The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ combined to prevent him from maintaining the headlong pace. Not least was the caution of his superiors at Army High Command HQ, shared by Hitler himself, who feared the speed of the advance would expose XIX Corps to a devastating flank attack.

      The Germans need not have worried. The Allied commanders were reluctant to credit the strength and extent of the breakthrough. The eventual move to counter it, a Franco-British drive south into the enemy flank around Arras on 21 May, achieved some initial success before being beaten off. However, it was to have important consequences. The action further reduced the appetite for risk in Berlin. Guderian was ordered to halt, dashing his hopes of a lightning victory.

      On the day before the Allied counter-attack, the 2nd Searchlight Battery (2nd SL) was in Arras. That morning they received orders to move to Calais, seventy miles to the north-west. As they left, there was little sense of alarm in the British garrison. They drove off down long straight roads past Vimy Ridge and the flat fields that only twenty-two years before had been a vast killing zone. Neave travelled in the front seat of an old khaki-painted Austin Seven alongside his driver, Gunner Cooper. Cooper was large and eager to see action, frustrated at being diverted away from the defence of Arras to what looked like another spell of tedious duty. Neave was inclined to agree. He had heard that there were Germans around but he and his comrades did not believe ‘that [they] had broken through … We were confident that, at most, a few armoured cars, a few motor-cyclists or a few light tanks were threatening the Allied lines of communication.’3 In fact, the countryside to the east and west was filling up with Panzers.

      They spent the night under the plane trees of the market square in the mediaeval town of Ardres, ten miles south of Calais, and arrived the following morning at their destination, a village called Coulogne on the south-eastern approach to the port. Neave set up his HQ in the Mairie. No bombs fell that night and he wrote later that on going to bed he ‘refused to believe that our role in Calais would be other than anti-aircraft defence’. But then he was ‘twenty-four, unmilitary, with opinions of my own’.

      Neave was being a little hard on himself. He had tried his best at soldiering, the theory as well as the practice. His failure to predict what was about to unfold was unsurprising. He and everyone else deployed in the defence of Calais were the victims of the extraordinary complacency of those in overall charge of operations, an attitude that was matched by an incompetence and vacillation that was surprising even to those familiar with the British military’s capacity for deadly muddle. Years later, he made a detailed study of the episode using official papers and the accounts of participants. There will always be debate about what effect the siege of Calais had on the shape of the Battle of France. What has never been in doubt is that the direction of the defence from on high was a disgrace.

      The German victory in the west has come to seem a preordained inevitability. That was not how it appeared at the time. The forces were evenly balanced. In the all-important realm of armour, the French had better tanks than the Germans and they had more of them. The Germans, though, made the maximum use of their resources. They were better organised and had better communications, exemplified by the radio links between individual tanks and from ground to air which could concentrate forces relatively swiftly to maximum effect. Most of all, they had a winning attitude. They were attuned to victory. Medium-level commanders were encouraged to initiate action without waiting for orders, and their men were eager to fight. These benefits on their own did not ensure success. But luck was on the Germans’ side, and their good fortune was compounded by the slow reactions and bad decisions of the Allied command. In Neave’s sector of the battle, both were on constant display.

      He arrived as the scramble began to prevent catastrophe. Following the capture of Abbeville on the 20th, reinforcements were ordered across the water to the Channel ports. The 20th Guards Brigade was sent to Boulogne. Calais was to be defended by the 30th Infantry Brigade. Firepower against the Panzers would be provided by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and a Royal Artillery anti-tank battery (229th). However, there would be no field artillery and the huge demands placed on the RAF meant that air cover was sparse. The meagre existing garrison, which consisted of a platoon of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and some anti-aircraft batteries, was to be boosted by three infantry battalions of the newly formed 30th Infantry Brigade. The force was under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a thoughtful and determined forty-two-year-old, whose reputation among his peers was high.

      This seemed like a healthy addition to the defences. However, as Neave judged in his post-war study, ‘Nicholson faced an impossible task … Many among the 3,000 British troops were untrained for battle. They had neither proper equipment, arms or ammunition … [he] had no field artillery and very few tanks. His only additional support were 800 French soldiers and sailors and a handful of Dutch and Belgians.’4 The first infantry battalion to embark was the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, a territorial motorcycle combination unit, which arrived with the 3rd RTR and 229 RA Anti-Tank Battery aboard the SS City of Canterbury in the early afternoon of 22 May. Confusion and miscalculation meant that the QVR arrived without their machines, transport or three-inch mortars. The two-inch mortars were stowed, but with only smoke bombs for ammunition. Four of the RA battery’s anti-tank guns were somehow left behind. Unloading the RTR’s forty-eight light and medium tanks was maddeningly slow, and the inefficient way that equipment had been stowed on embarkation meant the fast-moving Cruiser IIIs were the last to come off. The armament – three-pounder cannon and Vickers machine guns – had been packed in mineral jelly, which had to be laboriously cleaned off before a shot could be fired. The other two regular infantry battalions – the 1st Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, and the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) – arrived the next day. They were highly trained, but the Rifle Brigade had only half its ammunition and transport. Even when allowances were made for the inevitable balls-ups inherent in a last-minute embarkation, it was, as a young tanker officer remarked subsequently to Neave, ‘the most extraordinary way to go to war.’5

      Nicholson was famously unflappable. However, Neave reckoned he ‘must have been deeply troubled’ by ‘a stream of contradictory orders’. In the course of the siege, from across the Channel came instructions to send his tanks first this way, then the other. At various times he was told to prepare to withdraw, then to stand and fight. The desperation of the situation was obvious to London, and Nicholson ‘asked repeatedly for artillery, ammunition and food: he had explained his situation and the enemy’s.’ In addition, he had been ‘visited by two generals, an admiral and a naval commodore’.

      Neave wondered, ‘if they knew that they were so unfairly matched, why did they not send the reinforcements for which Nicholson pleaded?’ The answer was that from hour to hour events slipped further and further beyond the Allies’ control, so they were constantly reacting to situations that had already changed for the worse. As it finally became clear that the entire BEF was facing a choice between annihilation or evacuation, the fate of the Calais garrison became a secondary consideration. Instead, it was allotted a sacrificial role and the dubious honour of fighting to the death.

      The halt order given to Guderian was rescinded late on the night of 21 May. He was to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais, fifty miles to the north and west. During 22 May, the fresh winds of the storm brewing on the horizon began to be felt by Neave and his battery, ensconced around Coulogne. The village began to fill up with refugees, seeking to escape from a German advance coming from they knew not where.

      On that day his chief, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Goldney, who commanded 1st Searchlight Regiment, moved up from Lille to Ardres to take control of the air defences of Calais. Goldney ordered all searchlight detachments to concentrate on their troop headquarters – the Mairie at Coulogne in the case of Neave’s outfit. He would now be in charge of sixty or seventy men, armed with rifles, two Bren guns and one Boys anti-tank rifle, to defend the villages which had become the outer ring of the port’s defences. His men got to work digging trenches on the south and СКАЧАТЬ