Dunkirk's '˜little boats' forged a kind of victory from potential disaster

In the early summer of 1940, the British Expeditionary Force was facing disaster.

After visiting most of the divisions of the BEF on May 23 1940, the above was the calm, sober assessment of that supreme realist, Alan Brooke, the commander of the II Corps of the BEF, future chief of the Imperial General Staff and Viscount Alanbrooke of Brookeborough.

Three days previously the British government decided that it might be necessary to mount a partial evacuation of the BEF and instructed the Admiralty to begin assembling small ships on the south coast with a view to taking troops off the beaches of northern France.

The operation was codenamed Dynamo. At this stage the government had an inadequate appreciation of the seriousness of the rapidly deteriorating situation and that it would be necessary to evacuate the whole BEF.

Operation Dynamo got under way on May 26. The Admiralty feared that only 45,000 men could be rescued. Even on May 30 it looked as if half of the BEF would be left behind. Only 8,000 men were got off the beaches at Dunkirk on May 26-27; but on May 28, as the fleet of naval ships and civilian small craft standing in to the shore grew, 19,000 were embarked.

On May 29, 47,000 were rescued; on May 31 68,000. By June 4, when the last ship drew away, 337,000 Allied troops had been saved from capture.

That number included almost the entire manpower of the BEF, minus its temporarily irreplaceable equipment (almost 120,000 vehicles and 2,472 guns), and 111,000 French troops.

Scores of Ulster soldiers were plucked from the beaches. Ulster troops also made a very significant contribution to making the evacuation possible. The 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers enjoyed the enviable distinction of holding Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at bay for three days. The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers lost two-thirds of its strength fighting a series of rearguard actions most of the way to Dunkirk. The Royal Ulster Rifles and two anti-aircraft regiments raised in Ulster were also in the thick of it.

About 600 large ships – warships, ferry boats, merchant ships and Dutch barges – carried most of the troops back to the United Kingdom. Troops were ferried out to the larger ships lying offshore by some 850 ‘little ships’, a category which included fishing boats and cabin cruisers. The smallest boat involved in Operation Dynamo was the Tamzine, a 15ft wooden sailing vessel. She is now in the Imperial War Museum. The paddle-steamer Royal Daffodil made seven round trips, rescuing 9,500 men in total.

There is a myth that the Germans deliberately facilitated the evacuation of the BEF. In his post-war memoirs Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt propagated the remarkably enduring myth that Hitler did not wish to inflict a humiliating defeat on the British and had ordered the German Panzer divisions to halt 12 miles from Dunkirk.

The truth, however, is that Rundstedt, not the führer, issued the order to halt and for perfectly good military reasons. Since May 10 the German armour had travelled 250 miles on tracks with no time for maintenance, repairs or rest. Tracks were loose and worn and the troops were exhausted. Rundstedt wanted to preserve his Panzer divisions for the final push to bring the campaign against the French in the south to a swift conclusion.

Furthermore, German maps and military manuals held that the terrain was unsuitable for tanks. Hitler had absolutely no intention of allowing the BEF to escape. Göring, Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe, had persuaded the führer that Luftwaffe could easily finish off the BEF. Finally, Hitler was convinced that escape by sea was impossible.

The Germans certainly did not allow the evacuation to occur unmolested. German artillery had the range of Dunkirk and frequently shelled the beaches but, to some extent, the soft sand dunes lessened the impact of the shells. Mercifully, the sea was calm and the whole operation was shrouded in mist and low cloud. Poor visibility greatly curtailed the activity of the Luftwaffe. So too did the largely unappreciated efforts of RAF fighter command which flew 3,561 sorties and lost 145 aircraft, including 42 Spitfires, and, more seriously, as many as 80 pilots.

For the men on the beach, boarding a ship was no guarantee of safety. Of the 222 Royal Navy vessels involved in the evacuation, 30 were lost in the operation, including six destroyers. Many of the ‘little ships’ were lost too, resulting in the death of hundreds of soldiers and rescuers.

The last man to leave Dunkirk was an Ulsterman, Major General Alexander, the recently appointed commander of the I Corps of the BEF and future field marshal the Earl Alexander of Tunis. After the last British troops were embarked, oblivious to the danger, he took a small motorboat and travelled the length of the beaches and through the harbour complex of Dunkirk to check for stragglers. As he went, he called out through a loudspeaker, ‘Is anyone there?’ in both English and French. Receiving no reply, he boarded a destroyer for the journey home. The destroyer was bombed and machine-gunned by the Luftwaffe most of the way.

In the House of Commons on June 4 Churchill confessed that he feared that it would have been his lot to announce the greatest military disaster in British history. He described Dunkirk as ‘a miracle of deliverance’. However, he had no illusions and grimly warned, ‘we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations’.

The Ministry of Information thought popular morale was ‘almost too good’. Bernard Montgomery was furious at how many people regarded Dunkirk as a victory. ‘If it was not understood’ that the army had suffered a defeat, then ‘our island home was now in grave danger’.

Yet, Dunkirk was a victory of sorts: the greater part of the British Army was snatched from the jaws of comprehensive defeat and disaster. British troops would live to fight another day. The success of the evacuation also rendered more difficult any German invasion of the United Kingdom by increasing the size of the force the Wehrmacht would need to convey across the Channel. The drama of the evacuation, especially the role played by the ‘little ships’, boosted British morale and gave rise to ‘the Dunkirk spirit’.