Dunkirk 1940 Read online

  It has been said that the road to Dunkirk began in Manchuria. A few months after Field’s report, Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, commander of the Japanese garrison at Kwantung in Southern Manchuria was instrumental in manufacturing the ‘Mukden Incident’ of 18 September by sabotaging the South Manchurian Railway. Having provoked a confrontation with the Chinese, the Kwantung force used the incident to provide a pretext for its invasion. In London, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald quickly recognised the potential threat to Britain’s Far East empire and tried to have the Ten Year Rule abolished because he thought the international situation meant it was no longer justified. This was bitterly opposed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson who succeeded in keeping the rule in place for the time being.18

  By then, the annual Navy estimate – £120 million in 1919–20 – had fallen to an agreement that ‘a sum, not exceeding £32,529,300, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933, for Expenditure in respect of the Navy Services.’19 Air Force spending had dropped to £17,400,000:

  … down by no less a figure than £700,000 [from the previous year], a particularly heavy decline on the comparatively small total expenditure of an expanding and developing Service … As the House will realise, to effect so large an economy with a minimum of injury to the Service has been a difficult task, and one to which the Air Council have devoted long and anxious thought. That has only been achieved by a variety of expedients, many of them admittedly makeshift measures which it will not be possible to repeat another year.20

  In a climate of fierce inter-service rivalry, the army had come off worst. Planning for the future envisaged no more than a minor role – if any – for land forces in Europe and they were primarily seen as having reverted to their nineteenth-century function as an imperial police force. To that end, its establishment fell from 2,500,000 in 1919–20 to an order that ‘a number of Land Forces, not exceeding 148,700, all ranks, be maintained for the Service of the United Kingdom at Home and abroad, excluding His Majesty’s Indian Possessions (other than Aden), during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933.’ The entire Army was now no larger than the Expeditionary Force sent to France in the first months of war in 1914. The Commons vote agreed that ‘a sum, not exceeding £9,039,000, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Expense of the Pay, etc., of His Majesty’s Army at Home and abroad, excluding His Majesty’s Indian Possessions (other than Aden), which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1933.’21

  Faced with the growing threat to the Far East, the Committee for Imperial Defence (CID) recommended an end to the Ten Year Rule and the Cabinet finally revoked it on 23 March 1932 but with the proviso that, ‘this must not be taken to justify an expanding expenditure by the Defence Services without regard to the very serious financial and economic situation’ which the country was in.22 Without committing itself to increasing defence expenditure and instead pinning its hopes on the wide ranging British-led General Disarmament Conference which had opened in Geneva the previous month and which would run until 1934, the government hoped that they might be spared the need to rearm.

  On 10 November 1932, Sir Stanley Baldwin, acting as Lord President of the Council and leader of the Conservative Party, addressed the Commons to attack Clement Attlee’s proposal ‘that the British Government should give clear and unequivocal support to an immediate, universal, and substantial reduction of armaments on the basis of equality of status for all nations, and should maintain the principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations by supporting the findings of the Lytton Commission on the Sino-Japanese dispute.’ Even before the Lytton Report had been completed, the Japanese had unilaterally withdrawn from the League of Nations with the increasingly militaristic Japanese Government proclaiming Manchuria a puppet state and thereby showing the League of Nations to be toothless. With what appeared to be a growing threat in the Far East, the risk of another war seemed to be growing. In Britain, the Zeppelin and Gotha raids during the First World War had had a profound effect on thinking about the use of strategic air power and Baldwin’s speech would deeply affect the development of British military policy over the coming years. To a hushed house, he said:

  I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through, and it is very easy to understand that if you realize the area of space. Take any large town you like on this island or on the Continent within reach of an aerodrome. For the defence of that town and its suburbs you have to split up the air into sectors for defence. Calculate that the bombing aeroplanes will be at least 20,000ft. high in the air, and perhaps higher, and it is a matter of mathematical calculation that you will have sectors of from ten to hundreds of cubic miles.

  Imagine 100 cubic miles covered with cloud and fog, and you can calculate how many aeroplanes you would have to throw into that to have much chance of catching odd aeroplanes as they fly through it. It cannot be done, and there is no expert in Europe who will say that it can. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realize what is waiting for them when the next war comes.23

  As the government adjusted to the situation in the Far East and the growing fear of air attack, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany in January 1933 gave the Chiefs of Staff still more reason to press for a strong defence policy. On 14 October, they produced their annual review prepared, as usual, with assistance from the Foreign Office. In it they warned that Germany would surely rearm to the point where, in a few years, it could start a war in Europe. Two days later, almost as if in response, Germany withdrew from both the League of Nations and the ongoing Geneva Disarmament Conference. Hitler’s unilateral blow to ventures in which Britain had invested heavily forced the CID and Cabinet to agree in November 1933, some twenty months after having abandoned the Ten Year Rule, to establish the Defence Requirements Committee (DRC) to examine the country’s defences with the aim not of preparing for war, but rather to ‘prepare a programme for meeting our worst deficiencies’ and basing its recommendations for the time being on prioritising ‘the defence of our possessions and interests in the Far East; European commitments; the defence of India.’ Furthermore, ‘no expenditure should for the present be incurred on measures of defence required to provide exclusively against attack by the United States, France or Italy.’24 Simply put, the British needed to consider the strategic threats posed by Germany and Japan but could not afford to contemplate any other hypothetical dangers.

  The DRC report of 28 February 1934 signalled the start of a fundamental change in British policy. Having previously ruled out the likelihood of war for a decade to come it now was forced to assume that one was probable in just five years. In October 1933, the CID had prepared a memorandum on the danger from Germany and the DRC report now reinforced their view. Although the committee did not consider Japan’s activities in Manchuria an immediate danger to British imperial interests, it did propose strengthening its Far Eastern defences in case of emergency and attempting to regain Japan’s respect and friendship by reducing Britain’s ‘subservience to the United States’ in order to minimise the risk that ‘Japan might yield to the sudden temptation of a favourable opportunity arising from complications elsewhere.’ The ‘elsewhere’ meant Europe where Germany was identified as ‘the ultimate potential enemy against whom our “long-range” defence policy must be directed.’ Not yet seen as ‘a serious menace’ to Britain, it was felt Germany would become one ‘within a few years’.25

  The report was not recommending a full rearmament programme, but rather attempting to rectify the damage to the forces’ normal development programmes caused by the Ten Year Rule. Even this, they suggested, would not be politically popular with a public �
�morally disarmed’ in the wake of the First World War. Throughout the 1920s the economic slump had undermined the government’s ‘land fit for heroes’ promise to its troops. From pride in their accomplishment, the prevailing attitude had begun to drift towards a sense of betrayal of veterans by generals and politicians alike. In a worldwide economic slump, the diversion of large amounts of funding towards the military would be difficult to put into action. With limited resources, the problem became one of deciding how best to prioritise the money available. It was clear that even if Britain could afford to keep pace with the shipbuilding quotas agreed at the Naval Conferences in Washington in 1922 and London in 1930, the loss of logistical facilities since 1919 would mean that in the event of deployment to the Far East it would not arrive in the Pacific in any state to fight.

  The underlying belief that air power alone could be a war-winning strategy was brought into sharp focus by the DRC report’s observation that a German occupation of the Low Countries would bring their bombers within range of British cities and they would be in a position to deal a potential knockout blow before Britain could mobilise forces against them. Consequently, they said, an essential requirement was to develop the capacity to mobilise a ‘Regular Expeditionary Force’ of four infantry divisions, one cavalry division, two air defence brigades and a tank brigade within a month of the outbreak of war and supported by up to twelve divisions of the Territorial Army – ‘a matter which will require consideration when the urgent needs of the Regular Army have been met.’

  Alongside this, the Royal Air Force should be expanded to the 52 squadrons first approved back in 1923. Although not seen as one of the ‘worst deficiencies’, it was suggested that at least another 25 squadrons would be necessary for home defence and other tasks, especially if Germany should rapidly expand its air forces. The DRC estimated the cost of the whole program (apart from naval construction) at about £82 million over eight or nine years; of the £71 million for the first five years, £40 million would go to the Army, £21 million to the Royal Navy, and £10 million to the Royal Air Force.

  If war came in the Far East, it was assumed the Navy would have the lead role. In the event of war in Europe, it was expected that Britain would be allied to France and that the roles of the forces ‘would not differ very much in kind from those that they filled in the last war’. The Navy, they presumed, would protect the mainland British coast and all maritime communications whilst the Army would provide the land defence of ports, naval bases and the shoreline as well as providing anti-aircraft defence and, if required, an expeditionary force to be sent to Europe. To that end, in 1935 responsibility for the anti-aircraft defence of the UK was given entirely to the Territorial Army and between the formation of the TA Anti-Aircraft Division in January 1936 and April 1939, its strength grew from just 2,000 men to 96,000 – on paper at least.26 The Royal Air Force, meanwhile, would be responsible for defence against air attack and liaison with the Royal Navy and Army as well as for the provision of an air force to accompany the expeditionary force. Although they acknowledged that a European war might either lead to or coincide with a threat in the Far East and India, the DRC did not give much thought to the possibility of fighting a two-front war. Instead, it assumed that preparing the Royal Navy for a war in the Far East would enable it to accomplish its mission in any European war, and that by strengthening the Army and Royal Air Force for use in Europe would equally serve if they were deployed to India.

  British troops in the Saarland, 1934. Sent in to police the area during the plebiscite, the French decision to deploy African soldiers in the German territory was seen by many in Britain as vindictive and insulting, leading to widespread sympathy for the Germans.

  In late 1937, a relieved DRC under Sir Thomas Inskip had reported that ‘France no longer looks to us in the event of war to supply expeditionary forces on the scale hitherto proposed, in addition to our all-important co-operation on the sea and in the air.’ In fact, it claimed, ‘co-operation in the defence of the territory of any allies we may have in war’ was the lowest of all army priorities and far behind those of anti-aircraft duties and of garrisoning the empire, although they recognised that the government would be heavily criticised should a major European war mean that France was threatened and Britain forced to ‘improvise an army to assist her’.27 Despite the still very evident risks, on the basis that there would now be no need to significantly increase the size of the army to fulfil its expected role in any future conflict, the DRC initially recommended an increase in the defence budget of no more than £50 million by 1939.28 Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 changed things. Suddenly, the threat of war increased enormously.

  Even by early 1938, though, it had already become clear to British planners that the defence of France mattered a great deal to Britain even if neutral Belgium fell. As Cabinet Secretary Lord Hankey put it in a letter to Prime Minister Chamberlain on 28 April 1938, ‘It would be a nuisance to have the Germans in Belgium again, but better in Belgian ports than in French ports.’ Britain, he argued, should therefore concentrate on France alone. Ideally, Hankey suggested, Britain should encourage France to extend its Maginot Line defences from Longuyon on the Luxemburg border – where the fortifications currently ended – to the Channel coast. It would not be possible to build the heavy forts of the Maginot Line in the lowland areas along the Franco-Belgian border, but other types of defences were considered possible. Since the size and effectiveness of the French defence line would have a direct impact on the need to prepare and deploy a British Expeditionary Force, the stronger the line, the less Britain would need to contribute. The groundwork for the later claims and counterclaims of the respective failures of each nation was laid in the political wrangling over cost. ‘All our co-operation with France,’ Hankey wrote:

  whether by air or sea and eventually by land, will be very much less effective if the Germans get the [French] channel ports. It is therefore a strong French interest to cover them by an extension of the Maginot Line [to the coast] … Incidentally it is a strong British interest, but it would be advisable not to say so or else the French might ask us to pay!29

  The political cost of France’s militarising its border with neutral Belgium was too high to bear. Just as the British worried about bombing, the French needed to keep the Germans as far away as possible from their industrial heartlands of northern France and hoped to fight their war on Belgian soil. To build defences along the Belgian border would be a clear signal that they would abandon their potential allies to the north at a time when there was still an expectation that the Belgian’s own forts along the Albert Canal – including the apparently impregnable state-of-the-art defences of Eben Emael – would serve to delay any attacking army long enough for a combined Allied army to rush to their support. It was widely believed by the French High Command that the coming war could be fought primarily around the Gembloux Gap in eastern Belgium and the Maginot Line was intended not to be France’s first line of defence but as a deterrent to a costly frontal assault that would channel any German attack through the Low Countries for this very reason.

  Neville Chamberlain, who was widely condemned for his policy of appeasement. Chamberlain was constrained as much by an awareness that Britain could offer no resistance to Hitler as by his pacifist beliefs.

  In the wake of Munich and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, British concerns for French security – or more accurately for the ability of the French to keep German bombers out of range of the UK – further increased. Britain was now prepared to discuss the alliance France had tried for nearly twenty years to achieve. In February 1939, the Chiefs of Staff reported that ‘It is difficult … to say how the security of the United Kingdom could be maintained if France were forced to capitulate.’30 Despite this, some measure of the importance Britain still placed on assisting the French can be seen in the fact that in February 1939, when planning began under the direction of Brigadier L.A. Hawes for the deployment of the BEF to France, Hawes was unable
to find a single up-to-date map of France held by the War Office or the Foreign Office. His team worked from maps produced from a survey completed before the Franco-Prussian war seventy years earlier.31

  Having controversially succeeded the popular Alfred Duff Cooper as Secretary of State for War in 1937, Leslie Hore-Belisha had made a number of attempts to modernise the British armed forces and to boost recruitment by introducing improved pay, pension and promotion prospects. He also sought to make the army a more attractive career choice for ordinary soldiers with better barrack conditions including, for example, installing showers and recreation facilities and giving married soldiers the right to live with their families on or near their bases. The reduction in the size of the army over the previous two decades had left a glut of senior officers who were by now largely redundant and simply biding their time until retirement in unnecessary posts with little or nothing to do. The new ‘youth at the helm’ policy pushed these men into what they, of course, considered premature retirement to make room for up and coming junior officers. Almost overnight, men who had waited years to reach the next rung of the promotion ladder found themselves granted the ranks a stagnated army had not been able to afford to give them.

  British infantryman and equipment, 1939.