“A miracle of deliverance” – the epic story of Dunkirk

Posted in Boats, Famous news stories, Heroes and Heroines, Historical articles, History, Ships, World War 2 on Thursday, 27 February 2014

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This edited article about Dunkirk first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 572 published on 30 December 1972.

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Escape from Dunkirk by Graham Coton

The armada of small boats was on its way to France to save the British Army. There were almost a thousand of them, yachts, pleasure steamers, fishing trawlers, barges, tugs, cabin-cruisers, towed lifeboats and motor boats, and they had come from ports and tidal rivers all along the East and South Coasts to rendezvous in selected harbours and get their orders from the Navy.

They set off before dawn on May 30, 1940, from Ramsgate, Dover, Margate, Portsmouth, Folkestone and other places best known for jolly holidays by the sea, not the grim realities of war. It was a gallant little fleet, manned by every sort of sailor from ex-Navy men to weekend yachtsmen. There were 60-year-olds and teenagers and men of every age in between, some of them dressed in true seaman fashion, others in suits, raincoats and a wide variety of headgear.

Few of the boats had accurate charts, fewer still had much in the way of medical supplies, or experience of sailing far out at sea. And not many could boast any armaments. The Deal beach-boat “Dumpling” with a skipper of 70, had been built in Napoleon’s time! But every sailor in that strange but magnificent fleet was determined and ready for anything. Hardened naval men, watching from destroyers as the little ships went by, were sometimes almost moved to tears at the gallant sight.

The part-time sailors needed every scrap of gallantry that they could muster as they approached the beaches of Dunkirk and its harbour, once a bustling port, now a raging inferno. The full impact of the nightmare was soon grimly apparent. It was a nightmare that had really started at dawn just 20 days before, when the Second World War, which, on land at least, had become something of a joke, suddenly and violently came to life.

The war had begun in September 1939 and, after the initial German conquest of Poland, had settled down into stalemate, with the French and British behind the heavily fortified “impregnable” Maginot Line staring at the Germans behind their Siegfried Line. So little happened, except at sea, that the war was dubbed the Phoney War! Even the German conquest of Norway in the spring of 1940 did not alert the Allies. Yet the danger had been seen by a few British and French military thinkers.

These few were not convinced that the British Expeditionary Force 390,000 strong, was, as was officially claimed, “as well if not better equipped than any other similar army.” Actually, it had inferior tanks and mostly inferior guns, and many of the soldiers were undertrained. As for the French, though their army was bigger than the Germans’, it was riddled with defeatism and its leaders were rooted in the past. Most British and French generals failed to realise what their German opposite numbers knew – that in modern war air power and mobile, powerful tanks were destined to play major not minor roles.

They were soon to find out. And, to make things worse, the much-vaunted concrete masterpiece, the Maginot Line, did not even extend to the sea. All the Germans had to do was to invade Holland and Belgium and strike at France at the same time, and this they did on May 10, 1940, by land and air. The result was one of the most brilliant campaigns in history.

By May 25, it appeared that the greatest catastrophe ever suffered by a British army was imminent. The Germans had reached the Channel, cutting off hundreds of thousands of British and French troops from the main French forces to the south several days before, and it now seemed certain that the British Army would be driven into the sea. Fortunately, the German dictator, Hitler, ignored his tank generals’ advice and ordered his air force to finish the British off. So, though the Germans kept advancing, they did not move as fast as they might have done. Dunkirk was the place where the final outcome would be settled.

The evacuation began on May 26 and it ended on June 4. Britain had braced herself for a catastrophe, but, miraculously, in those desperate days and nights, almost 340,000 troops were rescued, including 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers. If Britain had lost her army, she would have been almost helpless, for the Royal Air Force had not enough planes and pilots at that time to fight and win a Battle of Britain, and there were scarcely any fighting troops left in the British Isles, except, literally, in “Dad’s Army.” As for equipment and guns, ancient pieces of artillery were being taken from museums!

But Dunkirk was not just a miracle, it was a hell on earth. The defeated troops endured hour upon hour of bombing and machine-gunning from the skies, as they waited their turn on the beaches and queued in the water, first for Naval ships, then for the small boats as well. The Navy lost 235 ships in all, which made the seas around Dunkirk a navigational nightmare. The harbour had been destroyed, and burning oil tanks made the dock area an inferno, but, despite bombing, the ¾-mile long mole was usable, and more than half of those who escaped, boarded vessels drawn up alongside it.

The little ships and their crews had a terrible baptism of fire from bombs, mines and machine guns, but they sailed on. The waiting troops had to watch destroyers, yachts and every sort of rescue craft, filled with their comrades, sink before their eyes, but there were always more boats into which they were packed tightly. As the Germans drew closer and the air raids worsened, some officers and men cracked under the strain and went to pieces, but most of them, like the sailors who rescued them, did not. They returned to a hero’s welcome, but they knew they had been defeated. Wars are not won by evacuations.

Meanwhile, back on the beaches, some men, chosen to stay behind, fought on to cover the retreat, then were captured or killed. Many R.A.F. pilots died too, as, hopelessly outnumbered, they fought it out over the stricken sands of Dunkirk. Then peace fell over the battlefield by the sea. All over Britain the survivors rested, or tossed about dreaming of the nightmare they had endured. But they lived to fight another day – and win.

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