The Man Who Was Saturday

This was not a good start to Neave’s fighting career and things were not about to improve. He had stationed himself at a barricade at the entrance to the village, constructed from the local undertaker’s hearse and a couple of carts. Refugees were still arriving, pleading to be allowed into Calais, among them a family of Austrian Jews. While he was trying to dissuade them, a mortar bomb crashed into the roof of the Mairie, showering them with broken tiles. It was followed by several others. Above the mayhem, a small Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft droned unconcernedly across the clear blue sky. Neave ‘fired at it wildly’ but without effect.8 The barrage lasted a quarter of an hour, tearing up paving stones and starting fires. When it stopped, a young girl lay dead on the roadside. Neave watched a soldier pull her tartan skirt gently over her knees. His despatch rider was dead beside him on the pavement. He ‘took his papers and looked down at him. He had been a cheerful man. He still had a smile that even a mortar bomb could not efface.’

Neave’s account of these events is emotionally restrained and all the more effective for being so. The spare narrative gives a strong sense of what war is really like. Neave had learned in a few hours that it was formless. It was about confusion, frantic improvisation, sudden eruptions of indiscriminate violence and the body of an innocent girl in a village street. In the late afternoon, the defenders began to fall back against the Panzer onslaught. When tanks came up, the men on the ridge were forced back to Orphanage Farm, which then came under a sustained barrage from the Panzers’ recently arrived artillery. At 7 p.m., after five hours of fighting, Goldney abandoned his HQ and ordered everyone to fall back on Calais.

Neave sent his men off by lorry, but for the moment he would not be joining them. He had been given an important task to complete before he could leave Coulogne. Together with a ‘Sergeant Maginis’ and a sapper equipped with some gun cotton, he was ordered to destroy the ‘Cuckoo’, the code name for an experimental sound-location device which the Searchlights had brought with them. On no account was it to fall into enemy hands. It was sitting on a trailer in the middle of the village and for five tense minutes the sapper fiddled with the explosive, trying to blow up the apparatus. The situation was resolved when two large French tankers full of aviation spirit came thundering down the road, with German infantry close behind. The drivers abandoned the trucks and gamely set them ablaze. The fire spread to the Cuckoo, which ‘providentially’ exploded, and Neave and his comrades were able to escape under cover of a thick cloud of black smoke.9

For a second time that day, events had not played out in the way Neave would have liked. Who knows what would have happened had the tankers not appeared? Nonetheless, in his post-war account, Neave gave the episode a positive spin. Quoting the 1st Panzer Division war diary, he reports that after the hot reception they received, it was decided that Calais was too strongly defended for them to attempt an improvised attack and they were ordered to push on to Gravelines and Dunkirk, leaving the capture of the port to 10th Panzer Division. From the German point of view, he wrote, ‘a great chance was lost. Guderian’s First Panzer Division had been hampered on its left flank as it advanced to Dunkirk, by British tanks and searchlights. If Calais had fallen to this division on the afternoon of the 23rd, Guderian would surely have sent his Tenth Panzer Division straight to Dunkirk and captured it before the defences were organised. The German records show that it was Goldney’s stand at Orphanage Farm which made him change his plans.’10

Neave was in this sense an optimist. He had the happy ability to glimpse within the fog of apparent debacle ‘providential’ outcomes. It was a fortunate attitude that would sustain him in the many setbacks that assailed him in the months ahead and a key component in the resilience and determination to persist in unpromising circumstances that carried him through not only the war but much of the rest of his life.

After the scrambled departure from Coulogne, Neave set off to Calais by foot, arriving at the Porte de Marck, on the eastern ramparts of the city, at 10 p.m., ‘shaken by the bombing … and my narrow escape.’11 The geography of Calais was complicated. Calais-Nord was the dock area, a collection of basins and interlocking canals connected by bridges and overlooked by a massive sixteenth-century citadel. The southern half was Calais-St-Pierre, the modern centre dominated by the huge and florid Hôtel de Ville. The whole ensemble was protected by an enceinte, a defensive enclosure of walls and bastions designed by the great military engineer Vauban on Louis XIV’s orders and added to over the centuries. It was pierced in several places by railway lines leading to the docks, but these fortifications now had to do service as a bulwark against the latest German invasion.

On the three-mile trudge from his outpost, Neave managed to pick up some members of his troop. He was ‘nervous and footsore’ but ‘tried to appear unbowed’. The sector was held by the Rifle Brigade, the Green Jackets, whose renown derived from countless brave exploits in centuries of continental and imperial wars. Neave and his Searchlight comrades were now under the orders of Major John Taylor, commanding ‘A’ Company. He spent the night lying on top of the ramparts, facing eastward, rifle in hand, while shells whined overhead to crash into the docks behind him, where intermittent efforts were being made to unload the Green Jackets’ transport.

The fate of the defenders lay in the hands of London. Whitehall’s ignorance of the true picture, though, produced a succession of hasty and short-lived decisions. Late the previous evening, the War Office decided that, having sent reinforcements to Calais, they were now going to pull them out. The situation in the Channel ports was untenable. Down the road in Boulogne, the 20th Guards Brigade, who had been holding out against a siege by Guderian’s panzers, were already being disembarked, leaving French troops to hold on for another twenty-four hours. The War Office had apparently concluded that the situation in Calais was equally hopeless and that the highly trained troops of Nicholson’s brigade should be extracted while there was still time. At 3 o’clock that morning, he received an order: ‘Evacuation decided in principle. When you have finished unloading your two M.T. [Motor Transport] ships commence embarkation of all personnel except fighting personnel who remain to cover final evacuation.’ It was not long before Nicholson was issued with completely contradictory instructions.

Neave watched the dawn rise over Dunkirk, whose vital importance, if terminal catastrophe was to be averted, was becoming ever clearer. He had been unable to sleep, ‘so strong was the sense of danger’.12 On the roads leading into Calais, the tanks, carriers, trucks and mobile artillery of the 10th Panzer Division were rumbling forward and the siege of Calais proper was about to begin.

Nicholson planned a layered defence, starting at an outer perimeter from which the troops could make successive withdrawals into the town. There was a huge area to defend. The walls of the enceinte stretched for eight miles. He had no artillery and a depleted tank force. Yet morale among the troops was good and had improved further as word spread that they would soon be on their way back across the Channel. At dawn, the first blows of the German assault fell on the QVR, holding forward positions on the south and south-west of the town. They were forced to fall back to the enceinte, which by midday had become the main defensive line.

During the morning, Neave was ordered to move his men from the eastern ramparts and wait in the sand dunes half a mile to the north, where hundreds of non-combatant troops were sheltered. It was an unsettling time. They were in the battle but not of it. ‘Calais had become a city of doom and I was not in the least anxious to remain,’ he wrote candidly afterwards.13 He was tired and nervous. For something to do, he walked down to the Gare Maritime, where the railway met the port, in time to see one of the transport ships leaving harbour. The scene stayed with him. There were twenty dead bodies on the platform, victims of the night’s shelling, and ‘the sad corpses, covered in grey blankets, had begun to stink.’ It was a clear day and he could see the white cliffs of Dover, so near but yet so far. Throughout the afternoon, German infantry, supported by tanks, attacked on all three sides of the perimeter, while shells rained down on the harbour area. The defenders fought with a ferocity that won the Germans’ reluctant admiration. By the early evening, they had only managed to break into the southern side of the town in a few places, at a cost of heavy losses of equipment, men and tanks.

In the early afternoon, Neave got his chance to join the fray. Green Jacket officers called for volunteers from the crowd of unemployed soldiers sitting among the dunes. He rounded up fifty from the Searchlights and they formed up at the Gare Maritime, before heading south along the dock road to get their orders at the Hôtel de Ville. It was a proud moment for men designated ‘non-fighting soldiers’. Marching off under the gaze of the Green Jackets, ‘not a man faltered. It would never have done to be seen to be afraid even though the shells were coming in fast over the harbour.’14 In the shadow of the gigantic clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville, Neave was told that he and his men were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th Rifles, who were holding a position by the western ramparts of the enceinte, which was under heavy attack from tanks and troops pushing in along the Route de Boulogne. They were led there by a staff officer through the deserted shopping streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which ran east–west across the centre of Calais-St-Pierre. The enemy tanks and machine guns had a clear field of fire down the boulevard, so Neave’s group moved west in the hot afternoon sun along a narrow parallel street. At some point it seems they could get no closer, and Neave led his men into a side street and left them in a doorway while he ‘moved gingerly into the boulevard itself’.

Ahead lay the Pont Jourdan, which crossed a railway line coming in from the south. It was held by the 60th and it was there he would have to go to get his next orders. It was the greatest test of his courage that he had faced until now and he was not sure how he would fare. ‘A steady hail of tracer bullets and some tank shells came flying over the hump of the … railway bridge,’ he wrote later. ‘They bounced off the paving stones in all directions as I clung for life to the walls of houses on the south side of the boulevard and crept towards the bridge. This was my first experience of street fighting and I was acutely frightened. It was difficult to understand how others could remain so collected under fire. Throughout the battle, the noise was so great that if you were more than ten yards away it was impossible to understand what was said to you.’15

Eventually, he reached the cover of the railway embankment that ran either side of the bridge, where he found Major Poole, the ‘B’ Company commander. Poole was a veteran of the last war, had been wounded, taken prisoner and escaped. Despite his great experience, Neave heard the anxiety in his voice. ‘I am afraid they may break through,’ he told him. ‘Get your people in the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. You must fight like bloody hell.’

This account comes from Neave’s book The Flames of Calais, which appeared in 1972. It intersperses his personal story, told with much detail and verbatim dialogue like the above, with the full story of the episode at every level, from decision-making in London and Guderian’s headquarters to platoon actions. The broader narrative is well supported by official documentation and participants’ accounts. But it is worth asking how accurate was his recollection of his own part in the story, thirty-two years after the event. There is no mention that he was working from a diary or semi-contemporaneous notes. Nonetheless, his account has the ring of authenticity. The recollections of combatants who were taken prisoner often have a fine-grained quality and an immediacy that is not so often present in other post-factum testimony. When removed from the battlefield and plunged into the tedium of captivity, he had plenty of time to obsess over events while the memory was still fresh. If the temptation for self-justifying adjustments to the narrative was strong, Neave appears to have resisted it. At no point in the story does he attempt to present himself as anything other than a tiny actor in the great events, often confused, frightened and ineffective, but always desperately concerned to do the right thing.

The right thing now was to obey Major Poole’s instruction and fight like hell. He returned to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, with bullets ricocheting around him, and found his men, now joined by two sergeants, crouched in the shelter of an ivy-covered wall. They were armed with only two Brens and some rifles. He ordered the sergeants to take up positions in the windows of the first floor of houses on either side of the street, from where they could fire on the German positions half a mile away on the Route de Boulogne. There followed a surreal episode of the sort that occurs with surprising frequency in the middle of battles. A door opened and a group of civilians scuttled past carrying the corpse of an old woman. There were other civilians about. The patron of a café near the bridge, proudly wearing his Croix de Guerre, spurned the mortal danger he was in to remain open, handing out cognac to anyone within reach and exhorting the defenders with a defiant slogan from the last war: ‘On les aura!’ (We’ll have ’em!)

There was danger behind as well as in front. A single rifle shot behind was followed by a shout of ‘Fifth column!’ After the battle was over, there would be many stories of mysterious gunmen appearing out of nowhere, some in German uniform, sniping at the defenders. They would reinforce the impression growing among many of the British troops that the French made unreliable allies. ‘B’ Company were deployed ahead on the far side of the railway bridge around an improvised road-block and facing down the Route de Boulogne. The Searchlights Bren teams reached their first-floor positions, smashed the windows and began to lay down supporting fire. Their eagerness and inexperience soon brought shouts of protest from the 60th on the far side of the bridge. Crouched in a doorway, Neave ‘could hear hoarse shouts: “F---ing well look where you’re shooting!”’16

In a lull in the fighting, he dodged across the boulevard to the corner of the Rue Edgar Quinet, a side street next to the bridge. From here he could see that the company’s position was critical and the weight of enemy fire seemed certain to break the defenders soon if they did not drop back. The situation seemed to improve a little when, at 4 p.m., one of the British cruiser tanks arrived at the railway bridge and fired two or three rounds towards the attackers. The German response was furious: ‘Tank shells and machine-gun bullets came thick and fast for twenty minutes. Ricochets off the walls and flying glass made my situation in the Rue Edgar Quinet … rather exposed … It was now without a sign of life, save for a young girl’s white face at a cellar grating. The wall which sheltered me had ragged gaps where mortar bombs had flung bricks into the street. I began to look for a safer position.’

He could see nothing but clouds of smoke and dust, and the enemy felt horribly close. The Searchlight men were firing through the lace curtains, bravely but inexpertly, endangering defenders as much as attackers. One of the Brens began to fire fitfully, then jammed. He was acutely conscious of his lack of training and his impotence, able only to observe and offer encouragement. The sun beat down and the air throbbed with the heat from burning buildings. His thirst became unbearable. He had to get something to drink. He decided to make a dash for the café. He waited for a lull in the firing and was about to run when he ‘felt a sharp, bruising pain in my left side. I collapsed to the pavement, my rifle clattering.’ He tried to get up and found that he could still walk.

He staggered across to his original destination, the café on the corner, and took shelter in the side street, gratefully accepting a large cognac from the proprietor. A bespectacled medical orderly appeared, opened Neave’s battledress and examined the wound. He pronounced him lucky – the bullet had passed half an inch from his heart. The orderly’s cheerfulness and inclination to ‘talk professionally about the condition of the wound’ grated on Neave’s nerves. His great fear was ‘that the Germans would break through in the next few minutes, that I should be left behind and captured’. He swore at the medic and ordered him to take him to the next street. There they were joined by a Frenchman and between them they walked him away.

There was no sign of a regimental aid post (RAP), and he knew the nearest hospital was a mile away. He was calmed by the arrival of a scout car carrying a young officer of the 60th, Michael Sinclair, who like him was captured and ended up in Colditz, where he was shot dead while trying to escape in 1944. Sinclair ‘smilingly drew my attention to a van flying the Red Cross’. The improvised ambulance, ‘smelling strongly of stale vegetables’, carried him at high speed back into the centre to the Pont Georges Cinq, the central of three spans that connected Calais-St-Pierre to Calais-Nord. They halted by a group of soldiers seeking directions to the 60th’s RAP, but no one knew its whereabouts and an argument broke out as to which of the three hospitals in town he should be taken to.

Lying in the back, listening to the confused voices, Neave ‘was suffering more from anger than pain’. He was still tortured by the thought that he might be captured. ‘My chief interest,’ he admitted frankly, ‘was in evacuation by sea to England.’ Eventually it was decided to take him to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent only a few hundred yards away in the Rue Leveux, under the eastern wall of the Citadel. He was unloaded under the supervision of the 60th’s medical officer, Lieutenant A. F. Stallard, who after examination told him he had received a ‘penetrating flank wound’ that would require an operation. He was ‘carried, protesting, into the dark interior of the hospital where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, awaited me’.

Beyond the ramparts of Calais, great strategic events had conspired to cancel all hope of evacuation. Throughout the day, the realisation had penetrated the heads of those directing events in London that the BEF was facing extinction. Unless it could be saved, Britain’s continuation in the war was seriously in doubt. Calais now assumed a new and different importance. It had become a key element in the struggle to bring the BEF home through the port of Dunkirk, thirty miles to the north-east. Their job was to drag the 10th Panzer Division into a fight to the last ditch, man and bullet, in order to delay it moving north and adding its weight to the enemy forces closing on the 200,000 beleaguered British troops.

Although the British did not know it, the threat of an armoured onslaught had temporarily subsided. That morning, Guderian had been ordered to halt his other Panzer divisions on a line on the river Aa, just to the east of Calais. Hitler had decided to give his exhausted soldiers a brief respite before moving against the French armies to the south. The British were beaten and he was prepared to allow Hermann Goering the chance to make good on his promise that the Luftwaffe would finish them off.

A further great decision settled the Calais garrison’s fate. Lord Gort, the BEF’s commander, came to the conclusion that the idea of attacking south to join up with the French army on the Somme was a fantasy. On the 25th, on his own initiative, he took what Neave described as ‘the most vital decision of the entire campaign’17 and ordered his army to fall back to the north and Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation. It was also one of the fateful decisions of the war. Had he prevaricated, the BEF would have been lost and with it perhaps any realistic hope that Britain could stay in the war and establish the conditions for eventual victory. But in order for the BEF to be saved, the Calais garrison had to be sacrificed. It became the tethered goat to distract the Panzers from the greater prize ahead.

The drastic change in thinking was signalled in orders which arrived late on the night of the 24th, crushing hope of an evacuation and telling Nicholson that he must fight on ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. This was a reference to the furious reaction of the French to the news that Calais, like Boulogne, was about to be abandoned, scuppering their plans to establish a bridgehead that could be supplied by sea and keep resistance alive in the north-east. The theme was repeated the following day in a message to Nicholson from Anthony Eden, which arrived at 2 p.m., stating ‘Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued co-operation with France. The eyes of the empire are upon the defence of Calais and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.’

That day saw the launching of the evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo. There would be no further reference to Allied solidarity, and the signal drafted in London that night by Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Chief of the General Staff, Edmund Ironside, was stark. It read: ‘Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.’

Nicholson needed no exhortations to keep fighting. That morning, the attackers broke into Calais-St-Pierre and at 8 a.m. the swastika was flying from the Hôtel de Ville. Three hours later, the Germans sent the town mayor, André Gershell, to Nicholson at his headquarters in the Citadel to demand his surrender. His reply was that ‘If the Germans want Calais they will have to fight for it.’18 A German officer led a second deputation in the afternoon, which was similarly rebuffed.

Neave spent the night of the 24/25th recovering from his operation in a ward in the cellars of the Hôpital Militaire. In the next bed lay a young Hurricane pilot who knew he was dying. He ‘could still speak and begged me to keep talking to him’.19 As it grew light, ‘his body shuddered and his mouth fell open. The orderly saluted and, for a few minutes, the ward was very quiet.’ He passed the rest of the day there, with the sounds of the fight piercing the thick walls and the occasional shell bursting in the vicinity, one of which showered his bed with broken glass. Outside, the defenders were being forced back street by street. Much of the town was choked with smoke and fire. In the early evening, the town was shaken by a prolonged artillery bombardment. Above the crackle of burning houses, Neave heard the ‘groans and cries’ of the wounded as they were brought down to the cellars.

At 9.30 in the morning, Stuka dive-bombers descended on the town, and an hour later enemy troops began crossing the bridges to Calais-Nord. The bombs shook the hospital and in the basement ‘the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering.’ Just before 10 a.m., a bomb landed in front of the hospital, blowing in the main doors. Fear seized Neave. He was ‘terrified that with the next direct hit the wounded would be buried alive’. When the Stukas finally departed, he left his bed and found he could walk unaided. He decided to head for the Gare Maritime and find transport. He fixed on the hope that ‘it might still be possible to evacuate the wounded by sea. Anything was better for them than entombment in the ruins of the Hôpital Militaire.’20 He seems to have discussed the idea with an unnamed fellow patient, a corporal who volunteered to go with him. Dressed in what he could find – shirt, battledress trousers and steel helmet – he left the shelter. The hospital garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, with shattered masonry and glass lying around the graves dug for five riflemen who had died of their wounds in the cellar. The French military doctor commanding the hospital listened to his plan with amazement, telling him, ‘You are crazy, mon lieutenant. You do not know what is happening in the town.’ Neave repeated that the men would only be taken prisoner if they remained and insisted on his belief that it was still possible to get hospital ships in the harbour. ‘You are absolutely determined to sacrifice your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘I was not interested in anything of the kind,’ Neave recalled. ‘I was irrationally confident that I could get through.’

The two injured men picked their way through the shattered and burning streets, Neave doubled up from the wound in his side and his companion limping. Calais-Nord was deserted after the dive-bombing, but as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.

His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.

At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.