Neave sent his men off by lorry, but for the moment he would not be joining them. He had been given an important task to complete before he could leave Coulogne. Together with a ‘Sergeant Maginis’ and a sapper equipped with some gun cotton, he was ordered to destroy the ‘Cuckoo’, the code name for an experimental sound-location device which the Searchlights had brought with them. On no account was it to fall into enemy hands. It was sitting on a trailer in the middle of the village and for five tense minutes the sapper fiddled with the explosive, trying to blow up the apparatus. The situation was resolved when two large French tankers full of aviation spirit came thundering down the road, with German infantry close behind. The drivers abandoned the trucks and gamely set them ablaze. The fire spread to the Cuckoo, which ‘providentially’ exploded, and Neave and his comrades were able to escape under cover of a thick cloud of black smoke.9
For a second time that day, events had not played out in the way Neave would have liked. Who knows what would have happened had the tankers not appeared? Nonetheless, in his post-war account, Neave gave the episode a positive spin. Quoting the 1st Panzer Division war diary, he reports that after the hot reception they received, it was decided that Calais was too strongly defended for them to attempt an improvised attack and they were ordered to push on to Gravelines and Dunkirk, leaving the capture of the port to 10th Panzer Division. From the German point of view, he wrote, ‘a great chance was lost. Guderian’s First Panzer Division had been hampered on its left flank as it advanced to Dunkirk, by British tanks and searchlights. If Calais had fallen to this division on the afternoon of the 23rd, Guderian would surely have sent his Tenth Panzer Division straight to Dunkirk and captured it before the defences were organised. The German records show that it was Goldney’s stand at Orphanage Farm which made him change his plans.’10
Neave was in this sense an optimist. He had the happy ability to glimpse within the fog of apparent debacle ‘providential’ outcomes. It was a fortunate attitude that would sustain him in the many setbacks that assailed him in the months ahead and a key component in the resilience and determination to persist in unpromising circumstances that carried him through not only the war but much of the rest of his life.
After the scrambled departure from Coulogne, Neave set off to Calais by foot, arriving at the Porte de Marck, on the eastern ramparts of the city, at 10 p.m., ‘shaken by the bombing … and my narrow escape.’11 The geography of Calais was complicated. Calais-Nord was the dock area, a collection of basins and interlocking canals connected by bridges and overlooked by a massive sixteenth-century citadel. The southern half was Calais-St-Pierre, the modern centre dominated by the huge and florid Hôtel de Ville. The whole ensemble was protected by an enceinte, a defensive enclosure of walls and bastions designed by the great military engineer Vauban on Louis XIV’s orders and added to over the centuries. It was pierced in several places by railway lines leading to the docks, but these fortifications now had to do service as a bulwark against the latest German invasion.
On the three-mile trudge from his outpost, Neave managed to pick up some members of his troop. He was ‘nervous and footsore’ but ‘tried to appear unbowed’. The sector was held by the Rifle Brigade, the Green Jackets, whose renown derived from countless brave exploits in centuries of continental and imperial wars. Neave and his Searchlight comrades were now under the orders of Major John Taylor, commanding ‘A’ Company. He spent the night lying on top of the ramparts, facing eastward, rifle in hand, while shells whined overhead to crash into the docks behind him, where intermittent efforts were being made to unload the Green Jackets’ transport.
The fate of the defenders lay in the hands of London. Whitehall’s ignorance of the true picture, though, produced a succession of hasty and short-lived decisions. Late the previous evening, the War Office decided that, having sent reinforcements to Calais, they were now going to pull them out. The situation in the Channel ports was untenable. Down the road in Boulogne, the 20th Guards Brigade, who had been holding out against a siege by Guderian’s panzers, were already being disembarked, leaving French troops to hold on for another twenty-four hours. The War Office had apparently concluded that the situation in Calais was equally hopeless and that the highly trained troops of Nicholson’s brigade should be extracted while there was still time. At 3 o’clock that morning, he received an order: ‘Evacuation decided in principle. When you have finished unloading your two M.T. [Motor Transport] ships commence embarkation of all personnel except fighting personnel who remain to cover final evacuation.’ It was not long before Nicholson was issued with completely contradictory instructions.
Neave watched the dawn rise over Dunkirk, whose vital importance, if terminal catastrophe was to be averted, was becoming ever clearer. He had been unable to sleep, ‘so strong was the sense of danger’.12 On the roads leading into Calais, the tanks, carriers, trucks and mobile artillery of the 10th Panzer Division were rumbling forward and the siege of Calais proper was about to begin.
Nicholson planned a layered defence, starting at an outer perimeter from which the troops could make successive withdrawals into the town. There was a huge area to defend. The walls of the enceinte stretched for eight miles. He had no artillery and a depleted tank force. Yet morale among the troops was good and had improved further as word spread that they would soon be on their way back across the Channel. At dawn, the first blows of the German assault fell on the QVR, holding forward positions on the south and south-west of the town. They were forced to fall back to the enceinte, which by midday had become the main defensive line.
During the morning, Neave was ordered to move his men from the eastern ramparts and wait in the sand dunes half a mile to the north, where hundreds of non-combatant troops were sheltered. It was an unsettling time. They were in the battle but not of it. ‘Calais had become a city of doom and I was not in the least anxious to remain,’ he wrote candidly afterwards.13 He was tired and nervous. For something to do, he walked down to the Gare Maritime, where the railway met the port, in time to see one of the transport ships leaving harbour. The scene stayed with him. There were twenty dead bodies on the platform, victims of the night’s shelling, and ‘the sad corpses, covered in grey blankets, had begun to stink.’ It was a clear day and he could see the white cliffs of Dover, so near but yet so far. Throughout the afternoon, German infantry, supported by tanks, attacked on all three sides of the perimeter, while shells rained down on the harbour area. The defenders fought with a ferocity that won the Germans’ reluctant admiration. By the early evening, they had only managed to break into the southern side of the town in a few places, at a cost of heavy losses of equipment, men and tanks.
In the early afternoon, Neave got his chance to join the fray. Green Jacket officers called for volunteers from the crowd of unemployed soldiers sitting among the dunes. He rounded up fifty from the Searchlights and they formed up at the Gare Maritime, before heading south along the dock road to get their orders at the Hôtel de Ville. It was a proud moment for men designated ‘non-fighting soldiers’. Marching off under the gaze of the Green Jackets, ‘not a man faltered. It would never have done to be seen to be afraid even though the shells were coming in fast over the harbour.’14 In the shadow of the gigantic clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville, Neave was told that he and his men were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th Rifles, who were holding a position by the western ramparts of the enceinte, which was under heavy attack from tanks and troops pushing in along the Route de Boulogne. They were led there by a staff officer through the deserted shopping streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which ran east–west across the centre of Calais-St-Pierre. The enemy tanks and machine guns had a clear field of fire down the boulevard, so Neave’s group moved west in the hot afternoon sun along a narrow parallel street. At some point it seems they could get no closer, and Neave led his men into a side street and left them in a doorway while he ‘moved gingerly into the boulevard