I Fought at Dunkirk by Mike Rossiter

Author:Mike Rossiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407081618
Publisher: Transworld

14

JACK HASKETT MEETS THE GERMANS

18–21 May

SO FAR THE description of events has followed the veterans who moved up into Belgium after the start of the fighting on 10 May. But there were more troops in the British Expeditionary Force than in just those nine divisions that were sent forward as part of Plan D. The British rear echelon stretched all the way back to the disembarkation ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg and Brest, and the depots at the railheads in Rennes and Le Mans. There was another group of soldiers, though, who were formed into fighting units but had not, originally, been considered fit for the front line. However, as the situation worsened, this changed and they were to come into direct contact with the enemy.

Jack Haskett, who had spent four years in the artillery as a Territorial and then had been conscripted into the infantry of the 2/6th Queen’s Royal Regiment, was in his billet near Amiens when the Germans invaded on the 10th. It had not disturbed Jack’s battalion greatly, although there had been a lot of air raid warnings early in the morning and throughout the day as the Luftwaffe bombed the Royal Air Force base at Abbeville. The 12th Division, of which the 2/6th Queen’s was part, was in the rear areas carrying out labouring work, because most of the soldiers were raw recruits and still needed a lot of training.

The situation changed with the German breakthrough in the south. That the French had been unable to stop the advance of German Army Group A under General Rundstedt meant that Lord Gort and the British General Staff were not only concerned with the German advance on their eastern front, but they also had to concern themselves with protecting their southern flank. The move to support Arras was part of this, but Gort also had to guard his lines of communication to the rear. The 12th Division, including Jack’s battalion, were ordered to guard four key towns in the west: Albert, Doullens, Amiens and Abbeville. By 18 May they were being mobilized. They had stood to in the morning, formed up and then later that morning marched towards Amiens.

The Official History compares the strength of the 12th Division with the strength of the approaching German army group. The 12th Division had only a troop of four field guns from a Royal Artillery school. Their signals and administration units were not fully up to strength and they were not properly armed. Their total numbers were barely more than half a normal division. In comparison, the five armoured divisions that spearheaded Rundstedt’s Army Group A were made up of seventeen tank battalions armed with over nine hundred pieces of artillery. There were fifteen motorized infantry battalions and twelve batteries of field guns. Lord Gort had no inkling of the size of the German force at the time, but he knew that they were powerful enough to have overcome any French resistance. He must have known that the deployment of the 12th Division, and the 23rd Division further east, was an act of desperation.

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