ii NAVY NEWS, EVACUATION FROM FRANCE 70th ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT JULY 2010


fter the uninspiringly-titled Fall Gelb – Plan Yellow – which had entrapped the Allied armies at Dunkirk, the German military machine devised Fall Rot – Plan Red – to fi nish off France. Red would deliver two blows. One thrust along the Channel coast, the other a few days later into the heart of the republic. At dawn on June 5, Hitler’s Army struck. On the very extremity of the German front, St Valéry-sur- Somme, a motorised brigade and infantry division ran headlong into Major General Victor Fortune’s 51st Highland Division. The fate of one battalion, 7th


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Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, speaks for the heroism and sacrifi ce of British troops this day. By nightfall this Wednesday, they had lost nearly two dozen offi cers and 500 men, killed, wounded or missing. June 5 1940 was, the unit’s war diarist noted that evening, “the blackest day in the history of the battalion”. Such sacrifi ce did not impress the irascible Maxime Weygand. As the 51st fell back in the face of overwhelming German pressure, the French generalissimo railed at the failure of the British troops and above all their leader for retreating. “Your general should be called Misfortune,” he sneered at a British liaison offi cer. Maxime Weygand had ordered his men to “hold fast to the soil of France without thought of retreat”. Many did. But some did not. After several days’ rest, the assault troops of 7 Panzer Division slipped across the Somme at fi rst light on the fi fth. Within four hours engineers had thrown a bridge across the river. By dusk, the armour had punched its way through ten miles of French-held territory. As he had done throughout the campaign in France, the division’s dashing commander, one Erwin Rommel, never allowed the advance to slacken.


Cooler British heads realised the 51st Highlanders faced encirclement. Once again, the gaze of British generals in France turned to the Royal Navy.


waterfront, the offi ces of Admiral William James were buzzing. To the Vice Admiral Dover had fallen the grave responsibility of evacuating the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk.


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His armour avoided the roads wherever possible, ploughing through fi elds of tall corn or the meadows of the lower Somme valley. The panzers passed blazing petrol tankers, riderless horses, columns of prisoners – some of them drunk. In the June heat, the vehicles of 7 Panzer trailed huge clouds of dust. “The enemy,” Rommel reported to his masters as night fell, “has been torn apart.” His panzers were bound for the Seine at Rouen. So too the armour of his neighbouring division, 5 Panzer. In doing so, they would cut off British and French troops in the Pays de Caux, the chalk plateau between the mouths of the Somme and the Seine. The encirclement of Allied forces at Dunkirk would be repeated – albeit on a smaller scale. Instead of ordering a withdrawal behind the greatest of France’s arteries, the only orders from an increasingly hysterical General Weygand were: hold on. “It’s the decisive battle of the war,” the French commander insisted. “Every man must stand and fi ght.


now been passed to the Commander- in-Chief Portsmouth for a new rescue mission, Operation Cycle: the evacuation of Allied troops on the Le Havre peninsula. ‘Bubbles’ James was not cut from the same cloth as his counterpart in Dover. Bertram Ramsay was an organiser. Admiral Sir William James was a leader of men in the more traditional sense. For more than a quarter of a century he had held commands, served as a fl ag offi cer or executive offi cer. When his career allowed, he delved into naval history, publishing numerous tomes. As for the nickname, that came from a painting by his grandfather of the fi ve-year- old William entranced by a bubble he had just blown. The image was subsequently used to advertise Pears soap... hence the sobriquet, which the admiral detested. Now, however was not the time to be entranced. James hurriedly gathered a staff of junior offi cers and merchant sailors to round up “an armada of vessels of all sorts and sizes”. South coast ports were raided and an assortment of cross-Channel ferries, Dutch barges, yachts and pleasure cruisers, tugs and cutters, 200 in all were ready to sail for France by June 8, shepherded by a handful of destroyers. They set sail for Le Havre “in high heart”.


By the time the Cycle force sailed, German troops already stood on the Seine. Erwin Rommel again. First at Elbeuf, a dozen miles upstream of Rouen, then at the great cathedral city. Every crossing of the Seine was gone – destroyed either by the French or by the Luftwaffe, which had pounded Rouen. The 12th-Century cathedral still stood, undamaged, as did many of the mediaeval buildings surrounding it. But elsewhere the city burned and the German soldiers looted abandoned French Army trucks. “Everything is free – like in a large department store,” German staff offi cer Hans Meier-Welcker wrote. “Everything is searched by the troops and they take what they fancy – as long as they can carry it. They drag full bags of coffee from heavy goods vehicles, shirts, stockings, blankets, boots and countless other goods. What you have to save up for and pay a high price everywhere else, here you can pick it


Along the south coast, orders had


n Semaphore Tower, the imposing naval


dominated the Portsmouth base headquarters which


Each tank must become a fortress! Every man must attack!”


up on the streets or on the ground.” As Rouen burned, so too the port


of Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine. “The atmosphere was desolate,” recalled F J G Hewitt, First Lieutenant of HMS Bulldog which had arrived in the Seine Bay ready to carry out Operation Cycle. “Oil tanks were burning on shore with huge black clouds of smoke rising further inland.


“Nobody from shore seemed to take much notice of our arrival – the only information we gleaned was that the Army had lost touch with its forward units.” Such chaos and indecision would characterise the evacuation.


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Portsmouth. His fl otilla had reached French shores, but was still waiting for instructions to evacuate – command on the other side of the Channel rested with a French admiral... and the French admiral was fl apping. Bubbles seized the initiative. He commandeered a motor torpedo boat – commanded by his son, although the admiral only realised it as the craft left harbour – and sped for France.


onday June 10 dawned with William James pacing his operations room


in


riders, wearing long waterproof coats, walked straight out until the water was over their knees – I had to call them back.


brief. The sight of a fl otilla of 200 small and large ships off the Normandy coast quickly caught the eye of the Germans. Their guns engaged – and damaged – HMS Ambuscade. She fared better than two B-class destroyers ordered to close the French coast – Boadicea and Bulldog. The former also came under enemy


fi re as she picked up four dozen British and French troops from the beach at Veulettes, fi ve miles from St Valéry. As Bulldog moved in to support her sister, the two warships were bounced by nine Stukas.


The frolicking in the Channel was


As the boat approached Le Havre, James could see the port’s oil tanks still burning from a heavy air raid three days earlier. The air was shaken constantly by the sound of explosions – engineers were at work destroying the port installations. Le Havre was home to a headquarters


staff of more than 1,000 British troops. James struggled against a torrent of refugees to reach the HQ. On the wall, a huge chart revealed the plight of the Highlanders, now cut off. There was a constant stream of despatch riders coming and going. None brought good tidings. It was clear to the admiral that the 51st Division would never reach Le Havre. There was only one hope of extricating the Highlanders:


The dive bombers split into two groups: three circled Boadicea, the rest focused their attention on Bulldog. Three bombs struck Bulldog, wrecking her steering gear and causing carnage in the boiler and engine rooms – even though one of the bombs did not explode. Boadicea suffered even graver damage. Two direct hits caused the loss of power and infl icted heavy casualties below decks. She would probably have sunk but for a blanket of fog which shrouded Norman shores. It prevented any further attacks by the Luftwaffe – and allowed Ambuscade to tow Boadicea back to Portsmouth. Bulldog’s engineers were able to restore power. She limped back to Portsmouth, where a bomb disposal expert from HMS Vernon was waiting for the ship. He made safe the unexploded bomb in the boiler room. The dive-bombers had released their ‘eggs’ too late; the timer on the fuses had not run out. It was a mistake Argentinian bombers would repeat four decades later...


port of St Valéry-en-Caux, 40 miles up the coast. St Valéry is no Dunkirk. It is no Le Havre. It is not even a Dieppe. It is a small fi shing port of fewer than 5,000 souls, nestling between towering chalk cliffs. The harbour is small, its entrance, fl anked by two piers, narrow. The beaches either side are small and strewn with pebbles. Only at low tide does the sand materialise. The only way to embark troops at St Valéry was using small craft; the harbour was too small for destroyers and transporters. It was late afternoon by the time


the


Co-ordinating this disparate force was far from easy. Few of the vessels were fi tted with radio. The persistent mist – which had saved the three destroyers the previous afternoon – rendered signalling by fl ags or even Aldis lamps useless. Megaphones were the last resort. Some skippers heard the instructions and closed to within sight of the port. Many did not. To the travails caused by the elements were added the travails caused by man. William James was ordering his ships to evacuate the 51st. The Highlanders were


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the fi rst ships of Admiral James’ fl otilla, led by HMS Bulldog, arrived off St Valéry. A small rowing boat with half a dozen men dressed in khaki approached the destroyer. They clambered aboard Bulldog. In thick Scottish brogue, they told the ship’s First Lieutenant they were men of the 51st Highland Division. They had ‘borrowed’ the boat... and intended to row to England.


As HMS Bulldog picked up a handful of Highlanders, Erwin Rommel’s vanguard reached the coast at Les Petits Dalles, ten miles along the coast from St Valéry. “The engines and the rattle of tank tracks fall silent on the coast,” one of Rommel’s signallers wrote. “The marvellous coastal terrain and the sublime view of the Atlantic are, to us, the most wonderful reward.” Panzer regiment commander Oberst (Colonel) Karl Rothenburg drove his Panzer Mk III through the sea wall and on to the beach, while his commander fl ashed a terse message to the rest of the division: Am at sea. A few months later, he described the moment:


The sight of the sea with the cliffs on both sides thrilled every man. We climbed out of our


vehicles and walked down the shingle beach to the water’s edge until the water lapped at our boots. Several dispatch


aerial support after constant hounding by German bombers.


refused to send it. It also refused to authorise an evacuation, determined to send the French government a signal that London would not desert its Allies. The men on the ground in St Valéry pressed ahead with plans for embarkation after dark on the 11th.


Just as in Dunkirk a fortnight earlier, morale and discipline in St Valéry were beginning to break down.“Thousands of drunken French soldiers were looting cafes, shops and houses, blazing away at anything with their rifl es,” one sergeant with the Seaforth Highlanders recalled.


As the poilus drank themselves into a stupor, 7 Panzer spent the morning regrouping. Come mid-day, the armour rolled once more, bound for St Valéry.


Le Tot, 2½ miles outside St Valéry, by ferocious British resistance. While Rommel’s infantry grappled with the hastily-constructed strongpoints, the panzers simply bypassed them and made for the cliffs overlooking the small port. From their lofty vantage point, the Germans could observe lively activity in St Valéry. “The French and British,” wrote Hans von Luck, in command of a reconnaissance battalion, “seemed to be preparing for embarkation.”


●♦● They found their way blocked at


demanding Whitehall


y fi rst light on June 11, the bulk of the Cycle force was mustering off St Valéry.


After several hours in discussion with the Highlanders’ commander Victor Fortune, Cdr Robert Elkins returned to the seafront to see how preparations for the evacuation with progressing. Elkins had been hurriedly dispatched to France to serve as the 51st’s naval liaison offi cer. If there was indecision elsewhere, it did not extend to the naval commander who busied himself – and his small team – with plans for evacuation both from the harbour and from the small beaches. Word of the impending rescue had spread around St Valéry. There were now hundreds of French soldiers milling around on the small west beach, waiting either for salvation – or to surrender. On the clifftop a soldier was waving frantically, urging the soldiers to down weapons and join him. Robert Elkins was suspicious. His suspicions were confi rmed when he spied a German helmet and the barrel of a panzer peeking over the cliff. He grabbed a French rifl e and ran down the pier, urging British troops on it to destroy all their secret equipment. Machine- guns raked the mole “but I was running very fast and they missed,” Elkins recalled. However fast he ran, however, he could never reach the end of the pier alive. He threw himself behind granite boulders on the beach and contemplated his fate. “For half an hour he lay behind a pile of stones, pretending to be dead,” Erwin Rommel wrote.


fi nally surrendered. He was taken to 7 Panzer’s staff, where one of Rommel’s offi cers berated him for not giving up sooner, sparing the lives of many of the men on the mole. “Would you have acted any differently in my position?” he snapped back. Erwin Rommel was rather more gracious than his staff. He sent for a bottle of wine and shared it with Robert Elkins before the latter joined more than one thousand French and British soldiers captured by 7 Panzer Division this day. Despite this large-scale surrender,


St Valéry was far from captured. The Germans held only part of the small port on the western side of harbour. There were still thousands of Allied troops in the heart of town and in the port – and they planned to escape.


Under a white fl ag, Rommel sent negotiators into St Valéry: surrender or face an all-out assault at 9pm. The calls fell on deaf ears. “It was mainly the British who turned down all suggestions to surrender,” Rommel wrote. “They had their men heavily engaged building barricades and moving large numbers of guns and machine-guns into position around St Valéry.”


Back in Semaphore Tower, a fl urry of desperate signals from the 51st was handed to William James: Situation critical. When can we expect boats? Running short of ammunition. And fi nally, at dusk on the 11th, a terse plea: Consider tonight last possible chance of evacuation of 51 Division. Twenty-four thousand men – half of them British, half of them French – needed rescuing.


Admiral James responded with a pledge to extricate the Highlanders: Evacuation from St Valéry is to commence this evening. All available transports are being sent.


At 9pm, as promised, 7 Panzer began its bombardment of St Valéry, directing its onslaught fi rst at the pier, then at the town itself. “The effect,” wrote Rommel, “was especially devastating.” To the east of St Valéry, 5 Panzer was compounding the misery of the trapped Allied troops, squeezing the ever- shrinking pocket. The besieged forces defended doggedly. “Each house has to be taken individually,” a German war correspondent wrote. “Each wall is a nest of enemy resistance.” But it was an ill-matched struggle. The headquarters of 5 Panzer intercepted a radio message


Pinned down on all sides, Elkins


from British troops broadcast en clair: To our left artillery, to our right tanks. This is the end!


After dark on June 11, thousands of British soldiers made for the beach and harbour at St Valéry, awaiting deliverance. Fog and mist turned at times to drizzle. The buildings around the harbour burned in the wake of Rommel’s bombardment. Tracer from German machine-guns occasionally fl ashed across the harbour, striking the quays and pier.


Into this hell sailed the tug Fairplay towing several drifters. In the glow of the fi res, the fl otilla quickly came under attack from German mortars and machine-guns. Two drifters were sunk. The rest abandoned the rescue mission and turned for home waters. Not so the destroyers Codrington and Saladin, observing proceedings in the small port. Their captains had watched the fl otilla of drifters move in. They had seen the hail of steel poured down on the small craft and drawn the obvious conclusion: St Valéry was a death trap. The force moved four miles along the coast to Veules-les-Roses where things were much quieter.


Over the next six hours they embarked 1,200 Britons waiting on the shore, plus some 900 Frenchmen. When the guns of 5 Panzer Division found the range of the ships, they set sail.


It wasn’t just the Germans who had seen the armada mustered off Veules. The men of the 51st, who had waited on the beach and in the harbour of St Valéry, also observed the activity. Some decided to ignore orders and seek salvation. Capt Derek Lang of the Cameron Highlanders, accompanied by “a number of Jocks” struggled along the shoreline. The foot of the cliffs was littered with corpses – desperate soldiers had tried to climb or abseil down the sheer faces to reach the waiting ships. When Lang reached Veules he found a solitary “large trawler- type fi shing boat” run aground on the sand. “A seething mass of human beings” had forced their way aboard the Hebe 2, a Dutch coaster, hoping that the tide would carry her out. The Germans proved faster than Nature. They soon appeared on the cliff top and began shooting at the stranded vessel.


Half a dozen craft reached Veules.


“We climbed out of our vehicles and walked down the shingle beach to the water’s e The sight of the sea thrilled every m– Generalmajor Erw


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