NAVY NEWS, EVACUATION FROM FRANCE 70th ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT JULY 2010 “My last moments before capture


were spent fi ring a Lewis gun – which was fi xed to the side of this boat – at these tanks,” Lang recalled. “Quite a forlorn hope.”


The white fl ag was now fl ying over St Valéry. French troops had hoisted it. They had orders to cease fi ghting – although they hadn’t had the courtesy to tell the British. Victor Fortune was already in a foul


mood. His men had spent “all night on [the] beach” waiting for ships which never came. Now a note was handed to him by the senior French offi cer in the town, Général Marcel Ihler: Le feu cessera à huit heures – Cease fi ring at 8am. Fortune intended to fi ght on; he still had hopes that the Royal Navy might rescue the remnants of his division. The matter was beyond his control. The white fl ag on the steeple was followed by white fl ags throughout the port as the poilus laid down their arms and Rommel’s tanks had entered the edge of town. There was no hope of defending St Valéry- en-Caux any longer. Frenchmen and Britons, offi cers


and other ranks, all converged on the market square where a formal, if not orderly, surrender was conducted. One British general – Victor Fortune – and four French commanders surrendered to Erwin Rommel. One French general buttonholed the German commander. Which division had captured them? Rommel told him it was the 7 Panzer. “Damn it!” snapped the Frenchman.


“The ghost division!” He explained that his unit had been chased across France and Belgium by Rommel’s men. “We’ve repeatedly run into this division, wandering all over France like a ghost.” The nickname stuck.


At least 12,000 men, 4,000 of them British, fell into Rommel’s hands at


St Valéry. “What was particularly surprising was the sang froid with which the British offi cers accepted their fate,” the German general wrote. Despite their predicament Fortune, and especially his staff, joked and laughed – although they did not appreciate the intrusions of a propaganda fi lm crew accompanying Rommel’s division. The senior captives were invited to dine with their captors at an open-air lunch. They declined. Rather less civility was shown the ordinary soldiers. At Veules-les-Roses, Gerhard Starcke of 31 Panzer Regiment – Roten Teufel (Red Devils) – watched thousands of British and French prisoners being marched away. “They have not merely thrown away their weapons, their also disarmed inwardly as well,” he wrote. “Many are wounded, their uniforms


torn.” A corporal who had tried in vain to swim to one of the waiting Cycle ships fi led past Starcke dejected. “The Red Devils are hell,” he muttered. And so ends the story of the 51st Highland Division in France. “It was a terrible disappointment,” William James wrote a decade later. Dynamo had been distinguished by supreme organisation, courage, determination and luck. Cycle was remarkable only for smatterings of courage and determination. You could blame the mist. You could blame the Germans. You could blame Whitehall. Admiral James chose to blame the French for this “wretched affair”; they had dithered and consistently refused to allow any evacuation. By the time permission came, St Valéry was surrounded.


marched into captivity, 40 miles away in Le Havre, thousands of British troops were being embarked, largely


T


he end of the Highlanders was not the end of the evacuations from France. As the 51st


on steamers and ferries. More than 11,000 men were rescued – the last overnight on June 12-13. The next day, German troops marched into the port. They found the oil tanks around the harbour in fl ames, the cranes and quayside installations smashed, and the streets fi lled with abandoned British trucks and cars, most undamaged, ready to be loaded on ships which never came. Civilians looted crates of raincoats, stole cushions from cars, drained petrol from vehicles. In short, anything not nailed down ended up in a Frenchman’s home. For the soldiers who’d escaped


Le Havre, salvation was short-lived. Within hours, 9,000 of them were back on French soil, dropped in Cherbourg across the Seine Bay to continue the struggle. But for how much longer? French resistance had collapsed. Rommel’s panzers – on the move again towards Calvados and the Cotentin peninsula – was scything through Normandy. “I can’t believe there’ll be any more serious fi ghting,” the general wrote to his wife. “People are glad that for them, the war is over. We’ve even been presented with fl owers by the roadside in some places.” The Battle of France, 7 Panzer’s commander observed, had turned into “a lightning tour of France”. The lanes of Calvados were “strewn with destroyed guns, with ammunition and steel helmets, with foreign clothes and letters,” German soldier Bernd Hardeweg wrote. He continued:


Bottles lay there, half consumed. Household goods. Dogs shot. Horses with bloated stomachs, stinking. Curtains hung on telephone poles. Like fog, the smell of fuel hung over the road. A dead person lay with her face turned down, doll- like in death. The tiny hand


was stretched out pointlessly into the fl owery grass. She was yellow like wax and reached for something. There was a mass grave next to a bomb crater, Frenchmen covered with earth in a hurry. Armoured cars, motorcycles, guns, machine-guns, shell cases, cartridges, ammunition. Ruined, done in, abandoned – a picture of appalling collapse.


Indeed France’s war was nearly


over. On June 14, German troops marched into Paris. The following day, they launched an all-out assault on the Maginot Line. That same day the Admiralty took a momentous decision. It would bring the rest of the British Expeditionary Force home. Operation Aerial, as it was codenamed, demanded planning – and evacuation – on a scale comparable with Dunkirk. It succeeded. And it is largely forgotten, save for one tragedy.


James found his burden lessened somewhat when it came to executing Aerial. He only had to rescue troops from Cherbourg and St Malo. James emptied the ports of soldiers quickly – and none too soon. Late on the afternoon of June 15, seven Ju88s appeared over the latter harbour with orders to wreak havoc. Pilot Peter Stahl watched his comrades attack, before beginning his own dive against the warehouses on the quayside. He ignored the anti-aircraft shells exploding all around his dive-bomber – the smell of burnt cordite fi lled the cockpit – and carried out a textbook attack against his target. As the bombs were released and the Ju88 pulled out of its dive – exerting four to fi ve Gs on the crew – Stahl’s dorsal gunner


A


fter the exertions of Operation Cycle, which had been such a disappointment, William


yelled with delight: Volltreffer – bull’s eye. Peter Stahl turned his aircraft for home, away from the setting sun, overjoyed that his fi rst operational sortie had been a success. Despite Peter Stahl’s elation, the


Luftwaffe’s attacks on Cherbourg achieved little. William James succeeded in arranging the rescue of 30,630 men from the port at the tip of the Cotentin peninsula “without the loss of a single life or damage to a single ship” the offi cial historian noted proudly. The evacuation of St Malo was no less successful – or bloodless. A further 21,474 troops were lifted off, thanks in part to the umbrella the RAF provided, keeping German bombers at bay.


A far more onerous task fell to William James’ counterpart in Plymouth, Martin Dunbar-Nasmith. The Commander-in-Chief of the Western Approaches was a legendary fi gure who owed his popular fame not to a soap advert but deeds in battle. In command of submarine HMS E11, he had been the scourge of the Marmara, negotiating the hazardous Dardanelles to target Turkish shipping. Which he did, seemingly with impunity. It earned him the VC. A generation later, the poacher turned gamekeeper. It was now his task to keep submarines at bay and safeguard shipping in the Western Approaches. For now, all thoughts of prosecuting


the U-boat war were put on hold. Dunbar-Nasmith was to muster what shipping he could and evacuate troops from Brest, St Nazaire and La Pallice. Dunbar-Nasmith rounded up liners


and troopships and sent them across the Channel, protected by destroyers and minesweepers. The evacuation of Brest was a


rather hurried if successful affair. By nightfall on June 17, more than 32,000


iii


troops, many of them RAF personnel, had been picked up by several large troopships, including the former liners Arandora Star and Otranto. Convinced the great Brittany port was about to fall to the panzers, the evacuation was halted. Brest did not fall for another two days. And still French soil was not


devoid of Tommies. There were anywhere between 40,000 and 60,000 Commonwealth troops strung out along the Loire, making their way for the estuary. When they reached St Nazaire, they waited in an orderly fashion in the port’s basin for smaller craft – warships, tugs, drifters, small ferries – to carry them out to the half a dozen or so liners and troopships waiting three or four miles offshore in Quiberon Bay. The evacuation began promisingly.


More than 12,000 troops embarked on a quartet of liners and steamers in the bay. In the midst of this bustle arrived


two former Cunard liners – the ‘ia’ at the end of their names immediately revealed their owner’s identity. The 20,000-ton Franconia and the slightly older – and smaller – Lancastria had both been converted into troopships, and had both brought troops safely home from Norway in the wake of the German advance through Scandinavia. As a French trawler guided the transporters past the island of Belle- Île-en-Mer, a single Junkers 88 – by far the best German bomber of the day – made for the liners. Its bombs fell astern of the Franconia. They landed close enough to lift her out of the water, knocking out one of her engines. After temporary repairs, she returned to Liverpool. Not so the Lancastria. She dropped anchor in the roadstead.


 Continued on page iv


● Général Marcel Ihler (wearing a distinctive kepi) surrenders to Erwin Rommel in St Valéry on June 12 1940. The ill-starred 51st Highland Division’s commander General Victor Fortune is on the right of the photograph


● (Above) Le Havre burns after a German air raid and (below) the fi shing port of St Valéry-en-Caux ablaze following a bombardment by 7 Panzer Division


man.” edge. win Rommel


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