His Panzer divisions were within fifteen miles of what was left of the defeated British Army trapped near the French port of Dunkirk. He believed that decisive victory was at hand. The general assumed that the British had nowhere to go and that bombardment by the Luftwaffe would soon compel its surrender.
He wanted his tanks in good repair for their deployment south against the French. Hitler momentarily wavered. He decided to speak with the commander in chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, and the chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, both of whom disagreed with Rundstedt.
They advised Hitler to destroy the British Army without hesitation. His mind made up, Hitler overruled Rundstedt and ordered the tanks into Dunkirk. It was a one-sided contest. The British and their Allies had left most of their heavy armor behind in the headlong retreat. They had few munitions, little food, and no hope of relief or of holding out.
On May 28, Lord Gort, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, sought permission to surrender from the small war cabinet summoned by Winston Churchill, the new prime minister. Churchill reluctantly gave his permission. That same day, Belgium capitulated to Germany and soon afterward, devoid of allies and its own forces disintegrating, so did France. At midnight on May 28, the guns fell silent as a temporary armistice took effect on the Western Front.
The Allied troops not killed or seriously wounded in the last, fruitless defense of Dunkirk were herded into long, miserable columns and marched into German captivity. It was a defeat unparalleled in British history.
Despite the odds, Churchill remained defiant, arguing that it was better to go down fighting than to capitulate cravenly. This made little sense to the other politicians present—Neville Chamberlain, the former prime minister and current leader of the Conservative Party; Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary; and Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, leader and deputy leader, respectively, of the Labour Party.
Dismissing Churchill as overly emotional, the war cabinet seized on an opening that had arisen three days earlier, on May 25, when Lord Halifax had been approached by Signor Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London.
Well aware of the hopeless British plight on the channel coast, Bastianini had raised the possibility of a negotiated end to the war brokered by Benito Mussolini. The army was lost, the air force still weak. No help could be expected from the United States. Continuing hostilities would probably result in pointless destruction, quite possibly in a German invasion of Britain. A negotiated end could prevent the relentless bombing of British cities and a potential German occupation.
Attlee and Greenwood, new to the government, fell into line. He knew it meant the end of everything he had stood for, his own political demise, and, most likely, disaster for his country.
Mussolini lost no time in orchestrating a conference in Brussels on June 2 and 3. The four powers that had met at the Munich Conference at the end of September , when Britain and France had chosen to cede part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler instead of deciding to fight him, returned to the negotiating table.
While Mussolini preened with self-importance in brokering the peace deal, he had mixed feelings about its potential outcome. And the victor, bestriding the conference in Brussels, left no one, least of all Mussolini, in doubt of his achievement—and his total mastery of Western and Central Europe.
Before the Brussels Conference, Hitler had stipulated three preconditions for acceding to negotiations. Churchill must be replaced as prime minister and denied participation in the peace talks. Forced to hand in his resignation, Churchill and his immediate family fled into exile to Canada the following day. Secondly, neither the British nor French navies were to be moved from their present positions. The third condition demanded the signing of the peace agreement in two locations. On the other hand, the German dictator was prepared to provide assurances in advance that, with territorial adjustments, the British Empire and French colonial possessions would be allowed to remain in existence.
Crucial time was bought by those covering the retreat. At Lille, the French 1st Army fought German forces to a standstill for four days, despite being hopelessly outnumbered and lacking any armour. The French forces forming a perimeter defence around Dunkirk were all either killed or captured. British forces covering the retreat also paid a high price.
Those who were not killed in the fighting became prisoners of war. But even that was no guarantee of safety. At least Muslim soldiers of the French army met with the same fate.
As the quays of Dunkirk had been destroyed, evacuation had to take place from the shore itself, justifying the foresight of the Admiralty to co-opt the small ships. Troops were transported by these small craft to larger vessels of the Royal Navy and French Navy under frequent harassment from the Luftwaffe. Remarkably, however, Hitler was persuaded to halt the advance on land in favour of air strikes against the men on the beaches.
The limitations of isolated air operations and the deteriorating weather that reduced the number of sorties missions flown probably saved many British and French lives. The BEF was rescued, but this was far from a victory. More than 50, men had been lost killed, missing, or captured and an enormous number of tanks, guns, and trucks had been left behind, too. The POWs were denied food and medical treatment. The wounded were jeered at. To lower officer morale, the Nazis told British officers that they would lose their rank and be sent to the salt mines to work.
They were forced to drink ditch water and eat putrid food. They had fought the battles to ensure the successful evacuation of over , fellow soldiers. Their sacrifice had brought the salvation of the British nation. Yet they had been forgotten while those who escaped and made their way back home were hailed as heroes.
The crimes began as Dunkirk was being evacuated. On May 28, the SS Totenkopf Division marched about members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which had just surrendered, to a pit in a farm in Le Paradis and murdered them with machine gun spray. They were forced into a barn and massacred with grenades. As the war dragged on, forced marches became more common, sometimes with very little food or none at all — one British battalion reported receiving only two sugar lumps and two tablespoons of a mixture of carrots and potatoes a day.
On arriving at train stations the POWs were loaded into cattle cars for trips to work sites in Germany and Poland. A year-old from Essex, Waite was captured on May He was moved from place to place and kept prisoner on a farm in Poland and forced to work the fields with Nazi guards watching.
In the frigid winter of —45, on a forced march of nearly a thousand miles from Poland to just outside of Berlin, Waite almost died. He finally was rescued in April by Allied forces as the war was drawing to a close. But in , we had the additional challenges of one of the coldest winters on record that January, of having suffered years of misery, fear, exhaustion and starvation and of watching fellow men die and helping to bury them by the roadside.
Those are things you never forget. British soldier Peter Wagstaff recalled similar treatment. Some were killed. But you took it because it was part of life. You accepted it. This was happening all the time. You are fighting to keep alive. Meanwhile, the French military was in tatters and seemed poised for defeat. From the day of the German invasion on May 10 through the evacuation of Dunkirk, France had lost 24 infantry divisions, including six of seven motorized divisions.
Instead of four armored divisions equipped with tanks each, the country now had three, each equipped with
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