Nicholson was famously unflappable. However, Neave reckoned he ‘must have been deeply troubled’ by ‘a stream of contradictory orders’. In the course of the siege, from across the Channel came instructions to send his tanks first this way, then the other. At various times he was told to prepare to withdraw, then to stand and fight. The desperation of the situation was obvious to London, and Nicholson ‘asked repeatedly for artillery, ammunition and food: he had explained his situation and the enemy’s.’ In addition, he had been ‘visited by two generals, an admiral and a naval commodore’.
Neave wondered, ‘if they knew that they were so unfairly matched, why did they not send the reinforcements for which Nicholson pleaded?’ The answer was that from hour to hour events slipped further and further beyond the Allies’ control, so they were constantly reacting to situations that had already changed for the worse. As it finally became clear that the entire BEF was facing a choice between annihilation or evacuation, the fate of the Calais garrison became a secondary consideration. Instead, it was allotted a sacrificial role and the dubious honour of fighting to the death.
The halt order given to Guderian was rescinded late on the night of 21 May. He was to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais, fifty miles to the north and west. During 22 May, the fresh winds of the storm brewing on the horizon began to be felt by Neave and his battery, ensconced around Coulogne. The village began to fill up with refugees, seeking to escape from a German advance coming from they knew not where.
On that day his chief, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Goldney, who commanded 1st Searchlight Regiment, moved up from Lille to Ardres to take control of the air defences of Calais. Goldney ordered all searchlight detachments to concentrate on their troop headquarters – the Mairie at Coulogne in the case of Neave’s outfit. He would now be in charge of sixty or seventy men, armed with rifles, two Bren guns and one Boys anti-tank rifle, to defend the villages which had become the outer ring of the port’s defences. His men got to work digging trenches on the south and south-east approaches to the village and setting up roadblocks.
As the day wore on, the flow of refugees increased. Like many who endured the siege, Neave later came to believe that among them were a number of Fifth Columnists. By now the port was under attack from the Luftwaffe. The troops on the checkpoints blocked the refugees’ path to Calais, where bombing had wrecked electricity and water supplies. At the docks, in the lulls between bombardments, they struggled to disembark reinforcements and unload supplies, then fill up the returning ships with casualties and non-fighting servicemen deemed by London to be ‘useless mouths’ with nothing to contribute to the struggle.
That night, Neave ‘lay awake in my bedroom at the Mairie and heard the tramp of their feet as they were turned away to sleep in the fields. The red glow of the fires of Calais, started by the Luftwaffe, shone on the ceiling and there was the sharp crack of the anti-aircraft guns.’6 At dawn he was woken to deal with an emergency. A column of men, women and children, half a mile long and led by a young priest, was confronting the guards at the checkpoint at the Pont de Coulogne, which crossed the Canal de Calais. He arrived to find the priest trying to persuade the crowd to disperse to the fields, but they were determined to reach the port and a boat to imagined safety, and there were ugly shouts of treachery. They ‘seemed about to rush the roadblock,’ Neave recalled. ‘I drew my .38 Webley revolver of the First World War and asked for silence. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, mon lieutenant,” said several anxious voices.’ He managed to calm them down and persuade them to turn back to the countryside. It was the first episode in a dramatic day.
Though he did not know it, the Germans were closing in all round. The British garrison in Boulogne, twenty-two miles to the south, was already under siege by Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Division. A 1st Panzer Division battle group, under Oberst Walter Krüger, was only eighteen miles away from Calais. For the moment, Guderian was uninterested in Calais and still dead set on gaining Dunkirk. The troops were tired and operating on stretched lines. Their orders were to press forward and secure crossings over the Aa river to the east of Calais. They were to enter the port only if it was thought that it could be taken by surprise and a major battle avoided. That morning Guderian did not have control of the 10th Panzer Division, which had been held in reserve during the Allied counter-attack at Arras. At 10 o’clock it was restored to him. The decision was now taken to move them forward fast. They were given Calais as their next objective.
In the meantime Battle Group Krüger was advancing to the south of Calais, intent on capturing the bridgeheads that would allow Guderian’s forces to close on Dunkirk. To do so, they had to get across the Canal de Calais. As they moved forward in the early afternoon of Thursday 23 May, the defenders of Calais and the Germans clashed for the first time. As the Panzers moved between the hamlet of Hames-Boucres and the village of Guînes, they met with 3RTR tanks commanded by Colonel Ronald Keller, who against his better judgement was responding to an order from the BEF HQ to proceed to St-Omer. In the action that followed, up to a dozen British tanks were lost – about a quarter of the total strength.
They were forced to withdraw and the Germans pushed on to Les Attaques on the Canal de Calais, a few miles south of Coulogne. The news of their arrival reached the commander of the ‘C’ Troop of the 1st Searchlight Battery, 2nd Lieutenant R. J. Barr, whose headquarters were at Ferme Vendroux, just to the north of the German line of march. Barr rounded up fifty men and a lorry and set off across the canal to prevent the Germans crossing at Les Attaques. His force was beefed up by reinforcements from 2nd Searchlight Battery from Coulogne. Panzers began moving over the canal bridge at 2 p.m., to be met by fire from the Brens, rifles and Boys guns of Barr’s improvised force. The hot resistance lasted for three hours, but eventually the defenders were surrounded and forced to surrender.
While this was going on, Krüger’s infantry advanced on Orphanage Farm, less than a mile to the north of Coulogne, where the 1st Searchlight Regiment commander, Colonel Goldney, had set up his HQ. Goldney prepared to defend it with the padre, the medical officer and a handful of men, despatching a small force to hold a ridge on the southern approach to the farm against the attackers. When making his dispositions, Neave had posted Bren gunners on the south-eastern side of Coulogne, below the ridge held on the other side by Goldney’s advance guard. When the Germans arrived, they opened up on the farm’s defenders with ‘very heavy rifle and automatic fire’. Sited in the lee of the ridge, Neave’s men were unable to see the fray but nonetheless opened up in the direction of the fighting, ‘narrowly missing’ their comrades.7 The result was that a despatch rider ‘roared over the fields’ from Goldney’s farmhouse HQ ‘with a well-deserved “rocket” from the Colonel and the Brens were moved forward.’
This was not a good start to Neave’s fighting career and things were not about to improve. He had stationed himself at a barricade at the entrance to the village, constructed from the local undertaker’s hearse and a couple of carts. Refugees were still arriving, pleading to be allowed into Calais, among them a family of Austrian Jews. While he was trying to dissuade them, a mortar bomb crashed into the roof of the Mairie, showering them with broken tiles. It was followed by several others. Above the mayhem, a small Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft droned unconcernedly across the clear blue sky. Neave ‘fired at it wildly’ but without effect.8 The barrage lasted a quarter of an hour, tearing up paving stones and starting fires. When it stopped, a young girl lay dead on the roadside. Neave watched a soldier pull her tartan skirt gently over her knees. His despatch rider was dead beside him on the pavement. He ‘took his papers and looked down at him. He had been a cheerful man. He still had a smile that even a mortar bomb could not efface.’
Neave’s