Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (29 page)

Stukas had destroyed the inner harbor, but by the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, scores of smaller ships sent from England entered the outer harbor. At 7:00 p.m. Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, officially began. Thousands of small boats took men off the Malo, Bray, and La Penne beaches to larger ships offshore. Tens of thousands of men would eventually be rescued by Royal Navy destroyers that entered the outer harbor and docked alongside the east breakwater. Dutch
schuyts
, broad-beamed canal boats, ran continuously across the Channel and would safely deliver 22,000 soldiers.

But on the first full day of evacuation, May 27, Sailor Malan and the 74 Squadron “Tigers” were in the thick of it. Arriving over Dunkirk in the morning, they spotted roving flights of Messerschmitts and immediately attacked. Having learned the futility of the Vic, Malan split his flight into two pairs and pulled straight up toward a 109’s belly. The German rolled away and dove, a now-standard defensive maneuver, and Sailor followed. Getting in four bursts from 300 yards, he saw the German plane begin smoking before it disappeared into the clouds. Banking away to the west, he picked up eight Dornier 17’s heading toward the harbor to bomb ships and strafe the beaches. Low on fuel, he and his wingman attacked anyway, shooting down one and scattering the rest. His wingman, Pilot Officer Stevenson, suffered damage to his plane and glided down toward Dunkirk, vanishing beneath the clouds. Malan managed to land back at Rochford with two gallons of fuel remaining in his tanks. Over the harbor again that afternoon the Tigers attacked another bomber formation, chasing the Germans away from the beaches and following them inland as far as St. Omer. By sunset his squadron had accounted for eight aircraft destroyed, with three more probables.

But this day also saw the Germans on the move again. The halt order had been lifted, and if Berlin was hesitant, the German field commanders knew a priceless opportunity when they saw it and weren’t about to let soldiers escape that would one day fight back. So the panzers advanced, bringing Dunkirk within artillery range, and they shelled the town every day. But the destruction had an unintended benefit, as a heavy pall of smoke hung over the entire area and made accurate German air attacks nearly impossible. The low-lying ground around the port was also flooded, and that, combined with a stubborn defense, kept the Germans at bay.

However, on May 28 the Belgians surrendered unconditionally, opening up the entire Allied left flank. The commander of the French First Army, Georges Blanchard, finally realized that the British had no intention of dying for France and were planning to evacuate. According to Gort’s chief of staff, General Pownall, the Frenchman went “completely off the deep end” and adamantly refused to cooperate, adding to the confusion of an already complicated defense. However, despite assaults from the panzers and the French general’s petulance, tens of thousands of British soldiers reached the defensive perimeter by the day’s end.

Others did not.

Hauptsturmführer Fritz Knochlein, a company commander of the Brandenburg Regiment of the Waffen SS Totenkopf Division, ordered ninety-seven British prisoners to be executed. These men were part of the 2nd Royal Norfolks and were machine-gunned in the northern French village of Paradis.
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A further eighty French and British captives were murdered by soldiers of the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in a barn near Wormhoudt.

But then there was Hans-Ekkehard Bob.

Flying a Bf 109E, the young lieutenant was escorting Stukas over Dunkirk when his flight was attacked by seventeen French fighters. Splitting off, he latched onto a Curtiss Hawk and had a wild twenty-minute dogfight that ended in a treetop-level stalemate. The German pilot was surprised. With three victories and thirty missions under his belt, Bob was no novice,
and
he was flying an Emil. Low on fuel, he decided to separate and pulled around to the east. Glancing behind him, he saw the Hawk turn back toward the Allied lines. Immediately pitching back, Hans opened the throttle and the faster 109 rapidly closed the distance. Maybe tired but certainly unaware, the Frenchman didn’t react, and Hans opened fire with both guns and cannon.

Mortally damaged, the other fighter glided down into a field behind the German lines, burning and smoking. Pulling up, the German throttled back and circled as the French pilot tumbled out and lay still. Unhesitatingly, Hans lowered his gear, cobbed the throttle, and bounced in for a landing. Coasting to a stop beside the shattered Hawk, he shut down the engine and jumped out, grabbing his first-aid kit. Bandaging the Frenchman’s wounds, he got the pilot’s name and parents’ address, promising to let them know that their son was alive. He then climbed back into his fighter and took off, heading for home. Despite his excellent record and ace status, Hans could’ve been court-martialed and shot for aiding the enemy. But right is right, and he was a fighter pilot—a killer, not a butcher.

May 29 was a bad day in many respects. With Belgium’s collapse, the German Fourth and Sixth Armies had gotten around Lille to encircle the Allied forces not already on the beaches. Most of the French First Army, though fighting savagely, was cut off, and they surrendered. Four divisions of the BEF made it to the coast before the net closed. This did nothing to assuage the bitterness felt by French leadership that the English had deserted them. The British point of view was that the fall of France was inevitable and the destruction of the BEF would do nothing to prevent it. So the only sensible choice, and indeed the only way to continue fighting the Nazis, was to withdraw. A tough decision, but many Brits felt that France’s predicament was of her own making. After all, if the Germans had been stopped at the Meuse, the Allies wouldn’t be in the sand now.

On the twenty-ninth some 47,300 men were evacuated from the harbor by small civilian boats and the Royal Navy. Not without loss, though, as two destroyers were sunk. HMS
Wakeful
was torpedoed by a German E-boat off the Belgian coast, losing 85 of her 110-man crew. She was also carrying over 650 soldiers—of whom only one was rescued. HMS
Grafton
came to her aid and was subsequently torpedoed by a U-62, losing her captain and a dozen men before sinking. Stukas caught a third destroyer, HMS
Grenade
, on the east pier in Dunkirk harbor, and she went down later that afternoon.

Though the RAF had more than twenty Chain Home radar stations for early warning, they were for Britain’s protection, not the French Channel ports. The indomitable Air Vice Marshal Keith Park’s 11 Fighter Group was responsible for southeast England and the French coast near Dunkirk. Park, a New Zealander, had enlisted during the Great War and fought his way ashore at Gallipoli. Earning a battlefield commission, he transferred to the British regular army as an artillery lieutenant. After being wounded during the Battle of the Somme, Park joined the Royal Flying Corps. A fighter pilot now, he’d been posted to 48 Squadron in France and had shot down five Germans to finish the war as a major and commanding officer. Park was definitely a “lead from the front” sort and often took his own Hurricane over the coast to evaluate the situation for himself.

Yet with just sixteen of thirty-six squadrons remaining, the only effective British response was to keep Hurricanes and Spitfires in the air over the beaches—high over the beaches. This left some of the infantry below feeling abandoned by the RAF. Ignorant of air combat, they didn’t realize what was happening above them and rarely saw the savage fighting taking place. Also, in true infantry fashion, anything flying was a threat, and they shot at whatever they could see, so RAF fighter pilots understandably avoided the beaches unless engaged in hot pursuit. Not that it mattered to the men on the ground; there were numerous accounts of fighters being damaged or downed by friendly troops.

Aviation losses were proportionately heavy, and nearly a quarter of the RAF fighters sent to the Battle for France and to cover Dunkirk never returned. More than three hundred irreplaceable, highly trained, and experienced pilots were lost. Pilot Officer Allan Wright, who survived the battle but lost more than 30 percent of his squadron mates, had a difficult time reconciling the loss of so many skilled, clever men who had their lives still before them.

On May 31 an additional 68,000 men were evacuated, including Lord Gort. June 3 saw more than fifty ships risk the Dunkirk harbor and beaches to rescue 35,000 French soldiers. The British left behind more than 63,000 vehicles, 2,472 artillery pieces, and half a million tons of ammunition and supplies. They also left 68,111 men who were captured, missing, or killed. But the extraordinary ten-day operation had saved some 338,226 soldiers, and at 3:40 a.m. on June 4, HMS
Shikari
steamed from the shattered port—the final vessel to leave.
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It was a tremendously successful rescue: lost equipment could be replaced, but it took twenty years to grow a soldier, and many had been saved to continue fighting. However, Churchill put it into perspective by reminding Parliament that “wars are not won by evacuations.” By 2:23 p.m. that same day, Operation Dynamo had officially ended. The Royal Air Force had flown 4,822 combat sorties to cover the evacuation, adding another 106 fighter aircraft to the 329 Hurricanes lost during the Battle for France.
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Altogether, 280 fighter pilots were lost to the RAF, leaving a mere 330 fighter aircraft and fewer than 800 pilots to defend Great Britain.

The day following the end of Dynamo, Generaloberst Erhard Milch took a flight over the beaches and Dunkirk harbor. Milch was second in command of the Luftwaffe and had long advocated finishing Britain off immediately. Later that day he told Hermann Goering, “The British Army? I saw perhaps twenty or thirty corpses. The rest of the British Army has got clean away to the other side.”

Milch wanted to do a Norway-style Luftwaffe attack using tactical bombers, with the German navy and paratroopers securing a beachhead in southeast England. If such a foothold could be seized, with the critical airfields intact, the British would be too weak to counterattack. After all, they’d left virtually all their heavy equipment and weapons on the beach. With the country reeling, it was time to strike—hard. Milch said, “If we leave the British in peace for four weeks it will be too late.”

He was correct—and he was dead wrong.

He was correct in that there would never be a better time for conquering England. Britain was truly alone. Both Turkey and Egypt had failed to honor their promises for assistance, and from Norway to Spain the coasts were controlled by the Third Reich. Only tiny Gibraltar on the tip of the Spanish peninsula remained in British hands. Hulking darkly to the east was the Soviet Union—archfoe of England and utterly untrustworthy. Far to the west lay the great hope of the United States with its immense industrial might, resources, and manpower, but at least eighteen months away from waging war. There was no one else to fight off the Germans.

But he was wrong in assuming the British could be beaten that quickly. Invading England was no guarantee of victory—they weren’t French, after all. The Germans would most likely find themselves with a protracted, nasty guerilla war on their hands. In any event, Nazi leadership hadn’t decided yet whom to fight, and that was a
very
big problem. Indecision, “soft” objectives, and lack of a coherent strategy are ruinous to any military group.

There were those who wanted to stop and consolidate the immense territories gained by capturing Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and France. They wanted Sweden to feed the growing German steel industry so that factories could produce more tanks and aircraft. Berlin persuaded a frightened Rumania to trade oil for arms, thus gaining a small but steady supply of the vital fluid. Reparations payments were mandated by the Germans and provided an infusion of hard cash from Luxembourg, Holland, and especially the French. Men needed rest, reorganization, new equipment, and replacements. There was also a crucial shortage of transport aircraft following heavy losses in the first days of the campaign. Pilots and aircrew of all types were in short supply.

Nor was the fighting over. When the Germans cut the Allied line during their dash for the coast, a large number of Allied troops were isolated west of the Somme. Most of these were support and communications troops from the huge BEF supply depots in Rouen and Le Havre. But the only British armored division (what was left of it) was also in the south, along with the 51st Highlanders. The 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions had broken through the Somme, and the British had no choice but to fall back to avoid entrapment. Operation Cycle, initiated on June 10, rescued 11,059 men of the British 51st Highlanders and First Armored Division from the little port of St. Valery in northern Normandy.

Sir Alan Brooke, who’d led II Corps during the retreat to Dunkirk, had been sent back in command and he immediately realized there was no hope of continuing a continental fight. Personally calling Churchill, he insisted on a withdrawal over the prime minister’s objections. This was eventually approved, and Operation Ariel began on June 15, 1940, to gather up the remaining Allied soldiers. This included the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry and 1st Canadian Divisions, which had fallen back on Cherbourg when Rommel’s 7th Panzers severed the road to Le Havre. More than 30,000 men were evacuated between June 15 and 17, including the 5th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters—Albert Ball’s infantry unit from the Great War.

With the coast now closed from Normandy north to the Pas de Calais, 21,474 Canadians retreated to St. Malo in Brittany, from where they were evacuated. Another 32,000 men left from Brest, followed by RAF ground crew, Poles, and Czechs from St. Nazaire. Farther down the coast at La Rochelle, an English officer found no ships for the 14,000 Poles and British troops there, so he simply commandeered French merchant ships and sailed for home. Until June 25 evacuations continued along the Bordeaux coast for any stragglers; this included the last British and Polish diplomatic staff.