Both Hitler and his generals later pretended that the spectacular Panzer drive across France had always been their intention. Historians have known for decades that this was not true, although the advance from Sedan to Abbeville was the preferred option of the more ambitious Panzer leaders. In fact several attempts were made by OKW to halt the Panzers as they far outdistanced the foot-slogging bulk of the German Army. Finally out of supplies and badly overextended, Guderian called an unofficial rest day on May 21 and then the next day swung north toward the Channel ports. By nightfall the leading elements of the 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions had reached the outskirts of Boulogne and Calais. Dunkirk, the last major port still secure for the British, was only twenty-five miles away along the coast.
Hitler and his service chiefs met on May 20 to congratulate themselves on the success of Case Yellow and to plan the next phase of the defeat of France, an exploitation southward in “Case Red.” Since the navy had contributed little to the Battle of France, Grand Admiral Raeder raised the invasion of Britain with Hitler after the meeting and again the next day, but Hitler was not interested and Raeder himself knew that the idea was impractical. All this changed a day later, with the news of a major German disaster.
Late on May 20, after considerable shouting and telephoning, Gort agreed to a British attack next day southeastward from Arras to be made by two divisions, in conjunction with a French attack coming northward from Amiens to meet it, thus cutting the German Panzer corridor in two. Entrusted with the British attack was Maj. Gen. Gifford “Q” Martel, a veteran armored warfare specialist commanding the 50th Northumbrian Division. Such was the state of the BEF’s reserves that Martel had to scrape together troops from five different divisions, plus the 1st Army Tank Brigade, of two battalions (including a handful of the precious Matildas). His attack was made by two battle groups mixing armor, infantry, and artillery, swinging parallel to each other a few miles apart, counterclockwise around to the west of Arras before setting off southeastward, altogether about a division’s worth of troops.
On the morning of May 21 neither Martel nor Franklyn knew that four Panzer divisions had already driven past the open southern flank of the Arras defenses, and that another was approaching fast. This was the 7th Panzer Division, commanded by one of the political appointees that Hitler found useful to curb the power of the German military aristocracy. Maj. Gen. Erwin Rommel was not a Nazi party member, but owed his position to his support for Hitler and his military advice to the SA in the 1930s. His reward for this, and for commanding Hitler’s escort in the Polish campaign, had been one of the precious Panzer divisions. Lacking any experience with armor, Rommel was also vain and ambitious (he took his own publicity photographs in action), and Goebbels’s propaganda machine was preparing to lionize him. Rommel had been lucky on the Meuse, getting his division across despite a near failure. Now he had allowed the 7th Panzer Division to become strung out into four widely separate columns: his armored regiment leading—mainly Czech-built Panzer 38(t) tanks—followed separately by his two infantry regiments in trucks, and then the artillery and the bulk of the divisional transport, all moving on a collision course with Martel’s attack.
The first clash came during mid-afternoon. Rommel’s armor missed Martel’s columns entirely and ended up northwest of Arras, completely out of touch. Then the two British battle groups slammed into the remaining columns, tanks against unsupported infantry. Realizing too late what was happening, Rommel positioned himself on the high ground west of Arras—marked as “Rommel’s Hill” by the massive monument erected since the war—and tried to scrape together a defense. Urgent radio appeals brought his tanks racing southward, only to run into an antitank screen positioned by Martel for that very purpose. A few minutes later and the British tanks were over Rommel’s Hill and into the division’s supply train, creating havoc. Rommel’s aide, Lieutenant Most, described how “he died before he could be carried to cover beside the gun position. The death of this brave man, a magnificent soldier, touched me deeply.”
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Only later did Martel learn that it had all been for nothing. Just before his attack commenced, the French had informed Gort that they could not move until the next day, and the Panzer corridor was still open. Two nights later Gort pulled Martel and Franklyn’s divisions back from Arras, covering the southern flank of the pocket into which the BEF was being squeezed.
The loss of most of the 7th Panzer Division meant considerable German redeployment. On May 22 the Germans also learned of a new British plan, “Operation Dynamo.” The information came from several sources, including a high-ranking British officer who was also a German agent. The attack at Arras had been only the preliminary to Dynamo, which was an elaborate Anglo-French trap involving six fresh divisions (one of them Canadian) together with massed Matilda tanks, ready to attack as the Panzers advanced farther. On top of the existing anxieties at OKW this was simply too much. The next day, Göring asked Hitler if the Luftwaffe, not the army, should have the triumph of wiping out the BEF. On May 24, Col. Gen. Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, told Hitler of Dynamo. Hitler’s reaction was that the Luftwaffe should have its head, permitting Rundstedt an “administrative halt,” and a more cautious advance next day. It was revealed only years later that Dynamo was a British deception plan, and that the cherished German spy had been a double agent. It bought the British perhaps a day; but this would turn out not to be enough.
Also on May 23, Hitler summoned his service chiefs once more to demand a plan for the invasion of Britain. What exactly changed his mind is unknown, but revenge for Rommel was certainly uppermost in his ranting, bitter speech that day. Under pressure from OKH and OKW, Grand Admiral Raeder reluctantly put forward “Case Lion” for landing two complete armies—over 260,000 men, 30,000 vehicles, and 60,000 horses—on a broad front from Ramsgate to Weymouth. This was violently rejected by Hitler when Raeder (who was hoping to scotch the idea altogether) explained that it could not be mounted until September, and then only if the Luftwaffe could achieve complete air supremacy. Faced by Hitler’s demands for an alternative, OKW admitted with some embarrassment to the existence of Manstein’s “Case Smith.” On May 25, Manstein was summoned by Hitler and ordered to implement his plan, pulling his XXXVIII Army Corps out of the line to do so, while Göring was told that his new priority was to defeat Britain by bombing from the air. In London on the same day, the Chiefs of Staff Committee, chaired by the First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, advised the Prime Minister that “should the enemy succeed in establishing a force, with its vehicles, firmly ashore, the army in the United Kingdom, which is very short of equipment, has not got the offensive power to drive it out.”
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Führer Directive 16, authorization for what was now “Case Sea Lion,” was signed by Hitler on June 1. With battles continuing in France, Belgium, and even Norway, Manstein had just over six weeks to make Sea Lion a reality, and as he soon found out, the “full powers” that Hitler had granted him only provoked hostility and resistance from others. OKW promised two fully equipped infantry divisions, the 6th Mountain Division and 17th Division. Student, his arm in a sling from a wound sustained in Rotterdam, was more than happy for his 7th Air Division and the gliders of the Airlanding Assault Regiment to take part. Indeed, Student wanted an immediate airborne landing in southern England, but with his troops still spread all over the Low Countries, this was not a practical proposition. Göring promised 750 Junkers 52 transport aircraft for July, enough to lift at least one division and keep it resupplied by air. The final element of the XXXVIII Army Corps was—at Hitler’s insistence—a reformed and renamed 7th “Rommel” Panzer Division, for which Manstein obtained the command for Colonel Model. Air support would come at first from the 2nd Air Fleet under Col. Gen. “Smiling Albert” Kesselring, joined later by the 3rd Air Fleet.
Also on that fateful Saturday May 25, Lord Gort took the decision that doomed the BEF. On May 21 a series of angry inter-Allied meetings had taken place at Ypres, at which the French proposed a plan not unlike the fictitious “Dynamo,” for an offensive by eight French, British, and Belgian divisions from north and south to close the Panzer corridor, starting on May 26. As if to underline that nothing was working for the Allies, Gen. Georges Billotte commanding 1st Army Group drove off from that meeting and was almost immediately killed in a car crash. Over the next three days, the French plan simply fell apart under the pressure of the German advance and mutual Allied recriminations. By Saturday all that was left of it was Gort’s promise to take part the following day, launching the 5th Infantry Division and 50th Northumbrian Division south once more.
Meanwhile to the north, II Corps’ safety depended on the Belgians holding their line between Courtrai and the sea against the onslaughts of the German 18th Army; if they broke, Lieutenant General Brooke had nothing to plug the gap. Montgomery’s troops had captured a German map showing that, with the Netherlands out of the war, a major offensive by the 18th Army was threatening to cut the BEF off from the sea. Evacuation seemed the only option, but as Allied communications broke down, neither Gort nor Halifax thought to warn King Leopold of the British plans.
All day, Gort sat silent at the plank trestle table in the small farmhouse that was his headquarters. He had received no advice or even contact from London, other than vague exhortations from the War Cabinet. He had been out of touch with all French commanders since the Ypres conference. Word came that Boulogne had fallen; Calais was about to fall; if the French attacked at all it would be with just one division; Martel had only two Matilda tanks left. At about 1800 he looked up and gave his order, “Send them over to Brookie!”
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Gort still gave the French every chance: rather than pulling out of the line at once to move northward to II Corps, both the 5th Infantry Division and 50th Northumbrian Division would move the following afternoon, just in case the promised French attack from the south materialized. Of course, it did not, but the French still never forgave Gort for his decision, and, as things turned out, neither did the British. Even so, from what he knew at the time, it is hard to argue that Gort was either wrong or disloyal to his allies.
Gort followed this military decision with a political one: to make public the view that the BEF had been stabbed in the back. Mason-Macfarlane returned to London to confer with Gen. Sir John Dill, about to succeed Ironside as CIGS. On May 28, Mason-Macfarlane briefed correspondents in London on War Office orders, announcing that the BEF was about to go down fighting, betrayed by its allies and by politicians. The shock of next morning’s newspapers went around the country, and destroyed what little trust remained between the Halifax government and the army. With nothing left to hide, on May 29 the British government made public a telegram from King George VI to Gort supporting the stab-in-the-back story. “Faced by circumstances outside their control in a position of extreme difficulty,” the king’s message read, “they are displaying a gallantry that has never been surpassed in the annals of the British Army. The hearts of every one of us at home are with you and your magnificent troops in this hour of peril.”
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That evening, General Dill secured for Mason-Macfarlane a slot on BBC radio following the nine o’clock news. Speaking anonymously as “a senior BEF commander,” Mason-Macfarlane repeated the same message, that the BEF had fought hard but lost through no fault of its own. There were now those in the Halifax cabinet, perhaps the Prime Minister among them, who genuinely expected some kind of military coup.
By May 26, while its reserves fought to hold the line together with the French, the main body of the BEF had retreated to a battlefield that its senior officers knew intimately from the First World War, the Ypres-Messines ridges. Reconnoitering personally that morning, Lieutenant General Brooke discovered a gap of some 4,000 yards between his forces and the French 60th Infantry Division to the north. Racing to BEF Headquarters, Brooke obtained immediate command of the 50th Northumbrian and 5th Infantry Divisions, ordering their brigades into the line. On the evening of May 27 the Belgian government requested a cease-fire from the Germans. Given a few hours’ warning, Brooke ordered Montgomery to seal the gap. Working largely in darkness and under fire, Montgomery pulled the 3rd Infantry Division out of line and steered it northward directly behind II Corps’ front from one end to the other, while only a few hundred yards away the Germans probed and hammered at the British positions. It was a virtuoso display of maneuvering that in other circumstances might well have saved the BEF. But it was all happening about half a day too late. As its brigades followed the 50th Northumbrian Division to block the German attack, the 5th Infantry Division was being spread too thin; it could hold off two divisions, but not three. Next morning, German infantry of the 18th Division worked their way onto Kemmel Hill, while to the north five German divisions drove unopposed along the coast toward Dunkirk.
Even when trapped, the regular divisions of the BEF were a formidable fighting organization. Short of everything from fuel to ammunition, commanders gathered their men together with TA and French units that had attached themselves during the retreat, and prepared for the endgame. The evacuation of rear area personnel from Dunkirk had begun on May 26 (the real “Operation Dynamo”), on the same day that troops of the 2nd Panzer Division reached the port area from the southwest. Late on May 28, Montgomery’s extraordinary 3rd Infantry Division was tasked to clear a path through to the Dunkirk beaches together with the few remaining tanks of the French 2nd Light Mechanized Division, with the rest of II Corps closing in behind it like a protective fantail.