jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
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Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Harvard University Press was reviewed in today's New York Times. Sounds very good.
****
There is evidently something in the British character that relishes a really solid military reverse. Many more hearts, among the island race, are set pounding by the gallant fiasco of the Light Brigade than even by Waterloo or Trafalgar. George MacDonald Fraser has made a fortune out of chronicling the numberless heroic drubbings to which, from Afghanistan to Zululand, British armies have been subjected. Nobody can quite decide whether the Somme in 1916 was a victory or a defeat, because some things indeed do lie too deep for tears.
It is not as if the British dwell too much on their humiliations (Singapore and Suez are often passed over in a gruff silence). Perhaps it just seems bad form to celebrate one’s victories too much — unless of course they are attained just as the bloody jaws of defeat are about to snap shut. Then, every spine is straightened and we are back at Agincourt, on a sticky wicket somewhere in France but with the home island not all that far away.
The absolutely critical moment in Shakespeare’s account comes with King Henry’s reply to the enemy’s herald. Young Harry knows that his army is awash with pox and diarrhea and otherwise in thoroughly bad shape. “We would not seek a battle, as we are,” he confesses to Montjoy. But then comes the spine-stiffener. “Nor, as we are, we say, we will not shun it.”
This came back to me with particular force as I turned the pages of “Dunkirk,” Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s first-rate panoramic history, and highly affecting worm’s-eye account, of Britain’s absolutely all-time favorite disaster. Has there ever been a more obviously foredoomed military escapade (for once one can employ the word accurately) than the dispatch, for the second time in a quarter-century, of a British Expeditionary Force to defend Belgium and France from German expansionism? The name given to the army was suggestive of the tentative and the improvised, as if its very presence on the European mainland was something rather out-of-the-way and short-term. As indeed it proved to be: the chief historic achievement of the B.E.F. was to have got itself home again, if not quite in one piece. Sebag-Montefiore, the author of “Enigma: The Battle for the Code,” helps amplify and redeem the sad story, though, by telling us of those who followed the terse order that is contained in his subtitle, and who thereby made that great escape possible.
The author’s own cousin, Denzil Sebag-Montefiore, may have been one of the few Jewish platoon commanders on those gruesome beaches, but like Siegfried Sassoon before him, he conducted himself with distinctive insouciance. He shared his Fortnum & Mason food hamper with his men, who repaid the kindness by heaving him into a boat (after he had lightened himself by tossing away his engraved ivory hairbrushes).
The book is replete with the exploits of double- and triple-barrel names: Lt. Col. Lionel Bootle-Wilbraham marvels at the speed with which British soldiers disappear into brothels. Maj. Reggie Alston-Roberts-West teams up with the Duke of Northumberland and finds a lieutenant of the Grenadier Guards, with the title Master of Forbes, badly wounded. They drag him away, “rather like a dead stag is pulled off the hill by its antlers.” Brig. M. B. Beckwith-Smith offers £5 to any of his gunners who can bring down a Nazi dive- bomber, adding the advice that those aiming should “take them like a high pheasant.” It’s a bit like crossing Sassoon with Anthony Powell, and finding upper-crust fox hunters and deerstalkers chivying their way through shell-holes.
“I managed to have a word with Fat Boy Gort,” says Nick Jenkins’s officer-class father in Powell’s “phony war” novel, “The Kindly Ones” — a book that gives a beautifully understated sense of the impending shambles. In reality, Lord Gort, the commander of the B.E.F., had perhaps the least enviable of all jobs. He had to lead a dismally unprepared force across to France, then contend every day with French and Belgian, not to mention British, politics. The particular brilliance of this book lies in the manner in which Sebag-Montefiore interleaves the military with the political.
In a vertiginous space of time, the wretchedly equipped B.E.F. was forced to deal with exorbitant demands from Paris that the French essentially be lent the bulk of the Royal Air Force; with a cowardly sellout on their left flank by King Leopold of Belgium; and with intelligence from German sources (in one case anti-Nazi and in one case not) about the precise date when Generals Guderian and Rommel would roll forward and carry the swastika flag into the Low Countries. As if this were not enough, the war cabinet in London, still reeling from the ease with which Hitler had defeated another British “expedition” to Norway, was seriously entertaining a proposal of “mediation” from Benito Mussolini. ( I find it somehow humiliating — no, make that nauseating — even to have to read about this latter episode.)
By the time Churchill and Clement Attlee had outpointed Chamberlain and Halifax and the other capitulationists and formed a serious government, it was probably already too late. Churchill’s own memoirs give the most haunting account of the moment of truth. Seeing the dispiriting picture on the map when he flew to Paris in the middle of May 1940, he turned to Gen. Maurice Gamelin to ask where his reserves were and received the bleak one-word response “Aucune” — there weren’t any. Through the window, Churchill suddenly noticed that the evacuation of the Quai d’Orsay was already in rapid progress.
To say the flight from Dunkirk placed the Entente Cordiale under considerable strain is to say the least of it. By the end, British soldiers were simply pushing their French counterparts over the side in the scramble for the boats. (It also wouldn’t be very long before Churchill gave the order, still hugely resented in France, for the Royal Navy to sink the French fleet in the Algerian port of Oran, lest it even consider surrendering to Hitler.) There were other appalling scenes of panic and misery on Dunkirk’s beaches, recently and grimly reconstructed by Ian McEwan in his novel “Atonement,” as exhausted soldiers endured leisurely German strafing and cursed the absence of the R.A.F. The whole bitterness and shame was somewhat annealed in the public mind by the little volunteer vessels that poured across from England to take off survivors, but Sebag-Montefiore is unsparing in his description of the crack-ups, shell-shock and drunkenness that sometimes seemed endemic among these rescuers. Churchill himself was sufficiently alarmed by the euphoria over the whole calamity to remind his listeners that wars are not won by evacuations.
It was quite late in the day when a detachment of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiment (the “Ox and Bucks” ) were told of the order to “fight to the last man, to the last round. ” And so many of them did, even though they knew the cause was lost and that many of their comrades were embarking for England. These men purchased necessary time in the hardest possible currency. Judging by some of the diaries and letters cited by Sebag-Montefiore, about the prostitutes and wine-cellars of the region, many of the English soldiery were as poxed and shaky as King Henry’s legendary rabble. But, not seeking a battle as they were, it must yet be said of them that they did not shun it.
****
There is evidently something in the British character that relishes a really solid military reverse. Many more hearts, among the island race, are set pounding by the gallant fiasco of the Light Brigade than even by Waterloo or Trafalgar. George MacDonald Fraser has made a fortune out of chronicling the numberless heroic drubbings to which, from Afghanistan to Zululand, British armies have been subjected. Nobody can quite decide whether the Somme in 1916 was a victory or a defeat, because some things indeed do lie too deep for tears.
It is not as if the British dwell too much on their humiliations (Singapore and Suez are often passed over in a gruff silence). Perhaps it just seems bad form to celebrate one’s victories too much — unless of course they are attained just as the bloody jaws of defeat are about to snap shut. Then, every spine is straightened and we are back at Agincourt, on a sticky wicket somewhere in France but with the home island not all that far away.
The absolutely critical moment in Shakespeare’s account comes with King Henry’s reply to the enemy’s herald. Young Harry knows that his army is awash with pox and diarrhea and otherwise in thoroughly bad shape. “We would not seek a battle, as we are,” he confesses to Montjoy. But then comes the spine-stiffener. “Nor, as we are, we say, we will not shun it.”
This came back to me with particular force as I turned the pages of “Dunkirk,” Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s first-rate panoramic history, and highly affecting worm’s-eye account, of Britain’s absolutely all-time favorite disaster. Has there ever been a more obviously foredoomed military escapade (for once one can employ the word accurately) than the dispatch, for the second time in a quarter-century, of a British Expeditionary Force to defend Belgium and France from German expansionism? The name given to the army was suggestive of the tentative and the improvised, as if its very presence on the European mainland was something rather out-of-the-way and short-term. As indeed it proved to be: the chief historic achievement of the B.E.F. was to have got itself home again, if not quite in one piece. Sebag-Montefiore, the author of “Enigma: The Battle for the Code,” helps amplify and redeem the sad story, though, by telling us of those who followed the terse order that is contained in his subtitle, and who thereby made that great escape possible.
The author’s own cousin, Denzil Sebag-Montefiore, may have been one of the few Jewish platoon commanders on those gruesome beaches, but like Siegfried Sassoon before him, he conducted himself with distinctive insouciance. He shared his Fortnum & Mason food hamper with his men, who repaid the kindness by heaving him into a boat (after he had lightened himself by tossing away his engraved ivory hairbrushes).
The book is replete with the exploits of double- and triple-barrel names: Lt. Col. Lionel Bootle-Wilbraham marvels at the speed with which British soldiers disappear into brothels. Maj. Reggie Alston-Roberts-West teams up with the Duke of Northumberland and finds a lieutenant of the Grenadier Guards, with the title Master of Forbes, badly wounded. They drag him away, “rather like a dead stag is pulled off the hill by its antlers.” Brig. M. B. Beckwith-Smith offers £5 to any of his gunners who can bring down a Nazi dive- bomber, adding the advice that those aiming should “take them like a high pheasant.” It’s a bit like crossing Sassoon with Anthony Powell, and finding upper-crust fox hunters and deerstalkers chivying their way through shell-holes.
“I managed to have a word with Fat Boy Gort,” says Nick Jenkins’s officer-class father in Powell’s “phony war” novel, “The Kindly Ones” — a book that gives a beautifully understated sense of the impending shambles. In reality, Lord Gort, the commander of the B.E.F., had perhaps the least enviable of all jobs. He had to lead a dismally unprepared force across to France, then contend every day with French and Belgian, not to mention British, politics. The particular brilliance of this book lies in the manner in which Sebag-Montefiore interleaves the military with the political.
In a vertiginous space of time, the wretchedly equipped B.E.F. was forced to deal with exorbitant demands from Paris that the French essentially be lent the bulk of the Royal Air Force; with a cowardly sellout on their left flank by King Leopold of Belgium; and with intelligence from German sources (in one case anti-Nazi and in one case not) about the precise date when Generals Guderian and Rommel would roll forward and carry the swastika flag into the Low Countries. As if this were not enough, the war cabinet in London, still reeling from the ease with which Hitler had defeated another British “expedition” to Norway, was seriously entertaining a proposal of “mediation” from Benito Mussolini. ( I find it somehow humiliating — no, make that nauseating — even to have to read about this latter episode.)
By the time Churchill and Clement Attlee had outpointed Chamberlain and Halifax and the other capitulationists and formed a serious government, it was probably already too late. Churchill’s own memoirs give the most haunting account of the moment of truth. Seeing the dispiriting picture on the map when he flew to Paris in the middle of May 1940, he turned to Gen. Maurice Gamelin to ask where his reserves were and received the bleak one-word response “Aucune” — there weren’t any. Through the window, Churchill suddenly noticed that the evacuation of the Quai d’Orsay was already in rapid progress.
To say the flight from Dunkirk placed the Entente Cordiale under considerable strain is to say the least of it. By the end, British soldiers were simply pushing their French counterparts over the side in the scramble for the boats. (It also wouldn’t be very long before Churchill gave the order, still hugely resented in France, for the Royal Navy to sink the French fleet in the Algerian port of Oran, lest it even consider surrendering to Hitler.) There were other appalling scenes of panic and misery on Dunkirk’s beaches, recently and grimly reconstructed by Ian McEwan in his novel “Atonement,” as exhausted soldiers endured leisurely German strafing and cursed the absence of the R.A.F. The whole bitterness and shame was somewhat annealed in the public mind by the little volunteer vessels that poured across from England to take off survivors, but Sebag-Montefiore is unsparing in his description of the crack-ups, shell-shock and drunkenness that sometimes seemed endemic among these rescuers. Churchill himself was sufficiently alarmed by the euphoria over the whole calamity to remind his listeners that wars are not won by evacuations.
It was quite late in the day when a detachment of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiment (the “Ox and Bucks” ) were told of the order to “fight to the last man, to the last round. ” And so many of them did, even though they knew the cause was lost and that many of their comrades were embarking for England. These men purchased necessary time in the hardest possible currency. Judging by some of the diaries and letters cited by Sebag-Montefiore, about the prostitutes and wine-cellars of the region, many of the English soldiery were as poxed and shaky as King Henry’s legendary rabble. But, not seeking a battle as they were, it must yet be said of them that they did not shun it.
