The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

chateau that served as General HQ, Major-General Henry Pownall was
woken at 4.40 a.m. with the sound of four or five bombs exploding in the
distance, followed by the boom of anti-aircraft fire. An hour later, Pownall,
along with the rest of the staff officers, was washed, shaved and dressed,
and anxiously awaiting news and orders from Général Georges’s North-East
Front, the French command under which the BEF had been placed.
It was Brigadier Swayne, head of the BEF’s mission at Georges’s HQ,
who rang at around 5.30 a.m. with the instructions that Alerts 1, 2 and 3 had
been given simultaneously. As Chief of Staff of the BEF, Pownall was with
the British commander, General Lord Gort, when at about 6.15 a.m. a
further message arrived from Général Georges’s Headquarters. Orders had
been issued by the French Supreme Command for the immediate
implementation of Plan D, the forward movement of troops to occupy
positions along the River Dyle in Belgium.
It could not be carried out quite immediately, however. The system of
alerts, as devised by the French, was to warn the Allied forces along the
front to prepare for various stages of readiness. Yet although they had been
expecting a German offensive, the campaign in Norway of the past few
weeks had distracted them somewhat, whilst during the previous days there
had been the diversion of a political crisis not only in London, but in Paris
too. Consequently, no alert of any kind had been issued in the last twentyfour
hours and as a result no troops were ready to get moving right away.
With this in mind, Gort announced that Zero hour for beginning the march
into Belgium was 1 o’clock that afternoon, nearly seven hours hence.
In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force had been sent to France, and so it
had again in 1939, following the outbreak of war. The name was telling; it
suggested that the enterprise was an ‘expedition’, an adventure, rather than
a force soon to be embroiled in a bitter and bloody war. That its name
harked back to an earlier age was also indicative of a mindset that had not
moved forward as much as it should have done.
In fact, the British Expeditionary Force was a large field army. An army
can be called as such if it contains two or more corps. A corps, in turn,
should contain at least two divisions. This latter is a major tactical and
administrative unit that contains within its structure all the various forms of
arms and services necessary for sustained combat, such as infantry, tanks,
artillery, engineers and support troops. Divisions could have different