In the opening scene of Chris Nolan’s film, Dunkirk, we see Tommy entering Dunkirk through a section of the perimeter held by French troops. Once inside, he finds himself in the Dunkirk bubble, a world of misrule populated by the men (and, occasionally, women) we have met in the pages of this book, whose initial goal has been to reach Dunkirk, but who, once there, are desperate to leave again. Wandering down onto a beach, Tommy is confronted by queues of soldiers leading to the water. They are hoping to be picked up by a small ship which will take them offshore to a bigger ship, which in turn will take them back to England. Tommy is turned away from the first queue he attempts to join, before teaming up with another soldier and becoming an ad hoc stretcher bearer. He has already been papered with enemy propaganda leaflets, helped the other soldier to bury a body, been attacked by a Stuka, and tried to relieve himself on several occasions.* These were the sorts of incidents experienced inside the perimeter by hundreds of thousands of people over the days of the evacuation.
It can hardly be overemphasised how the experiences of these people varied. A private of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment arrived on the beach only to be turned away from several queues, like Tommy, by men saying, ‘Find your own unit, chum! Not here!’ Other soldiers, in contrast, were able to join the first queue they saw, while others still were so appalled by the length of the queues that they settled down in the sand. Some saw no queues at all.
Some veterans will set aside their pride and tell you how they went to the toilet. But another told me vehemently that nobody had eaten anything for days, so there was absolutely no need for anybody to do so. Captain Humphrey Bredin of the Royal Ulster Rifles, whom we last met fighting doggedly on the River Dyle, speaks of small groups of British soldiers sitting on the beach playing cards in the sun as though at a holiday resort. Others tell of impromptu cricket matches, Royal Engineers stunting on motorcycles in the sand, and an ex-circus performer doing tricks on the back of a horse as soldiers watched appreciatively.
Sub-Lieutenant John Crosby came ashore at La Panne on Wednesday 29 May from a Clyde paddle steamer. With his ship grounded by the tide for most of the day, he made his way to the Hotel Splendide, where he sat lazily with a bottle of wine alongside two British soldiers who were drinking lemonade because, they complained, there was no beer left in the town. There were, however, brothels, and men could be seen waiting patiently in queues – a peculiar parallel of those on the beach – to receive a last taste of the continent.
It was here, too, that Fred Carter of the Royal Engineers had his first taste of champagne. Having dug a foxhole in the sand dunes with his hands, Fred and his friends decided to visit an estaminet a little way away. They ‘had a good feed’, spending all of their remaining cash. Fred decided to try some champagne to see what all the fuss was about. It was, he discovered, ‘glorious’.
Yet men were simultaneously arriving in Dunkirk so shattered, bloodied and demoralised that the offer of a quick one before Blighty would have been meaningless. One soldier describes his uniform as being so battered and dirty that it had lost its colour, while his socks and feet had merged into a single bloody, woolly mess. An officer who jumped from the mole onto a ship crumpled in a heap on landing. When his boots were removed, the bones of his feet were visible. Vic Viner, a beachmaster responsible for order and discipline, recalls experienced NCOs breaking down in tears in front of him. ‘It’s hard to express how gruesome it was,’ he says.
Elsewhere, a platoon found a tin of baked beans and shared it; they ended up with three beans each. Several men, meanwhile, were seen sitting in a circle on the sand, maddened by days without food, pretending to eat a meal. They mimed the use of knives and forks, and chewed imaginary food. Another man was seen trying to eat the leather strap of his helmet. Robert Halliday of the Royal Engineers scoured Dunkirk for food, entering one house after another. He found nothing at all – and his search was interrupted by a falling bomb that tossed him fifty yards down the road, blowing out both of his eardrums.
After this, Halliday and fifty other Royal Engineers built a raft on the beach at Bray Dunes. Made from the floorboards of lorries and buoyant petrol tins, it was held together by scavenged rope. The plan was that one member of the team would swim out to contact a boat, while the non-swimmers were placed on the raft and pushed towards the boat by those who could swim. The men spent two busy days building the raft before a naval officer ordered them to stop immediately. ‘What I want you to do,’ the officer said, ‘is to file straight out into the sea as far as you can go and stay there.’
While Halliday and his friends were working in vain, countless others lay around on the sand doing nothing, or burying themselves in sandy trenches. ‘Blimey, he’s dug himself in well,’ said one joker, staring at a helmet sitting on the beach.
Here are just a few tastes of Dunkirk’s messy paradox. Life is always complex, nuanced and contradictory. We instinctively know this. But too many modern politicians and media sources would have us believe that it is straightforward and monochrome. If one thing alone is remembered about Dunkirk, then it should be this: there was no single story. And this is a theme reinforced by Chris Nolan’s film, which takes place in three realms: land, sea and air. In each of these realms, people were having very different experiences. And they are all equally valid.*
The evacuation, as we have seen, was being tentatively contemplated as early (in relative terms) as 17 May. And two days later, the sending home of the ‘useless mouths’ had begun. This was the unflattering description given of anybody considered peripheral to the essential running of the British Expeditionary Force. By the end of 26 May, almost twenty-eight thousand butchers, bakers and candlestick makers had been sent from Dunkirk home to England. But now, the real evacuation – of as many soldiers as possible – was to start.
On 26 May, Lord Gort received two telegrams, one from Anthony Eden, another from the War Office. The first warned him that evacuation might prove necessary, the second confirmed that it was now necessary. In overall charge of the evacuation would be a fifty-seven-year-old vice-admiral, Bertram Ramsay, a meticulous and impatient man who had only recently been persuaded by his friend, Winston Churchill, to return to the Royal Navy.
Ramsay’s headquarters would be in Dover Castle’s Dynamo Room. Once the home of the castle’s lighting generator, it now lent its name to the daunting effort of organisation, improvisation and willpower that lay ahead. The evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force began a few minutes before seven o’clock in the evening of Sunday 26 May with a signal sent by the Admiralty: ‘Operation Dynamo is to commence.’
The first ship to sail after the signal was sent was the Isle of Man steam packet Mona’s Isle, which embarked 1,420 troops from the harbour; twenty-three of them were killed on the voyage home by artillery fired from the shore at Gravelines and a machine-gun attack from the air. This set the tone for the days to come – but Mona’s Isle, which eventually arrived back in Dover at noon the following day, was not the first ship to sail on 26 May. Even before the sounding of the signal, a number of other passenger ships had set off for Dunkirk. These included ships with soon-to-be-familiar names such as Mona’s Queen, King Orry and Maid of Orleans, which would each bring many thousands of men to safety over the next nine days.
At the start of the evacuation, British expectations were low. The Allies were trapped in a narrow pocket, fighting for their lives against stronger forces. The Germans were ten miles from Dunkirk and victory. Winston Churchill believed that thirty thousand troops might be rescued, while Ramsay hoped for forty-five thousand. But this would depend on many variables. How many troops could reach Dunkirk? How long could the French and British soldiers hold out on the perimeter? How effectively could the Luftwaffe neutralise soldiers, ships and equipment within the perimeter, at sea, and perhaps at receiving ports in England? Would a truly effective means of evacuation be found, allowing large numbers to be evacuated every day? Would the weather favour the evacuees or the attackers? On the evening of 26 May, nobody knew the answers.
At 1 a.m. on Monday 27 May, Major Philip Newman, a surgical specialist with 12th Casualty Clearing Station, arrived in Dunkirk. With him were forty men in three lorries, and they had come to open a front-line medical unit in a chateau alongside a French field ambulance. Newman, until recently a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital in London, was resigned to the fact that while everybody else would now be going home, he and his colleagues would not. ‘There was an awful languid feeling among all of us,’ he writes, ‘in having to open up again and hold the baby.’
His first impression of Dunkirk was of blazing buildings and exploding bombs. The Luftwaffe had already been bombing the town and the port for some time, but this was the day when they would be pulverised by continuous large raids. Newman settled down that night in an empty, but still beautifully furnished, terraced house, and at dawn moved to the chateau. There he began setting up his operating theatre in a room on the ground floor with large windows, good artificial lighting, and parking space outside for an X-ray van. Within minutes, ambulances full of wounded men began arriving.
Anthony Rhodes arrived in Dunkirk at about six o’clock that morning. He remembered it from peacetime as a pleasant place, full of nice restaurants and shops to buy foreign gifts for friends. Now, the first thing he saw was the huge pall of smoke from the burning oil tanks that would characterise the evacuation, and which is recreated in the film. Like many of those who arrived in Dunkirk at the start of Operation Dynamo, he found a cellar near the harbour in which to shelter from the bombing. That harbour, after all, was the obvious point of evacuation.
Rhodes believed that a cellar was the safest possible place to shelter from a Luftwaffe raid. Bombs would surely explode on the upper floors, leaving the basement untouched, and as he was beneath a three-storey house, he felt secure. But he felt less secure when he came out at the end of the first raid to find that an identical building opposite had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Anybody in its cellar would clearly have been buried alive.
Norman Prior of the Lancashire Fusiliers also moved into a cellar on arrival. He took his boots off for the first time in a fortnight, lay down – and felt a small movement. When he looked up, he saw a Frenchman trying to steal the boots. ‘I just blasted him with a mouthful of whatever,’ he says, ‘it didn’t come to fisticuffs.’ He kept them on at all times after that.
Many of those arriving in Dunkirk on that day, before the British authorities had taken proper control of the town, witnessed an anarchy inspired by fear and relief. Ernest Holdsworth, a lifelong teetotaller, found himself in a hotel cellar, drinking a mixture of rum, whisky and brandy. It was a nightmarish scenario – British, French and Senegalese soldiers, all together, singing, vomiting and passing out.
On that day, Captain William Tennant, chief staff officer to the First Sea Lord, was sent to Dunkirk to assume the position of Senior Naval Officer Dunkirk. A navigational expert, diffident by nature, Tennant would be responsible for organising the distribution of ships and the embarkation of soldiers. He was encountered by a snarling mob of British soldiers, ready to challenge his authority. And he met soldiers smeared with lipstick and a drunk sergeant wearing a feather boa.
Carrying on to Bastion 32,* the headquarters of Admiral Abrial (the commander of French forces at Dunkirk), Tennant met two senior British army officers and a naval commander, who informed him that the harbour was too badly damaged, and too vulnerable to air attack, to be used for Operation Dynamo. All embarkations would have to be made from the beaches. They also told him that the Germans would arrive in Dunkirk in twenty-four to thirty-six hours’ time. Faced with the reality that large ships could not come near the shore, and with the almost total lack of small boats to ferry the men from the beaches to these ships, his job appeared impossible. Churchill’s aim of rescuing thirty thousand troops seemed hopelessly ambitious.
From Bastion 32, Tennant started sending wireless messages to Ramsay in Dover Castle. He asked for every available craft to be dispatched immediately to the beaches. In the Dynamo Room, all ships on their way to the harbour were correspondingly diverted. Tennant’s naval party, in the meantime, started rounding up the soldiers in cellars around the harbour and sending them to the beaches.
One of these men was Anthony Rhodes. By now, air raids were coming every half-hour, and, apart from a brief and unsuccessful trip to find another shelter further out of town, Rhodes had spent all day in his cellar. It was far too dangerous, he decided, to be outside. But that afternoon, he heard a cry from the street for ‘Officers!’ Heading up to find out more, he was informed that no more evacuations would be made from the harbour, and was told politely to collect as many men as possible and escort them to the beaches. And so Rhodes – and almost everybody else in the town of Dunkirk – headed eastwards.
The resulting crocodile of troops was duly attacked from the air. As the bombs fell, Rhodes flattened himself, face down, on the ground. And when the aircraft came back to machine-gun the survivors, he did the same again, noting that two men who had stayed erect to fire a Bren gun at the attackers were riddled with bullets.
After the raid was over, Rhodes continued on to the beaches. Once there, he looked into the distance; he was impressed by the sight of so many thousands of men, some staring, some eating, some sleeping, waiting for the next ship or the next raid. He might be an officer, but army battledress was so generic that it was difficult for a stranger to distinguish him from the rank and file. It would be much easier, over the next few days, for naval officers, dressed in their striking blues, to assert their authority than it would be for men such as Rhodes. He walked a couple of miles, eventually settling down in the sand dunes at the beach’s edge. His wait had begun, for the large ships that would anchor offshore – and the small boats to ferry him there.
The shortage of small vessels was a problem from the start of the evacuation. Not until 30 May did they begin to appear in any numbers. Until that time, the lifeboats and whalers of larger ships had to be used. But even when the boats were available, they suffered heavily. When the sea was at all rough, it was very difficult for soldiers to climb onto them from the shore. Beyond this, the boats were used so heavily that they became prone to mechanical breakdowns and the exhaustion of their crew. Indeed, many boats were requisitioned from their owners and operated by naval personnel who simply did not know how to handle them. And once a boat had been rowed out to a larger ship, it was often allowed to drift away rather than returning to shore to pick up more soldiers.
Late on the night of 27 May, Captain Tennant noticed that while the Luftwaffe had been exerting itself in an effort to destroy the main Dunkirk harbour, it was neglecting to bomb the outer harbour. The result was that two long breakwaters – the eastern and western moles – were intact. These were not piers or jetties; they were huge concrete arms protecting the harbour, and preventing it from silting up. Tennant quickly spotted the potential of the eastern mole. It stretched almost a mile out to sea, it had a wooden walkway on top that could accommodate four men walking abreast, and soldiers could be brought there relatively easily from the beaches. On the other hand, it had a fifteen-foot tidal drop and was subject to treacherous currents, while there was no obvious method of berthing ships alongside it. But, figured Tennant, there was little to lose. And so the first crucial improvisation of Operation Dynamo was put into practice.
A passenger ship – Queen of the Channel – was quickly diverted from the beach at Malo-les-Bains to the mole, and soldiers were brought alongside to clamber on board as best they could. At a little after four o’clock on the morning of 28 May, Queen of the Channel set out for Dover carrying 950 British troops. Tennant’s idea was clearly workable, and other ships were ordered to the mole. If the troops defending the perimeter could hold the Germans off a little longer, if the weather remained good, if plenty of ships and boats could be pressed into service, if the Luftwaffe could be prevented from destroying those ships and boats – as well as the mole – then Churchill’s ambitions might be met. By the end of Monday 27 May, 7,669 soldiers had been brought home, and the following day, it was hoped, many more would follow.
All the time, more and more soldiers were arriving inside the perimeter. Some, like the Guards battalion seen marching up the mole in perfect order, arrived as a unit, but many came in dribs and drabs. And many, despite the appalling experiences they had endured and the dismal conditions they continued to face, were keen to bring home souvenirs of their time abroad. These ranged from those with hundreds of cigarettes jammed into their haversacks, keen to avoid customs regulations, to a man holding a large model seaplane intended as a present for his son. One soldier brought a motorbike onto the mole. ‘Can I get this on board your ship, mate?’ he asked a sailor, adding – as though that might convince him – that it had only done 280 miles. Given that the aim of Operation Dynamo was to bring as many men home as possible to defend Britain, and to allow the war to continue, it is hardly surprising that the sailor said ‘no’.
Yet it still seems harsh to discover the fate of the pets befriended by soldiers as they retreated. Able Seaman Ian Nethercott, a gunlayer on board HMS Keith, was surprised by the stream of dogs that men tried to bring on board, and appalled by what happened to most of them. ‘As the men arrived with their dogs,’ he says, ‘the military police were shooting them and throwing them in the harbour.’ Every time this happened, a loud ‘boo’ went up from soldiers and sailors. Not even the sight of a dachshund puppy’s head poking from a haversack softened the military policemen’s hearts.
Thankfully, however, not every dog was summarily executed. A terrier mongrel named Kirk (presumably after the port where he now found himself) came aboard HMS Windsor and was warmly welcomed by the crew. Kirk, who initially responded only to French commands, stayed with the ship throughout the evacuation, and was then placed in quarantine in England. At the end of his adventure, he was adopted by a country vicar, the father of a sub-lieutenant on the ship.
Other animals spotted included a caged canary balanced on a man’s head as he queued in the water, and a black-and-white rabbit in a basket held by an inexplicably naked man. One soldier’s kitbag was full of watches intended for sale in England; that of another, who hoped to open a barber’s shop, was full of hair clippers. Many soldiers carried postcards and photographs of their time in France, but one particularly grisly souvenir was eight bullets prised from the body of a man shot for spying. And one of the saddest was spotted spilling out of a man’s tunic as he lay dead on the beach at Bray Dunes: several tiny dresses intended for his daughter.
As soldiers arrived in Dunkirk, they passed others, men such as Jimmy Langley, defending the perimeter against German units trying to break through. But the Germans were trying to frustrate the evacuation in other ways. Shells fired by German batteries were a constant danger to those inside the perimeter, and the further the Germans advanced, the heavier the shell fire became. It was a particular problem to ships crossing the Channel. The shortest crossing between Dover and Dunkirk, known as ‘Route Z’, involved sailing close to the French shore between Calais and Dunkirk – but this was far too dangerous in daylight due to the batteries of German guns positioned along the coast. As a result, a much more northerly ‘Route Y’ was introduced. It was initially safer, but it increased the round trip from 80 miles to 172 miles – and it, too, came within the range of German guns when Nieuport was captured. A compromise route, ‘Route X’, soon became the only safe method of crossing during the daytime. With a round trip of 108 miles, it was relatively short, and since it avoided exposing ships to the shore batteries, it was relatively safe.
Other methods of attack included motor torpedo boats and submarines which attacked ships as they crossed the Channel. (HMS Grafton, for example, was sunk by a U-boat.) And, of course, the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed soldiers on shore and ships at sea.
The ships did what they could to avoid attack. They kept a strict blackout at night, meaning that they had to sail without navigation lights. And onshore, there was very little anti-aircraft defence, short of a few Bofors guns close to the mole and the beaches.
The principal reason for the deficiency was the destruction of the heavy anti-aircraft guns defending Dunkirk – by the troops manning them. This extraordinary act had been the result of mistaken communication between two officers. The first officer had sent a message that wounded men should be taken to the beaches for evacuation. The message received by the second officer, however, was that all men should be taken to the beaches for evacuation. Believing that all his men were now returning to England, the second officer ordered that their guns be destroyed. Once this had been done, he marched up to Lieutenant General Adam, saluted, and proudly told him that all the BEF’s heavy anti-aircraft guns had been spiked. Adam was appalled and very nearly speechless. ‘You fool. Go away . . .’ he finally managed to say.
One of the Luftwaffe’s most important – but lesser known – jobs was mine laying. Beginning seriously on the night of Tuesday 28 May, and focusing on points along Route X, mines were floated down into the sea by parachute. They might be buoyant contact mines, detonated by a ship pressing one of the mine’s protruding horns, or the more insidious magnetic mines, which could destroy a ship without the need for contact. Lying deep in the water, these consisted of an explosive attached to a magnetic mechanism set to detonate when any steel-hulled ship passed overhead.
This potentially catastrophic weapon might have killed tens of thousands of soldiers during Operation Dynamo, and prevented tens of thousands of others from being rescued. It might, in fact, have changed the story of the evacuation. But, in the event, it sunk only two ships despite being heavily laid throughout the Channel.* The neutralising of the magnetic mine by a Canadian scientist working in London is one of the great – and least known – stories of Dunkirk.
Charles Goodeve became, in 1939, the deputy director of the Admiralty’s Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, a coven of scientists and problem solvers known collectively as the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’. Goodeve shared a conviction with Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, that the application of science would have a huge impact on the war. Not everybody agreed. Arthur Harris, future chief of RAF Bomber Command, detested Churchill’s reliance on science. ‘Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide-rules?’ he once asked furiously.
Churchill puffed his cigar calmly. ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s try the slide-rule for a change.’
With Churchill’s support, Goodeve began trying to find an effective means of countering magnetic mines. He first suggested an improved method of sweeping them. This involved two boats, sailing in parallel, towing long cables behind them. A current would be passed through the cables, creating a magnetic field between the ships that would detonate any mines within.
By chance, a magnetic mine had just been defused at Shoeburyness, allowing Goodeve the opportunity to examine its mechanism. As a result, he set up an elaborate experiment on a salt-water lake near Portsmouth. Acting as decoys, a number of sailors dragged model boats across the lake, watched by curious members of the public, as Goodeve and his assistants conducted the real experiment in a rowing boat. The electrical cables were submerged at the bottom of the lake while Goodeve sat in the boat with the mechanism from the defused mine. When a current was passed through the cables, creating a magnetic field, a dial on the mine’s mechanism started to flicker: the mine would have detonated had it been active. The experiment was a success.
Known as the ‘Double L Sweep’, Goodeve’s method of clearing magnetic mines came into use in February 1940, making nearly three hundred mines safe over the next three months. Had this been his most significant achievement, it would have been impressive, as the Double L Sweep kept Routes X, Y and Z clear of magnetic mines throughout the Dunkirk evacuation.
But Goodeve achieved far more. By blending expertise with creative thinking, he came up with a method of ‘wiping’ ships to make them impervious to magnetic mines. Once wiped, they could sail over the mines all day long and suffer no harmful consequences whatsoever.
The practice of ‘coiling’ already existed. It involved wrapping a ship’s hull with live copper coils to counteract its magnetic field. But not only was this a time-consuming and expensive process, there was neither enough copper coil nor the fitting facilities to deal with the vast number of ships needing protection. Goodeve came up with a far superior solution. If a large electrical cable, with a current of 200 amps, was passed up and down the ship’s sides, it had the same effect as coiling. But the procedure could be carried out cheaply and easily by the ship’s own crew.
Goodeve suggested the idea to the Admiralty but received no response, so he decided to begin his own experiments. Starting with small boats, and progressing to larger ships, the experiments were successful, although it became clear that the altered magnetic field would be eroded very gradually by the vibrations of the ship’s engines and by the pounding of the sea – meaning that the ship would need to be wiped every six months.
Goodeve called the process ‘Degaussing’, a name he came up with during a night of drinking; it paid homage to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the first calibrator of magnetic force – and it rhymed nicely with ‘delousing’. In the immediate build-up to Operation Dynamo, a remarkable four hundred ships of all shapes and sizes were degaussed in just three days by teams working round the clock. Over subsequent days, another thousand ships were wiped. This, combined with the Double L Sweep, kept British ships astonishingly safe from mines throughout the evacuation. The miracle of Dunkirk owes much to Charles Goodeve and the fortunate timing of his work. As he said after the war: ‘The battle of the magnetic mine was the first technical battle of the war and one in which Britain won a decisive and, to Germany, totally unexpected victory.’ And it set the tone for a war fought not solely by guns and bravery, but also by amps and volts and Arthur Harris’s beloved slide-rules.
But even if degaussing kept ships safe from the dreaded magnetic mines, they would still need somewhere to embark troops – and the most practical embarkation point, so long as it remained viable, was the mole, which at high water could fit sixteen good-sized ships. Queues from the mole often stretched far back into the town. Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker (sent to Dunkirk on Wednesday 29 May to work with Tennant as Senior Naval Officer afloat) remembers watching an unending stream of exhausted men moving forwards, lit up in silhouette by huge flames. Sometimes, he writes, they would break into a tired run, and sometimes they would ‘just plod blindly on towards safety’. The distinctive noise that accompanied their progress was the muffled tramp of boots and the clatter of rifles.
Once on the mole, with the rise and fall of the tide, it proved difficult to board the ships. At low tide, the naval destroyers sat so low in the water that larger passenger ships sometimes lay up between them and the mole, acting as floating platforms. At other times, the men would lower themselves on ladders, walk gingerly across on planks, or – despite the risks of drowning, broken bones, and being crushed between ship and piles – would simply jump. And even when the tide was more accommodating, the wooden walkway’s unbroken protective rail meant that everybody, even the stretcher cases, had to clear an obstacle before boarding.*
At eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 29 May, the Isle of Man steamer Manxman arrived at the mole to find it completely deserted of men. ‘It was very eerie,’ says a sailor on board, ‘streaming in with not a soldier to be seen.’ There was no one even to take Manxman’s ropes. But then, as the ship moved in closer, soldiers began to appear. An air raid had sent them hiding underneath the mole, desperately hugging and straddling the criss-cross piles, some chin-deep in the water. Once the bombing was over, they clambered back on top. This striking image is referenced in the film as Tommy and Gibson take shelter in the piling beneath the mole.
By Wednesday morning just over twenty-five thousand soldiers had been evacuated. Churchill’s desired figure of thirty thousand had not yet been met, but embarkations from the mole onto passenger ships and destroyers offered hope. Even given its problems, the mole allowed about six hundred men to board a destroyer in just half an hour – an exceptional rate of evacuation.
Until that day, most attacks on the mole had come from heavy artillery about seven miles to the west. But on Wednesday, the heavy smoke over the town was cleared by a northerly wind. The result was consistent heavy raids on the mole by Stukas and other bombers as well as strafing raids from Messerschmitts.
That afternoon, Crested Eagle came alongside the mole. A Thames paddle steamer, she was originally fitted with a telescopic funnel that retracted whenever she passed under London Bridge. Her peacetime job was to take holidaymakers from London to the seaside resort of Southend and further along the coast to Clacton and Felixstowe. Fitted with two anti-aircraft guns, she was pressed into wartime service on the Thames, before receiving orders, on Tuesday afternoon, to join Operation Dynamo.
As she sat on the seaward side of the mole, a ferocious Stuka attack – the third of the day – began. The mole was crowded with passenger ships, destroyers and fishing trawlers. Crested Eagle was berthed directly behind another paddle steamer, Fenella, diagonally across from two destroyers, HMS Grenade and HMS Jaguar, and opposite six trawlers moored together. Behind the trawlers sat a large transport ship and a French destroyer.
Ordinarily the mole was difficult for an aeroplane to spot. It may have towered over ships at low tide, and appeared substantial when viewed from the side, but from the air it amounted to a barely visible sliver. On this afternoon, however, with no cloud or smoke cover, and with large ships moored down its length, it was a very clear and tempting target for bombers. Near misses on Jaguar put her out of action; her troops were transferred elsewhere. Grenade was hit by several bombs. She caught fire, and desperate efforts were made to cast her off to prevent her from sinking and blocking a section of the mole. She drifted into the harbour channel and was finally towed into open water by a trawler, where she sank.
One man who watched this happen was Vic Viner, a naval beachmaster at Bray Dunes. Viner’s brother, Albert, was a leading telegraphist on Grenade, and Viner received permission to walk up to the harbour to greet him. Drawing near the mole, he witnessed the Stuka attack, and returning to Bray Dunes to continue his job, he had no way of knowing what had happened to his brother. In fact, Albert survived, and like many others from Grenade, he was moved onto Crested Eagle.
As the attack continued, a bomb landed directly on the mole, making a large hole. Almost immediately, another aircraft swooped low to machine-gun troops who had clambered onto the mole from Grenade. On the other side, meanwhile, Fenella, a mainly wooden paddle steamer of similar design to Crested Eagle, was hit on her promenade deck, before a near miss blew concrete from the mole through her hull. A third bomb blew out her engine room, and she sank at her berth.
Despite the chaos, the momentum of Operation Dynamo had to be maintained, and there were still undamaged ships beside the mole waiting to embark troops. Many men were now fleeing down the mole in panic, desperate to escape danger. In their way stood Commander James Clouston, a naval officer brought to Dunkirk to maintain order on the mole, and Lieutenant Robin Bill, responsible for the trawlers. Clouston and Bill, standing aloof in their naval blues and gold braid, were able to restore order – although they had to brandish their revolvers to do so.
‘We have come to take you back to the UK,’ said Clouston calmly to the mob of desperate soldiers. ‘I have six shots here, and I’m not a bad shot. The lieutenant behind me is an even better one. So that makes twelve of you.’ And then he raised his voice: ‘Now get down onto those bloody ships!’*
Clouston’s words seemed to calm the men down. Many of them turned around and boarded Crested Eagle – which throughout the chaos had not been hit.
The minesweeper HMS Pangbourne, meanwhile, was nearing the beaches when she, too, was attacked by a swarm of Stukas. A sub-lieutenant on board remembers hearing a voice shouting ‘Take cover!’ – before realising that the voice was his own. Deciding that the advice was good, he threw himself down on the wooden deck. He could not distinguish the scream of the bombs from the scream of the diving plane. And in that instant the world went mad:
I stagger to my feet and gaze at a picture of utter horror. Blood and flesh is everywhere; mutilated bodies that ten seconds ago were men I knew personally, are flung in grotesque heaps all about me . . . I climb with difficulty to where the gun layer is lying, his neck and stomach torn open, and his hand blown away. He is still breathing and moaning faintly.
When the sub-lieutenant moved on to the bridge, he learned that five bombs had landed close by, but none had scored a direct hit. Pangbourne had not been seriously damaged.
At this point the sub-lieutenant wiped his face – and noticed that his hand was covered with blood. He looked down and saw that his left trouser leg was even bloodier. Somebody then pointed out that the back of his jacket was missing. Slipping off the remains, he found that a slice of flesh had been carved away. Lowering his trousers, he found his leg full of shrapnel – and then he heard the sound of Stukas coming again. For a moment he enjoyed the thought that he was caught with his pants literally down, before he grew confused. He was in a cabin . . . someone was patching up his wounds . . . he could not see properly . . . there were a lot of people talking at once . . .
Beside the mole, meanwhile, Crested Eagle was casting off. Hundreds of troops on her upper deck, many of whom had transferred from Grenade, Fenella and the damaged trawlers, began cheering loudly. They were finally going home. Below decks lay the wounded, in varying degrees of disability. A sailor on board remembers: ‘The throb of the engines and the thump of the paddles gave us renewed hope, and a fresh breeze was most welcome as we swung clear and left for the trip back to Dover.’
Because of the falling tide, Crested Eagle could not sail directly towards Dover. She had first to head east, parallel to the shore. She sailed for some time past an unbroken stretch of sand crammed with soldiers – but as she came to Malo-les-Bains, she was spotted by another wave of Stukas. The sight of yet more dive bombers was demoralising, but hardly surprising; the conditions were allowing the Luftwaffe its most indulgent day, and a paddle steamer, with its huge wooden wheels, created a wake twice as wide as any other ship. As the planes dived, Crested Eagle’s guns jammed, and the bombs fell. Even the brief moments between attacks were filled by machine-gun bursts from the Stukas’ rear gunners as they pulled up and away.
Nearby was HMS Pangbourne. The wounded sub-lieutenant was now unconscious, but another sailor watched in horror as bomb after bomb fell on Crested Eagle, shattering her and setting her alight. He saw oil leaking from the vessel into the sea, and watched men in battledress with full packs jumping into the inches-thick fluid. Some drowned in it; others died when it caught fire, burning them alive.
A sailor on board Crested Eagle realised that she had been struck again when he ‘felt the ship shudder as if some giant hand had picked us up’. As fire took hold, he watched men running with the skin blasted from their bodies. A lieutenant passed, whom he identified by the emblem on his helmet – but not by his face. That was unrecognisable.
Lieutenant Commander Bernard Booth, Crested Eagle’s captain, managed to run her aground near Bray Dunes. Just before he did so, another sailor jumped into the sea, carefully taking off his shoes first, and swimming the short distance to the beach. Only once on land did he realise that the skin was hanging from his hands in melted shreds. Soldiers watched amazed as the ship, her hull burning red-hot for hours afterwards, joined them on the shore.
She is still there, a shocking skeletal presence, emerging from the sea at low tide. At the time of writing, one of her guns is exposed, waiting to be liberated by a ‘collector’ or by the French government. She is nowadays visited by mussel pickers and those paying their respects to the roughly three hundred men who died on her. One of these was Vic Viner’s brother Albert.
Ship losses were very heavy on Wednesday 29 May. Three destroyers and twelve other large ships were lost. And yet over 47,000 soldiers were rescued. By the start of Thursday 30 May, 72,783 men had been rescued in total – considerably more than the Admiralty had anticipated. But that night, a misunderstanding occurred with potentially disastrous consequences for Operation Dynamo.
At about 7 p.m., Ramsay’s Dynamo Room in Dover Castle received a telephone call from a naval officer present at Lord Gort’s headquarters in La Panne. The officer was, like Charles Goodeve, one of the Admiralty’s ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’, and he made the call without authority. He said that Dunkirk harbour was completely blocked by damaged ships, and that the evacuation must now be carried out entirely from the beaches.
This was not true – and it is unclear why he made the call. Perhaps he had been unduly panicked by the attack on the mole. A little earlier, in the midst of that attack, the Dynamo Room had received a garbled wireless message from a destroyer reporting that it was ‘impossible to embark more troops’ from the mole. This – at the time the message was sent – had been true.
Taking these messages together, Ramsay decided that the mole must now be out of action – but before he could act, he wanted confirmation. Just before 9 p.m., he wired Tennant asking him whether the harbour really was blocked. Tennant replied that it was not – but his message never reached Ramsay, who then sent a message to Admiral Abrial at Bastion 32: ‘I cannot get in touch with Captain Tennant. Can you inform me whether it is still possible for transports to enter harbour and berth alongside?’
Again, Ramsay received no answer. Rather than take any chances, he ordered all ships to the beaches. Throughout the night – while the weather was excellent and the Luftwaffe almost absent – only four drifters and one yacht came alongside the mole. The chance to evacuate fifteen thousand men, all of whom were ready to depart, was wasted.
The next morning, the evacuation proceeded as before, and ships returned to the mole. But it is clear from these mistaken messages (and others like them) that one of Operation Dynamo’s chief problems was communication. This is hardly surprising given the hurriedly improvised nature of the operation. Tennant had made his headquarters in a dug-out near the end of the mole. With him was a signals team, consisting of an officer, an NCO and twenty-four signalmen. Unfortunately, they had brought very little equipment with them: just some hand flags and an Aldis lamp, useful only for signalling to ships immediately offshore.
At first, Tennant’s wireless messages had to be transmitted either from the French station at Bastion 32 or from destroyers on the mole. Messages could only be received, meanwhile, at Bastion 32. On 30 May, Tennant took possession of a Marconi TV5 wireless transmitter/receiver set. It could – in theory – transmit by Morse or by voice. But for the first few hours of its life, it failed to transmit, and a few hours later it broke down completely due to sand in the generator.
Tennant’s next stab at rectifying the situation involved the establishment of a Royal Corps of Signals wireless station in a lorry next to Bastion 32. This was far more effective; it meant no longer having to rely on a handily sited ship or on French goodwill. It also meant that misunderstandings such as that of 29 May were far less likely to occur.
It is worth noting that while Tennant was struggling to communicate, Lord Gort’s headquarters in a villa at La Panne had an excellent cable telephone link with the Dynamo Room at Dover Castle.* Unfortunately, Tennant’s only method of communication with La Panne (or with any of the beaches) was by motorcycle dispatch rider, so this was of no use to him. And Tennant’s difficulty in contacting his beach parties was mirrored by the beach parties’ difficulty in contacting ships offshore. Communication could only be made using semaphore flags, or the headlamps of cars used as signal lamps.
On 30 May, Tennant received two field telephones with which he set up a link to Commander Clouston on the mole. The two officers may have only been a short distance apart, but for Tennant, the mole was the single most important element of Operation Dynamo. Clouston was also given a loudspeaker for issuing instructions, which showed its value during a lull in the evacuation when Commander Guy Maund, Tennant’s assistant, used it to urge on the troops: ‘Remember your pals, boys! The quicker you get on board the more of them will be saved!’
The result was instant. The soldiers broke into a run, and in just two hours, eight destroyers embarked 8,528 men, while four passenger ships embarked 5,649 more.
The overall communication picture reveals Operation Dynamo as the improvised – and often ramshackle – endeavour that it truly was. But this is hardly a criticism; it was an eventuality that no one had expected. As the people of Britain were learning to make do and mend, those responsible for their future were doing the same on a more pressing scale.
And because Dynamo was an improvisation, conflicting interests tended to arise. The Admiralty, concerned with the loss of so many destroyers in a single day on 29 May, ordered the withdrawal of its eight most modern destroyers from the evacuation. Just as Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force feared the loss of its Spitfires and Hurricanes, so the Admiralty feared the loss of its most effective ships.
For Ramsay, however, this was a disaster. He now had only fifteen destroyers at his disposal, and these ships were the backbone of Operation Dynamo. By the end of the evacuation, they would have brought off almost 30 per cent of all troops rescued – more than any other kind of ship. Thankfully, the decision was reversed the following day, returning the modern destroyers to full evacuation duties.
Destroyers, first developed at the end of the nineteenth century, were fast, heavily armed ships, well suited to Operation Dynamo – although their speed and size caused difficulty to smaller vessels in the crowded Channel. Lady Brassey, a Dover harbour tug, was very nearly struck by a destroyer steaming towards England at over 30 knots. A sailor on board watched troops on the destroyer’s fore deck, drenched and helpless, repeatedly deluged by waves as she surged forward oblivious to all around her.
Typically, six or seven hundred men would be crammed onto a destroyer, but there are plenty of accounts of crossings made with more than a thousand soldiers on board. Some destroyer captains deliberately jettisoned their torpedoes and depth charges so that they could take on more men. Leading Seaman Ernest Eldred remembers soldiers crammed into every inch of space on HMS Harvester. They were on the upper deck and the mess decks, in the engine room and down the stoke hole. ‘The only place we couldn’t have them,’ he says, ‘was round the guns.’ The destroyer had to defend itself, after all, and it might also have to fire at enemy batteries on shore.
So weighed down were the destroyers that low tide presented a problem, particularly when a ship’s depth-finding equipment failed – as happened on HMS Sabre.* The captain’s solution was to place a sailor on either side of the deck to ‘swing the lead’: that is to drop a line weighted with lead into the water to gauge its depth. The sailors would then sing out the depth in fathoms – ‘Mark 5!’ – just as sailors on the Mississippi had done in the last century.*
But if many soldiers came home on naval ships (minesweepers as well as destroyers), a similarly vast number – over a quarter of all those rescued – were brought back on civilian personnel ships. These included passenger ferries, car ferries, large pleasure boats (such as Crested Eagle), Dutch schuits (flat-bottomed boats designed for Dutch waterways), and countless other varieties of passenger and cargo ship. Twenty were cross-Channel steamers and cargo boats belonging to Southern Railway, five of which were lost. They could take an extraordinary number of soldiers: the Isle of Man ferry Tynwald, sailing from the mole at the very end of the evacuation, embarked three thousand soldiers at once.
Anthony Irwin sailed home on board another Isle of Man ferry. When the ship was shelled from the shore, an incontinent officer began screaming for everybody to move to the far side. ‘The men, already wetting themselves, lost all semblance of control,’ writes Irwin. Fortunately, some level-headed members of the Royal Tank Regiment held the men back while an army chaplain smacked the officer over the head with a lead stick. But as soon as order was restored, six Messerschmitt 110s flew over the ship, machine-gunning the occupants. The scene on deck in the aftermath was gruesome. Next to the gangway was a pile of bodies eight feet high. Irwin and others pulled the dead away and tried to help the wounded. A tank corporal with sixteen bullets in his chest and stomach refused morphine, saying that he still had a lot to talk about. He died three hours later.
There was plenty of more prosaic chaos on the large ships. The cook on board Medway Queen remembers a crush at the galley doors, and a sudden rush of soldiers pushing billy cans and mess tins in his direction, all expecting to be fed. ‘These were not peckish men,’ he says. ‘They were starving animals, most of them too desperately hungry to be polite.’
Yet politeness and gentility were also evident. Captain Humphrey Bredin boarded an Isle of Man ferry berthed on the mole. To get on board, he had to step over a dead man on the gangplank while bombs fell all around. Once inside, he found himself a corner and settled down. A while later, he was surprised to find a man neatly dressed in a white coat standing over him.
‘Are you a steward?’ asked Bredin.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the man. ‘Can I do anything for you?’
‘Well, would it be possible to produce a glass of beer for me?’
‘By all means. But you do know the rules, sir? I can’t supply you with alcohol until we’re three miles out.’
Once the ship was beyond the reach of licensing laws – if not of Stukas – the steward brought Bredin his beer. ‘How could we lose the war,’ he laughs, ‘with people like this around?’
The stewards, it is worth noting, were not all men. On board the Southern Railway ship Dinard, now a hospital ship, was fifty-nine-year-old Amy Goodrich. And on the Southern Railway steamer Paris was Mrs Lee, a train carriage cleaner from Brighton. After Paris was bombed and sunk on 2 June, Mrs Lee was machine-gunned in the water and picked up by a lifeboat, only to be thrown back into the water when another bomb landed alongside. After another hour and a half in the sea, she was pulled aboard a tug and finally brought back to Dover. Evacuated with her was Gladys Seeley, a nursing sister, who had been badly wounded by shrapnel in an adjacent lifeboat.
The hospital ships all had five or six QUAIMNS* sisters working on board. ‘They worked like Trojans,’ wrote Captain John White, medical officer on the Isle of Guernsey, adding that his job was made easier as none of them ever had to be told what to do. It was made a great deal harder, however, by the Luftwaffe’s relentless attacks. The hospital ships were painted white with large red crosses – but not only did this fail to deter the Germans, it seemed to attract them. In his diary, White complained that the red crosses were making the hospital ships sitting ducks. ‘Why not paint us grey and put some guns on board?’ he wrote.
Isle of Guernsey was attacked while berthed at the mole. As the bombs fell around her, she loaded a thousand men, 490 of whom were stretcher cases. In the chaos, White noticed fit men climbing on board, but he decided not to interfere. As Isle of Guernsey sailed away, every bed was full, and the floors, passageways, dining saloon and cabins were crammed with stretchers. Alongside the physically wounded were men suffering from shellshock, ‘whose brains had snapped after days and nights of strain, privation and terror’. These men were placed in a guarded cabin and given sedative injections.
Some hospital ships could not get near the mole due to the bombing. Josephine Kenny, a sister on board St Julien, travelled to Dunkirk on six occasions, but was unable to reach the mole on four of them. ‘We all felt helpless and depressed on the empty trips back,’ she writes, ‘so different to the elation felt when every inch of deck space was filled with terribly wounded soldiers.’ Her words, a strange conflation of exultation and misery, seem to reflect the intense extremes of Operation Dynamo.
Isle of Guernsey, meanwhile, was responsible for picking Flying Officer Ken Newton out of the sea. Newton was an RAF pilot who had bailed out after a dogfight. Like the character Collins in the film, he was helped out of the water by sailors. The sailors were killed, however, by German aircraft raking them with machine-gun fire as they leaned over the side to pull Newton aboard. An account of a hospital ship being machine-gunned as it helped a downed airman surely serves to deflect any suspicions that Hitler was allowing the British to escape. There is little evidence in stories such as these of a golden bridge being built in May and June 1940.
There were, however, a few soldiers who managed to do what Tommy and Gibson attempt to do in the film – take a stretcher on board a ship and remain there to be taken home. Corporal Charles Nash of the Royal Army Service Corps was ferrying stretchers onto the mole when suddenly a military policeman shouted, ‘Here! We’ve got room for a few more! Who’d like to come aboard?’ Nash clambered onto a fishing boat, and a few hours later was home. Carrying stretchers was a difficult job, however – particularly given the damage sustained by the mole. Members of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry were given the job of loading a hundred stretcher cases onto the corvette HMS Kingfisher. Like Tommy and Gibson, they had to carry their stretchers across a narrow plank bridging a large hole in the mole, even as the bombing continued.
On the evening of Thursday 30 May, William Tennant and Frederic Wake-Walker dined at Lord Gort’s headquarters at La Panne, in a villa described by Wake-Walker as a pretentious house overlooking the sea.* The men shared Gort’s last bottle of champagne and rounded off the meal with tinned fruit salad. Wake-Walker was infuriated by Gort’s comment that while the army had successfully fallen back intact, the navy was making no real effort to help it escape. He tried to underline the difficulties involved, but was interrupted by Brigadier Oliver Leese who spoke of the ‘ineptitude of the navy’. Wake-Walker could do little but seethe. Several days into the evacuation, there was no sign of a miracle.