The surrender at Saint-Valery-en-Caux

On the morning of 12 June 1940, in the small Normandy port of Saint-Valery-en-Caux, between Dieppe and Fécamp, the remnants of General Marcel Ihler’s French IX Corps and of the British 51st (Highland) Infantry Division under Major General Victor Fortune laid down their arms. For three days they had been pinned against the sea by General Erwin Rommel’s German 7th Panzer Division, waiting for the ships that were to take them to England. On the last night fog rolled in over the coast and the flotilla assembled by the Royal Navy could not close the shore. Coming a week after the end of the Dunkirk evacuation, it was the British Army’s greatest defeat of the French campaign, and in Scotland, where most of the soldiers came from, it was remembered for generations as “the forgotten Dunkirk”.

It is often said that “more than 10,000 British soldiers” of the 51st Division were taken prisoner. The figures given in the sources vary. British studies and the museums of the Scottish regiments usually speak of 8,000–10,000 Britons, counting together with the division the units from outside Scotland attached to it. Some studies state that the division’s own soldiers in this group numbered more than 6,000. According to German reports, the 7th Panzer Division took a total of some 40,000–46,000 prisoners at Saint-Valery and in the surrounding area, including about 8,000 Britons and twelve generals, but these figures cover the whole shattered French force and come from the victor. What is certain is that this was the largest group of British soldiers to go into captivity in 1940.

The division that was not at Dunkirk

The 51st Highland Division was a Territorial Army division made up of battalions of the Scottish Highland regiments: the Black Watch, the Seaforth Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders, the Cameron Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Its predecessor had made its name in the First World War as one of the finest British divisions. General Fortune, who had served in the Black Watch since 1903 and fought in France throughout the previous war, had commanded it since 1937. The division arrived in France in January 1940 and joined the British Expeditionary Force, which since the autumn had been standing on the Belgian border. At the turn of April and May, reinforced among other things by machine-gun battalions, artillery and a motorised cavalry regiment, it took over a sector in front of the Maginot Line in the Saar, under the orders of the French Third Army.

That is why, when the Germans struck in the west on 10 May, the 51st Division did not advance into Belgium with the rest of the BEF. When on 20 May German tanks reached the English Channel and cut off the Allied armies in the north, the division was left on the other side of the corridor. The French command moved it by rail and road to the lower Somme. There, from 25 May, it came under General Ihler’s French IX Corps in General Robert Altmayer’s group, which soon became the Tenth Army. When the main British forces were evacuated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo, the 51st Division was the largest British fighting formation left in France, and its soldiers fought under French command.

At the beginning of June the Scots relieved two French divisions facing the German bridgehead on the south bank of the Somme at Abbeville. On 4 June they took part in the last Allied attack on this bridgehead, carried out mainly by French tanks. The 152nd Brigade attacked towards Caubert and the woods above the road to Bray. The attack failed and the division suffered heavy losses. The next day its front, stretched over several dozen kilometres from the Somme to the sea, became the target of the German offensive.

From the Somme to the Bresle, and cut off

At dawn on 5 June General Günther von Kluge’s German Fourth Army launched its attack from the Somme – the second phase of the campaign, known as Case Red (“Fall Rot”). On the 51st Division’s sector German infantry infiltrated between the villages held by the Scots, which were too far apart to support one another. A battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was surrounded at Franleu, and by the end of the day the 154th Brigade had fallen back to the Woincourt–Eu line. According to British figures, by 7 June the division’s three brigades had lost about 80, 60 and 25 per cent of their strength respectively. On 6 June General Fortune obtained permission to withdraw behind the river Bresle, where, together with the French 31st (Alpine) Infantry Division, he manned a new line, reinforced by a brigade from the improvised Beauman Division, made up of rear-echelon troops.

The line on the Bresle could hold only as long as no one outflanked it. On 7 and 8 June General Hermann Hoth’s German XV Corps, which included the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions, broke through the front to the south-east of it and drove on Rouen. The Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, who arrived at Tenth Army headquarters on the evening of 7 June, told the officers that the decisive battle of the war was being fought and forbade any retreat. On the morning of 9 June German tanks entered Rouen, where the bridges over the Seine had already been blown. Below the city there was no crossing at all. IX Corps and the 51st Division were shut in on the chalk plateau of the Pays de Caux, between the Seine and the sea, with ten German divisions on their heels. The French Tenth Army lost contact with them.

Le Havre or Saint-Valery

On the morning of 9 June General Fortune learned from the British commandant at Le Havre that the Germans were in Rouen. He agreed with General Ihler that the only way out was to fall back on Le Havre and evacuate through that port. The French admiral at Le Havre asked the Admiralty for ships for some 85,000 men. In London the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, realised only in the evening that Weygand’s plan for IX Corps to cross the Seine was no longer valid. As late as 10 June Weygand sent, through the Admiralty and the War Office, an order for the corps to withdraw behind the Seine below Caudebec, although there were no bridges left and no means of carrying it out.

To cover the road to Le Havre Fortune detached a force called Arkforce, after Arques-la-Bataille, where it was formed: the 154th Brigade, “A” Brigade from the Beauman Division, and two regiments of artillery and engineers, under Brigadier A. C. L. Stanley-Clarke. It was to hold a line from Fécamp to Lillebonne. Arkforce set out on the night of 9–10 June and got through before the Germans cut the road. The rest of the division – two weakened brigades with supporting units – withdrew more slowly, at the pace of the French infantry, much of it horse-drawn, and throughout 10 June defended the crossings of the Arques and the Béthune.

Meanwhile Rommel’s division, which had turned north after taking Rouen, reached the sea west of Saint-Valery on 10 June. At around eleven in the morning its tanks took Cany on the river Durdent – on the line to which the 51st Division was to withdraw the following night – and captured a wireless lorry sent after Arkforce. In the afternoon German guns positioned on the cliffs near Saint-Valery fired on the British destroyers that for several days had been supporting the division with fire from the sea. HMS Ambuscade and HMS Boadicea were hit. The road to Le Havre was closed. In the evening Fortune, with Ihler’s agreement, ordered a withdrawal to Saint-Valery and reported to London that he had food for two days and was counting on the division being taken off the coast.

Two days in the pocket

The withdrawal on the night of 10–11 June was a nightmare. French columns, mostly horse-drawn, turned from side roads onto the route allotted to the British and blocked it. To fit all the men onto the lorries, blankets and non-combat equipment were abandoned and artillery ammunition was limited to a hundred rounds per gun. When on the morning of 11 June the units took up the defensive perimeter around the town, French transport columns were still streaming into it, and at times the defenders could not tell friend from foe. Fortune sent his commanders an order which made it clear that the navy would try to take them off perhaps that night, perhaps the next, and that the evacuation demanded iron discipline.

At around 2 p.m. the Germans attacked the western sector of the perimeter. Tanks broke through the positions of the 2nd Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders, at Le Tot and Saint-Sylvain and came out onto the cliffs above the harbour from the west. The French regiment that was to have taken position there failed to arrive in time because of the jammed roads. The Gordon Highlanders battalion on the southern sector and the battalions in the east, including the 1st Battalion, Black Watch, beat off attacks by tanks and dive-bombers, but German artillery and machine guns on the cliffs now dominated the harbour and the beaches from which the evacuation was to take place. In the fighting on 11 June the commander of the French 2nd Light Cavalry Division, General André Berniquet, was killed. In the evening a captured Frenchman was brought to divisional headquarters, sent by the Germans with a demand for surrender by ten o’clock. Fortune sent him back with the reply that the division had no intention of surrendering.

At sea waited the flotilla assembled at Le Havre by the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral William James: according to the British official history, 67 merchant ships and 140 small craft. Only 16 of them had wireless; the rest could be directed only by visual signals. On the evening of 11 June the French admiral at Le Havre agreed to the evacuation and James ordered it to begin. During the night the men who were not needed to hold the perimeter went down to the harbour and the beaches. It began to rain, and thick fog came in over the sea. The ships could neither close the shore nor pass orders to one another. Only at the eastern edge of the pocket, at Veules-les-Roses, a few kilometres from the town, did vessels manage to reach the beach. Under fire from the cliffs they took off 2,137 British soldiers, 1,184 French soldiers and 34 sailors and civilians before German guns and bombs made further embarkation impossible.

The morning of 12 June

At around three in the morning Fortune realised that the ships would not arrive before dawn. He decided to hold the town and the cliffs for one more day, in the hope of an evacuation the following night. That required retaking the western cliffs, and he had only four weakened battalions left for the attack. Three others, including the 2nd Seaforth and most of the 1st Gordons, were cut off on the perimeter, and the guns, tanks and carriers had been disabled during the night in anticipation of embarkation. General Ihler judged further resistance impossible and gave Fortune a prepared telegram to Weygand’s headquarters announcing the surrender, to be sent, as he himself had no other means of communication. Fortune accepted the telegram but said he would send it only if there were no other way out. At 7.30 a.m. he was still asking Portsmouth for the cliffs to be shelled from the sea.

The Scottish attack collapsed before it had properly begun. In front of the 5th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, advancing on the eastern cliffs, French soldiers marched past with white flags, masking the field of fire, and German tanks surrounded the forward companies. In the west the Black Watch and the Cameron Highlanders came upon French troops who had already surrendered or were in the act of doing so. At 8.15 a.m. a white flag appeared on the church tower next to the 51st Division’s headquarters. Fortune ordered it torn down and the culprit arrested, but it turned out that it had been hoisted by a French officer and that General Ihler had indeed surrendered. A runner brought Fortune a note from the corps commander: “Fire will cease at eight o’clock. Ihler”. The British division was subordinate to the French corps. At 10.30 a.m. Fortune informed the War Office that he would not obey the corps commander’s order until he was sure that no part of the division could be evacuated. But in view of the French white flags now flying all over the town, he added: “I have now given the order to cease fire”. Half an hour later a message arrived from Portsmouth: the fog had prevented the ships from coming in during the night, but additional vessels would arrive that evening.

In the market square of Saint-Valery Rommel accepted the surrender of General Ihler, General Fortune and the commanders of the French divisions. A photograph of Rommel talking to Fortune went round the German press. In a letter to his wife that day he wrote that the battle was over, and that a corps commander and four divisional commanders had presented themselves before him in the square, forced to surrender by his division. According to German tallies, some hundred guns, several dozen armoured vehicles, several hundred machine guns and thousands of lorries were also captured. About 70 per cent of the town was destroyed. Two British companies on the Bresle, which the order to withdraw had never reached, held their crossings until 13 June and surrendered only when they learned that the fighting north of the Seine had ceased.

Le Havre and Operation Cycle

Arkforce had better luck. Its units reached Le Havre, from where, in Operation Cycle, the Royal Navy took off 11,059 British soldiers between 10 and 13 June: according to the official history, 2,222 were carried to England and 8,837 to Cherbourg, where they were to fight on. The evacuation ended early on the morning of 13 June. In this way roughly one-third of the 51st Division survived, above all the 154th Brigade.

Historians generally believe that even without the fog the evacuation from Saint-Valery would have been at best a partial success. From the afternoon of 11 June German guns commanded the narrow harbour entrance and the beaches, and on a clear night they would have fired even more accurately. What really sealed the division’s fate was the failure to withdraw it from the Bresle earlier, while the road to Le Havre was still open. The British liaison officer with the Tenth Army, General James Marshall-Cornwall, and other officers already regarded it as lost on 6 June, and General Henry Karslake, commanding the British lines-of-communication troops in France, urged its withdrawal. The government in London, which, as historians stress, was anxious to show the French that Britain was not abandoning its ally, nevertheless left it under French command, and Weygand forbade a retreat to the very end. General Alan Brooke, appointed on 2 June to command the re-forming Expeditionary Force, which was to take in all British troops in France, did not leave for France until 12 June, when it was already all over at Saint-Valery. That same day, at a château near Briare on the Loire, Winston Churchill’s conference with the French government and high command was ending, at which Weygand made it clear that organised French resistance was drawing to a close.

Captivity

The prisoners were driven on foot across northern France and Belgium, along the same road the German offensive had taken in May, and then carried on by barge and by train in goods wagons. Officers were separated from the other ranks. Most of the men were sent first to Stalag XX-A at Toruń, in the Polish lands annexed to the Reich, and later also to camps at Malbork and Łambinowice (Stalag VIII B). Many tried to escape during the march across France. Of the 290 British prisoners who had escaped and returned to Britain by the end of June 1941, 134 came from the 51st Division. For the rest, captivity lasted five years and ended in the winter of 1945 with a gruelling march westwards ahead of the advancing Red Army. As the senior British prisoner in his camps, General Fortune strove to improve conditions for his men. After a stroke in 1944 he refused repatriation so as not to abandon them. Freed in April 1945, he was knighted for his care of the prisoners. General Ihler remained in captivity until May 1945.

Place in the war

The surrender at Saint-Valery ended the involvement of sizeable British forces in the fighting in France. From 15 June, in Operation Aerial, the British evacuated the rest of their troops from the ports of western France, along with the Polish soldiers of General Władysław Sikorski. The French government had left Paris on 10 June, the day Italy declared war; on 14 June the Germans entered the capital, and on 22 June France signed an armistice. For Rommel, Saint-Valery – and a week later the surrender of Cherbourg – crowned a campaign that made him one of the Reich’s most famous generals. Two years later he would face the re-formed 51st Division in North Africa.

In August 1940 the name and traditions of the 51st Division were taken over by its twin, the 9th (Highland) Division, formed in 1939 from the reserves of the same regiments. The new Highland Division fought at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942, in Tunisia, in Sicily and in Normandy. In September 1944, on the orders of General Bernard Montgomery, it was this division that liberated Saint-Valery-en-Caux, and its pipers played in the streets of the town where four years earlier their predecessors had surrendered. General Charles de Gaulle, whose 4th Armoured Division had fought alongside the Scots at Abbeville, said in 1942 that the comradeship in arms with the 51st Division had played a part in his decision to fight on at the Allies’ side to the end.

The memory of Saint-Valery long remained in the shadow of Dunkirk. In Scotland a legend also grew up that Churchill had deliberately “sacrificed” the Scottish division to save the English. Historians reject it: the division was fighting more than a hundred kilometres south of Dunkirk, a week after that evacuation had ended, and it was undone by French orders, British loyalty to an ally, the speed of the German panzer divisions and, at the last moment, the fog. The division’s memorial stands today on the cliff above Saint-Valery – the same cliff from which German guns shelled the harbour on 11 June 1940.