This was inadequate atonement for Lord Lindley. “General Clay, there is a possibility you will enter history as one of its great military criminals.”
“Horseshit. You gave me a job, and I did it. Now stop your whining.”
Lindley blinked as if Clay had spit at him.
A code clerk entered the room and gave a message to the prime minister. Churchill’s face darkened as he read it. He looked up, “General Clay, this is from Marshall in Washington. You have been relieved of command of the American Expeditionary Force. General Hargrave is now its commander. You have been ordered to Washington.”
Clay’s face was impassive. A long moment passed. Then his mouth twitched, and his eyes became glassy. He blinked several times. He was struggling with himself, I could tell. He inhaled slowly. When he pursed his lips—that expression I had seen so many times—I knew he was in control.
He reached for his Pall Malls and dropped them into his pocket. He gathered his papers, then pushed himself up from his seat. I rose with him. General Alexander nodded. I learned later that Alexander had spoken over the telephone with President Roosevelt and had encouraged Clay’s removal. All eyes were on Clay, but, once again, I found them unreadable.
Clay walked to the door slowly, to hide his limp. He turned to them. “You people need some advice.” His voice was as strong and as true as a warning tocsin.
Lindley cleared his throat, dismissing Clay.
“You may think your resources are depleted and your soldiers are exhausted, but you must pursue the enemy with utter ruthlessness into the channel. No battle is won without the coup de grâce. Do not make the mistake of thinking you have won anything yet.”
Clay’s hand was on the door handle when Winston Churchill said magisterially, “You are advising us not to make the error General Meade did after Gettysburg, in failing to aggressively pursue the broken Confederate army.”
Clay’s eyebrow rose. “Yes.” Again his hand went for the door handle. But he paused and said, “Or, as a better example, the French failure to pursue the Austrians after Wagram.”
“Or, even better, Marlborough’s failure to vigorously pursue the French after Malplaquet.”
Clay countered, “Or, better than Marlborough, General Howe’s failure to pursue Washington into Manhattan Island.”
Puzzled AACCS members looked left and right, left and right, following the match.
“What you are suggesting,” Churchill said, his eyes locked on Clay’s, “is that we act as Napoleon at Austerliz did, when he ordered his artillery to smash the frozen Satschan Pond, so the Austrians fleeing across it would break through and drown.”
Clay came back with, “Or as the English did after defeating the Jacobites at Culloden, chasing them in a spree of death and mutilation.”
The prime minister paused, his next volley on his tongue. But it would not come. His brows sewn tightly together, he stared at the fan on the wall, then at the damp end of his cigar. “Well, my memory has failed me for the moment.”
Clay smiled briefly. “Then this meeting wasn’t a total loss.”
I followed him into the hallway. We were stepping up the stairs into the London weather when Clay said to me, “He gave me that one.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“He let me win, as a gift. And you can write in your goddamn diary, which will likely prove the ruin of me, that I said so.”
General Clay had nothing to do with the British victory that followed, so I have little to report. The storm lasted three days, during which few German men or supplies landed and Luftwaffe sorties were severely reduced. The phosgene and the tabun and the weather worked together to cripple the Wehrmacht’s operation. Then the British army crushed it. Ten days after they landed, the last German was thrown off the island.
But not to return to the beaches would leave General Clay’s ledger unfilled. He met the enemy there, and it is fitting I describe how the invasion ended there.
Winston Churchill and General Stedman took Clay’s advice to heart, or, more probably, they were of the same mind all along. There was no repeat of Dunkirk, where the Germans strangely let a British army escape. The beach fighting was less a battle than a vengeful melee. I interviewed a number of German survivors.
Sergeant Waldemar Rasch, who had seen his entire ten-man squad fall rushing up the beach, witnessed the same thing when he returned to the beach. “Even though the seas had lessened, the evacuation was chaotic. The beach resembled a crowd at a rally, thousands of soldiers milling about. There was nothing to do but wait for a ship or a barge. All that we held of England then was the beach, a narrow band between the water and the British. And the British were angry.”
American units had received the brunt of the invasion and had been pulled off the line. The pursuit was made by the British. After the slapdash rush south, many British soldiers could not find their regiments. They fought in spontaneously formed units.
Rasch was ten feet from the surf, in a line of riflemen waiting to climb onto a barge. His new squad had seven men left. Then a shell landed at the waterline. “I believe it was just one piece of shrapnel that tore through five of them in line, ripping through the first soldier’s groin and rising as it blew back, through four more, then ripping off a portion of Hans Handlisch’s head. He had been standing in front of me. With them all down at once, I was next in line to board. I did so quickly.”
Alwin “Ajax” Oesten piloted a forty-foot French riverboat that normally plied the Seine. He told me, “We were using everything that floated, and that shallow-keeled boat wasn’t made for chop. I put it right up to the surf, then swung hard to port, and signaled the waiting soldiers to board. I wasn’t expecting them to come all at once.”
Infantrymen frantically waded out to the boat, some casting away their rifles and kits to climb aboard. “Forty or fifty of them suddenly grabbed my starboard rail. I yelled, but they wouldn’t let go of the boat, and it listed. That made it easier to climb on, and when they did, the boat tilted further. Finally, it foundered, rolled right on over. A few, including me, jumped free, but many drowned under the hull.”
Able Seaman Gustav Foerster was a deckhand on a Kriegsmarine tug. Before the invasion his barge had hauled gravel, so it was easily capable of sustaining the weight of the three hundred soldiers he was taking home. “I thought we were clear of the carnage,” he told me later. “We were churning away from the beach, leaving the turmoil behind, when an artillery shell struck the barge athwartships. When the smoke cleared, a few soldiers were standing fore and aft on the barge, but nobody in the middle, just pieces of them, and the barge was awash in blood.”
At Pevensey Bay, Sergeant Hugo Brinkmann was pushed into the sea by a mass of soldiers. “It was like the bread riots during the panic in the early thirties. A weaving, pulsing throng, pushing and pushing. I was pressed deeper and deeper into the water. I don’t think those at the back of the pack knew we were in trouble. They shouldered those in front of them to get away from the beach fire. Some soldiers were trampled under foot, others forced into the water.”
Struggling against the tumultuous mob of soldiers, Brinkmann threw away his gas mask and scraped off his boots. “We were packed so tightly that I couldn’t bend to get out of my pack, so I cut it off with my knife. Just as I did, my feet no longer touched the bottom and waves washed over my head. All around me were the thrashing and gasping and crying of soldiers. Many drowned before they could break free of the horde. I was pulled under by desperate hands, but I kicked free, and kept kicking until I was away from the pack. A barge glided by, and several soldiers pulled me on board.”
At Rottingdean, just east of Brighton, the remnants of Corporal Max-Eckart Schuur’s company, once a spirited unit of 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Division, attempted to surrender. Schuur rigged a white flag made from a flour sack to his rifle and with three others crept to the crest of a hill and waved the rifle back and forth.