Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

Havre early the next morning. These young men, like so many others, were travelling abroad for the first time. What should they expect? What would France look like? Would it be different?

      Second Lieutenant Peter Hadley, of the Royal Sussex Regiment, noted an atmosphere of undisguised excitement among his men as they crossed the Channel. They were like children on a Sunday school outing. But after only a short time in France, Hadley began reading letters from his charges to their parents and girlfriends, expressing disappointment that the people and the houses seemed very much the same as those in England.

      Cyril Roberts’ battalion had a similar experience. At first, the soldiers crowded the train windows as they sped through northern France. But they were very soon bored, and drifting away to play cards. Arriving at their destination at Abancourt in the Pas de Calais, the men were set to work building railway lines. It was hard, physical labour, carried out with pick and shovel, without any mechanical assistance. And this, as far as they were concerned, would be the extent of their role. They were not trained for fighting.

      Shortly before its outbreak, most people in Britain were strongly in favour of war. And once it had begun, the majority believed that Hitler’s bluff had now been called. We have heard what Lord Gort told a journalist in November 1939. Victory was certain, and everybody from the commander-in-chief to the man on the Clapham omnibus thought so. Of course, many of these people had also believed that the last war would be over by Christmas.

      But war was also welcomed for personal reasons. Fred Carter had been an unemployed concreter before joining the Royal Engineers. He viewed the war as an opportunity to return to his old trade – or something very similar. John Williams of the Durham Light Infantry felt actively sorry for the ‘poor sods’ not in the army, condemned to their ordinary little jobs while he and his mates got the glory and the girls.

      Listening to Chamberlain’s announcement in his Surrey mess, Jimmy Langley, a Coldstream Guards subaltern, admits that he half-expected a couple of armed Germans to burst through the door. And for a very few Britons, the action did begin straight away. Winifred Pax-Walker was an eighteen-year-old Londoner who hoped to become a movie actress. She was travelling to Montreal with her mother on the Anchor-Donaldson ocean liner Athenia.

      That evening, as the ship was sailing two hundred miles west of Ireland, a note was posted announcing that war had been declared. At dinner, an authoritative-sounding man, who had been gassed in the last war, told Winifred and her mother that Athenia would be safe from attack. The Germans, he said, would not attack until the ship was returning from North America packed full of armaments. Travelling away from Britain, they had nothing to worry about. Just as the man finished speaking, the first of two German torpedoes struck Athenia.

      Hitler had given orders that no passenger ships were to be attacked; but it seems that the commander of U-30, a German submarine, mistook Athenia for an armed merchant cruiser, zigzagging as she was with all lights blacked out. Fearful of the consequences for a peace settlement, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels quickly denied any German responsibility.

      Winifred and her mother had been hoping to escape the war. And yet it had found them within hours. As Athenia began sinking, stern first, their lifeboat failed to lower properly, and nobody could find the plug for its bung-hole. These problems resolved, passengers started to descend two at a time, causing the lifeboat’s ladder to break. Seamen had to fish people out of the water with boat-hooks. Winifred’s mother was picked up off the ship’s deck by a sailor and thrown into the boat. Winifred made her own way down.

      In the dark, the lifeboat encountered a Norwegian freighter, Knut Nelson, and the passengers were brought on board. As they sailed towards Galway in Ireland, the freighter’s captain told Winifred, ‘You British! You’re always at war! Be like Norway! Keep out of all these things!’ A little later, as the freight’s tender approached Galway harbour, Winifred overheard two middle-aged English ladies chatting away as though at a Women’s Institute meeting. ‘Of course, my dear,’ said one, ‘you have to pour the pink icing over the cake …’

      One hundred and twelve of Athenia’s passengers were killed in the attack. In its aftermath, a few ocean liners continued to cross the Atlantic. On board the Cunard liner Aquitania, it was said that American passengers nervously prayed for the crossing to end peacefully – while British passengers sat in the Palladium Lounge determinedly discussing the weather.

      By 27 September, 152,031 British soldiers (and 60,000 tons of frozen meat) had safely reached France. John Williams was surprised to see so many bright lights in French towns, utterly different from blackout conditions in England. ‘All these bars and brothels with lights on!’ he remembers. William Harding was touched by the warm welcome the Royal Artillery received. Marching through the streets of Cherbourg, the soldiers were showered with flowers by people leaning so far out of windows they seemed about to fall.

      And once they had reached their destination, east of Lille on the French side of the border with Belgium, the men started to dig in, and to consolidate houses and pillboxes. They behaved as though they were settling down – even though they were not intending to remain. Once the anticipated German attack began, they were to move seventy-five miles east to take up new positions on the River Dyle in Belgium. There were a number of reasons for this; the French wanted to keep the fighting away from their industrial areas, the British did not want the Germans to establish airfields within striking distance of southern England, and both nations wanted Belgium as a partner. But because Belgium professed neutrality, the French and British were not permitted to enter Belgian territory until the start of the attack, and so, for the time being, they built entirely pointless defences.

      For Winston Churchill, Belgium’s position was a source of frustration. In January 1940, he compared neutrality in the face of a sabre-rattling Germany with feeding a crocodile. Each neutral country was hoping that feeding the crocodile enough would ensure its being eaten last. Still, it is hard not to sympathise with Belgium; had she gone to war, the Germans would have used that as a pretext to invade. As Oliver Harvey, British minister in Paris, observed in January 1940, ‘Germany will invade Belgium if it suits, whatever Belgium does.’

      And so British troops built their meaningless Gort line. The winter trenches were so wet, and the water table so high, that infantrymen ended up digging breastworks practically naked from the waist down, with canvas wrapped around their feet. Richard Annand, a Durham Light Infantry officer, found that if he joined in with the digging, his men responded and worked harder. His brigadier quickly ordered him out of the trench. His job, he was told, was to supervise his men – not to become one of them. By blurring the lines, he was queering the pitch for members of his class. Nevertheless, Annand returned to the trench and continued to muck in. Eventually the brigadier reappeared, murmuring angrily to the colonel, ‘I notice you have some well-spoken private soldiers in your battalion.’

      The winter of 1939 was particularly cold, and soldiers’ living conditions were poor. Finding their barn overrun by rats, men of the Royal Corps of Signals built raised beds out of materials they had to hand – wood and telephone cables. Colin Ashford remembers washing and shaving in a freezing algae-filled pond as cattle drank from it. Percy Beaton of the Royal Engineers had to clean up a billet that French soldiers had been using. ‘There was excreta all over the place,’ he says. ‘The French had obviously wiped their backsides with their hands and wiped it down the wall.’

      And once British soldiers started to wear battledress, replacing the more formal service dress worn previously, their overall discipline declined. Battledress had no buttons to shine, and although boots still needed polishing, and cotton webbing still required blanco, soldiers were no longer, says John Williams, ‘the smart, button shining people we’d been the month before’.

      For some it was difficult even to look presentable. ‘My battledress was very dodgy,’ says Royal Engineer Fred Carter. In the quartermaster’s stores he had been issued with a uniform several sizes too big, and he tried to make all the necessary alterations himself. He was, unfortunately, not much of a tailor.

      Battledress consisted of a greenish-brown jacket and trousers in wool serge, worn by officers and men alike (although