On 22 May 1940 the first British reinforcements landed at Calais as German armored divisions, having reached the Channel, turned north toward the ports behind the British Expeditionary Force. A garrison of British riflemen, territorials, tanks and French troops was given a stream of contradictory orders, then told to hold the town to the end without hope of evacuation. It fought until the evening of 26 May, when the citadel fell and the survivors went into captivity.
Reinforcements without their kit
When German armor broke through to the coast at Abbeville on 20 May, Boulogne and Calais became, with Dunkirk, the only ports left to supply the British army in the north. On 22 May, as the German 2nd Armored Division closed on Boulogne and the 1st moved up from the Somme, the first British troops sent to Calais began to land.1
First came the 1st Queen Victoria's Rifles, a territorial motorcycle battalion that arrived without its motorcycles or transport, many of its men armed only with pistols. Behind them came the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, whose vehicles could not be unloaded until thousands of gallons of petrol stacked on deck had been landed by exhausted stevedores. On 23 May Brigadier Claude Nicholson arrived with the 30th Brigade, the 2nd King's Royal Rifle Corps and the 1st Rifle Brigade.2
Contradictory orders
The British official historian, L. F. Ellis, describes how within forty-eight hours the force received conflicting orders from General Headquarters in France, from Lord Gort's adjutant general in Dover and from the War Office in London. The tanks were sent first toward Boulogne, then toward St Omer, and lost heavily when they ran into the German 1st Armored Division. Nicholson was told to escort a convoy of 350,000 rations to Dunkirk, but German armor blocked the road.3
On 24 May the 10th Armored Division, sent by Heinz Guderian, began its attack on the town after a dawn bombardment. That evening London told Nicholson that there would be no evacuation: the French commander in the north had forbidden it, and Calais was to be held for the sake of allied solidarity.4
Fighting to the end
The defenders fell back from the outer ramparts to the old town and the canals. When the Germans sent the captured mayor of Calais to demand surrender on 25 May, he was kept under guard and his escort sent back. A second demand under a flag of truce that afternoon drew the reply that the German war diary recorded in English: the answer was no, as it was the British Army's duty to fight as well as it was the Germans'. The same day Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, signaled that the eyes of the Empire were on the defense of Calais.5
On 26 May heavy artillery fire and dive bombing broke the defense into isolated groups among the rubble. In the afternoon the Germans took the citadel, where Nicholson had his headquarters, and by evening the fighting was over. Most of the survivors spent the rest of the war as prisoners, and Nicholson died in captivity in 1943. The Royal Navy brought away some wounded and others in small craft, and the destroyer Wessex was sunk off the port.6
What the stand achieved
How much Calais mattered is debated. Ellis argues that the garrisons of Boulogne and Calais engaged two of Guderian's three armored divisions during the most critical days and helped the British Expeditionary Force reach Dunkirk. John Latimer, writing for HistoryNet, goes further and calls the defense probably the episode that let the evacuation succeed, while also noting that Hitler's order of 24 May had already halted Guderian's corps outside Dunkirk. The evacuation that followed is told in our article on Dunkirk, and the British attack at Arras the day before the landings in our page for 21 May.7
