The Lost Band of Brothers Read Free Page A

jumbled, exhausted and often leaderless units wrecked and then abandoned their weapons, stores and vehicles as they edged closer to the sea.
    The leading German Panzer units of General Heintz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Korps reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, west of Dunkirk, on 20 May after just ten days of brutal, exhilarating advance. To those dust-caked, red-eyed, sleep-starved, deafened tankers gazing out across the Channel in sudden, bruising silence as engines were switched off after advancing 180 miles since crossing their start lines on 10 May, it must have seemed that the end of the war was in sight.
    Yet, if there was a miracle of Dunkirk, then perhaps it was the controversial German ‘halt order’ of 25 May that stopped German armoured units at Gravelines south-west of Dunkirk for three days to regroup and permit their rear echelon of supplies, ammunition and replacements to catch up. That, and the gift of good Channel weather that ensured mostly light winds and flat seas, permitted that armada of ‘little ships’ and Royal Navy warships to pluck a weary BEF from those sandy, smoke-shrouded beaches and shuttle them back to England. Most returned with their personal weapons, yet many came home with little more than helmet and damp, salt-stained battledress to be greeted with buns and sandwiches, hot tea, survivor postcards and a cheering crowd at every railway halt who hailed them as the returning victors they manifestly were not.
    At the outset it had been hoped that perhaps 30,000 men might be evacuated in two days by the Royal Navy’s well-organised Operation Dynamo before German intervention made further evacuation impossible. In the event – and after nine days and nights of heroic endeavour, shared by the French whose First Army, surrounded at Lille, fought on alone for four vital days thus delaying the advance of seven extra German Divisions to Dunkirk – 338,226 French and British troops were lifted off the French beaches and moles of Dunkirk and spirited away to England. Yet 68,111 members of the BEF did not return home. Excluding combat casualties, 41,030 British soldiers were left behind to be either wounded or marched into a long captivity. Also left behind were most of the British army’s weapons, cased food, ammunition and vehicles. The statistics of loss make sober reading, for every round of ammunition, every Bren gun and rifle, every hand grenade, mortar round and field gun would be needed in the fight to repel the invasion of Britain which must now surely follow. Yet left behind in France were 2,500 artillery pieces, 377,000 tons of stores, 162,000 tons of petrol and 68,000 tons of ammunition. Britain’s military cupboard was now bare. Little wonder then that the early Local Defence Volunteers drilled with broom handles while troops on the south coast practised rapid deployment from corporation omnibuses. And 65,000 vehicles and 20,000 motorcycles had also been left behind for the Germans.
    It was the loss and self-destruction of the cars and lorries under his own command that one particular subaltern, 24-year-old Second Lt Geoffrey Appleyard, RASC, found particularly shaming. Vehicles, after all, were to that particular corps what field guns were to the Royal Artillery and field dressings were to the Royal Army Medical Corps. A Cambridge University Engineering graduate with First Class Honours, Appleyard had heeded the climate of an increasingly war-nervous Europe and volunteered to join the Supplementary Reserve of officers in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1938. On 1 September the following year he and his fellow Reservists were mobilised. He soon found himself at Bulford Camp, Wiltshire, commanding the skilled mechanics, fitters, turners, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, drivers and mobile workshop personnel who made up his forty-five-strong unit in the Workshops of ‘E’ Section, No 6 Sub Park, 11 Ammunition, RASC. A week earlier, on 23