The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

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       Blooded

      In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the country’s politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the port’s burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.

      Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldier’s calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack gunners. It was not for this that he had studied Clausewitz. As he admitted ruefully, it was hardly ‘a shining form of warfare’.1

      The first six months of hostilities were spent in a field in Essex preparing for an invasion that never came. After a training stint in Hereford, he set off in February 1940 to Boulogne to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in charge of an advance party. The searchlight men ranked low in military esteem. A remark by a Guards officer that their equipment was ‘quite Christmassy’ rankled. Yet although he might have preferred a more dashing outfit, Neave liked his comrades, and his accounts of his service with them are affectionate and respectful. By the time he reached Calais he was a troop commander with the 2nd Searchlight Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment (RA), in charge of about eighty men. They included ‘a high proportion of older men with First World War experience. Most were industrial workers with a few clerks and professional men … All were vocal and democratic.’2

      They ‘did not see themselves as front-line soldiers’, and with good reason. When they arrived in France they were virtually untrained in infantry tactics and were armed with rifles that most of them had never fired. Their other weapons were some old-fashioned Lewis machine guns and a few Bren guns for use against aircraft. As defence against the German armour that spearheaded the Blitzkrieg, they had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It fired slim, .55 calibre rounds at a rate of ten a minute that could penetrate a light tank at 100 yards but were little use against the Panzer IIIs in the divisions bearing down on the BEF. In any case, no one in the unit was qualified to operate it.

      Nonetheless, what they lacked in regimental elan ‘they made up in willingness to fight’. Again and again in the four days of the siege they showed extraordinary guts. Unlike the previous generation of upper-class British men who had served in the war, Neave and his contemporaries had had few dealings with people outside their social level who were not servants or tradesmen. The army had given him his first intimate exposure to how other Britons thought and behaved. It taught him that patriotism, courage and gallantry were not the preserve of the privileged.

      Even after months of anticipation, the end of the Phoney War came as a shock. On 10 May 1940, the German forces that had massed along the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg plunged west. The main thrust came where the least preparation had been made to meet it – through the Ardennes. In three days, forces spearheaded by the Panzer divisions of Heinz Guderian cleared the forest and crossed the Meuse. On 13 May, aided by pulverising attacks by the Luftwaffe, they broke the French defences at Sedan. The armoured columns moved at a speed that surprised the Germans themselves, sweeping round behind the Allied armies arrayed around the Belgian border. On 19 May, the three divisions of Guderian’s XIX Corps were in Amiens, less than fifty miles from the Channel. The following day they reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme, driving home a wedge that divided the Allied armies in the Pas de Calais and Belgium from the French forces to the south.

      Utterly sure of his instincts and confident in his tactics, troops and tanks, Guderian was set on a move that, had it succeeded, might have brought Britain’s war to an end. His goal was the Channel ports, and in particular Dunkirk, which, once taken, would СКАЧАТЬ