The Last Phase of the 1940 French Campaign

      The British, meanwhile, had begun to evacuate the BEF from the port and beaches of Dunkirk. ‘It was evident to one and all that a monumental military disaster was in progress,’ Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall wrote with weary resignation. ‘Therefore we could take refuge in history, knowing that this was not only to be expected but actually the commonplace experience of our army when tossed recklessly by our politicians into European war.’ Sergeant L.D. Pexton was one of more than 40,000 British soldiers taken prisoner, after a rearguard action near Cambrai in which his unit was overrun: ‘I remember the order “Cease Fire” and that the time was 12 o’clock,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Stood up and put my hands up. My God how few of us stood up. I expected my last moments had come and lit a fag.’

      The Dunkirk evacuation was announced to the British public on 29 May, when civilian volunteers from the Small Boat Pool joined warships rescuing men from the beaches and harbour. The Royal Navy’s achievement during the week that followed became the stuff of legend. Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, operating from an underground headquarters at Dover, directed the movements of almost nine hundred ships and small craft with extraordinary calm and skill. The removal of troops from the beaches in civilian launches and pleasure boats forged the romantic image of Dunkirk, but by far the larger proportion – some two-thirds – were taken off by destroyers and other large vessels, loading at the harbour mole. The navy was fortunate that, throughout Operation Dynamo, the Channel remained almost preternaturally calm.

      Soldier Arthur Gwynn-Browne poured out in lyrical terms his gratitude for finding himself returning home from the alien hell of Dunkirk: ‘It was so wonderful. I was on a ship and any ship yes any ship is England. Any ship yes any ship I was on a ship and on my way to England. It was wonderful. I kept quite still and the sea breezes I swallowed them, no smoke and burning and fire and thick grey oil smoke hazes, but sea breezes. I swallowed them they were so clean and fresh and I was alive it was so wonderful.’ Many men arrived in England fearful of their reception, as flotsam from one of the greatest defeats their country had ever suffered. A company quartermaster, Walter Gilding, wrote: ‘When we went ashore I thought everybody was going to shoot us, especially as being regular soldiers, we’d run away…But instead of that there were people cheering and clapping us as if we were heroes. Giving us mugs of tea and sandwiches. We looked a sorry sight, I think.’

      John Horsfall had the same experience: ‘At Ramsgate we met for the first time the unbelievable feat of improvisation achieved by the armed services and civil authorities acting in concert. Here was Britannia to greet us with the wand of a fairy and her mantle of magic; here, too, was a brief flash of history. Dimly conscious of it, we were deeply touched and knew immediately the national mood of defiance which brought down Napoleon and would destroy Hitler too. The warmth of the reception in this ancient seaport was inspired…An endless series of trains were awaiting and charming ladies with tea and other comforts. But fatigue and reaction were hard on the emotions, and we may have been less than responsive.’

      The legend of Dunkirk was besmirched by some uglinesses, as is the case with all great historical events: a significant number of British seamen invited to participate in the evacuation refused to do so, including the Rye fishing fleet and some lifeboat crews; others, after once experiencing the chaos of the beaches and Luftwaffe bombing, on reaching England refused to set forth again. While most fighting units preserved their cohesion, there were disciplinary collapses among rear-echelon personnel, which made it necessary for some officers to draw and indeed use their revolvers. For the first three days, the British were content to take off their own men, while the French held a perimeter southwards and were refused access to shipping. On at least one occasion when poilus attempted to board vessels, they were fired on by disorderly British troops. Only when Churchill intervened personally did ships begin to take off Frenchmen, 53,000 of them after the last British personnel had been embarked. Most subsequently insisted upon repatriation – and thereafter found themselves forced labourers in Germany – rather than remain as exiles in Britain.

      A British soldier based at Dover barracks, Donald McCormick, found little romance in his own contribution to the evacuation, described in a letter home on 29 May: ‘We…are woken & taken down to the docks at 1.45am, where we undergo physical strain & mental torture until 8.30 carrying corpses about & loose hands & brains are all in the day’s work. I feel very upset & sometimes feel like crying when I am down there. It is all so pointless & I hate the callousness with which it is treated by the majority of our people who chiefly go down to see what they can pinch in the way of cigarettes & money.’

      The navy suffered severely at Dunkirk, losing six destroyers and a further twenty-five damaged. Its worst day came on 1 June, when three destroyers and a passenger ship were sunk by air attack and four others crippled. Thereafter, the Admiralty felt obliged to withdraw its large warships from the evacuation. The RAF was often cursed by soldiers and sailors for its supposed absence from the skies; every man at Dunkirk learned to dread the repeated Stuka attacks. Yet Fighter Command made a major contribution to holding the Luftwaffe at bay, at the cost of losing 177 aircraft during the nine days of the evacuation. As the Germans sought to impede Dynamo, their pilots declared themselves more hard-pressed by fighters than at any time since 10 May. The Luftwaffe’s effort against the departing British fell far short of Goering’s hopes and promises, and this was as much due to the RAF as to its own bungling. After 1 June the Luftwaffe redeployed most of its aircraft to harry the French, making the final phase of the evacuation much less costly than the first.

      The towering reality was that the BEF got away. Some 338,000 men were brought back to England, 229,000 of them British, the remainder French and Belgian. The withdrawal and evacuation were widely held to be Gort’s personal triumph; but while the C-in-C indeed gave appropriate orders, success would have been unattainable had not Hitler held back his tanks. It remains unlikely, though just plausible, that this was a political decision, prompted by a belief that restraint would render the British more susceptible to peace negotiations. More credibly, Hitler accepted Goering’s assurance that the Luftwaffe could finish off the BEF, which no longer threatened German strategic purposes; and the panzers needed rapid refit before being urgently redeployed against Weygand’s forces. The French First Army conducted a brave stand at Lille, which contributed importantly to holding the Germans off the Dunkirk perimeter; it was understandable that British soldiers showed bitterness towards their allies, but Churchill’s army had performed little better than Reynaud’s in the Continental campaign.

      Dunkirk was indeed a deliverance, from which the prime minister extracted a perverse propaganda triumph. Lancashire woman Nella Last wrote on 5 June: ‘I forgot I was a middle-aged housewife who sometimes got