Ride Out The Storm

• Copyright & Information
  
• About the Author
  
• Introduction
  
• Author's Note
  
• Sunday, 26 May
  
• Monday, 27 May
  
• Tuesday, 28 May
  
• Wednesday, 29 May
  
• Thursday, 30 May
  
• Friday, 31 May
  
• Saturday, 1 June
  
• Sunday, 2 June and Afterwards
  
• Epilogue
  
• Synopses of John Harris Titles
  

John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other 'part time' careers followed.

He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling
The Sea Shall Not Have Them
was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as
Dunkirk
. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the 'Chief Inspector' Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

We shall…ride out the storm of war and outlive the menace of tyranny… That is the resolve of HM Government… That is the will of Parliament and the nation…we shall not flag
or fail… We shall fight on the seas and oceans…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender…

Winston Churchill, 4 June, 1940

Since this book is based firmly on fact, I have read everything possible on the subject by historians and by the soldiers who were there. I am particularly indebted to three books: Gun-Buster’s
Return Via Dunkirk
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), Sir Basil Bartlett’s
My First War
(Chatto and Windus, 1940), and David Divine’s detailed and authoritative
The Nine Days of Dunkirk
(Faber, 1969). I also owe a great deal to those men who agreed to go through the whole thing again with me in their homes, producing old maps and photographs and digging into their memories for modest accounts of how it had seemed to them. Like most old soldiers they were very casual about it, and for the most part seemed to consider only that it had been ‘a bit dodgy’.

Dunkirk!

There were nine days of Dunkirk and in the early afternoon of the first of those nine days, 26 May, 1940, well aware that his country was on the threshold of one of the greatest crises in her history, Alban Kitchener Tremenheere was walking through the flat streets of Littlehampton in Sussex towards his lodgings. He was none too sober and felt in the sort of devilish mood that had more than once in his lifetime got him into trouble. Indifferent as always to other people’s opinions, he was convinced that before long he was going to be dead, dying, or at the very least a slave of the Greater German Reich, and was therefore determined, even if no one else was, that he was going to have some fun before the chopper fell.

For eight months since the war had started the previous year there had been no fighting and, with most of the casualties coming from road accidents, he had lulled himself into believing the war wasn’t as had as people had led him to expect. He had not been alone in his view, of course, because the whole country had felt the same and even the Prime Minister had said that, like an old soldier, the war would eventually fade away to nothing as the Germans became convinced they couldn’t win.

Hitler had changed all that. With a vengeance. Invading Denmark and Norway, he had flung aside with contemptuous ease the scratch British and French force that had gone to the rescue, and then in the darkness of the morning of 10 May the blitzkrieg which had devastated Poland the previous year had begun to sweep across Holland, Belgium and Northern France against soldiers who had spent the period of the Phoney War painstakingly building up the traditional forces of 1918. By 20 May it had reached the sea to split the allied armies in two and the British, still expecting to fight according to the gentlemanly rules of earlier wars, had suddenly found themselves dealing with situations which had not even come within the scope of their imagination.

By 26 May –
that
Sunday morning – the disaster had reached such proportions that the Secretary of State for War had sent a telegram to Lord Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, announcing bluntly that there was no longer any course open to him but to fall back upon the coast. It was out of date and quite superfluous because by that time, together with the remnants of the Belgian army and the French First and Seventh Armies, the BEF was penned in a tongue of land no more than 40 miles deep and the same distance wide with, on the east, a highly dangerous indentation. Lord Gort, despite a VC, three DSOs, an MC and a Guardsman’s instinct for obedience, had decided he must disobey his French superiors’ orders to smash his way through the Germans to the armies in the south in order to close the dangerous gap opening to the east, and was in effect already doing what he was now being instructed to do.

None of these details was known to Tremenheere, of course. But, though the newspapers – making much of the self-sacrificial bombing attacks by brave young British airmen in outdated machines – would only admit that the situation was ‘grave’, it required no particular intelligence to grasp what was happening. The Channel coast of France was ablaze and the whole of the BEF, sent to the Continent with such high hopes the previous autumn, was in danger of being captured. In London, instead of being concerned with victory, thoughts were suddenly dwelling on the possibility of defeat and, though an attempt was still being made to keep open the Channel ports for the struggling army, one after the other they were falling to the Germans. Calais alone had held out – to hold the right flank of the beleaguered BEF – but by this time it was clear that when that evacuation by sea which was already uneasily being mentioned in high places became a fact, there would be only one usable port left – Dunkirk.

As he had sat on a box on the deck of the motor launch,
Athelstan,
on which he was employed as the hired hand, Tremenheere had stared at the heavy print of the Sunday newspapers with a sense of growing horror. He was a sturdy black-haired man whose speech still retained the burr of the Roseland peninsula south of Truro where in the last days of 1917, having got a girl into trouble, he had decided it might be a good idea to give up fishing and join the navy. By the time he found himself home again, his problem had been solved by the girl marrying the man for whom he’d worked a twenty-five-foot lugger, but his father, an unforgiving elder of the Baptist Church, had nevertheless cocked a thumb as he’d opened the door and spoken only two words in greeting – ‘Keep going’.

It hadn’t particularly worried Tremenheere because by then there had been another girl in Portsmouth and he did just what his father advised and returned to make an honest woman of her. At the age of nineteen he’d been a handsome young man with heavy brows that collided in the middle to give him the look of a good-humoured satyr; but he’d always liked his beer too much, and, three years to the day after he’d led her from the altar surrounded by none-too-sober relatives, his new wife had abandoned him like a parcel left on a bus, for a sergeant in the Royal Marines.

Despite the sergeant of Marines and the fact that he’d fought for jobs all through the thirties, Tremenheere had never once ceased to believe in the British Empire and the nobility of British arms. He’d been raised on pictures of men standing on hilltops, holding flags in heroic attitudes, and nothing had ever destroyed his faith. Now, in the general confusion of defeat and dismay, he wasn’t so sure. The headlines that morning had been like mourning bands and there had been pictures of Cabinet Ministers crossing Whitehall for Downing Street, grim-faced with a sense of destiny and despair. The reports from Germany had claimed enormous successes, and hastily drawn maps had shown a situation that was already out-of-date as events moved faster than the newspapers could co-ordinate them.

Hardly aware of the slow clang of church bells over the still air, Tremenheere had stared at the stories, sucking his empty pipe, startled at the frightening speed with which disasters seemed to be following each other. It had seemed impossible that the British Army was being defeated in France by the men they’d licked so completely only twenty years before. For months everyone had been wanting something to happen and, now that it had, events were crowding one upon another with an intensity that was terrifying. Moving restlessly on his box, he had suddenly felt badly in need of a drink. Climbing ashore from the dinghy, he’d walked to his local, aware of an uncomfortable feeling that somewhere something was terribly wrong, and as he had seen the barman waiting for his order, somehow it hadn’t seemed to be a day for a pint of mild.

‘Give us a rum, me dear,’ he’d said briskly. ‘A bloody big one!’ Now, several rums later, he was heading towards his official residence, Thirteen, Osborne Road, with a view to sleeping it off.