Dunkirk evacuation

• 1. Strategic Context And Invasion

  ›

  Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering a declaration of war from France and the British Empire. The British Expeditionary Force landed at Cherbourg, Nantes, and Saint-Nazaire to defend French territory. By May 1940, this force comprised ten divisions under General John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort. The French had built the Maginot Line along their border with Germany to deter invasion. This fortification was designed to funnel any enemy attack into Belgium for destruction by French forces. However, the heavily wooded Ardennes region north of the line remained lightly defended. French leaders believed this area was impenetrable to large military operations. On the 10th of May 1940, German Army Group B attacked into Belgium while three panzer corps drove south through the Ardennes. These armored units reached the English Channel by the 21st of May. They trapped the BEF, Belgian troops, and three French field armies along the northern coast. General Gort immediately recognized that evacuation across the Channel was the only viable option. He began planning a withdrawal to Dunkirk, the closest port with good facilities.

  132730

• 2. The Halt Order Controversy

  ›

  Late on the 23rd of May, Gerd von Rundstedt issued an order halting the advance of his panzer units near Dunkirk. Adolf Hitler approved this decision the following day and sent confirmation to the front lines. Attacking the surrounded Allied forces was left to the Luftwaffe until the order was rescinded on the 26th of May. This pause gave the Allies time to construct defensive works and pull back large numbers of troops. Some accounts suggest Hitler deliberately allowed the British to escape, though historians debate the exact motivation. General Heinz Guderian later called the failure to assault Dunkirk one of the major German mistakes on the Western Front. Manstein described it as one of Hitler's most critical errors in judgment. The delay prevented the Germans from stopping the Allied retreat from Lille. It also allowed the construction of vital defenses around the perimeter. On the 24th of May, engineers built five bridges over the Canal Line, but only one British battalion barred their path. The halt order has been the subject of much discussion by historians ever since. B. H. Liddell Hart concluded that Hitler believed once Britain's troops left continental Europe, they would never return.

  222335

• 3. Operation Dynamo Execution

  ›

  Churchill ordered Operation Dynamo to begin just before 19:00 on the 26th of May. By that time, 28,000 men had already departed for England. Initial plans called for recovering 45,000 men within two days before German troops could block further evacuation. Only 7,669 soldiers escaped during this first period. On the 27th of May, the first full day of the operation, one cruiser and eight destroyers were active alongside 26 other craft. Admiralty officers searched nearby boatyards for small vessels to ferry personnel from beaches to larger ships. An emergency call resulted in nearly four hundred small craft voluntarily participating by the 31st of May. When the docks became unusable due to air attacks, Captain William Tennant ordered evacuations directly from the beaches. He later re-routed troops to two long stone breakwaters known as the east and west moles. Almost 200,000 troops embarked on ships from the east mole over the next week. James Campbell Clouston organized the flow of men along the mole into waiting ships. The total number rescued reached 338,226 by the end of the eighth day.

  184760

• 4. The Little Ships Fleet

  ›

  A wide variety of small vessels from south England were pressed into service to aid the Dunkirk evacuation. These included speedboats, Thames river boats, car ferries, pleasure craft, and many other types of small craft. The most useful proved to be motor lifeboats with reasonable capacity and speed. Some boats were requisitioned without the owner's knowledge or consent. Agents scoured the Thames for likely vessels and took them downriver to Sheerness where naval crews were placed aboard. Due to shortages of personnel, many small craft crossed the Channel with civilian crews. The first little ships arrived at Dunkirk on the 28th of May. Wide sand beaches meant large vessels could not get near the shore. Even small craft had to stop about one mile from the waterline and wait for soldiers to wade out. In many cases, personnel abandoned their boat upon reaching a larger ship. Subsequent evacuees had to wait for boats to drift ashore with the tide before making use of them. At times, panicky soldiers had to be warned off at gunpoint when attempting to rush to boats out of turn. Soldiers at De Panne and Bray-Dunes constructed improvised jetties by driving rows of abandoned vehicles onto the beach.

  5942

• 5. Air War And Naval Losses

  ›

  The Luftwaffe heavily bombed Dunkirk town and dock installations on the 27th of May. As the water supply was knocked out, resulting fires could not be extinguished. An estimated one thousand civilians were killed during these attacks. RAF squadrons were ordered to provide air supremacy for the Royal Navy during the evacuation. They shifted efforts to covering Dunkirk and the English Channel while protecting the fleet. The Luftwaffe engaged with 300 bombers protected by 550 fighter sorties in twelve raids. They dropped 15,000 high explosive bombs and 30,000 incendiary bombs. No. 11 Group RAF flew 22 patrols with 287 aircraft in formations of up to 20 planes. Over 3,500 sorties were flown in support of Operation Dynamo throughout the week. Six British destroyers were sunk along with nine other major vessels. The French Navy lost three destroyers including Le Foudroyant. The RAF lost 145 aircraft while the Luftwaffe lost 156 aircraft during operations. For every seven soldiers who escaped through Dunkirk, one man became a prisoner of war.

  645442

• 6. Casualties And Prisoner Treatment

  ›

  During the entire campaign from the 10th of May until the armistice on the 22nd of June, the BEF suffered 68,000 casualties. This included 3,500 killed and 13,053 wounded. Most heavy equipment had to be abandoned resulting in the loss of nearly 65,000 vehicles. Almost all of the 445 British tanks dispatched to France were abandoned. Many prisoners reported brutal treatment by their guards including beatings, starvation, and murder. Another complaint was that German guards kicked over buckets of water left at roadside by French civilians for marching prisoners to drink. Many prisoners were marched to the city of Trier taking as long as 20 days. Others were sent by barge to the Ruhr before being transported by rail to prisoner of war camps. The majority worked in German industry and agriculture for the remainder of the war. The 4,504 men of the BEF who died or died as prisoners have no known grave. They are commemorated on the Dunkirk Memorial located near the coast.

  1237

• 7. Political Aftermath And Legacy

  ›

  Churchill referred to the outcome as a miracle but warned the House of Commons on the 4th of June that wars are not won by evacuations. He stated we must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of victory. The British press presented the evacuation as a disaster turned to triumph so successfully that Churchill felt compelled to remind the country otherwise. Left-wing accounts focused exclusively upon Dunkirk portraying it as the beginning of the people's war. Conservative accounts portrayed Dunkirk as merely one part of a wider battle of the ports. The triumph of the people's war interpretation was largely due to cinema which chose to focus on the evacuation. Filmmakers ignored other battles along the French coast such as Calais and Boulogne. Hitler stated on the 5th of June 1940 that Dunkirk had fallen and declared it the greatest annihilation battle of all time. More than 100,000 French troops evacuated from Dunkirk were shuttled to camps in south-western England before being repatriated. About half of these repatriated troops were redeployed against Germans before France surrendered eight days later.

  75167