As dawn broke on Sunday 26 May, it was plainly only a matter of time before the Germans overran the old town and the port area where British forces were still holding out. The evacuation had been cancelled, though some wounded were still being taken off under heavy shelling by motor torpedo-boat. Stuka raids again hit the hospital. Around Neave men lay badly hurt and blinded. He recollected that the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering. Yet the British laughed and laid bets on when the bombers would reappear. In mid-morning, their position became untenable. A Stuka’s bomb fell by the main doors of the hospital, blowing them in and showering debris on the wounded. Terrified that the next direct hit would bury them all alive, Neave decided to make a break for it. He could walk, with difficulty, and if he could reach the Gare Maritime he might be among the wounded being taken off. With the admonition of the French medical officer ringing in his ears, Neave and a corporal who volunteered to go with him crawled out beneath the great double doors into the burning streets. He had no idea how badly the situation in Calais had deteriorated. Whole streets were ablaze as they made their halting way northwards to the harbour station. Neave was doubled up with the pain of his wound and his companion limped badly. Thick smoke choked them both. At the junction with the Boulevard des Alliés, they turned east and continued through eerily silent Calais-Nord. Suddenly, shells burst around the pair as they passed the Courgain. Neave was not hit but the corporal ‘vanished in the blinding flash and dust’. Falling to the ground, Neave crawled to the side of the street. From a cellar window, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac. He drank, and lurched on alone to the lighthouse where he encountered troops of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in front of the station, staring down their guns as he struggled to join their ranks. An officer barked at him to hurry up and listened in disbelief to his extraordinary story. Calais had been expertly infiltrated by German fifth columnists and the QVR were taking no chances. Neave’s identity card was carefully scrutinised as yet more cognac was dispensed. He looked round at scenes of devastation. Amid the debris lay the bodies of dead British soldiers. He was hurried to the first aid station below the Gare Maritime, where more wounded lay. Soon after, intense shelling forced them to find deeper cover in a tunnel under the port’s Bastion 1.
After the Stuka and artillery bombardment of the morning of 26 May, it was only a matter of time before the Germans took Calais. Guderian arrived in person to direct the attack, and street by street British forces were pushed back into an enclave around the port. The Citadel fell at 4.30 in the afternoon, and the commanding officer, Brigadier Nicholson, was taken prisoner. He did not surrender his forces, however. In fact, the garrison never surrendered. Split into small groups, the men were hunted down piecemeal and killed or captured when their ammunition ran out. The Gare Maritime was evacuated, soldiers taking refuge in the dunes. Some remained on top of Bastion 1, above Neave, firing on the Germans, but their position was untenable and they surrendered. Lying in one of the underground rooms, Neave could hear the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung to the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came the enemy, field-grey figures waving revolvers. A huge man in German uniform wearing a Red Cross armband put him gently on a stretcher. He was a prisoner of war. It was a sad ending to a desperately fought battle.
Outside the bastion, British troops were ordered to scatter and try to escape in small parties, an instruction interpreted as ‘every man for himself’. Just before 8.00 that evening, Eden messaged his officer commanding: ‘Am filled with admiration for your magnificent fight which is worthy of the highest tradition of the British army.’ The message never arrived. By then Nicholson was a prisoner and the gallant stand of his men was over. Less than three hours later, troops of the BEF began disembarking at Dover from the beaches of Dunkirk.
The wisdom of the decision to hold Calais to the last man has been hotly debated for sixty years. Neave, who endured the entire bloody nightmare (and whose courage earned him a Military Cross), was naturally partisan, and devoted his most polemical book to the issue. The stand at Calais against impossible odds can be compared with other actions in the history of war, he argues. ‘All through the episode there runs a thread of poor intelligence and indecision.’ Reinforcements were landed too late to do little more than block the town entrances. Tanks were deployed, but not in numbers to hold back the Blitzkrieg. Neave blames those who failed to supply the War Office with up-to-date information on Guderian’s dash for the coast, during which he was pursued and bombed by the RAF. ‘Coordination of intelligence with the RAF had evidently a long way to go,’ he remarked tersely.
Neave also complained of an air of defeatism in the War Office, whose top echelons had evidently decided that most of the BEF had already been lost and troops were needed much more urgently for the Home Front than in the defence of Calais. The fault for the loss of Nicholson’s brigade, he insisted, lay with ‘higher authority’, the General Staff which was obsessed with getting the BEF back to Britain and had no plan for Calais. ‘Indeed, it was not clear who was in charge of the operation.’ In addition, few commanders ‘since the days of Balaclava’ had issued such suicidal orders as Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Adjutant-General of the BEF, who had ordered tanks to attack Boulogne when it had already been lost. Given Neave’s ancestry perhaps the reference to Balaclava was not the most appropriate.
Churchill was in no doubt that the last stand at Calais was vital for the success of Operation Dynamo which allowed the British army to fight another day. In the British press the defenders were lionised as heroes. Writing in The Times, Eric Linklater argued that the death struggle waged over four days halted panzer troops who would otherwise have cut off the retreating BEF: ‘The scythe-like sweep of the German divisions stopped with a jerk at Calais,’ he wrote. ‘The tip of the scythe had met a stone.’ Guderian himself and the respected historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart disagree with this poetic verdict. In his war diaries, the German general insisted that the heroic defence of Calais, while worthy of the highest praise, had ‘no influence’ on the development of events at Dunkirk and did not delay his advance. Neave is withering on this point. ‘One thing is indisputable, the Tenth Panzer Division was delayed at Calais for four days and not by Hitler,’ he wrote.7 Guderian, he claimed, was covering up for his failure to take the port earlier, as he had planned.
Liddell Hart argued, somewhat patronisingly, that Churchill was obliged to justify his decision to sacrifice the Calais garrison, but questioned whether it had the outcome asserted by the wartime premier. The panzer division that attacked the port was only one of seven in the area and had been deployed ‘because it had nothing else to do’. The gallant stand was nothing more than ‘a useless sacrifice’, Liddell Hart