Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler by Gelb Norman

Author:Gelb, Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Published: 2018-03-08T08:00:00+00:00

Day Three — the Long Retreat

The capitulation of the Belgian army during the night posed a possibly terminal problem for the BEF. By the terms of their surrender, Belgian troops were obliged to allow the Germans to proceed unhindered through what had been their sector of the front, the twenty miles to the sea guarding the British left flank. The pummeled, demoralized Belgians had no intention of doing otherwise. Their soldiers displayed white handkerchiefs to show they were finished with the war even before the Germans moved up. Whatever obstacles to the German advance they had set were removed or left unguarded. If the enemy plunged through in force before the gap was sealed and raced down the coast toward Dunkirk, the perimeter defense for the city, not yet fully established, would prove as useless as the Maginot Line had been. Whatever chance Operation Dynamo had of bringing even a comparatively small number of troops home would be quickly lost. That twenty-mile gap had to be covered immediately.

The task fell to General Brooke’s II Corps. Though his troops were hard pressed elsewhere on the front, Brooke patched together an assortment of units to rush into key positions vacated by the Belgians. General headquarters troops were hastily dispatched to do the same. At Nieuport on the coast, the Germans were only just kept from bursting through after they captured a bridge and established a small foothold on the Dunkirk side. At Dixmude, to which a patrol of the 12th Lancers dashed, a Belgian officer — now no longer an ally — had to be forced at gunpoint to reveal how a crucial bridge had earlier been prepared for destruction. The Lancers blew it up only minutes before a strong force of Germans raced up from the east to try to rush across. To Gort’s relief, by nightfall, the gap had been sealed and the Germans blocked for the moment from hurtling down toward Dunkirk.

News of the Belgian capitulation came as a shattering blow to French morale. Sanitized official pronouncements had shielded most French people from understanding the desperation of the Allied position. Many had been persuaded by government pronouncements and their newspapers that with General Weygand and Marshal Pétain back in harness, German advances in the north would be checked and the invaders would be thrown back or wiped out. For them, the capitulation of Belgium was more than a betrayal, as Premier Reynaud told them it was in a doom-laden radio address that morning. It was evidence that catastrophe for France was also imminent.

The British government was, of course, also dismayed by the Belgian surrender. With characteristic hyperbole, former Prime Minister David Lloyd George told Parliament, “You can rummage in vain through the black annals of the most reprobate kings of the earth to find a blacker and more squalid example of perfidy and poltroonery than that perpetrated by the King of the Belgians.” However, some in London attempted to extract signs of advantage from French fury at being let down by Leopold.

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