The Hour of the Donkey

visited Colonel-General von Rundstedt's Army Group Headquarters that morning.

'No one now believes (as was rumoured at the time) that Hitler deliberately allowed the British to escape, on the grounds that they would be more likely to make peace if he left them their pride intact, for his subsequent actions do not support such a theory.

'Goering's offer to finish the job from the air may well have influenced the decision. Certainly, this would have combined a political merit—unlike the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe was very much a Nazi creation—with the military virtue of preserving the travel-worn panzer divisions from further loss at the hands of a defeated but still dangerous foe when there were important battles to come.

'Yet if that was the case, the military consideration was even more certainly the stronger of the two. For the fog of war, which had utterly confounded the retreating Allies, equally concealed many things from: the advancing Germans—above all, the completeness of the brilliant victory which they had already won.

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'Indeed, what appeared to the rest of the world to be a new type of warfare, devilishly conceived and ruthlessly executed, was in fact a campaign plagued by doubts and hesitations, and by arguments between conventional commanders and innovators. It was Hitler's supreme insight that the French Army of 1940, and France herself, lacked the will to re-fight the battle of the Marne. But his insight went no further, and on that fatal 24th both he and von Rundstedt believed that the Battle of France was as yet only half-won. As a result, both were deeply and not unreasonably concerned for the vulnerability of their flanks to counter-attack, and for the concentration of their scattered forces for that final supreme effort.

'Also, one other factor needs to be remembered (and not least by the beneficiaries of the miracle that was to come), imponderable though its contribution must always remain in the historian's calculations.

'Although by comparison with the 'contemptible little army'

of 1914 the British Expeditionary Force of 1940 was lamentably ill-equipped to handle the army of Rommel and Guderian, the quality of the British rank and file was as high as ever.

'The gallant, haphazard, hopeless British tank attack at Arras on 21 May undoubtedly played a part out of all proportion to its actual size in raising doubts in Hitler's mind; it is unlikely that the self-sacrificial heroism of the garrison of Calais was altogether in vain; and who knows what unrecorded acts of dummy4

defiant bravery by individual units, or even single soldiers, contributed to the sum of events which in the end tipped the scales of decision?

'But so much for conjecture. What is certain is that the 'Halt Order' of 24 May was given—and confirmed. And in that hour the final victory which was within Hitler's grasp, which his soldiers had won for him, began to slip through his fingers, and the last days of his Thousand-Year Reich had begun.'

—From Sir Frederick Clinton's The Dunkirk Miracle (Gollancz, 1959)

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