Belgium capitulates

At 4 a.m. on 28 May 1940 the Belgian Army stopped fighting. The previous evening King Leopold III, who had commanded the army in person since the first day of the war, had accepted the German demand for unconditional surrender. After eighteen days of fighting, pushed back into a strip of Flanders by the sea, with no reserves, no ammunition and no hope of help from its allies, an army still several hundred thousand strong went into captivity. The King refused to leave the country and became a prisoner of the Germans. The government of Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot, which had left Brussels twelve days earlier, regarded the capitulation as contrary to the constitution, declared that the King was unable to reign and announced that the war would go on alongside France and Britain. That day saw the birth of a dispute that divided the Belgians for the next ten years and in 1951 cost Leopold III his crown.

Two earlier events are also bound up with the capitulation: the government’s departure from Brussels on 16 May and the arrival at Plymouth on 26 May of a patrol vessel carrying the last consignment of the National Bank’s gold out of Belgium. Both belong to the same story: the separation of the state, which fought on, from the King and the army, which remained in the country.

16 May: the government leaves Brussels

Until mid-May the Allied front in Belgium held on the line of the river Dyle. The French 1st Army was beating off attacks at Gembloux, the British were defending Leuven (Louvain), and the Belgian Army held its own sector between Leuven and Antwerp. But on 13 May the Germans broke through on the Meuse at Sedan, and their panzer divisions drove west, into the rear of the armies fighting in Belgium. On 16 May, the same day on which in Paris Winston Churchill heard from General Maurice Gamelin that France had no strategic reserve whatsoever, the Allied forces in Belgium were ordered to fall back from the Dyle behind the Scheldt. Brussels was to be given up without a fight.

The Belgian government decided the same day to leave the capital. The ministers moved first to Ostend, from where most of them went on over the following days to France, where the Belgian administration and a mass of refugees were gathering. Several of the most important members of the cabinet, however – Prime Minister Pierlot, the Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, the Minister of Defence General Henri Denis and the Minister of the Interior Arthur Vanderpoorten – remained in the unoccupied part of Flanders, close to the King and his headquarters. On 17 May the Germans entered Brussels, which had been declared an open city.

According to the popular version, the government went “to Bordeaux” and then to London. That is a simplification. In May the Belgian ministers were working in Paris and, at the end of the month, also in Limoges and Poitiers. They reached Bordeaux only in June, together with the retreating French government. Some of the ministers made their way to London in the summer, while Prime Minister Pierlot and Minister Spaak, after escaping through Franco’s Spain and Portugal, arrived only on 22 October 1940.

The National Bank’s gold

A government that was to wage war from exile needed money, and Belgium had an exceptionally large amount of it for the purpose. In the 1930s the National Bank of Belgium had accumulated some 600 tonnes of gold. As tension rose in Europe, the greater part of the reserves was sent abroad: according to the bank’s figures, about 200 tonnes were deposited in Britain and about 200 tonnes in the United States and Canada. A further consignment, 198 tonnes of fine gold in 4,944 boxes, was entrusted to the Banque de France, which kept it in vaults at Bordeaux and Libourne. Sources differ as to exactly when it was transferred, but all agree that by May 1940 this gold was already in France.

A small remainder stayed in Belgium, kept at the bank’s Ostend branch. The only vessel at hand turned out to be the small, old patrol boat A4, a former British armed trawler from the First World War, with the Belgian colours of the neutrality period painted on her sides. According to the most frequently repeated account, around 19 May some 40 tonnes of gold were loaded aboard her. Also on board was a bank official, Hubert Ansiaux, later governor of the National Bank of Belgium. Avoiding bombed Dunkirk, the vessel crossed to England, but for the safety of her cargo she was sent on from port to port. The gold was unloaded at Plymouth on 26 May, two days before the capitulation, and deposited with the Bank of England. The crew of A4, unwilling to return to an occupied country, then sailed to neutral Spain and were interned there until the end of the war.

The A4’s cargo was the final chord of a much larger operation and not, as popular chronologies might suggest, the evacuation of the main part of the reserves. It was the gold accumulated earlier in Britain and America that allowed the Belgian government-in-exile, unlike most governments in exile, to support itself from its own resources. The fate of the consignment entrusted to France was quite different. In June 1940 the French shipped it from Lorient to Dakar and then deep into Africa, to Kayes in French Sudan. The Vichy government, despite Belgian protests, handed it over to the Germans, who in May 1942 carried the gold across the Sahara, Algeria and Marseilles to Berlin and melted it down. After the war the Banque de France compensated Belgium from its own reserves, and part of the bullion was found by the Americans in a salt mine in Thuringia.

The army’s last days

Cut off from France on 20 May, when the German tanks reached the English Channel, the Belgian Army defended an ever narrower strip of the country. From 23 May it stood on the river Leie and along the canals towards Ghent and the sea, on the eastern flank of the encircled Allied forces. On 24 May the Germans attacked near Kortrijk and forced the Leie. In a battle lasting several days, the bloodiest of the campaign, the Belgians counter-attacked but, without aircraft or reserves, could not throw the enemy back. Several times they asked the British to attack the German flank. Lord Gort, himself under threat, was already preparing to retreat to Dunkirk and could not help them.

In the area still in Belgian hands, less than 2,000 km², several hundred thousand refugees were crowded alongside the troops. The roads were choked and the Luftwaffe bombed small towns and columns. There was ammunition and food for only a few days. Between 25 and 28 May, at Vinkt and neighbouring Meigem, soldiers of the German 225th Infantry Division, who had suffered heavy losses there in fighting against the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais, murdered several dozen civilians.

Wijnendale: the King parts from his government

On the morning of 25 May (some sources give 24 May), at Wijnendale castle near Torhout, where the King had his headquarters, Leopold III met Pierlot, Spaak, Denis and Vanderpoorten for the last time. The ministers begged him to leave with them and, like King Haakon VII of Norway, to embody fighting Belgium from exile. They reminded him that under the constitution no act of the King was valid without a minister’s countersignature, and that he could not decide alone on a capitulation, which was a political act. Leopold III replied that the Allied cause in Belgium was lost, that as Commander-in-Chief he would not abandon his army, and that his presence in the country would protect the Belgians from the occupier better than a government in exile. The ministers left convinced that the King intended to come to terms with Hitler after the defeat. He himself was convinced that the government, by going abroad, was abandoning the country.

The same day the King announced in an order of the day to his soldiers that, whatever happened, he would share their fate. On 25 May he also sent, through General John Dill and Admiral Roger Keyes, Churchill’s liaison officer at his headquarters, a letter to King George VI warning that once the army was encircled its assistance to the Allies would come to an end. On 26 May the Belgian command informed the French military mission that the army was at the end of its strength. The British, meanwhile, without telling the Belgians, began the evacuation from Dunkirk on the evening of 26 May.

27–28 May: unconditional surrender

Before noon on 27 May the front on the Leie broke in several places. At 5 p.m. Leopold III, on the advice of his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Oscar Michiels, sent the deputy chief of staff, General Olivier Derousseaux, to the German command to ask for terms for a ceasefire. The Allied military missions at Belgian headquarters were informed, but the news reached Gort only late in the evening, and the French belatedly or not at all. At about 10 p.m. Derousseaux returned with Adolf Hitler’s answer: the Führer demanded unconditional surrender. The King accepted this condition and proposed that firing should cease at 4 a.m. on 28 May. And so it did. General Derousseaux signed the protocol on behalf of the army.

Leopold III accepted the capitulation as Commander-in-Chief of the field army. He signed no political agreement, concluded no armistice on behalf of the state and did not announce that Belgium was leaving the war. The capitulation did not extend to the armed forces in the Belgian Congo or to the Belgian recruits and rear units evacuated to France. In the King’s understanding it was a purely military decision, belonging to the commander on the battlefield. In the government’s understanding it was a political decision, taken against the unanimous advice of the ministers. The last forts around Liège, which came under a separate command, surrendered on a separate order. Fort Tancrémont capitulated only on 29 May.

The King refused to escape, which the British were prepared to make possible. The Germans treated him as a prisoner of war and soon confined him under guard at the royal palace of Laeken near Brussels. According to various estimates, some 200,000 Belgian soldiers or more went into captivity. The capitulation opened a gap about 30 km wide between Ypres and the sea on the eastern side of the ring around Dunkirk, which the British hastily closed by rushing divisions towards Nieuwpoort.

“Treason” or defeat

On the morning of 28 May the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, broadcast a speech in which he accused Leopold III of having laid down his arms “in the midst of battle, without warning” the French and British who had come to Belgium’s aid, thereby opening the road to Dunkirk to the Germans. He called it an event without precedent in history. Reynaud also had the King struck off the roll of the Legion of Honour. Belgian refugees in France were met with insults, and in Paris someone left at the statue of Albert I an inscription calling his son an “unworthy successor”. The British press wrote of the “traitor king”.

The Belgian ministers, who had reached Paris after Wijnendale, sided with Reynaud. On 28 May the Council of Ministers, invoking Article 82 of the constitution, declared that the King, being in the hands of the enemy, was “in the impossibility of reigning”, and assumed his powers. Pierlot declared on French radio that Leopold III had acted against the unanimous advice of the government, that his decision did not bind the Belgians and that Belgium remained at war. On 31 May the deputies and senators who had managed to reach France, meeting at Limoges, condemned the capitulation, although there were not enough of them to form a parliamentary quorum.

Churchill spoke with restraint in the House of Commons on 28 May, but on 4 June, after the end of the evacuation from Dunkirk, he charged the King with having surrendered his army and exposed the Allied flank “without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his Ministers”. Most historians now judge these charges unjust in their military aspect. The Allies had known for several days that the Belgian Army was at the end of its endurance, and on 27 May Churchill himself wrote to Gort that the Belgians were being asked to sacrifice themselves for the British. The battle on the Leie gave the BEF several precious days to withdraw to the sea. Reynaud, already aware that the battle of France was lost, found in the King a convenient culprit. The political side, however, remains disputed: whether the King had the right to stay in the country against the will of his government, and whether his staying did not signal a readiness to come to an understanding with Hitler.

Significance

The capitulation of 28 May ended the Belgian campaign and opened the last phase of the encirclement at Dunkirk. For Belgium it marked the beginning of four years of occupation under the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen. The decision that both the King and the army should remain in the country while the government left, however, divided the Belgian state in a way that was to prove advantageous. Because the King had concluded no political agreement and the ministers had taken lawful authority with them, Belgium formally remained at war. In the autumn of 1940 Pierlot’s government settled in London and, drawing on the gold deposited in Britain and America, the merchant fleet and the resources of the Belgian Congo, including uranium, waged war alongside the Allies until the liberation of the country in September 1944.

For Leopold III himself, 28 May was the beginning of a long road to abdication. At first most Belgians accepted his decision with understanding, even with gratitude that he had not left the country. His meeting with Hitler in November 1940, his second marriage during captivity, his political testament of 1944 and his silence towards the government-in-exile, however, undermined that trust. After the war the so-called Royal Question split the country along political and linguistic lines. In the 1950 referendum about 58 per cent of voters backed the King’s return, but in Wallonia and Brussels the majority was against. Strikes and riots in which people were killed forced Leopold III to hand over power to his son and, in July 1951, to abdicate. The throne passed to Baudouin I.