The halt order before Dunkirk

Late on the morning of 24 May 1940 Adolf Hitler arrived at the headquarters of Army Group A in Charleville-Mézières and agreed with its commander, Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt, that the German panzer divisions should halt. The tanks, which four days earlier had reached the English Channel and turned north along the coast, stopped on the line of the Aa Canal, a dozen or so kilometres from Dunkirk, the last port through which the Allied armies encircled in Flanders could still escape. In the meantime the destruction of the pocket was to be left to the air force of Field Marshal Hermann Göring and to the infantry advancing from the east. The halt lasted a little over two days. By the time Hitler rescinded it in the early afternoon of 26 May, the British and French had managed to man the line of canals around Dunkirk, and the British Expeditionary Force had begun to fall back towards the sea. In the same days the Germans captured two other ports on the Strait of Dover: Boulogne surrendered on the morning of 25 May, and Calais on the afternoon of 26 May.

Dates

War chronologies usually record under 25 May the retreat of British and French troops to Dunkirk, the halting of the offensive by Hitler, who allowed Göring to attack the bridgehead from the air, the defence of the coast by the RAF and the fall of Boulogne, and under 26 May the capitulation of Calais. All these events, however, fall within the period between the order itself, issued on 24 May, and its cancellation.

Strictly speaking, the order had two stages. The first was issued by Rundstedt on the evening of 23 May: at the request of Colonel General Günther von Kluge, commander of the 4th Army, he ordered Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group to halt its advance the next day and to put its units in order. On 24 May Hitler confirmed this order and gave it the force of an order from the Supreme Commander. He rescinded it on 26 May, and the tanks moved off again during the night and on the morning of 27 May. The Allied retreat towards Dunkirk really began on 25 and 26 May, when Lord Gort abandoned the attack southwards and London agreed to an evacuation.

The position on 24 May

After the breakthrough at Sedan the panzer divisions of Army Group A crossed the whole of northern France within a week. On 20 May the 2nd Panzer Division reached the sea near Abbeville, and the Allied armies were cut in two. North of the German wedge were the Belgian Army, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under General Lord Gort, the French 1st Army and the remnants of the 7th and 9th Armies. The new French Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin, wanted to extricate them by an attack southwards, combined with an offensive from the Somme. On 21 May British tanks struck Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at Arras and caused serious alarm in the German command, but there was not enough strength for a second such blow.

On 22 May General Heinz Guderian’s corps set off north from the Somme along the coast: the 2nd Panzer Division towards Boulogne, the 10th Panzer Division towards Calais and the 1st Panzer Division further on, towards Dunkirk. By the evening of 23 May the 1st Panzer Division already held bridgeheads over the Aa Canal between Saint-Omer and Gravelines. Further east, Kleist’s other divisions and Hoth’s corps stood on the canals near Aire-sur-la-Lys and Béthune. Along this water line the British and French defence was weak: Gort had manned it with improvised groups of rear-area troops, sappers and gunners without guns. A dozen or so kilometres of flat country separated the Germans from Dunkirk, while from the east the infantry of Colonel General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B was pressing on the pocket, just then breaking through the Belgian front on the river Leie (Lys).

Why the tanks stopped

The commanders of Army Group A saw the situation differently from Guderian. On 23 May Kleist reported that after two weeks of marching and fighting about half the tanks in his divisions were serviceable, and that he faced “a strong enemy”. Kluge proposed giving them a day for rest, repairs and bringing up the infantry. Rundstedt, still under the impression of the counter-attack at Arras, feared that the Allies would strike simultaneously from the north and the south at the long, thin flank of the German wedge. The army group’s command also believed that the marshy Flanders lowland, criss-crossed by canals, was unsuitable for tanks, and that the panzer divisions had to be conserved for the second phase of the campaign, the offensive across the Somme and the Aisne deep into France.

On top of this came a quarrel within the German command. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, and his Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, wanted to close the pocket as quickly as possible, and on 24 May they transferred the 4th Army, together with the panzer divisions, to Army Group B, so that one headquarters would direct the whole battle in Flanders. They did so without Hitler’s knowledge. Hitler, who arrived in Charleville at about 11.30 a.m., overruled this decision, left the conduct of operations to Rundstedt and endorsed his assessment. The Chief of the OKW Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, noted in his diary that the Führer agreed with it “completely”. The order issued around midday told the armoured forces to remain on the line Lens–Béthune–Aire–Saint-Omer–Gravelines and to “leave Dunkirk to the Luftwaffe”.

The air force had volunteered for the task. According to later accounts by members of Hitler’s entourage, as early as 23 May Göring had assured him at the Felsennest headquarters that the Luftwaffe would destroy the encircled forces without the help of the army, and that the credit for the victory would go not to the generals but to his airmen. The commander of Air Fleet 2, General Albert Kesselring, wrote after the war that this was an empty promise: his crews were tired after two weeks of flying and their airfields lay far behind the front. Hitler’s Directive No. 13, issued on 24 May, nevertheless assigned the air force exactly this task: to break the resistance of the encircled forces and prevent the British from escaping across the Channel.

Guderian, whose tanks were already standing in bridgeheads beyond the canal, received the order with disbelief. In his memoirs he wrote that his staff were “utterly speechless”. Not everyone obeyed at once. Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s SS regiment “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” crossed the canal at Watten on 24 May and took a hill dominating the plain, and Guderian, who went there the next day, allowed it to stay. These were exceptions, however. For two days the main armoured forces stood still, while Halder noted in his diary with growing irritation that the divisions that could have closed the pocket from the sea were waiting idle while Bock pushed the enemy back frontally.

Boulogne, 22–25 May

Boulogne was defended chiefly by the French of General Pierre Lanquetot’s 21st Infantry Division and the port garrison, and from the morning of 22 May also by the British 20th Guards Brigade under Brigadier William Fox-Pitt – two battalions, of the Irish and Welsh Guards, brought over from Dover in ships and a destroyer. General Rudolf Veiel’s 2nd Panzer Division attacked the town that same day, 22 May, and over the next twenty-four hours pushed the defenders back towards the harbour. On the evening of 23 May British destroyers entered the harbour basins under fire from tanks, guns and Ju 87 dive-bombers and during the night of 23–24 May took off about 4,400 soldiers, including most of the Guardsmen. During this operation the captain of the destroyer HMS Keith was killed, the French destroyer Orage was sunk and Frondeur was badly damaged.

The French fought on within the medieval walls of the upper town and in the citadel, while a group of Welsh Guardsmen left behind fought on above the harbour. The Germans scaled the walls on ladders, with grenades and flamethrowers. On the morning of 25 May, at about 8.30 a.m., General Lanquetot capitulated. According to various estimates, about 5,000 French and British soldiers went into captivity. Boulogne was the first of the Channel ports to be captured by the Germans.

Calais, 22–26 May

The fighting for Calais lasted longer. On 22 May the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, a tank battalion, arrived from England, and on 23 May Brigadier Claude Nicholson’s 30th Infantry Brigade: the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the territorial battalion of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles. Together with French soldiers, sailors and volunteers under Raymond Le Tellier, they took up positions on the old town ramparts facing General Ferdinand Schaal’s 10th Panzer Division. The British had come with the intention of breaking through to Dunkirk with a consignment of rations for the BEF, and their orders were then changed several times. Late on the evening of 24 May the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, informed Nicholson that the French sector commander had forbidden an evacuation and that he must comply.

On 25 May Schaal twice called on the defenders to surrender. Nicholson replied that it was the British Army’s duty to fight, just as it was the German Army’s. That evening he received a telegram from London, which Winston Churchill later quoted in his memoirs: every hour of continued resistance was of the greatest help to the BEF, so the government had decided that he must fight on, and there would be no evacuation. From the morning of 26 May the town and the citadel were bombed by Ju 87s and shelled by artillery. Around midday the Germans broke into one bastion after another, and in the afternoon, when the citadel fell, and Nicholson and Le Tellier with it, resistance ceased. According to British figures, about 3,500 British soldiers were taken prisoner, along with many thousands of French, Belgian and Dutch troops, including men from auxiliary units and stragglers from other formations. Small craft took several hundred men off the quays during the night. Nicholson died in captivity in June 1943.

The significance of the defence of Calais is still disputed. Churchill believed that it had tied down panzer divisions that would otherwise have advanced on Dunkirk and had helped to save the army. Guderian maintained, on the contrary, that it had been heroic but had changed nothing. The British official history credits it with significance chiefly because the 10th Panzer Division was occupied at Calais during the days when the Allies were manning the canal line. Many historians, Karl-Heinz Frieser among them, believe that the fate of the pocket was decided above all by the German halt orders themselves.

Retreat to the sea

The halt of the German tanks coincided with the most difficult decisions on the Allied side. On the eastern side of the pocket the Belgian front on the Leie began to crack under the attack of the 6th Army, and a gap was opening between the Belgian Army and the BEF north of Lille. On the evening of 25 May Gort, on his own responsibility and contrary to the Weygand Plan, called off the preparations for the attack southwards and sent the two divisions earmarked for it, the 5th and the 50th, to the Ypres–Comines canal to close this gap. In practice this meant giving up the idea of breaking through to the main French forces. On 26 May the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, authorised Gort to withdraw towards the coast, and Gort and the commander of the 1st Army Group, General Georges Blanchard, agreed on a retreat behind the Leie. In the evening the Admiralty signalled Dover to begin the evacuation.

During those two days divisions of the French 16th Corps and improvised British units manned a bridgehead along the canals around Dunkirk, while in the south British battalions held strongpoints such as Hazebrouck and Cassel, covering the corridor through which the main forces were to pass. The approaches were also flooded by opening the sluices. When the German tanks moved off again on 27 May, instead of a weakly defended plain they faced manned positions, and cutting the BEF off from the sea was no longer possible.

Air power over the coast

The order of 24 May assumed that the air force would have the last word. The Luftwaffe bombed Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk and the crowded roads of the retreat, but in those days most of its strength was still supporting the armies along the whole front, and the bomber airfields lay far away in Germany. British fighters, on the other hand, appeared over the coast. The head of RAF Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, had since mid-May been resisting the dispatch of further squadrons to France, but over the Strait of Dover his fighters could operate from airfields in England. From 22–23 May squadrons of Keith Park’s No. 11 Group, including for the first time Spitfires in large numbers, patrolled over Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk and fought hard battles with German fighters and bombers. Losses were heavy on both sides. The patrols, several squadrons at a time, could cover the coast for only part of the day, which the soldiers on the ground experienced as the absence of the RAF.

In the same days German bombers began to appear over England itself. On the night of 24–25 May a single aircraft dropped a dozen or so bombs on the area of the Dorman Long steelworks at South Bank near Middlesbrough. It was the first raid of the war on a large British industrial town, but the damage was slight. Isolated night raids on eastern and northern England were repeated over the following weeks. The Luftwaffe was not yet ready for an organised air offensive against Britain.

The order rescinded

On 25 May Brauchitsch tried to persuade Hitler to let the tanks move, but was told that the decision lay with Rundstedt, who himself wanted to wait longer. Only on 26 May, when it had become clear that the Belgians were close to collapse and ships were sailing from Dunkirk, did Hitler agree to resume the advance, at first only far enough to bring the port within artillery range. Getting the divisions ready, after two days of resting and repairing their equipment, took many hours. The tanks moved off again during the night and on the morning of 27 May and at once came up against an organised defence. Over the following days, moreover, most of the panzer divisions were withdrawn from Flanders to prepare them for the offensive to the south.

The controversy over the order

The halt order before Dunkirk became one of the most debated decisions of the war. After the war German generals, above all in conversations with the British historian Basil Liddell Hart, laid the blame for it on Hitler alone, and Hitler himself suggested in 1945 that he had wanted to spare the British so as to make it easier to conclude peace. Historians who have gone to the war diaries of Army Group A, the OKH and the OKW reject this version. The initiative came from Rundstedt and Kluge; Hitler approved it for military reasons and at the same time used it to show the Army High Command who was directing the campaign. Confidence in Göring’s promises and concern for the tanks ahead of the second phase of the campaign reinforced the decision. In his diary entries at the end of May Halder wrote bitterly that the pocket would have been closed at the coast had the armoured forces not been held back.

Significance

The two-day halt of the German tanks was not the only reason the British Army was saved. Also contributing were Gort’s decision of 25 May, the stubborn defence of the canal line, Boulogne and Calais, the weather, which in the following days often grounded the Luftwaffe, and above all the efficiency with which the Royal Navy organised the evacuation. But without the halt of 24–26 May the German panzer divisions would probably have taken Dunkirk before the Allies could organise a defence around it.

Operation Dynamo, begun on the evening of 26 May, carried more than 338,000 British and French soldiers to England by 4 June, albeit without their heavy equipment. The rescue of the professional core of the British Army gave Churchill’s government an argument for rejecting, after the fall of France, any idea of negotiations with Hitler. Britain was able to rebuild its land forces, and the German air force, which at Dunkirk had failed to make good Göring’s promises, had to face the RAF over England itself in the summer of 1940. For the Germans Dunkirk remained a lesson in the limits of what air power alone can achieve, and for historians an example of how a single decision in the high command of a victorious army can shape the further course of a war.