The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop
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