Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

While this was going on, Krüger’s infantry advanced on Orphanage Farm, less than a mile to the north of Coulogne, where the 1st Searchlight Regiment commander, Colonel Goldney, had set up his HQ. Goldney prepared to defend it with the padre, the medical officer and a handful of men, despatching a small force to hold a ridge on the southern approach to the farm against the attackers. When making his dispositions, Neave had posted Bren gunners on the south-eastern side of Coulogne, below the ridge held on the other side by Goldney’s advance guard. When the Germans arrived, they opened up on the farm’s defenders with ‘very heavy rifle and automatic fire’. Sited in the lee of the ridge, Neave’s men were unable to see the fray but nonetheless opened up in the direction of the fighting, ‘narrowly missing’ their comrades.7 The result was that a despatch rider ‘roared over the fields’ from Goldney’s farmhouse HQ ‘with a well-deserved “rocket” from the Colonel and the Brens were moved forward.’

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.