Searchlight detachments were ordered to converge on Coulogne, gathering a force of about sixty men for the defence of this ‘ghastly bottleneck’. Neave’s men dug trenches in the southern sector and put up rather inadequate roadblocks comprising furniture from the local school and the village hearse. Their work was hampered by the spate of fugitives from the battle zone, whose pathetic columns stretching up to half a mile long had been infiltrated by spies and fifth columnists. At one stage, Neave was forced to draw his .38 Webley revolver on a crowd of refugees threatening to break through the roadblock, prompting cries of ‘Don’t shoot, mon lieutenant!’ The German tank thrust reached them in the afternoon of 23 May but was held back for five precious hours by the Searchlight Regiment’s spirited defence of its HQ at nearby Orphanage Farm. Neave’s Bren gunners took part in this action, but almost fired on their own side until he moved them forward. After the farm came under intense artillery fire, the order to retreat towards Calais was given at about 7.00 p.m. Neave was told to go back into Coulogne to blow up a new piece of kit known as the ‘cuckoo’, a sound-location device which at all costs must not be captured. With a sergeant and a sapper, he tried valiantly with gun cotton to destroy the trailer on which the secret equipment was mounted. As they tried feverishly to carry out the order, two French aviation fuel drivers set fire to their tankers alongside. The ‘cuckoo’ blew up and Neave’s party escaped, choking on fumes from the blaze, to the Calais road.
They found only relative safety in the city. Guderian’s tanks had been briefly, and inexplicably, halted the previous week on Hitler’s personal instructions. His race to the sea might otherwise have been complete by this stage of the war, trapping and capturing the BEF gathering on the sand dunes of Dunkirk just up the coast from Calais. But now he was advancing at full speed and Calais was in the way of his main objective: the British army. His initial plan was to bypass the port and take Dunkirk with the Tenth Panzer Division, but a determined counter-attack by the British south of Arras on 21 May checked his drive, and the German High Command ordered Guderian to wait on the Somme, robbing him of the impetus that could have altered the direction of the entire conflict. Taking advantage of this breathing space, the British threw reserves across the Channel into Calais, elements of the Royal Tank Regiment, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles and the 60th Rifle Brigade. Their orders were unclear and constantly changing. Meanwhile, service chiefs began emergency planning for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 330,000 soldiers of the BEF from the sands of Dunkirk by the Royal Navy and a flotilla of ‘little ships’.
German artillery found their range on Calais docks as these reserves were landing and the siege of Calais began in earnest. The British High Command was in an agony of indecision: whether to fight to the death in the strategic port, dominated by fortifications dating back to the sixteenth century, or withdraw. Churchill had once described Calais as ‘simply an enceinte [fortification] protected by a few well-executed outlying fieldworks … it could certainly not be counted on to hold out more than a few days against a determined attack’. Indeed, at 3.00 a.m. on 24 May, the War Office telegraphed Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commander of British forces in the port, that it had decided ‘in principle’ on evacuation. Many British soldiers, including Neave, hoped desperately that that decision would be implemented. It never was.
As Neave related in his war classic, The Flames of Calais, it was impossible to sleep on the night he bivouacked on the dunes to the west of the town. He was aware that Calais would be surrounded and that a battle was imminent. Yet, throughout the night, rumours of evacuation grew. Neave was frank. ‘Calais had become a city of doom, and I was not in the least anxious to remain. I did not feel heroic.’5 Later that day, Churchill countermanded the previous decision: a War Office telegram decreed that Calais should be defended to the end, ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. Nicholson was instructed: ‘Select best position and fight on.’ The garrison of Calais, recorded Glover, was deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to her allies, ‘but it was the last major sacrifice that Britain was going to make in that lost cause’.6 British troops trapped behind the nineteenth-century fortifications could not throw back Guderian’s panzers. The best they could do was hold up the Nazi advance so that Operation Dynamo could be implemented.
On the ground, the men were beginning to realise the way things were going. They needed no explanation. ‘It was now time to forget about evacuation and show what “non-fighting soldiers could do,’ Neave reflected. With fifty volunteers from his men, he formed up with newly disembarked troops of the Rifle Brigade and marched to the eastern ramparts. As he marched, he thought of others who had moved up the line. ‘This was it. Everything before was of no consequence. But would I pass the test?’
His orders were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th on the south-west of the town centre where a German breakthrough appeared imminent. A staff officer led them through the deserted streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which was under fire from German tanks and machine gunners advancing up the Boulogne road. Neave left his men in the shelter of a doorway and stepped nervously into the boulevard. Tracer bullets and even tank shells rained down as he made for the Pont Jourdan railway bridge. He clung for dear life to the sides of the houses as he crept towards his objective. This was his first experience of street fighting, and he was not ashamed to admit that he was acutely frightened. Reaching the bridge, he was called down to the railway tracks below by Major Poole, commander of ‘B’ Company. Poole ordered him to get his men into the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. ‘You might fight like bloody hell,’ he admonished.
Neave and his men, armed only with rifles and two Bren guns, took up position in the houses and opened fire on the German positions on the Boulogne road. Their inexperience showed, as regulars of the 60th fighting at the other side of the bridge shouted ‘F—ing well look where you’re shooting!’ Amid the firing, the proprietor of a café at the end of the street, wearing the Croix de Guerre from the First World War, coolly dispensed cognac. In mid-afternoon, a British tank made a brief appearance, prompting a furious response from the Germans, a savage bombardment which pinned Neave down in the Rue Edgar Quintet, a normally quiet street with a girls’ school, but now deserted. The only visible sign of life was the face of a frightened girl at a cellar window.
As the afternoon wore on, Neave began to feel the lack of combat training for battle: his reading of Clausewitz had not prepared him for street fighting. The heat from the sun and blazing buildings produced an unbearable thirst. He longed to get back to the café. He waited for the firing to lift and was about to cross the road when he felt a ‘sharp, bruising pain’ in his left side. He collapsed to the pavement, rifle clattering. A concerned soldier shouted from a window: ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Neave did not reply but pondered uselessly whether it was a sniper or a machine-gun bullet. He realised he could still walk, and, doubled-up, staggered across to the café. His most pressing fear was that the Germans would break through and he would be left behind and taken prisoner. It was a common fear shared by all. British combatants had a confused but horrific picture of the fate of prisoners taken by the Nazis. Death in action they understood but the stories of concentration camps made them fear capture even more. The café proprietor brought him a large measure of cognac, while a medical orderly inspected his wound. Through a half-faint, Neave heard him say: ‘You’re a lucky one, sir. ‘Arf an inch from the ‘eart.’
The orderly and a Frenchman helped him to his feet and began walking him to an aid post where they met a young officer of the 60th in a scout car, Lieutenant Michael Sinclair. Sinclair pointed out an improvised