Figure 1.--. |
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As the Panzers cut accross France, the British decided to evacuate the BEF. About 400,000 British an French soldiers began to fall back on Dunkirk. At this time the BEF was still within Hitler's grasp. It was not just the number of men that were at stake. The BEF was the professional core--the heart of the British Army. The men of the BEF would be the officers and NCOs of the British army that would eventually play an important role in defeating the Germans. The loss of the BEF would hsve crippled the Bitish war effort if not forced the British to seek terms. Churchill warned the Commons that it "should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings". The Panzers were only a few miles south of Dunkirk and facing no serious opposition. Hitler ordered the Panzers to halt. Some believe that he hoped this gesture would help convince the British to comes to terms, other believe that is was just as it was described at the time, aneeded pause to regroup and prepare for a more coordinated assault. [Davidson, p. 408 and Fest, p. 630.] What ever the reason, this 48-hour respite allowed the British to organize a defensive perimter
around Dunkirk and begin an almost miraculous withdawl. Although King Leopold III surended the Belgian Army, the French First Army delayed the Germans.
The BEF fell back toward Dunkirk, abandoing their equipment along the roads. Nearly 340,000 men were evacuated from Dunkirk, including French and Dutch
sholdiers. This is even more important that it sounds as akmost all if the British sholdiers were regulars and would form the corps of the future British Army that
would play such an important role in the War. All of the BEF's equipment, however, was lost and there was no replacemments for the lost equipment waiting for
them back in England.
The Germans proceeded to conquer virtually all of Western Europe. After a few months of the "Phony War", France's turn came. The Germans struck on a wide
front against the neutral Netherlands, Belgiym, and Luxemburg. The terror bombing of Rotterdam convinced the already hard-pressed Dutch Army to surrender.
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) rushed north to aid the Dutch. The Germans then struck in the Belgian Ardenes which allowed them to avoid the formidable
Maginot Line. The French and Belgians considered the Ardenes impassable to tanks. The Germans managed to easily penetrate the rough terraine, crossed two
substantial rivers, and the XIX Panzer Corps rapidly reached the English Channel--cutting the BEF off from the French and rendering the Maginot Line uselss. The
French entrenched behind the Maginot Line simply could not cope with the exposive highly mobil style of Blitzkrieg warfare. The Panzers surrounded the Belgian
Army which King Leopold III surrendered. The BEF was within Hitler's grasp. Paris soon fell and the French signed a NAZI imposed armistace. The collapse of
France after only a few weeks was a disaster of emense proportions. It was the French Army that had provided the bulk of the allied War Western Front in World
War I. The German victory was not accomplished with massivelyu superior numbers or weaponry. In fact they had fewer men and tanks. What they had was a
superior tactical doctrine. The Germans were amazed to find, for example, that French tanks were not even equipped with radios, and a more disciplined fighting
force. NAZI propaganda began to describe Hitler as " Der grösste Feldherr Allerzeiten " (the greatest field commander of all time). [Davidson, p. 483.]
Just as the NAZI blow in the West came, Prime Minister Chamerlain resigned. His position in Parliament had become untenable. "Go! In the name of God go!"
shouted one MP. It was expected that Foreign Minister Lord Halifax would replace him. But Halifax declined. It is not know why he declined nor has he ever
explained. Perhaps he realized he was not up to the job. Instead the Commons turned to Churchill. Later Churchill wrote, "At last I had the authority to give
direction over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past lifehad been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." Never has
a British prome minister taken office in such a crisis. The news was bad and would get worse. Ambassador Bullit in Paris and Ambassador Kennedy in London
cabled Washington with reports that got worse day by day. Neither had confidence in Churchill or the British. As the weight of the NAZI offensive fell upon
France, Churchill atempted as best he could to keep the French in the War.
Lord John Gort (1886- ), a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and World War I hero, was placed in command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) deployed to France and Belgium (1940). He was a highly respected officer who had commanded the Staff College. Interestingly the BEF was the only fully mechanized force involved in the campaign. The Wehrmacht had a powerful mechanized force, but a substantial part of the Wehrmact was still not mechanized and relied on horse-power. (This was still the case a year later when Hitler laubched Barbarossa.) Despite the example of Poland, Gort and his command were unprepared for Blitzkrieg when the Germans launched their Western Offensive (May 10). The Germans struck first at the Dutch and Belgians. Gort ordered the BEF away from prepared defenses to assist the Dutch. The Dutch Army, however, after the bombing of Rotterdam surrendered before the BEF could reach them.
The Panzers broke through at Sedan and drove to the Channel. The Panzers were led by legendary German tank commander General Heinz Guderian. He crossed the Meuse (May 14) and opened a 50-mile gap in the Allied front. The Panzers with Rommel in command of one dividion reached the Channel (May 20). The BEF, Belgians, and French First army, was cut off from the rest of the Frech Armny. This left the position of the BEF untenable.
As the Panzers cut accross France, the British decided to evacuate the BEF and French troops fighting with them. Churchill who had just becime primeminister 2 weeks earlier ordered the activation of Operation Dynamo. Once the decession was made to evacuate, Gort deployed units away from Dunkirk and on the beaches to the east of the town. His strategy was to hold the Germans away from Dunkirk so the evacuation could proceed. Gort was re-called to Britain during the evacuation. He never receieved another combat command.
Britain faced what many felt was certain defeat. At this time Britain could have made a deal with Hitler. Lord Halifax thought Britain had little choice. Halifax was Britain's Foreign Secretary and had supported Chamberlain's policy of apeasement to avoid warwith Germany. One of the unansweed questions about the War is why Halifax did not replace Chaberlain as primeminister. He was next in line and could have been primeminister rather than Churchill, yet he declined. No one
knows why. Some believe he thought he was not up to the task. It may well be that as the German Wester offensive fell (May 10) that he did not want to be the
primeminister presiding over a defeated Britain. Hitler admired the British. Hewould have offered an arrangement more attractive than that offered France. Britain could have kept its fleet and much of the Empire. Hitler in the end did not wantwar ith Britain. He wanted to secure his western front so he could fovcus on the Sovit Union in the east. Churchill refused, however, to treat with Hitler and the NAZIs. He was determined to resist as dire as the circumstances. Halifax and others in the war Cabinent believed that Britain should deal with Hitler. Churchill was narroiwly able to bring the War Cabinent with him. There would be no British Vichy. There was some support in Britain for reaching an understanding with Hitler. Some of the moneyed class saw Hitler and the NAZIs as a way of controlling the working class and confronting Bolshevism. In the end Britain would be saved, not by the gentry, but the minors, workers, and common people often living in squalid city slums. [Jesson] That commitment was to be shown by London's East End when the Blitz commenced. Churchill after the RAF had defeated the Luftwaffe and
defeat was no longer eminent, replaced Halifax with a close ally, Anthony Eden. Halifax was disposed of by being made ambassador to the United States, a deft
political move.
Dunkirk was a Channel port in northern France near the Belgian border. It was primarily a fishing port. The evacuation was conducted from the harbor and beaches near to Dunkirk. Dunkirk because of its relatively small hsrbor was not the port of choice to evacuate the BEF. The fast moving German Panzers, however, had taken or cut the BEF off from other ports. The Germans seized both Boulogne and Calais with their important ports. The BEF found itself in the position that Dunkirk was the wide beaches nearby as the only remaining coastal area still in Allied hands.
Admiral Ramsey was put in chrge of Operation Dynamo. Beginning on May 20 from his headquarters in Diver, Ramsey began gathering the needed shipping. Ramsey deployed 693 ships (39 Destroyers, 36 Minesweepers, 77 trawlers, 26 Yachts and a variety of other small craft). The actual number of vessels involved is a matter of some disagreement some authors used a slightly larger figure--850 vessels. [Sebag-Montefiore] They were not all British, Dutch, Belgian, and French ships were also involved.
About 400,000 British and French soldiers began to fall back on Dunkirk. As the BEF fell back they abandoned their equipment along the roads.
Churchill ordered Admiral Ramsay at Dover to begin amassing small vessels 'in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast' (May 20). A wide range of privately owned boats were mobilized for the evacution. They included motor yachts, fishing boats (smacks and trawlers),cockle boats, lifeboats, paddle steamers, Thames barges, tugs, and many other types of craft. It was without doubt the oddest collection of shipping put together for a World War II operation. The "little ships", many actually boats, are a major part of what has come down as the legend of Dunkirk. Any thing that was serviceable enough to get accross the Channel was employed. Many of these ships were comandeered and sailed by Royal Navy personnel. Many of the ships were manned by their owners and other civilians anxious to help the beleagered BEF and avert dissaster.
At this time
the BEF was still within Hitler's grasp. It was not just the number of men that were at stake. The BEF was the professional core--the heart of the British Army. The men of the BEF would be the officers and NCOs of the British army that would eventually play an important role in defeating the Germans. The loss of the BEF would hsve crippled the Bitish war effort if not forced the British to seek terms.
Vice Admiral Ramsay was placed in chsrge of Operation Dynamo. He disptched sent destroyers and transport ships to evacuate the men. Naval plsanners were not optimidtic about what could achieved. They at first thought that only about 30,000 men could be safely brought back accross the Channel. [Knowles] Churchill sites an estimate of 45,000 men. He warned the Commons that it "should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings". [Churchill, Finest, pp. 99-101.]
Many popular accounts of Dunkirk focus pn the small boats, undoubtedly an important part of the Dunkirk story. Their heroics, however, would have been for nought had the Dunkirk pocket not have held off the advancing Panzers to give the Royal Navy the tine needed to carry out the evacuation. The British soldiers who held back the Panzers were out-gunned abd out-manned, but as one historian maintains, were "the true heros of Dunkirk". [Sebag-Montefiore] Units defending the pocket were ordered to fight to the last man. And there were considerable casulaties. The British suffered 25,000 casualties, killed or wounded. Another 41,000 Britons were captured or missing.
The Panzers were only a few miles south of Dunkirk and facing no serious opposition. Hitler ordered the Panzers to halt. Some believe that he hoped this
gesture would help convince the British to comes to terms, other believe that is was just as it was described at the time, aneeded pause to regroup and prepare for
a more coordinated assault. [Davidson, p. 408 and Fest, p. 630.] What ever the reason, this 48-hour respite allowed the British to organize a defensive perimter
around Dunkirk and begin an almost miraculous withdawl. The Luftwaffe was the primary German force attempting to stop the evacuation. The Wehrmacht despite moving on Dunkirk never launched a full-scale attack. Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstadt, the German commander in France at the time, wrote after the War that Hitler's failure to smash the Dunkirk pocket was his first fatal mistake of the war. Rundstadt has commande has to share some of the blame. The Germans after the War had a habit of blaming Hitler for everything that went wrong. He was in fact concerned over the aggressive tactics of Guderian's Panzers. Rommel's Dividsion became known as the Ghost Dividsion because Rundstadt often lost contact with it. Rundstadt wanted the Panzers to slow so the infantry could catch up. Hitler supported Rundstadt. Interestingly Hitler and Rundstadt 4 years later by deploying the Panzers away from the Nomandy beachead and restricting their commitment to the battle which played a major role in the success of the Normany D-Day invasion (1944).
The Luftwaffe had played a major role in the German victory in Poland and in the smashing the Dutch. Reich Mtshall Goering was not a professional military man. He also had a tendency to boast. At this stage of the War, he had enormouis prestige with Hitler. Both Hitler and Goering overestimsated what could be accomplidshed with air power. Without consulting his generals, Goering offered to smash the Allied Dunkirk pocket. Hitler and Runstadt concerned that the Panzers were over extended, accepted Goering's offer to 'finish' the Dunkirk pocker from the air. The Liftwaffe did inflict heavy losses on the British evscution fleet, but it fsiled to prevent the evacusation.
Belgium remained strictly neutral, but was invaded by the Germans for a second time (May 10, 1940). The Germans struck at both the Netherlands and Belgium at the same time. It was the start of the long anticipated German offensive in the West. After a few months of the "Phony War", it was the turn of the Low Lands and France. The German initiated their long awaited western campaign on a wide front against the neutral Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg. The Luftwaffe played a key role in the German success in the west. King Leopold before the War had promoted the construction of important defensive fortifications from Antwerp to Namur in front of the German border. These defenses were quickly taken by the Germans. The British Expeditionary Force rushed nort to assist the Dutch. This meant that they were not present in force to opposed the Germans when they broke through in the Ardennes. Leopold, with the bulk of the Belgian Army, was surrounded by the Germans, and capitulated (March 28). Leopold ordered his army to surrender and refused to flee with officials to form a government-in-exile in England. His actions were resented by some Belgians. His surrender at a crucial point in the battle for the low countries left a critical gap in the Allied ring around Dunkirk and could have made the evacuation impossible if the Germans had pressed their attack.
the French First Army delayed the Germans.
Admiral Ramsey activated Operation Dynamo (May 26). The evacuations were conducted from the Dunkirk port and its adjoining beaches. The and the first men from the BEF were brought home at night (May 26). The initial evacuations did not go well. Luftwaffe attacks sunk ships in the small harbor. The harbur was thus partially blocked by sunken ships. The Royal Navy had to shjift to the surounding beaches.
The next day a call went out for small craft (May 27). The Navy found quite a number. Churchill writes, "... a great tide of small vessels began to flow towards the sea, first to our Channel ports, and thence to the beaches of Dunkirk and the beloved Army." [Churchill, Finest, p. 101.] Taking the men off the beaches was at first thought to be impossible because the water was so shallow. Here the fleet of little ships ptroved to be a God-send. The little ships with their shallow draft could go close enough in that the men could wade to them. They ferried the men off to the destroyers and other ships waiting offshore in deeper water. Some of the lrger boats were able to taken men back across the Channel on their own.
Nearly 340,000 men were evacuated from Dunkirk, including French and Dutch
sholdiers. About 140,000 of the total were French troops. All heavy equipment was abandoned and left in France.
This is even more important that it sounds as akmost all if the British sholdiers were regulars and would form the corps of the future British Army that
would play such an important role in the War. All of the BEF's equipment, however, was lost and there was no replacemments for the lost equipment waiting for
them back in England.
The German campaign in the West, with the exception of Luftwaffe terror bombing and strafing of refugees, is generally depicted as observing the rules of war. One author notes that the Germans in the Dunkirk campaign massacered prisioners. [Sebag-Montefiore]
Among the small boats that came to the rescue of the BEF were a number of youths. Perhaps the youngest was Albert Barnes who was only 14 years old at the time. Albert had left school to take a job as a galley boy on the docking tugboat Sun XII. He reported for work one morning and without any advance warning was told the tug was headed to France towing two sailing barges loaded with ammunition and drinking-water. There was no time to tell his parents. When they arrived in Dunkirk, the evacuation was in full swing. Albert reported seeing "sunken vessels everywhere". He describes,
"Bodies floating, bombs and shells going off. And the noise - it was absolutely horrific. Till then the loudest bangs I'd heard had been on Bonfire Night. .... We saw some pretty bad sights. .... Mr Barnes recalls the thousands of soldiers trapped on the beach. "And I remember the dead ones too because they were floating everywhere. .... I was very frightened, terrified in fact, because there were German dive-bombers all around us. Being rescue tugs we saw some pretty bad sights, especially seeing tankers go up. That's something I'll never forget - watching a tanker go from a ship to a mass of flames. I was very frightened, terrified in fact, because there were German dive-bombers all around us. But we just got on with the job." Two weeks later Albert returned home. "'Where the hell have you been?' his mother asked. He told ger, "I've been to France' because Dunkirk wasn't well known in those days. She looked amazed and said 'You've never been to Dunkirk?' and I said, 'Oh that's it, that's the place.' 'Oh my God' she said." [Lewis]
The British papers treated Dunkirk was a victory. It was not victory, only a narrow escape. But perhaps the most important escape in history. Churchill spoke to the Commons a few days later stressing in no uncertain terms what was to come. "Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a minute believe, this island or a large part of it were subgecated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." (June 4, 1940)
Dunkirk was central to the Allied World War II victory and even more so to the survival of Western Democracy after the War. The BEF was essentially the British Army. Without the BEF back in England, even the heroics of the RAF might not have been sufficient to save Britain. And it was the BEF that would serve as the expereienced skeleton of the British Army that would invade France with the Americans and drive east into the Reich. Without the BEF, even if Britain managed to survive, and that is a big if, Briain would have had to build a new army largely with inexperienced new recruits. The British gradully became a junior ally as America steadily expanded its army. But it was a very important and experienced junior partner. British experience and support was key to the Allied victory in North Africa. Had it not been for the British, America might have attempted an invasion in 1943 which almost certainly would have either failed or have been enormously costly. American commanders came to criticise the British, in part because of ill-will generated by Montgomery. And it is pfrobably true that the British were more cautious than the Americans. Here military historians discuss and debate this in great detail, but the British Army created around the survivors of the BEF was key to the Allied effort in the difficult period before D-Day and before the American Army became an experienced, battle hardened force. And without the BEF and Britain's survival, America would have found it difficult if not impossile to even attempt to reenter the Continent. That would have meant that World War II would have left all of Europe in the hands of either Hitler or Stalin--an outcome that is too frightening to even contemplate.
Churchill, Winston. Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin: Boton, 1948), 751p. This is of course Churchill's memoirs on World War II. Churchill summarized the book as "How the British people held the fort ALONE till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready."
Davidson, Eugene. The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler (Univesity of Missouri: Columbia, 1996), 519p.
Fest, Joachim C. Hitler (Vintage Books: New York, 1974), 844p.
Knowles, David J. Escape From Catastrophe, 1940 Dunkirk.
Lewis, Nigel. "One boy's terrifying mission," BBC News, May 27, 2000.
Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (Harvard, 2006). This is a vey British account of Dunkirk focusing on the British fighting to maintain the Dunkirk pocket.
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