The World War II Collection

  “Now you can go back to your old regiment,” dryly observed a lieutenant-colonel standing by.

  As Georg Schmidt, one of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda men, photographed the scene, his section chief drove up and reminded him that Goebbels expected pictures of British POW’s—did Schmidt have any?

  Schmidt replied that the British were all gone.

  “Well,” said his chief, “you’re an official photographer. If you don’t get any pictures of British POW’s, then you were an official photographer!”

  Schmidt needed no further encouragement. He hurried over to the POW compound, where he found 30,000 to 40,000 French, but still no British. He looked harder and was finally rewarded. Scattered here and there were two or three dozen Tommies. Schmidt put them up front and began taking his pictures. The day was saved.

  Most of the British were indeed gone, but they took an astonishingly large number of French troops with them. Over 26,000 jammed the decks of the last ships to leave Dunkirk. As the Medway Queen groped through an early-morning fog toward Dover, an officer strummed a mandolin on the after deck, trying to cheer up the already homesick poilus. On the destroyer Sabre Commander Brian Dean drew cheers by addressing his passengers in French. There was much banter comparing the accommodations on the crowded Sabre with those on the luxury liner Normandie.

  Generally speaking, the passage back was uneventful—but not always. As the Belgian trawler Maréchal Foch neared the English coast, the minesweeper Leda loomed out of the fog and rammed her. The “Foch” sank instantly, pitching 300 soldiers into the water.

  The French motorboat VTB 25, carrying Admiral Abrial and other high-ranking officers, heard cries and rushed to the scene. But the fog knew no favorites: VTB 25 ran into a piece of wreckage and lost her propeller. Now she wallowed helplessly in the sea.

  Eventually the destroyer Malcolm came up. Captain Halsey’s smooth-working crew picked up 150 survivors and threw a line to VTB 25. Somewhat ignominiously, Admiral Abrial was finally towed into Dover around 6:00 a.m.

  About this time the fog lifted, but that didn’t help a young French ensign named Tellier, commanding the auxiliary dredge Emile Deschamps. He was thoroughly lost, and when he asked directions from a passing ship, he couldn’t understand the answer. He tried to follow the crowd, and was just off Margate when the Emile Deschamps struck a magnetic mine and blew up. She sank in less than half a minute with most of the 500 men aboard.

  Lieutenant Hervé Cras managed to swim clear of the wreck. He was getting accustomed to this sort of thing, having also gone down on the destroyer Jaguar the previous week. Now, as he tread water gasping for breath, he was hailed by a shipmate, Lieutenant Jacquelin de la Porte de Vaux: “Hello, Hello! Let’s sing.”

  With that, de la Port de Vaux burst into “Le Chant du Depart”—“The Song of Departure”—a well-known French march. Cras was in no mood to join in, and gradually drifted away. Later, after both men were rescued, de la Porte de Vaux chided him for not singing in the water, “as all sailors with their hearts in the right place must do in such circumstances.”

  Perhaps he was right. Certainly the men who manned the evacuation fleet needed every conceivable device to keep up their spirits. The Emile Deschamps was the 243rd vessel lost, and many of the crews had now reached the breaking point. During the morning of the 4th, Admiral Abrial met with Ramsay in Dover Castle, and they agreed that the time had come to end “Dynamo.” Abrial observed that the Germans were closing in; the French had now used up all their ammunition; and the 30,000 to 40,000 men left behind weren’t combat units. He was wrong only on the last point: the troops standing forlornly on the pierheads of Dunkirk included some of France’s best.

  Paris gave its formal approval at 11:00, and at 2:23 p.m. the British Admiralty officially announced the end of Operation Dynamo. Released at last from the strain and tension, Ramsay drove up to Sandwich and celebrated with a round of golf. He shot a 78—by far the best score in his life.

  The past several days had been so all-consuming that he never had time even to write “darling Mag,” but she had kept the asparagus and gingerbread coming, and now on June 5 he once again took up his pen: “The relief is stupendous, and the results beyond belief.” He tried to describe what had been achieved, but it sounded awkward and full of self-praise. He was really a man of action, not a man of letters. He quickly wrapped his effort up: “Tons of love, darling Mag, you are such a comfort to me.”

  Along with relief went a deep feeling of vindication. Ramsay had never gotten over his years in eclipse; his break with Admiral Backhouse hurt too deeply. Now Dunkirk made up for everything, and the grateful letters that poured in seemed doubly sweet.

  He cherished them all, including one from his barber. But the most touching was a letter signed simply “Mrs. S. Woodcock,” a British soldier’s mother he had never met:

  As a reader of the Daily Express and after reading in today’s paper of your wonderful feat re Dunkirk, I feel I must send you a personal message to thank you. My son was one of the lucky ones to escape from there. I have not seen him, but he is somewhere in England, and that’s good enough. My youngest boy John Woodcock died of wounds received in Norway on April 26; so you can guess how thankful I feel and grateful to you. …

  It was a nation already overflowing with gratitude and relief when Winston Churchill went to the House of Commons on the evening of June 4 to report on the evacuation. The benches were filled; the Public Gallery, the Peers Gallery, and the Distinguished Strangers Gallery all packed. The crowd welcomed him with a rousing cheer, then sat enthralled by that rarity—a speech devoted mainly to bad news but which, nevertheless, inspires men with hope and courage.

  He thrilled the House with his ringing peroration—“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets”—but what impressed astute observers the most was his frankness in facing unpleasant facts. The News Chronicle praised the speech for its “uncompromising candour.” Edward R. Murrow called it “a report remarkable for its honesty, inspiration, and gravity.”

  This was as Churchill wanted it. The rescue of the Army must not lull the nation into a paralyzing euphoria. “We must be very careful,” he warned, “not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

  For the moment his warnings did little good. The returning troops were greeted—often to their own amazement—like conquering heroes. Captain John Dodd of the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, had expected sullen and angry faces, possibly hostile crowds, and a stigma that would stick for all time. Instead, he found nothing but joy and thankfulness, as if the BEF had been the victors, not the vanquished.

  When the troops tumbled ashore at Ramsgate, the women of the town swamped them with cups of cocoa, buried them in sandwiches. The manager of the Pavilion Theatre gave away all his cigarettes and chocolate. A director of the Olympia Ballroom bought up all the socks and underwear in town, and handed them out as needed. A grocery store at Broadstairs gave away its entire stock of tea, soup, biscuits, butter, and margarine. A wealthy Scotsman at St. Augustines bought every blanket in town, sending them all to Ramsgate and Margate.

  As fast as possible the returning troops were loaded into special trains and taken to assembly points scattered over England and Wales. Here the various units would be rested and reorganized. As the trains moved through the countryside, crowds gathered at the station platforms along the way, showering them with still more cigarettes and chocolate. Bedsheet banners hung from the windows of London’s suburbs with messages like “HARD LUCK, BOYS” and “WELL DONE, BEF.” Children stood at road crossings waving Union Jacks.

  Lady Ismay, wife of Churchill’s military adviser, was changing trains at Oxford when one of these “Dunkirk Specials” pulled in. The people on the platform, until now bored and apathetic, saw the weary faces, the bandages, the torn uniforms, and suddenly realized who these new arrivals were. In a body the cr
owd rushed the station refreshment stand and showered the exhausted soldiers with food and drink. That night when General Ismay told her how well the evacuation was going, she replied, “Yes, I have seen the miracle with my own eyes.”

  “Miracle”—that was the word. There seemed no other way to describe such an unexpected, inexplicable change in fortune. In his address to Parliament Winston Churchill called it a “miracle of deliverance.” Writing a naval colleague, Admiral Sir William James of Portsmouth could only “thank God for that miracle at Dunkirk.” Gort’s Chief of Staff, General Pownall, noted in his diary, “The evacuation from Dunkirk was surely a miracle.”

  Actually, there were several miracles. First, the weather. The English Channel is usually rough, rarely behaves for very long. Yet a calm sea was essential to the evacuation, and during the nine days of Dunkirk the Channel was a millpond. Old-timers still say they have never seen it so smooth.

  At one point a storm seemed to be heading for the coast, but veered up the Irish Channel. Northerly winds would have kicked up a disastrous surf, but the breeze was first from the southwest, later shifting to the east. On only one morning, May 31, did an on-shore breeze cause serious trouble. On June 5—the day after the evacuation was over—the wind moved to the north, and great breakers came rolling onto the empty beaches.

  Overhead, clouds, mist, and rain always seemed to come at the right moment. The Luftwaffe mounted three all-out assaults on Dunkirk—May 27, 29, and June 1. Each time the following day saw low ceilings that prevented any effective follow-up. It took the Germans three days to discover the part played by the eastern mole, mainly because the southwesterly breezes screened it with smoke.

  Another miracle was Adolf Hitler’s order of May 24, halting his tanks just as they were closing in for the kill. That day Guderian’s panzers had reached Bourbourg, only ten miles southwest of Dunkirk. Nothing stood between them and the port. The bulk of the BEF still lay near Lille, 43 miles to the south. By the time the tanks began rolling again in the predawn hours of May 27, the escape corridor had been established, the BEF was pouring into Dunkirk and Ramsay’s rescue fleet was hard at work.

  Hitler’s “halt order” seems so mysterious that it has even been suggested that he was deliberately trying to let the BEF escape. With her army still intact, the theory runs, Britain might feel she could more honorably sit down at the peace table.

  Anyone who was at Dunkirk will have a hard time believing that. If Hitler was secretly trying to let the British go home, he was slicing it awfully thin. He almost failed and caught them all. Nor did he confide this secret to the Luftwaffe, the artillery, or the S-Boats. All were doing their best to disrupt the evacuation; none were told to go easy. Finally, there were the ideas tossed off by Hitler himself, suggesting better ways to raise havoc on the beaches.

  The most convincing evidence indicates that Hitler was indeed trying to block the evacuation, but wasn’t willing to risk his armor to do it. The British looked finished anyhow; Flanders was poor tank country; his lines were already stretched thin; the brief counterattack at Arras disturbed him; 50% of his tanks were said to be out of action; he needed that armor for the next phase of the campaign, the drive across the Somme and into the heart of France.

  It was understandable, especially for any German who had been through the First War. France was crucial, and Paris was the key. It had eluded them then; there must be no mistake this time. Far better to risk a miracle at Dunkirk than risk a second “Miracle of the Marne.”

  The decision was all the easier when Hermann Göring announced that his Luftwaffe could handle Dunkirk alone. Hitler didn’t buy this for very long—he lifted the “halt order” several days before it became clear that Göring couldn’t deliver—but the General Field Marshal’s boast certainly played a part.

  By May 27, when the tanks got going again, the great German drive had lost its momentum, and the panzer generals themselves were thinking of the south. Guderian, once-an impassioned advocate for using his armor at Dunkirk, now only had eyes for the Somme.

  Still another miracle was provided by the Luftwaffe itself. Perhaps Göring could never have stopped the evacuation, but he could have caused far more mischief. The German planes rarely strafed the crowded beaches; they never used fragmentation bombs; they never attacked tempting targets like Dover or Ramsgate. None of this was through lack of desire; it was through lack of doctrine. The Stuka pilots had been trained for ground support, not for interdiction. The fighters were expected to stay upstairs, covering the bombers, not to come down and mix it up. Whatever the reasons, these lapses allowed additional thousands of men to come home.

  “Had the BEF not returned to this country,” General Brookelater wrote, “it is hard to see how the Army could have recovered from the blow.” That was the practical significance of Dunkirk. Britain could replace the 2,472 lost guns, the 63,879 abandoned vehicles; but the 224,686 rescued troops were irreplaceable. In the summer of 1940 they were the only trained troops Britain had left. Later, they would be the nucleus of the great Allied armies that won back the Continent. The leaders—Brooke, Alexander, and Montgomery, to name only three—all cut their teeth at Dunkirk.

  But the significance of Dunkirk went far beyond such practical considerations. The rescue electrified the people of Britain, welded them together, gave them a sense of purpose that the war had previously lacked. Treaty obligations are all very well, but they don’t inspire men to great deeds. “Home” does, and this is what Britain was fighting for now.

  The very sense of being alone was exhilarating. The story was told of the foreigner who asked whether his English friend was discouraged by the successive collapse of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Lowlands, and now France. “Of course not,” came the stout-hearted reply. “We’re in the finals and we’re playing at home.”

  Some would later say that it was all clever propaganda that cranked up the country to this emotional peak. But it happened too quickly—too spontaneously—for that. This was a case where the people actually led the propagandists. The government’s fears were the opposite—that Dunkirk might lead to overconfidence. It was Winston Churchill himself who stressed that the campaign had been “a colossal military disaster,” and who warned that “wars are not won by evacuations.”

  Ironically, Churchill was a prime mover in creating the very mood he sought to dispel. His eloquence, his defiance, his fighting stance were almost bewitching in their appeal. Like Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War, he was perfectly cast.

  Another ingredient was the sense of national participation that Dunkirk aroused. Modern war is so impersonal, it’s a rare moment when the ordinary citizen feels that he’s making a direct contribution. At Dunkirk ordinary Englishmen really did go over in little boats and rescue soldiers. Ordinary housewives really did succor the exhausted troops reeling back. History is full of occasions when armies have rushed to the aid of an embattled people; here was a case where the people rushed to the aid of an embattled army.

  Above all, they pulled it off. When the evacuation began, Churchill thought 30,000 might be saved; Ramsay guessed 45,000. In the end, over 338,000 were landed in England, with another 4,000 lifted to Cherbourg and other French ports still in Allied hands. “Wars are not won by evacuations,” but, for the first time, at least Adolf Hitler didn’t have everything his own way. That in itself was cause for celebration.

  Curiously, the Germans felt like celebrating too. Years later, they would see it differently. Many would even regard Dunkirk as the turning point of the whole war: If the BEF had been captured, Britain would have been defeated. … If that had happened, Germany could have concentrated all her strength on Russia. … If that had happened, there would have been no Stalingrad. … and so on. But on June 4, 1940, none of these “ifs” were evident. Except, perhaps, for a few disgruntled tank commanders, the victory seemed complete. As the magazine Der Adler put it:

  For us Germans the word “Dunkirchen” will stand for all time for victory in the
greatest battle of annihilation in history. But for the British and French who were there, it will remind them for the rest of their lives of a defeat that was heavier than any army had ever suffered before.

  As for the escape of “a few men” back to England, Der Adler reassured its readers that this was no cause for alarm: “Every single one of these completely demoralized soldiers is a bacillus of disintegration. …” The Völkischer Beobachter told how women and children burst into hysterical tears as the battered troops staggered home.

  And they would never be back. Landing craft, “mulberries,” fighter-bombers, sophisticated radar, the whole paraphernalia of the 1944 counterstroke hadn’t even been invented. Viewed with 1940 eyes, it wasn’t all that important to annihilate the BEF. It had been thrown into the sea, and that was enough.

  Only the French were bitter. Whether it was Weygand sniping at General Spears in Paris or the lowliest poilu giving upon the eastern mole, the overwhelming majority felt abandoned by the British. It did no good to point out that 123,095 French were rescued by Ramsay’s fleet, 102,570 in British ships.

  Goebbels joyfully fanned the flames. The crudest propaganda poured out of Berlin. In a little book called Blende auf-Tiefangriff, correspondent Hans Henkel told how the fleeing British in one rowboat forced several Frenchmen at pistol-point to jump into the sea. The survivors now stood before Henkel, cursing the “sales anglais.”

  Then I asked, “But why do you have an alliance with these ‘sales anglais,’ these dirty Englishmen?”

  “But we didn’t do this! It was done by our wretched government, which then had the nerve to save them!”

  “You didn’t have to keep that government!”

  “What could we do? We weren’t asked at all.” And one added, “It’s the Jews who are to blame.”

  “Well, fellows, what if we now fought the English together?”

  They laughed and said with great enthusiasm, “Yes, we’d join up immediately.”