The first six months of hostilities were spent in a field in Essex preparing for an invasion that never came. After a training stint in Hereford, he set off in February 1940 to Boulogne to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in charge of an advance party. The searchlight men ranked low in military esteem. A remark by a Guards officer that their equipment was ‘quite Christmassy’ rankled. Yet although he might have preferred a more dashing outfit, Neave liked his comrades, and his accounts of his service with them are affectionate and respectful. By the time he reached Calais he was a troop commander with the 2nd Searchlight Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment (RA), in charge of about eighty men. They included ‘a high proportion of older men with First World War experience. Most were industrial workers with a few clerks and professional men … All were vocal and democratic.’2
They ‘did not see themselves as front-line soldiers’, and with good reason. When they arrived in France they were virtually untrained in infantry tactics and were armed with rifles that most of them had never fired. Their other weapons were some old-fashioned Lewis machine guns and a few Bren guns for use against aircraft. As defence against the German armour that spearheaded the Blitzkrieg, they had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It fired slim, .55 calibre rounds at a rate of ten a minute that could penetrate a light tank at 100 yards but were little use against the Panzer IIIs in the divisions bearing down on the BEF. In any case, no one in the unit was qualified to operate it.
Nonetheless, what they lacked in regimental elan ‘they made up in willingness to fight’. Again and again in the four days of the siege they showed extraordinary guts. Unlike the previous generation of upper-class British men who had served in the war, Neave and his contemporaries had had few dealings with people outside their social level who were not servants or tradesmen. The army had given him his first intimate exposure to how other Britons thought and behaved. It taught him that patriotism, courage and gallantry were not the preserve of the privileged.
Even after months of anticipation, the end of the Phoney War came as a shock. On 10 May 1940, the German forces that had massed along the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg plunged west. The main thrust came where the least preparation had been made to meet it – through the Ardennes. In three days, forces spearheaded by the Panzer divisions of Heinz Guderian cleared the forest and crossed the Meuse. On 13 May, aided by pulverising attacks by the Luftwaffe, they broke the French defences at Sedan. The armoured columns moved at a speed that surprised the Germans themselves, sweeping round behind the Allied armies arrayed around the Belgian border. On 19 May, the three divisions of Guderian’s XIX Corps were in Amiens, less than fifty miles from the Channel. The following day they reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme, driving home a wedge that divided the Allied armies in the Pas de Calais and Belgium from the French forces to the south.
Utterly sure of his instincts and confident in his tactics, troops and tanks, Guderian was set on a move that, had it succeeded, might have brought Britain’s war to an end. His goal was the Channel ports, and in particular Dunkirk, which, once taken, would leave the BEF stranded and facing annihilation or surrender. Various factors combined to prevent him from maintaining the headlong pace. Not least was the caution of his superiors at Army High Command HQ, shared by Hitler himself, who feared the speed of the advance would expose XIX Corps to a devastating flank attack.
The Germans need not have worried. The Allied commanders were reluctant to credit the strength and extent of the breakthrough. The eventual move to counter it, a Franco-British drive south into the enemy flank around Arras on 21 May, achieved some initial success before being beaten off. However, it was to have important consequences. The action further reduced the appetite for risk in Berlin. Guderian was ordered to halt, dashing his hopes of a lightning victory.
On the day before the Allied counter-attack, the 2nd Searchlight Battery (2nd SL) was in Arras. That morning they received orders to move to Calais, seventy miles to the north-west. As they left, there was little sense of alarm in the British garrison. They drove off down long straight roads past Vimy Ridge and the flat fields that only twenty-two years before had been a vast killing zone. Neave travelled in the front seat of an old khaki-painted Austin Seven alongside his driver, Gunner Cooper. Cooper was large and eager to see action, frustrated at being diverted away from the defence of Arras to what looked like another spell of tedious duty. Neave was inclined to agree. He had heard that there were Germans around but he and his comrades did not believe ‘that [they] had broken through … We were confident that, at most, a few armoured cars, a few motor-cyclists or a few light tanks were threatening the Allied lines of communication.’3 In fact, the countryside to the east and west was filling up with Panzers.
They spent the night under the plane trees of the market square in the mediaeval town of Ardres, ten miles south of Calais, and arrived the following morning at their destination, a village called Coulogne on the south-eastern approach to the port. Neave set up his HQ in the Mairie. No bombs fell that night and he wrote later that on going to bed he ‘refused to believe that our role in Calais would be other than anti-aircraft defence’. But then he was ‘twenty-four, unmilitary, with opinions of my own’.
Neave was being a little hard on himself. He had tried his best at soldiering, the theory as well as the practice. His failure to predict what was about to unfold was unsurprising. He and everyone else deployed in the defence of Calais were the victims of the extraordinary complacency of those in overall charge of operations, an attitude that was matched by an incompetence and vacillation that was surprising even to those familiar with the British military’s capacity for deadly muddle. Years later, he made a detailed study of the episode using official papers and the accounts of participants. There will always be debate about what effect the siege of Calais had on the shape of the Battle of France. What has never been in doubt is that the direction of the defence from on high was a disgrace.
The German victory in the west has come to seem a preordained inevitability. That was not how it appeared at the time. The forces were evenly balanced. In the all-important realm of armour, the French had better tanks than the Germans and they had more of them. The Germans, though, made the maximum use of their resources. They were better organised and had better communications, exemplified by the radio links between individual tanks and from ground to air which could concentrate forces relatively swiftly to maximum effect. Most of all, they had a winning attitude. They were attuned to victory. Medium-level commanders were encouraged to initiate action without waiting for orders, and their men were eager to fight. These benefits on their own did not ensure success. But luck was on the Germans’ side, and their good fortune was compounded by the slow reactions and bad decisions of the Allied command. In Neave’s sector of the battle, both were on constant display.
He arrived as the scramble began to prevent catastrophe. Following the capture of Abbeville on the 20th, reinforcements were ordered across the water to the Channel ports. The 20th Guards Brigade was sent to Boulogne. Calais was to be defended by the 30th Infantry Brigade. Firepower against the Panzers would be provided by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and a Royal Artillery anti-tank battery (229th). However, there would be no field artillery and the huge demands placed on the RAF meant that air cover was sparse. The meagre existing garrison, which consisted of a platoon of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and some anti-aircraft batteries, was to be boosted by three infantry battalions of the newly formed 30th Infantry Brigade. The force was under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a thoughtful and determined forty-two-year-old, whose reputation among his peers was high.
This seemed like a healthy addition to the defences. However, as Neave judged in his post-war study, ‘Nicholson faced an impossible task … Many among the 3,000 British troops were untrained for battle. They had neither proper equipment, arms or ammunition … [he] had no field artillery and very few tanks. His only additional support were 800 French soldiers and sailors and a handful of Dutch and Belgians.’4 The first infantry battalion to embark was the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, a territorial motorcycle combination unit, which arrived with the 3rd RTR and 229 RA Anti-Tank Battery aboard the SS City of Canterbury in the early afternoon of 22 May. Confusion and miscalculation meant that the QVR arrived without their machines, transport or three-inch mortars. The two-inch mortars were stowed, but with only smoke bombs for ammunition.