chivalrous attitude would obtain a chance of coming earlier to terms with Britain. Such an assumption, apart from everything else, is in full contrast to Hitler's concentrating the whole power of the German Air Force on the coastline after the British retreat.
BERTIE GOOD
Chief Steward on the ferry 'Royal Daffodil'
We arrived off Gravelines and were attacked by German aircraft. They just shot a few bullets at us but they really went for the hospital ship and tried to sink her. We went on into Dunkirk and the St Helier went in; he was there for about a quarter of an hour and came out and shouted to George Johnson, our captain, 'There's nobody there. I don't know what they've bloody well sent us here for, I'm going back to Southampton.' Well, George Johnson took us in and we tied up alongside and the troops came up out of the ground, like a lot of rats, and they just ran to the ship. We took seventeen hundred men on board and just when we were picking the gangway up about thirty or forty ambulances came down the pier. The ambulance drivers came up the gangway and the First Mate said, 'Anybody in those ambulances?' They said, 'Yes, there's six stretcher cases in each one of 'em. We've been chased from Boulogne to here.' So the ship's crew went ashore and brought every man out of the ambulances and put them in the after dining room. None of these chaps had had their wounds dressed, they were in a hell of a state. All the officers in the ship who had first-aid kits started to dress their wounds.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JOHN McBEATH
Royal Navy, commanding destroyer HMS Venomous
As soon as it was obvious the German Army had broken through and that the British forces, and of course a lot of French forces, were going to be pushed back on the coast and would possibly need evacuating, the powers-that-be back in the UK got this small-boat flotilla organisation going. It started in a rather haphazard way because all sorts of boats varying from little tiny family motorboats to much larger club boats and in fact almost everything that could steam across to the other side were operating it at first, rather on their own. Some of them never made it and a lot of them went to the wrong places, but eventually they got it channelled and then one came across lots of these little boats going to and fro, may of them with a dozen or so soldiers on board heading back to England resolutely. One quite often offered to take their crews of soldiers off them so that they could go back for another load but they said, 'No fear! We've got our twelve pongos and we're going back to England with them. You go and get your own!'
SQUADRON LEADER AITKEN
Dunkirk was a shambles: there was a huge pall of smoke which came from burning ships and burning oil installations, and aircraft were flying in this smoke and it was pretty hard to tell what sort they were. They'd come out, they'd see you and they'd go back in again, and equally if we saw a large formation of German fighters coming at two or three of us we'd dodge in and out of the smoke. We'd have occasional dogfights but it was very confusing. The weather was absolutely glorious – you could see for miles except for the smoke and the smoke was fantastic. We did not try to protect the troops over the beaches; that wasn't our job. Our job was to stop any aircraft getting to those troops because, believe me, if enemy aircraft had got superiority of the air at Dunkirk they would have massacred those fellows on that beach. Nothing could have been done – they had no guns, they had no anti-aircraft, and German bombers and German dive-bombers, the Stukas, would have just murdered them and we couldn't have got those troops off.
BERTIE GOOD
On the thirteenth trip we was off Gravelines when five German aircraft came down and had a practice. These planes came down and attacked us and dropped their bombs everywhere. We missed every one bar one that went right through three decks and we passed over it and it exploded astern. I organised the chaps to get all the bedding off the beds and we filled the bomb hole with all these fibre mattresses, but she was taking water and the port engine was out. The Ship's Writer was on the stern with a Lewis gun and it jammed. Well, he ran and as he did Jerry caught him. He'd pulled the smoke-room door back when Jerry practically cut him in half. There was five of my chaps all got wounded, one chap got seven bullets in his back and today he's still a cripple.
MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT
I started from headquarters in a small plane on 14th June 1940; I only knew that our troops were about to come close to the French capital. Only when arriving at the air space over Paris I observed that the large columns of German infantry were already entering the inner districts of the town. Remembering then the vain efforts to reach this highest goal during the First World War, my feelings of joy and exaltation became as strong that leaning forward I tapped the pilot on his shoulder and asked whether it would be possible to perform a landing on the place de la Concorde. After circling around a while and observing that there was no traffic at all in the centre of Paris we soon came down at the base of the Champs-Elysées.
GORDON WATERFIELD
The French government went to Bordeaux. There was terrible confusion because all the refugees landed up there eventually. There was a tremendous battle going on within the government and eventually of course Pétain came to the top and agreed to accept the German terms. It was a terribly depressing time and my French journalist friends were bitter against us for leaving. They said we ought to stay and see what happens and to report it. But we felt, well, there will be another battle, from England, and we'd better get back and join up or do whatever we can do.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER McBEATH
I had on my ship everything from the highest to the lowest. On the second to last trip, the night of 2nd to 3rd of June, we had on board General Harold Alexander and General Arthur Percival, who subsequently gained much more fame in North Africa and Malaya respectively. But quite a lot of colonels and people less than that would come up on to the bridge and they said, 'Do you mind me being up here? I'd like to see what's going on.' And you'd say no and when you spoke to them you got the impression that although they were naturally dejected at having been kicked out of Europe, there was no sort of idea that they'd been beaten. It was just, 'Well, we'll get them next time' sort of business.
J B PRIESTLEY
English novelist and broadcaster
It was just after Dunkirk so I took the theme, the idea of victory coming from defeat, which is a very English thing, I believe. We're great improvisers, we English. I'm not sure about the British but the English are, and that was important. Then, the feeling was very strong that now everything had happened we could really start, if you know what I mean, we're by ourselves now and really we can get on with this war, which was very strong after Dunkirk. And incidentally, which I didn't mention in the broadcast but I knew about, the way in which working people in the factories and so on worked till they dropped, after Dunkirk.
CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG
Englishwoman married to an anti-Nazi German lawyer
I think one could say that the actual defeat of France in six weeks came as a complete surprise to the generality of the German people. I found that there was a difference between my attitude to this defeat of France, and England being left alone. I didn't really ever feel that England was going to lose the war, even in those days when it looked as if it was absolutely certain that a landing would take place and they would be defeated. I couldn't believe that and realised afterwards that it was because I had been brought up in a feeling of victory after the First World War. I'd been brought up in the atmosphere of victory; all the Germans of my age had been brought up in the atmosphere of defeat. They were all therefore immensely surprised that they had, that victory was theirs. They were immensely surprised about the victory over France and equally worried about what was going to happen with England – could they win, couldn't they win – it was quite a different atmosphere.
LIEUTENANT PAOLO COLACICCHI
Italian Tenth Army in Africa
The Italian Air Force, even more than the Army, certainly felt that its equipment was bad and we were certainly not ready to go to war in 1940. It was a purely political movement by Mussolini who felt that Hitler was winning too much, too quickly and that if he didn't make some sort of gesture, take some sort of initiative, he would not be able to sit at the conference table. There was a rumour going round that he said, 'I want one thousand Italian dead to sit at the conference table,' and of course it cost many more than that.
MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS
The matter of the French fleet is a very, very big question, the French Navy being violently anti-British anyhow. Admiral Jean-François Darlan said, 'We'll never allow our ships to fall into German hands' – sounds very well and they probably believed it. But when I got back to London I said to Churchill that the one thing that's absolutely essential is to get the French fleet out of the hands of the French government because the day the Germans get hold of the fleet we've lost the war; we can't control the seas. On the day the Germans want the French fleet they'll say to the French government, 'We demand that the French fleet should be in such and such a harbour on such and such a day, if not we'll burn Marseilles on Monday, Lyons on Tuesday and so on, and we burn Paris on Saturday.' And who would resist that?
ANTHONY EDEN
So then we had to rebuild the Army at home, at least that was the responsibility of the War Office and of the munitions factories. And looking back it's quite extraordinary to register the attitude of the country at the time, and not least of the Army. I had, as Secretary of War, to go down and see the troops back from Dunkirk and I was expecting that there would certainly be some criticisms of the equipment, which was wanting, and the tanks, which had been very much wanting, and a rather general lack of preparedness in many respects. There was nothing of the kind, and even in the brigades which had been badly knocked about morale was extraordinarily high, and I think this applied to the whole country. So far as the Army was concerned I would think that this was really due to the fact that the soldiers felt that they'd measured the enemy, and all things being equal, in the form of equipment and so forth, and training, they were sure that they could defeat him. I don't suppose they'd put it into so many words, but that was the instinct I felt was there at the time.
J B PRIESTLEY
It was actually a feeling of relief, rather like – now you hadn't got to mess about with foreigners, you were on your own and this would really be much better. This goes back a long time in English history and I happened to be writing a book about the English at the time. In 1940 we felt – I think partly as a reaction from the Phoney War – everybody was miserable; I was intensely miserable, because nothing was happening and yet you knew something was happening behind the scenes, and it came at the time as a relief that it was all out in the open. Now we know what's going on and we had a lot of foreigners here because a lot of governments were here and good luck to them – but we're on our own. This gave people . . . there was almost a point of gaiety in it that was missing in, say, 1941 and 1942. I think the determination went right to the end of the war but a certain almost mad gaiety which you had in the spring of 1940 disappeared.