Donald Q. Coster, an American volunteer ambulance driver captured by the Germans in the city of Amiens, was exhausted after a chaotic night at his makeshift hospital. Early that morning he was taken by his captors to a field a few miles out of town. ‘Under a hot, cloudless sky lay a wide field of high grass, simply covered with the English dead and wounded, and wounded and dead cattle. The British boys had been massacred by the tanks, as they had no artillery, only a few light machine guns to supplement their rifles - about as effective against a tank’s armour as a pea-shooter. Their only hope had been to score a lucky hit through a gun slit ... Out of possibly 300 British, we picked up maybe 25 or 30. The rest had all been killed. Many of the wounded had been run down by tanks, their bodies flattened like pancakes. Others, caught by the cross machine-gun fire of the encircling tanks, had been almost cut in two before they fell. Every fourth or fifth bullet from these guns is a tracer which burns through the body like a white-hot poker. It was hard to locate all the wounded in the high grass; the hot sun was overhead when we got the last of them up, and I don’t have to remind you what that means in a battlefield.’ It was Tuesday 21 May 1940. Lying before him was the British Expeditionary Force’s last hope to avoid becoming trapped by the German blitzkrieg. On this hot, sunny day the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was doomed.
Twenty four hours earlier, these men of the Royal Sussex Regiment had been aboard a train hurrying north to link up with the BEF when their journey had been cut short by a German air strike. Unable to carry on, with no orders to go back, their Commanding Officer had decided to stay put and wait for instructions. Assured by the local French commander that the Germans were being held eighty miles away at the Meuse river, the CO had threatened disciplinary action against any man claiming to have seen any sign of the enemy to prevent panic amongst his men. By the end of the day, he was a prisoner aboard a German tank, touring the battlefield to call on isolated pockets of his men to surrender. Of the 701 men who had boarded the train, just 70 were marched into captivity that night.
Across northern France, the stunned survivors of battalions who had never expected to fight counted the cost of the day’s slaughter. Fifty, eighty, even ninety per cent casualties were reported by some units. It was a day the Germans came to call ‘the massacre of the innocents’.
When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, it was in no state to fight. In 1918 it had boasted the largest, most experienced and best equipped army it had ever known along with the world’s foremost navy and a powerful new Royal Air Force. Twenty years of cutbacks had reduced its armed forces to the point where General Bernard Montgomery’s 3rd Division was held up for days by Transport Officers who refused to believe that a spearhead unit of the British Regular Army would really need quite so many laundry vans. In fact, these requisitioned civilian vehicles, hastily painted green, were all that was available to move his men and he complained bitterly that their progress through France could be traced by the trail of broken down wrecks littering the roads, writing that the army of 1939 was ‘totally unfit to fight a first class war on the continent of Europe ... Indeed, the Regular Army was unfit to take part in a realistic exercise.’ It was a view shared by others. Lord Gort, commander of the BEF, was horrified to find men of his 42nd Division eating with their hands from corrugated iron tables because there were no plates, cutlery or mugs available whilst Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, commanding the BEF’s II Corps, inspected one of his machine gun battalion and described it as ‘unfit for war in every respect ... It would be sheer massacre to commit it to action in its present state’. Yet this was Britain’s front line.
If things were bad for the Regular Army, they were far worse for units like the Royal Sussex, designated as part of the second line Territorial Army (TA) still forming in Britain. Hastily formed in 1939 in response to a call to double the size of the TA, the second line units were the lowest priority for stores and equipment. The decision to send a number of first line TA units to join the Norwegian expedition not only diverted supplies from the BEF, it also pushed their colleagues even further down the list and further drained them of their few experienced soldiers. The men of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, for example, designated as the specialist machine gun battalion of the 23rd Division, had to train on just two Germans guns salvaged from the regimental museum. Elsewhere mortar training was only possible after a local carpenter built a wooden model.
Despite the poor state of the second line units, demands from France for a greater British contribution and from the BEF for more men to work on its long and complicated lines of communication forced a decision. Three infantry divisions - the 12th, 23rd and 46th - would be stripped of their artillery and heavy equipment and sent over to act as a labour force. Their training would be completed in any spare time they might have.
In late April, the three divisions had arrived and were put to work with the 12th Division busy building railway sidings around Abbeville, the 23rd constructing airfields on the Franco-Belgian border and the 46th unloading ships in Brittany. For the troops, many fresh from similar work in their civilian jobs, life in the war zone was little different to that at home but now with sunshine and cheap wine. ‘Life, after all’ wrote one war diarist, 'was pretty good'.
Suddenly, everything changed. On 10 May, German forces began smashing their way across the Belgian border. Smoothly, the British and French armies moved forward - straight into a carefully planned ambush. As the Allies left their carefully prepared positions, the real German attack smashed through the Ardennes and into northern France. If they could reach the sea, they would cut the Allied supply lines, trap the BEF in Belgium and destroy it at their leisure. Nothing stood in their way - except the men of the digging divisions.
In desperation, the British HQ at Arras ignored the promise that the labour troops would not be sent into action and ordered 23rd Division to take up a defence line along the Canal du Nord. Typical of the state of readiness of the digging divisions, among the 2000 men in the division’s 70 Brigade, 1400 had never fired a Bren gun and as many as one in five had not even had full training on the rifles they carried. Some had never fired a shot. They would, they thought, have plenty of time over the coming summer to put things right. They were wrong. It was clear they were being sent to their deaths but every second they could delay the enemy would buy time for the rest of the army to react ...
Along the Canal du Nord, the division took up their positions. They averaged one Bren per platoon and one anti-tank rifle per company with one 3 inch mortar between them. They were provided with artillery, but the guns could only fire over open sights at targets they could see and there were no anti-tank guns at all. Military doctrine held that a fully armed and supported division could be expected to hold no more than about 4 miles of front. 23rd Division was being asked to cover 17 miles.
The ‘canal’ turned out to be an empty ditch which, according to reports, in places a car could cross with ease and a decision was made to withdraw the forward battalions to a better location. At 7am on the 20 May the first trucks full of men of the Tyneside Scottish began to withdraw towards Neuville-Vitasse across open terrain with few defensive features so when, at about 8.30, a force of around 20 tanks of the 8th Panzer Division caught them in a pincer movement, there was little anyone could do. Crowded into lorries and without anti-tank weapons, the Tynesiders and their Durham Light Infantry colleagues took on the tanks with whatever was to hand - Provost Sergeant Chambers of the Tynesiders was last seen trying to prise open the hatch of a tank with his bayonet to get at the crew inside - but it was a one sided and vicious fight and the outcome inevitable. Around 130 men of the Tynesiders eventually made it back to Britain and their sister battalion, the 11th Durham Light Infantry, were equally decimated. When the brigade mustered at the planned rendezvous later that morning just 233 all ranks could be accounted for.
Alongside the 23rd on the canal line were the 6th Royal West Kents and the 5th Buffs of 36 Brigade of 12 Division. The brigade’s other battalion, the 7th West Kents, had been hurriedly detached, given trucks and redesignated as a mobile column and were now heading for Amiens, leaving the brigade with just two battalions to cover a front of twelve miles. That morning, as disaster struck the 23rd Division, French troops fled back through 36 Brigade’s positions and the town of Doullens behind them was heavily bombed. Around noon, German tanks and infantry appeared in extended line opposite the Buffs. Having left their signals support in Britain, the only contact companies had with each other was by runner and messages were not getting through. Any semblance of command quickly broke down and section and platoon began to fight its own battle. It was later shown that isolated pockets of the Buffs had held out for up to two hours and that the anti-tank rifles (spread out to one every two miles) had stopped at least two tanks before being overrun but keeping the Germans out of Doullens until late afternoon by which time the admin transport had left and an officer had gone around with a box of matches to torch the many petrol dumps in the area.
By then, the surviving Buffs had fallen back to join brigade HQ in the village of Lucheux where Brigadier Roupell, a VC from the first war, sat in the chateau listening to the battle drawing closer. A breathless officer ran in to report tanks approaching, but Roupell, trying to maintain control, calmly replied ‘never mind the Germans. I’m going to finish my cup of tea.’ At about 6.30pm, the sentry on the gate opened fire on a German column and managed to get it to pull back whilst Roupell and his staff escaped through the back door and through the surrounding woods. By then, he knew his brigade was lost. Seventy five men of the 6th RWK got back to Britain, 503 were listed as missing. Eighty of the 605 Buffs got back.
The brigade’s other battalion, the 7th RWK, in their role as mobile column, were sent north to fill the massive void left near Clery and arrived on the evening of the 18th. That night a probing attack by panzers was beaten back -but only by luck when the Boys anti-tank rifles provided a spectacular, if ineffective, display. Each round bounced harmlessly off the German armour as the firers realised they had been issued half-charged training ammunition. Their position untenable, they were redirected to Albert with orders to turn it into an anti-tank locality.
On the way, they collected four field guns from the gunnery school and arrived in Albert’s town square at about 6am on the 20th but even as they climbed out of the trucks, German tanks could be heard approaching. By 7am tanks of the 1st Panzer Division had appeared in side streets all around them. As the battalion tried to redeploy, two companies were caught crowded into lorries and wiped out by tank and machinegun fire. By 9am, despite what the Germans called tough and brave fighting, Albert was overrun. After the battle, the Germans assumed they had stumbled across a unit on exercise - why else would the guns be loaded with training ammunition?
Meanwhile, the 35th Brigade of 12th Division - all battalions of the Queen’s Regiment - had received orders to move to Abbeville by train and arrived to find confusing orders to ‘Proceed to Lens’. After contacting GHQ over a very poor connection, the brigade set out on the sixty mile journey, arriving during an air raid that cost several casualties only to find no-one seemed to know what to do with them. After a few frantic calls, their real orders were discovered - ‘Proceed Doullens’. Instead, the brigade pulled back towards Abbeville. Where, at about 2pm, the bombing began.
35 Brigade had been sent to Abbeville to form a reserve, not to defend it. Between them they had three Bren guns and five anti-tank rifles per battalion. Each anti-tank rifle had seven rounds of ammunition. As streams of refugees poured out of the town, it was clear that the brigade could no longer be reached by road and about 5pm the decision was taken not to leave them isolated and unsupported but to withdraw south across the Somme. By now, though, panzers had already appeared between the 2/7th and the 2/6th battalion positions.
With their anti-tank rounds soon gone, the battalions could do nothing as the German tanks stood spraying their positions with machine gun fire and the CO of the 2/7th gave orders to withdraw. Seeing his two forward companies fall back, he left to find a route across the river for his men. In fact, only one company had received the order. What he had seen were men falling back to what seemed better positions in the village of Vauchelles. Standing off the main road, the village was simply by-passed, leaving two and a half companies to be rounded up by German infantry the next day. Of the whole battalion, the CO managed to extricate about a hundred men across the debris of a blown bridge.
The 2/6th, to the north, sat tight as the Germans passed them by and later that night made its own way back across the river. The 2/5th, meanwhile, had been ordered to set up astride the Amiens road and cover the retreat of the other two battalions. At about 8pm, when it was obvious they others weren’t coming, they were ordered back but by then it was too late. Four companies were cornered at the village of Bellancourt from where about 100 men in five groups managed to break out. One platoon attempted to escape in trucks but ran into a panzer group and were mown down. Others swam the river and set up a rope of rifle slings to help others across but many drowned in the attempt. It would be another three days before the last stragglers reached Rouen. In a day, a brigade of 2,400 men had been reduced to 1,234.
The 1st Panzer, leaving troops to mop up Albert, then set out for Amiens. They reached it by late morning meeting only the strays of the 7th Royal Sussex on the way. They, along with their sister battalion, the 6th, had been on their way to Abbeville but were redirected towards Amiens and told they were being sent to Lens. At Amiens, Colonel Gethen, CO of the 7th, was told in all confidence by French officers that there were no Germans within eighty miles. They were wrong. Almost immediately an air raid hit the train near St Roche and the officers’ coach was among those hit. There were around eighty casualties from the attack and the battalion dashed into defensive positions nearby. The 6th, unharmed, almost reached Lens but were turned back because of track damage and eventually were shunted into a siding fifteen miles south of the Somme where they sat two days trying to find out what was happening.
Colonel Gethen was stuck. His orders were to go to Lens. He couldn’t. He had no orders to go back. So he decided to stay put. By noon on the 20th, German recce planes had spotted their positions. Soon after artillery and air strikes began, then the tanks came. The 7th held out until about 8pm in a battle the regimental history called ‘brief and suicidal’. When they were finally overrun, the battalion 2i/c refused to raise his hands and was shot out of hand. A German officer, impressed by the defiant defence, offered Lieutenant Jackson, who’d been wounded four times, a lift in his own car. Despite his pain, Jackson refused to leave his men.
The digging divisions had never been expected to fight. In a single day theye had suffered casualties not seen since the horrors of Passchendaele in 1917. By comparison, the entire BEF had suffered around 500 casualties in total over the past ten days.
Gazing across the field of dead near Amiens, a German soldier turned to Coster and sadly shook his head. Coster recalled that he seemed awed that men armed only with a rifle and bayonet would try to charge panzers because they were asked to. In the chaos of the fall of France, many thousands of men were rescued to fight on to defend Britain. The legend of Dunkirk remains a centrepiece of British mythology about the war but largely forgotten now are the untrained men who bought time to save an army. Survivors of the labour divisions were left behind to fight on for another two weeks in improvised units in a retreat across Normandy and battlefields that would only gain fame four years later as some of the same men returned. Seventy-five years on, it’s time to remember those who paid the price for the 'miracle' of Dunkirk.
Tim Lynch is the author of Dunkirk 1940 'Whereabouts Unknown'- How Untrained Troops of the Labour Division were Sacrificed to Save an Army. They called it ‘the slaughter of the innocents’. The barely trained and poorly equipped men of the Labour Divisions were never meant to fight, but when the German blitzkreig sliced through the Allied armies they were all that stood in the way of the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force. Paying with their lives they bought precious time as the army fell back towards Dunkirk, and long after the last of the little ships reached home, the men of the Labour Divisions fought on. Dunkirk 1940: Whereabouts Unknown uses official reports, diaries and personal accounts to tell the story of the chaos, terror and heroism of the amateur soldiers of 137th Infantry Brigade during the fall of France.