The German victory in the west has come to seem a preordained inevitability. That was not how it appeared at the time. The forces were evenly balanced. In the all-important realm of armour, the French had better tanks than the Germans and they had more of them. The Germans, though, made the maximum use of their resources. They were better organised and had better communications, exemplified by the radio links between individual tanks and from ground to air which could concentrate forces relatively swiftly to maximum effect. Most of all, they had a winning attitude. They were attuned to victory. Medium-level commanders were encouraged to initiate action without waiting for orders, and their men were eager to fight. These benefits on their own did not ensure success. But luck was on the Germans side, and their good fortune was compounded by the slow reactions and bad decisions of the Allied command. In Neaves sector of the battle, both were on constant display.
He arrived as the scramble began to prevent catastrophe. Following the capture of Abbeville on the 20th, reinforcements were ordered across the water to the Channel ports. The 20th Guards Brigade was sent to Boulogne. Calais was to be defended by the 30th Infantry Brigade. Firepower against the Panzers would be provided by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and a Royal Artillery anti-tank battery (229th). However, there would be no field artillery and the huge demands placed on the RAF meant that air cover was sparse. The meagre existing garrison, which consisted of a platoon of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and some anti-aircraft batteries, was to be boosted by three infantry battalions of the newly formed 30th Infantry Brigade. The force was under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a thoughtful and determined forty-two-year-old, whose reputation among his peers was high.
This seemed like a healthy addition to the defences. However, as Neave judged in his post-war study, Nicholson faced an impossible task Many among the 3,000 British troops were untrained for battle. They had neither proper equipment, arms or ammunition [he] had no field artillery and very few tanks. His only additional support were 800 French soldiers and sailors and a handful of Dutch and Belgians.4 The first infantry battalion to embark was the Queen Victorias Rifles, a territorial motorcycle combination unit, which arrived with the 3rd RTR and 229 RA Anti-Tank Battery aboard the SS City of Canterbury in the early afternoon of 22 May. Confusion and miscalculation meant that the QVR arrived without their machines, transport or three-inch mortars. The two-inch mortars were stowed, but with only smoke bombs for ammunition. Four of the RA batterys anti-tank guns were somehow left behind. Unloading the RTRs forty-eight light and medium tanks was maddeningly slow, and the inefficient way that equipment had been stowed on embarkation meant the fast-moving Cruiser IIIs were the last to come off. The armament three-pounder cannon and Vickers machine guns had been packed in mineral jelly, which had to be laboriously cleaned off before a shot could be fired. The other two regular infantry battalions the 1st Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, and the 2nd Battalion, the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) arrived the next day. They were highly trained, but the Rifle Brigade had only half its ammunition and transport. Even when allowances were made for the inevitable balls-ups inherent in a last-minute embarkation, it was, as a young tanker officer remarked subsequently to Neave, the most extraordinary way to go to war.5
Nicholson was famously unflappable. However, Neave reckoned he must have been deeply troubled by a stream of contradictory orders. In the course of the siege, from across the Channel came instructions to send his tanks first this way, then the other. At various times he was told to prepare to withdraw, then to stand and fight. The desperation of the situation was obvious to London, and Nicholson asked repeatedly for artillery, ammunition and food: he had explained his situation and the enemys. In addition, he had been visited by two generals, an admiral and a naval commodore.
Neave wondered, if they knew that they were so unfairly matched, why did they not send the reinforcements for which Nicholson pleaded? The answer was that from hour to hour events slipped further and further beyond the Allies control, so they were constantly reacting to situations that had already changed for the worse. As it finally became clear that the entire BEF was facing a choice between annihilation or evacuation, the fate of the Calais garrison became a secondary consideration. Instead, it was allotted a sacrificial role and the dubious honour of fighting to the death.
The halt order given to Guderian was rescinded late on the night of 21 May. He was to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais, fifty miles to the north and west. During 22 May, the fresh winds of the storm brewing on the horizon began to be felt by Neave and his battery, ensconced around Coulogne. The village began to fill up with refugees, seeking to escape from a German advance coming from they knew not where.
On that day his chief, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Goldney, who commanded 1st Searchlight Regiment, moved up from Lille to Ardres to take control of the air defences of Calais. Goldney ordered all searchlight detachments to concentrate on their troop headquarters the Mairie at Coulogne in the case of Neaves outfit. He would now be in charge of sixty or seventy men, armed with rifles, two Bren guns and one Boys anti-tank rifle, to defend the villages which had become the outer ring of the ports defences. His men got to work digging trenches on the south and south-east approaches to the village and setting up roadblocks.
As the day wore on, the flow of refugees increased. Like many who endured the siege, Neave later came to believe that among them were a number of Fifth Columnists. By now the port was under attack from the Luftwaffe. The troops on the checkpoints blocked the refugees path to Calais, where bombing had wrecked electricity and water supplies. At the docks, in the lulls between bombardments, they struggled to disembark reinforcements and unload supplies, then fill up the returning ships with casualties and non-fighting servicemen deemed by London to be useless mouths with nothing to contribute to the struggle.
That night, Neave lay awake in my bedroom at the Mairie and heard the tramp of their feet as they were turned away to sleep in the fields. The red glow of the fires of Calais, started by the Luftwaffe, shone on the ceiling and there was the sharp crack of the anti-aircraft guns.6 At dawn he was woken to deal with an emergency. A column of men, women and children, half a mile long and led by a young priest, was confronting the guards at the checkpoint at the Pont de Coulogne, which crossed the Canal de Calais. He arrived to find the priest trying to persuade the crowd to disperse to the fields, but they were determined to reach the port and a boat to imagined safety, and there were ugly shouts of treachery. They seemed about to rush the roadblock, Neave recalled. I drew my .38 Webley revolver of the First World War and asked for silence. Dont shoot, dont shoot, mon lieutenant, said several anxious voices. He managed to calm them down and persuade them to turn back to the countryside. It was the first episode in a dramatic day.
Though he did not know it, the Germans were closing in all round. The British garrison in Boulogne, twenty-two miles to the south, was already under siege by Guderians 2nd Panzer Division. A 1st Panzer Division battle group, under Oberst Walter Krüger, was only eighteen miles away from Calais. For the moment, Guderian was uninterested in Calais and still dead set on gaining Dunkirk. The troops were tired and operating on stretched lines. Their orders were to press forward and secure crossings over the Aa river to the east of Calais. They were to enter the port only if it was thought that it could be taken by surprise and a major battle avoided. That morning Guderian did not have control of the 10th Panzer Division, which had been held in reserve during the Allied counter-attack at Arras. At 10 oclock it was restored to him. The decision was now taken to move them forward fast. They were given Calais as their next objective.
Though he did not know it, the Germans were closing in all round. The British garrison in Boulogne, twenty-two miles to the south, was already under siege by Guderians 2nd Panzer Division. A 1st Panzer Division battle group, under Oberst Walter Krüger, was only eighteen miles away from Calais. For the moment, Guderian was uninterested in Calais and still dead set on gaining Dunkirk. The troops were tired and operating on stretched lines. Their orders were to press forward and secure crossings over the Aa river to the east of Calais. They were to enter the port only if it was thought that it could be taken by surprise and a major battle avoided. That morning Guderian did not have control of the 10th Panzer Division, which had been held in reserve during the Allied counter-attack at Arras. At 10 oclock it was restored to him. The decision was now taken to move them forward fast. They were given Calais as their next objective.
In the meantime Battle Group Krüger was advancing to the south of Calais, intent on capturing the bridgeheads that would allow Guderians forces to close on Dunkirk. To do so, they had to get across the Canal de Calais. As they moved forward in the early afternoon of Thursday 23 May, the defenders of Calais and the Germans clashed for the first time. As the Panzers moved between the hamlet of Hames-Boucres and the village of Guînes, they met with 3RTR tanks commanded by Colonel Ronald Keller, who against his better judgement was responding to an order from the BEF HQ to proceed to St-Omer. In the action that followed, up to a dozen British tanks were lost about a quarter of the total strength.
They were forced to withdraw and the Germans pushed on to Les Attaques on the Canal de Calais, a few miles south of Coulogne. The news of their arrival reached the commander of the C Troop of the 1st Searchlight Battery, 2nd Lieutenant R. J. Barr, whose headquarters were at Ferme Vendroux, just to the north of the German line of march. Barr rounded up fifty men and a lorry and set off across the canal to prevent the Germans crossing at Les Attaques. His force was beefed up by reinforcements from 2nd Searchlight Battery from Coulogne. Panzers began moving over the canal bridge at 2 p.m., to be met by fire from the Brens, rifles and Boys guns of Barrs improvised force. The hot resistance lasted for three hours, but eventually the defenders were surrounded and forced to surrender.
While this was going on, Krügers infantry advanced on Orphanage Farm, less than a mile to the north of Coulogne, where the 1st Searchlight Regiment commander, Colonel Goldney, had set up his HQ. Goldney prepared to defend it with the padre, the medical officer and a handful of men, despatching a small force to hold a ridge on the southern approach to the farm against the attackers. When making his dispositions, Neave had posted Bren gunners on the south-eastern side of Coulogne, below the ridge held on the other side by Goldneys advance guard. When the Germans arrived, they opened up on the farms defenders with very heavy rifle and automatic fire. Sited in the lee of the ridge, Neaves men were unable to see the fray but nonetheless opened up in the direction of the fighting, narrowly missing their comrades.7 The result was that a despatch rider roared over the fields from Goldneys farmhouse HQ with a well-deserved rocket from the Colonel and the Brens were moved forward.
This was not a good start to Neaves fighting career and things were not about to improve. He had stationed himself at a barricade at the entrance to the village, constructed from the local undertakers hearse and a couple of carts. Refugees were still arriving, pleading to be allowed into Calais, among them a family of Austrian Jews. While he was trying to dissuade them, a mortar bomb crashed into the roof of the Mairie, showering them with broken tiles. It was followed by several others. Above the mayhem, a small Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft droned unconcernedly across the clear blue sky. Neave fired at it wildly but without effect.8 The barrage lasted a quarter of an hour, tearing up paving stones and starting fires. When it stopped, a young girl lay dead on the roadside. Neave watched a soldier pull her tartan skirt gently over her knees. His despatch rider was dead beside him on the pavement. He took his papers and looked down at him. He had been a cheerful man. He still had a smile that even a mortar bomb could not efface.
Neaves account of these events is emotionally restrained and all the more effective for being so. The spare narrative gives a strong sense of what war is really like. Neave had learned in a few hours that it was formless. It was about confusion, frantic improvisation, sudden eruptions of indiscriminate violence and the body of an innocent girl in a village street. In the late afternoon, the defenders began to fall back against the Panzer onslaught. When tanks came up, the men on the ridge were forced back to Orphanage Farm, which then came under a sustained barrage from the Panzers recently arrived artillery. At 7 p.m., after five hours of fighting, Goldney abandoned his HQ and ordered everyone to fall back on Calais.
Neave sent his men off by lorry, but for the moment he would not be joining them. He had been given an important task to complete before he could leave Coulogne. Together with a Sergeant Maginis and a sapper equipped with some gun cotton, he was ordered to destroy the Cuckoo, the code name for an experimental sound-location device which the Searchlights had brought with them. On no account was it to fall into enemy hands. It was sitting on a trailer in the middle of the village and for five tense minutes the sapper fiddled with the explosive, trying to blow up the apparatus. The situation was resolved when two large French tankers full of aviation spirit came thundering down the road, with German infantry close behind. The drivers abandoned the trucks and gamely set them ablaze. The fire spread to the Cuckoo, which providentially exploded, and Neave and his comrades were able to escape under cover of a thick cloud of black smoke.9
For a second time that day, events had not played out in the way Neave would have liked. Who knows what would have happened had the tankers not appeared? Nonetheless, in his post-war account, Neave gave the episode a positive spin. Quoting the 1st Panzer Division war diary, he reports that after the hot reception they received, it was decided that Calais was too strongly defended for them to attempt an improvised attack and they were ordered to push on to Gravelines and Dunkirk, leaving the capture of the port to 10th Panzer Division. From the German point of view, he wrote, a great chance was lost. Guderians First Panzer Division had been hampered on its left flank as it advanced to Dunkirk, by British tanks and searchlights. If Calais had fallen to this division on the afternoon of the 23rd, Guderian would surely have sent his Tenth Panzer Division straight to Dunkirk and captured it before the defences were organised. The German records show that it was Goldneys stand at Orphanage Farm which made him change his plans.10
Neave was in this sense an optimist. He had the happy ability to glimpse within the fog of apparent debacle providential outcomes. It was a fortunate attitude that would sustain him in the many setbacks that assailed him in the months ahead and a key component in the resilience and determination to persist in unpromising circumstances that carried him through not only the war but much of the rest of his life.
After the scrambled departure from Coulogne, Neave set off to Calais by foot, arriving at the Porte de Marck, on the eastern ramparts of the city, at 10 p.m., shaken by the bombing and my narrow escape.11 The geography of Calais was complicated. Calais-Nord was the dock area, a collection of basins and interlocking canals connected by bridges and overlooked by a massive sixteenth-century citadel. The southern half was Calais-St-Pierre, the modern centre dominated by the huge and florid Hôtel de Ville. The whole ensemble was protected by an enceinte, a defensive enclosure of walls and bastions designed by the great military engineer Vauban on Louis XIVs orders and added to over the centuries. It was pierced in several places by railway lines leading to the docks, but these fortifications now had to do service as a bulwark against the latest German invasion.