On 22 May 1940 German armor closed on Calais, and British troops sent from England to hold the port were in the town by 23 May. Cut off that day and refused evacuation, Brigadier Claude Nicholson's British and French garrison fought on until Calais fell on 26 May. On 22 May 1455 the Yorkists won at St Albans.
The panzers turn north
After German armor reached the sea near Abbeville on 20 May 1940, the panzer columns turned north along the coast toward Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, the ports behind the British Expeditionary Force. On 22 May they were closing on Calais, though Army Group A briefly held them back while it waited to see whether the British attack at Arras, told on our page for 21 May, would be renewed.1
Troops were sent from England to hold the port. By 23 May the garrison had been reinforced by Brigadier Claude Nicholson's 30th Brigade and a tank regiment.2
The garrison
Nicholson had the 1st Rifle Brigade and the 2nd King's Royal Rifle Corps, the 60th Rifles, of his own brigade, the 1st Queen Victoria's Rifles and the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, with twenty-one light and twenty-seven cruiser tanks, together with French troops.3
On 23 May Calais was cut off. The tanks tried to break out toward St Omer and toward Dunkirk and were driven back into the town; only three got through, by way of Gravelines.4
No evacuation
Early on 24 May Nicholson was told that evacuation had been decided "in principle". Churchill called this "surely madness" in a minute that day: Calais was to hold the enemy on its front. Later messages reversed the decision: the French commander in the north forbade evacuation, and Nicholson was to comply for the sake of Allied solidarity.5
On the afternoon of 25 May a message from London told him that "the eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais". A later one told him that every hour he held out was of the greatest help to the British Expeditionary Force.6
The fall of Calais
Calais fell on 26 May, after the garrison had been pressed back into the old town and the citadel. Gort's despatch dates the end of the defense to the night of 26 to 27 May; the official historian L. F. Ellis has the citadel taken in the late afternoon of 26 May and the last groups in the town overwhelmed as evening came.7
Nicholson was taken prisoner and died in German captivity.8
What the stand bought
On 24 May the German armored divisions were halted short of Dunkirk, with Hitler's approval. Ellis writes that the garrisons of Boulogne and Calais engaged two of Guderian's three armored divisions and that the Calais garrison "helped to make it possible for the British Expeditionary Force to reach Dunkirk". Churchill went further in his memoirs: "Calais was the crux". On 4 June he told the House of Commons that its defenders had "defended Calais to the last". The evacuation is told in our article on Dunkirk.9
Also on 22 May: St Albans, 1455
Richard, Duke of York, with the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, attacked the party of King Henry VI in St Albans. A Paston account dates York's arrival in the field beside the town to the 22nd day of May, and the English Chronicle dates the battle to "the Thurseday the xxij. day of May" (Thursday the 22nd of May). The Yorkists broke into the town through gardens and houses.10
The accounts name Edmund, Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford among the slain, and have the king hurt in the neck by an arrow; in the chronicle, "the kyng that stoode vndre his baner was hurte in the necke wythe an arowe" (the king, who stood under his banner, was hurt in the neck with an arrow).11
