Operation Aerial

On 15 June 1940, the day after the Germans entered Paris, the British Admiralty set Operation Aerial in motion: the evacuation of British and Allied troops from the ports of western France, from Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula to Saint-Jean-de-Luz near the Spanish border. Ten days after the end of Operation Dynamo, transports full of soldiers were once again leaving France – this time not from a single besieged port but from a dozen or more harbours scattered along the coasts of the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. Among those evacuated were soldiers of the so-called second British Expeditionary Force, rear-echelon troops and airmen, as well as tens of thousands of Poles and Czechoslovaks who wanted to fight on after France’s defeat. The last ships sailed on 25 June, the day the Franco-German armistice came into force.

Two dates

War chronologies list the operation twice. Under 15 June they record the start of the evacuation of British troops from the ports of western France, and under 25 June the “last major evacuation” and the figure of 191,870 soldiers, airmen and some civilians who escaped from France in this way. Both dates are correct: the evacuation from Cherbourg began on 15 June and officially ended around noon on 25 June, when the last ships left Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The figure needs explaining. It comes from the British official history (L. F. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders 1939–1940) and covers not only Aerial but all the evacuations after Dunkirk, including Operation Cycle at Le Havre a few days earlier and the later, informal departures from the Mediterranean ports. It also counts only servicemen: according to Ellis, 144,171 British, 18,246 French, 24,352 Poles, 4,938 Czechoslovaks and 163 Belgians. In addition, several tens of thousands of civilians sailed on the same ships, but no one counted them precisely.

A second army in France

After the Dunkirk evacuation ended on 4 June, some 140,000 British soldiers still remained in France. Most of them had never been in the line: supply services, engineers, railwaymen, depot and hospital staff and airfield personnel, scattered among bases from Normandy to the Loire. On the Somme the 51st (Highland) Infantry Division, cut off from the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, was still fighting, together with the remnants of the 1st Armoured Division and improvised units made up of rear-echelon troops. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had reminded the House of Commons that “wars are not won by evacuations”, wanted to show the French that Britain was not abandoning them. It was therefore decided to re-form the Expeditionary Force. It was to consist of the divisions already in France together with fresh ones: the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Command was given to General Alan Brooke, who had just returned from Dunkirk as commander of II Corps. From the outset Brooke regarded the venture as militarily pointless, a political gesture, and said so to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, and to the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden.

The first brigade of the 52nd Division landed at Cherbourg on 7 June, and on 11 June the 1st Canadian Brigade began arriving at Brest. Meanwhile the German offensive on the Somme and the Aisne, launched on 5 June, had shattered the front. On 9 June the Germans crossed the Seine and cut off the 51st Division on the Normandy coast. In Operation Cycle, between 10 and 13 June, 11,059 British soldiers were taken off from Le Havre, but General Victor Fortune’s division was unable to fight its way through to the port. Some 3,300 more British and French soldiers were taken off the beaches at Veules-les-Roses, but the rest, hemmed in by Erwin Rommel’s panzer division, surrendered at Saint-Valery-en-Caux on 12 June. Brooke landed at Cherbourg that same day. He found the French Army in disarray and a government that had left Paris and was wandering from château to château along the Loire.

The Breton redoubt

At the end of May the Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, had put forward the idea that if the front collapsed a “redoubt” should be held in the Breton peninsula, around the ports through which France would keep its links with Britain and the empire. The plan was discussed with the British, and on 6 June General Maxime Weygand ordered work to begin. Among others, some 3,000 Polish soldiers were sent to dig the fortifications. None of the soldiers believed in the redoubt: a front would have had to be manned right across the peninsula, and there were no troops for it. On 14 June Brooke met Weygand and General Alphonse Georges. All three agreed that the plan was unrealistic, but since the politicians wanted it, they signed a joint agreement. Brooke telephoned Dill and learned that no one in London had heard of any such agreement.

On the evening of 14 June Brooke spoke by telephone with Churchill himself. The Prime Minister wanted the British to stay at the side of the French for as long as possible. Brooke replied that the French Army had ceased to exist as an organised force and that sending more divisions would only mean losing them. In the end Churchill gave way. That same night Brooke learned that he was no longer under French command and was to prepare the withdrawal of British troops from France. The units operating with the French Tenth Army were combined into “Norman Force” under General James Marshall-Cornwall, which was to fall back towards Cherbourg while still covering the French. The rest of the 52nd Division was turned back to cover the port. The Canadians, who had travelled by rail as far as Sablé-sur-Sarthe, returned to the ports without having fired a single shot.

The Admiralty and the air force

The evacuation was directed by two admirals. The Channel ports, Cherbourg and Saint-Malo, came under the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral William James; the Biscay ports under the Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches, Admiral Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, at Plymouth. After the losses off Norway and at Dunkirk there was a shortage of destroyers for escort duty, so the ships sailed singly or in small groups: transports and ferries from Southampton, small coasters, and Dutch motor barges, which had already proved indispensable at Dunkirk. The largest liners to hand were also sent, among them the Polish transatlantic liners Batory and Sobieski.

The Kriegsmarine did not interfere with the evacuation. The seven U-boats cruising off the west coast of France did not attack the transports, although many of them sailed without escort. The threat came from the air. Cover was provided by the five RAF fighter squadrons that had remained in France: three equipped with Hawker Hurricanes covered Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, and two, flying from the airfield at Dinard and later from the Channel Islands, covered Saint-Malo and Cherbourg. Fighters from southern England also patrolled over Cherbourg. The light bombers were sent home on 15 June.

From Cherbourg to Brest

The evacuation began at Cherbourg on 15 June. London was still hesitating: that day Dill explained to Brooke that “for political reasons” two brigades of the 52nd Division could not yet be embarked, and only after further discussions did he allow the artillery to be taken off. By 17 June most of the 52nd Division and the remnants of the 1st Armoured Division had sailed, on the evening of 17 June the improvised units and Norman Force, and on the afternoon of 18 June the rearguard battalion. The next day Rommel’s division entered Cherbourg. A total of 30,630 men were carried from the port to Portsmouth. At Saint-Malo 21,474 soldiers, mainly Canadians, were embarked on 16–18 June without loss and without damage to a single ship. The 1st Canadian Division lost one man killed and five missing in its brief expedition to the Continent.

From Brest, on 16–17 June, liners including Arandora Star, Strathaird and Otranto took off 28,145 British and 4,439 Allied servicemen, many of them airmen. The work was done in haste and on the strength of rumours of approaching Germans: soldiers destroyed guns and vehicles that could still have been loaded. The French blew up the port installations, and their warships put to sea so as not to fall into enemy hands.

Saint-Nazaire and Nantes

The largest number of men were waiting at the mouth of the Loire, at Saint-Nazaire and at Nantes, 80 kilometres upriver. Large ships could not enter the port, so they anchored in Quiberon Bay and in the roads off Saint-Nazaire, and the troops were ferried out to them by destroyers, tugs and fishing boats. On 16 June 16,000 men sailed from here, among others on the liners Georgic and Duchess of York and on Batory and Sobieski. On 17 June several tens of thousands of soldiers were still waiting around the mouth of the Loire, mostly rear-echelon troops and airfield support units.

At noon that day Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the French government since the previous evening, announced on the radio that “the fighting must stop” and asked the Germans for an armistice. In the afternoon German bombers, slipping past the Hurricane patrols, attacked the ships in the roads off Saint-Nazaire. The liner Lancastria, packed with men, was sunk. It was the greatest disaster of the whole operation and the worst in the history of British shipping. Even so, the evacuation from Saint-Nazaire continued. The last 4,000 British soldiers sailed on the morning of 18 June in two convoys of small ships, abandoning much of their equipment after alarmist reports of German tanks that were in fact still a long way off. That day Brooke also sailed for England, and the last serviceable Hurricanes flew home. For 19 June Dunbar-Nasmith sent another six destroyers and seven transports to Saint-Nazaire for 8,000 Poles who were reported to be making for the port. About 2,000 arrived. According to Ellis, a total of 57,235 men were taken off from Saint-Nazaire and Nantes, more than 54,000 of them British.

The Poles

For the Poles the fall of France meant a second lost campaign in nine months and a second evacuation. The Polish Army in France, built up since the autumn of 1939 by General Władysław Sikorski’s government based at Angers, numbered more than 80,000 men by the spring of 1940. Its units, committed to battle piecemeal and under French command, fought in June in Lorraine, Champagne and Burgundy. Brigadier General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko’s Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade, which had only just returned from Narvik after the Allies abandoned Norway, landed at Brest and was sent to the Breton redoubt. Shattered and scattered within a few days, it managed only in part to get away to England.

On 17 June, after Pétain’s appeal, the Polish units for the most part fought on. Sikorski flew to London and on 19 June agreed with Churchill on the evacuation of the Polish forces to Britain. That same day he ordered all units that could do so to fight their way to the Atlantic ports. Individual units and groups of soldiers made their way there, often on their own initiative, from training centres in Brittany and around Parthenay and Saintes. At La Rochelle and its port of La Pallice, British ships took off some 2,300 British and more than 4,000 Polish soldiers on 18 and 19 June.

The longest journey was made by those who got all the way to the Spanish border. At Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz Polish soldiers, civilian refugees, ministry officials and diplomats gathered. Local fishermen ferried them in their boats to the ships in the roads, in a heavy swell that made it hard to get from the boats up the ships’ sides. Sobieski and Batory, sent back to the Bay of Biscay after their voyage from Saint-Nazaire, took off from there on the night of 20–21 June, according to the report of a British naval officer, some 9,000 Polish soldiers. Also sailing on Batory was Maurice Schumann, one of the first Frenchmen who decided to join General Charles de Gaulle in London. In the following days Ettrick and Arandora Star arrived, the latter taking off some 3,000 soldiers and civilians, including most of the Polish staff. President Władysław Raczkiewicz, with his wife and entourage, sailed from the mouth of the Gironde on the British cruiser HMS Arethusa and came ashore at Plymouth on the morning of 21 June.

Ellis states that 24,352 Polish soldiers were taken out of France in the June evacuations. General Marian Kukiel, who reported on the evacuation, spoke of some 25,000 taken off between 19 and 25 June. Polish tallies that also include the soldiers who made their way out through Spain and the Mediterranean ports in the following weeks speak of 20,000–27,000, and some of an even larger number. Most of the airmen managed to get away. Even so, only about one in three soldiers of the Polish Army in France was evacuated. More than ten thousand went into captivity, some 12,000–13,000 soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Fusiliers Division were interned in Switzerland, and many remained in France and later joined the French Resistance.

The end of the operation

After 20 June there were few British left in France. The evacuation in the south concerned mainly Poles and Czechoslovaks, embassy and consular staff, British civilians and refugees from all over Europe. Many of the Czechoslovak soldiers sailed from Sète on the Mediterranean, by way of Gibraltar. The Franco-German armistice, signed on 22 June, came into force on the night of 24–25 June. The ships at Saint-Jean-de-Luz were ordered to end the evacuation of troops at 12 noon on 25 June. The last three freighters, Baron Kinnaird, Baron Nairn and Kelso, put to sea in the early afternoon. One of the last to be evacuated was the British Ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell. In the final week some 19,000 people, most of them Poles, were taken off from Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The operation claimed one more victim: on the evening of 25 June, in the mouth of the Gironde, the Canadian destroyer HMCS Fraser was rammed in the dark by the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Calcutta and cut in two. Several dozen sailors were killed.

Equipment was also taken out of the ports of western France, although far less than could have been. According to Ellis, more than 300 guns and nearly 4,800 vehicles, more than 32,000 tons of ammunition and more than 33,000 tons of other stores. Later researchers pointed out that many of these vehicles and stores had never been landed in the first place: they belonged to divisions that were turned back before they could be unloaded. Under the pressure of rumours of approaching Germans, dozens of guns and thousands of vehicles were destroyed or abandoned in the ports.

Significance

Aerial has remained in the shadow of Dunkirk, although after Dunkirk more than half as many men again were taken out of France as Dynamo had rescued. According to the British official history, a total of 558,032 men returned from France in May and June 1940, of whom 368,491 were British soldiers. The second evacuation ended the British Army’s part in the French campaign and saved the cadres from which, that summer, the defence of the British Isles against the expected invasion began to be built. There was no more talk of a Breton redoubt or a new expeditionary force. The British were not to return to France in strength until 1944, in Normandy, and Brooke, who in June 1940 had so firmly insisted on withdrawal, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff from the end of 1941 helped shape the strategy that led to that return.

For the Poles and Czechoslovaks the evacuation from France meant that their states remained in the war. In Britain the Polish Armed Forces in the West were formed from several tens of thousands of soldiers, and Polish airmen, most of them evacuated in June, were fighting in the Battle of Britain a few weeks later, among others in No. 303 Squadron. The Polish government and President began in London an exile that was to last much longer than the war, and Sikorski arrived there as prime minister of an allied state that still had an army, a navy and an air force. After 25 June the only routes from France to Britain were the crossings over the Pyrenees into Spain and Portugal and illegal passages across the Mediterranean. In the years that followed thousands of Polish soldiers who had not reached the ports in June made their way out by these routes.