By the end of Thursday 30 May, the total number of men evacuated stood at 126,606 – almost three times as many as the Admiralty had predicted. The latest news from the perimeter, still held by several thousand men of the rearguard, was that it would probably hold for forty-eight hours. Low visibility had brought respite from the Luftwaffe. And the day had seen, for the first time, more troops embarked from the beaches (29,512) than from the mole (24,311).
In some ways, the beaches were the best place to be. Sand had a curious effect on bombs. If a bomb lands on a hard surface, the shrapnel scatters, and injuries are severe and widespread. ‘But going into the sand,’ says John Wells, an anti-aircraft gunner aboard Princessa, ‘there was a thud, and you’d get covered in clods of sand but that was about it.’ Arthur Lobb, of the Royal Army Service Corps, remembers a bomb exploding in sand as a strange experience, causing a slow movement of the earth beneath you.
This is not to suggest that the beaches were a safe environment. Many men were killed by bombs on the sand, and as Robert Halliday of the Royal Engineers remembers, it was difficult to find shelter there from a strafing aircraft. And it could be equally difficult getting away from the beaches. There were often no inshore boats to be seen. Sergeant Leonard Howard of the Royal Engineers waded into the water in the hope of getting a lift on 30 May, but soon gave up. There was nothing coming. Even when boats did arrive, soldiers often struggled and vied with one another to get in. When Arthur Joscelyne brought his Thames barge close to shore the same day, troops rushed to get aboard. ‘We could have capsized at any moment,’ he says. But then a naval officer stood up in the bows, took out his revolver and threatened to shoot anybody who embarked before he gave permission. Like children waiting for an adult to take control, the soldiers calmed down and boarded in an orderly fashion. ‘They were in such a state that they just lay down anywhere and slept,’ says Joscelyne.
Leonard Howard watched a similar situation escalate. A small boat came inshore, and troops piled onto it so haphazardly that it seemed about to capsize. A soldier was doggedly gripping the stern, and the sailor in charge ordered him to let go. The soldier kept hold of the stern. So the sailor shot him in the head. In Howard’s view, this was the right thing to do, however awful it was to watch. ‘There was such chaos on the beach,’ he says, ‘that it didn’t seem out of keeping.’
This is not an isolated account, and most examples involve men driven to uncharacteristic extremes of behaviour. The troops were living through an extraordinary ordeal where even the incidental details reminded them of their possible fate. On Thursday, the same day that Leonard Howard watched the shooting take place, Colin Ashford of the Highland Light Infantry remembers seeing the bodies of dozens of young men wash up on the shore. ‘There they were, all lying in different attitudes. Some still clutching their rifles. Hundreds of them. As far as you could see.’ They came, he believes, from a paddle steamer that had been sunk nearby.* In another man’s recollections, the most disturbing aspect of the evacuation was the sight of dead soldiers in the water, moving in and out with the tide. The scene is imagined in the film as a character calmly pushes a floating body away.
Equally disturbing were incidents of premeditated malice. An officer had managed to secure a rowing boat, and he stood up to his waist in water, guarding it, as he waited for his men to arrive. But before they appeared, he was ambushed by a group of soldiers who took the boat from him at gunpoint, grinning as they pushed him away. It is important to remember stories such as these. The whole world was on these beaches, the bad as well as the good, and received wisdom should never obscure that fact.
For at least one officer, however, the situation was quite different. Captain George Ledger of the Durham Light Infantry was queuing on the beach on 1 June. ‘You’d think there’d never been a war,’ he says. He saw no disorder – although he did notice that, when an aeroplane came over, soldiers ran from the queues to the apparent protection of the sand dunes.
It is certainly true that better organisation led to better behaviour and increased confidence. Twenty-three-year-old Vic Viner was a naval beachmaster, sent to Bray Dunes to ‘create order out of chaos’. His job, simultaneously executed by others up and down the miles of beaches, was to keep control of a queue of men. He was told to use his revolver if anybody started to misbehave – ‘Shoot to kill, son!’
Viner encountered some trouble in his queue when an officer jumped out of line and began yelling, ‘I’m a captain! I’ve got to get in the front!’
‘Stay where you are!’ said Viner.
‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ shouted the officer. By this time, Viner had his revolver out, and a large sergeant was offering the captain some advice. ‘Do as he bloody well tells you, sir, or you will die!’
The officer stared at Viner, and Viner stared back. The whole queue was watching. Eventually, the officer backed down and returned to his original place.
Twice more Viner was forced to draw his gun, but, as he says, ‘They were shell shocked and they wanted to go back to England.’ Throughout the days he was on the beach, Viner says, nobody in his queue had to wait more than three days to find a ship – although they sometimes had to spend as much as ten hours in water up to their chests. There were times, he remembers, when the sea became rough and boats could not take soldiers on board. The Stukas usually attacked two or three times a day, although they might strike more frequently. Viner concedes that he was more fortunate than those at other points within the perimeter, for Bray Dunes was not being shelled by German guns.
There is one image that particularly haunts Viner:
So many of them committed suicide. They walked into the water. ‘Come on, join up!’ ‘No, I’m going!’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m going back home. England’s over there.’ I said, ‘I know, but if you walk into that water you’ll drown . . .’ And they just did it . . . They were exhausted and demoralised. It’s with me now for ever.
This story painted such a striking image that it served as some inspiration for a scene in the film. And it is a story confirmed by others. Leonard Howard describes men running into the water, overwhelmed by the experience of the beaches. ‘They were under terrific strain, and one couldn’t do anything for them.’
Sometimes these men were seen swimming far out to sea. On board a lifeboat offshore, troops spotted a fellow soldier swimming towards England with most of his heavy gear still on. Seeing the lifeboat, the soldier started shouting for help – and the troops begged the skipper to pick him up. But the skipper refused. Turning back, he said, would have risked the lives of everyone on board. The soldier was left to his fate.
Though the beach queues increased a soldier’s chances of being lifted, not everybody wanted to join them. While Robert Halliday was building his raft from the floorboards of abandoned trucks, all manner of other activities were taking place on the beaches. George Wagner, the young Royal Engineer whose passion was dancing, remembers most people just lying about in the dunes, passing time. He himself found a motorcycle, and drove it up and down the beach. Colin Ashford, an enthusiastic artist, drew a sketch of a destroyer lying offshore.* Rather than join a queue – ‘I didn’t see the point in it’ – Norman Prior spent his time helping others by pushing small boats, already loaded with troops, clear of the shallows where they risked being grounded.
About the most productive thing that any soldier could do was to help build one of the truck piers, another fine example of forced improvisation. It is not clear whose idea these originally were, but there is no doubt that the first one was constructed on 30 May at Bray Dunes. Abandoned lorries were driven down to the shoreline, where they were filled with sandbags and their tyres were shot out. They were lashed together, bonnet to tail, and planks were laid across their roofs to form a walkway. When the tide came in, the chain of vehicles stretched far out to sea. At least ten of these piers were built, some fitted with rails along the walkway, and as a result the rate of rescue was dramatically increased.*
Some surprisingly touching behaviour was observed on the beaches as older men counselled their nervous younger comrades. ‘We knew the ordeal these weaker-willed boys were going through,’ writes an NCO, ‘so we helped them as much as we could.’ One grizzled old sergeant was even spotted cradling a younger man’s head in his lap.
Inevitably, a great deal of fear, anxiety, and downright oddness was exhibited. A terrified officer was seen putting a champagne cork between his teeth every time an aeroplane came near. Should a bomb drop, he explained, he would experience less pressure if his mouth was open. And fear often led to prayer. Some did it privately. George Purton of the Royal Army Service Corps was not religious, but he prayed nonetheless: ‘Please God help me!’ Others took part in organised services on the beaches. Norman Prior was singing a hymn when an aircraft began machine-gunning the congregation. ‘I don’t know what happened to the padre,’ says Prior, ‘but we scattered and those that were on the slow side, caught it and were killed and wounded.’
Some gave up trying to get away. Known as dune dwellers, these men made little homes in the sand, digging holes and covering them with corrugated iron and salvaged bits and pieces. In numerous ways, people tried to avoid reality. Dune dwelling was one way, madness was another, suicide was a third. Arriving on the beaches, Patrick Barrass of the Essex Regiment found a fourth. Having discovered an abandoned ambulance on the sand, he climbed in, lay down and went to sleep. ‘I left the rattle of war outside,’ he says. The beaches were a rabbit hole down which the British army was trying to escape, if not to England then somewhere less tangible.
One notable feature of the retreat and evacuation was the formation of a meritocracy where natural leadership and force of personality won out over rank and hierarchy. Everybody had been reduced to a similar physical condition, they were wearing similar battledress, they were eating similar food, and they had the same prospects of survival. Nowhere is this clearer than in the encounter between a private and Major General Harold Alexander, commander of 1st Infantry Division.
‘You look like a big brass hat! Maybe you can tell me where we get a boat for England?’ said the private.
Alexander thought for a moment, pointed, and said, ‘Follow that lot, son!’
‘Thanks, mate,’ said the private, ‘you’re the best pal I’ve had in a hundred miles!’ In the land of Dunkirk misrule, the private felt emboldened to speak to Alexander as an equal. And because Alexander possessed both confidence and an air of natural authority, he was able to answer the soldier without feeling threatened.
Many officers, however, were less formidable than Alexander. With the normal order of things set aside, Dunkirk exposed their lack of substance. George Purton refused to obey the instructions of an officer at Dunkirk. ‘Normally I’d have been court-martialled,’ he says, ‘but that didn’t happen.’ It may not have lasted very long, but for a period, within the perimeter, the usual rules simply did not apply.
Yet for all the strangeness and danger of their existence, were the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force scared?
George Wagner claims to have had no fear. ‘I always had the feeling that I would get home,’ he says. Ted Oates was extremely philosophical: ‘When I was on the beaches, I remember thinking, “Well, if I’m taken prisoner, it will be a chance to learn German.”’
Arthur Lobb experienced a tense anxiety, a feeling that he might not survive. George Purton wondered how the hell he was going to escape. Vic Viner, who was on the beaches longer than anybody else, admits to having been terrified every time a Stuka came over. Twenty years later, he says, it all came out in the form of a nervous breakdown. And Ordinary Seaman Stanley Allen, serving on HMS Windsor, who had a chance to observe the soldiers at close hand, began to suspect that Dunkirk marked the end of the British way of life.
Given these feelings and the prevailing conditions, it is a testament to the optimism, fighting spirit, and determination of the soldiers that their discipline held so well. But this would all be for nothing if the boats and ships were not available to transport them to England.
On Friday 31 May – the sixth day of Operation Dynamo – the British public first learned of the evacuation. Newspaper headlines were relentlessly optimistic. ‘Tens Of Thousands Safely Home Already – Many More Coming By Day And Night’, shouted the Daily Express. The Daily Mail’s editorial read:
Today our hearts are lightened. Today our pride in British courage is mingled with rejoicing. We are proud of the way the men of our race have borne themselves in the gigantic battle across the Channel. We rejoice that a considerable part of the British Army has escaped what seemed like certain destruction.
But were British hearts really lightened? An examination of Mass Observation sources reveals a more nuanced and interesting picture. The general morale report for 1 June reports that people were encouraged by news of the evacuation, but not overwhelmingly so:
People are not quite clear what to make of the military situation, but think we must count this as a defeat. There is an undercurrent of feeling, however, that this will rouse us, and that we will really show the Germans what the British Nation is like.
Here we can see that spontaneous creation of Dunkirk Spirit as a manifestation of people’s relief. It did not have to be imposed from above – and this is underlined by a note sent by Mass Observation to government ministers the following day, stating that the vast majority of the British people were wholeheartedly behind the war, and were anxious to be kept there. ‘But it will only be kept there by bold leadership, and a forceful, imaginative use of propaganda.’
In other words, the British people were manufacturing their own spirit – and the government’s job became to foster, encourage and shape that spirit. It was against this background that Churchill made his speech and J. B. Priestley gave his wireless talk over the coming days.
But it should not be thought that the country was feeling or acting uniformly. The 1 June morale report stresses that while news of the evacuation encouraged the public, reports were also causing anxiety. One Mass Observation diarist, a thirty-two-year-old woman in Birmingham, found herself unable to think, or talk, about anything but the evacuation. A friend had received a postcard from her brother, just arrived back from France, saying that he was going to tell her ‘how blasted Hitler blasted the B.E.F.’. The diarist writes that she was not usually one to cry, but she had been crying all the time since learning of the army’s fate. Nevertheless, she adds: ‘Everybody is cheerful, and in no way cast down. They have momentary spasms of doubt, but it doesn’t make them unhappy.’
She was extremely fearful of a German invasion. Most people, she felt, had little idea what this would really mean, the slaughter, the upheaval and terror it would cause. She had spent the day carrying on – but knowing that something nasty was going to happen. It was like, she writes, waiting to visit the dentist for an extraction.
Her conflicted words and feelings, lurching between fear, forced courage and banality, offer a vivid sense of the period. This is how you and I would have behaved on the Home Front. A few days later, like the soldiers on the beach, she was escaping into her own foxhole: ‘If I worry and fret, it will only help to wear my nerves a bit more, so I have created a kind of blank in my mind about the battle.’
But like so much of the British population, she tried to channel her fears in a more productive way. ‘I would like to engage in local defence work, or something,’ she writes. This adds weight to the 1 June morale report, when it notes that people seemed ‘willing to do a lot themselves to help the war’. The tidal wave of volunteerism had begun, that spontaneous unity that was shortly to bind the country and change it for ever.
At home in Britain, as the troops were suffering in France and Belgium, we can observe the birth of Dunkirk Spirit as a reaction to fear, and an alternative to escape. In order to survive, however, fear was going to have to be balanced – and boosted – by hope.
Back in France, on Friday 31 May, Lord Gort handed his command over to the impressive Major General Alexander and returned to Britain.* Gort had been keen to stay to the bitter end, but Churchill would not allow the possibility; he could imagine how Goebbels’ propaganda machine would have exploited Gort’s capture. The chief of the British Expeditionary Force would have been paraded in front of Nazi film cameras, and photographed looking sheepish alongside Hitler. The prospect was intolerable.
Conditions in Dunkirk on 31 May, meanwhile, were not easy. A fresh wind was causing a sizeable surf, but the greater problem was a shortage of boats. Although significant numbers had actually been arriving at Dunkirk since the previous day, accounting for the fact that almost thirty thousand soldiers had been taken off the beaches on Thursday, many more were needed. Early in the morning, soldiers could only stare at the empty naval and civilian ships offshore. To make matters worse, an artillery bombardment on the mole was sending even more passenger ships to the beaches. But things were about to change.
This Friday, 31 May, was the day that the Dunkirk legend was born. It was the day that the Armada truly arrived. A procession of coasters, launches, lighters, lifeboats, barges, tenders, trawlers, motor boats, cockle boats, pinnaces, fire floats, tugs, yachts, and goodness knows what else left Ramsgate and made its way to Dunkirk. The line of boats stretched for almost five miles. To Frederick Eldred, aboard HMS Harvester, it was a fantastic sight. ‘It was almost a holiday scene,’ he says, ‘with every type of boat afloat.’ Flight Lieutenant Frank Howell of 609 Squadron flew low overhead.* In a letter to his brother he wrote: ‘The shipping between England and Dunkirk was a sight worth seeing. Never again shall I see so many ships of different sizes and shapes over such a stretch of water.’
The ships did not appear by magic. The possibility that they would be needed for some purpose had been contemplated for a fortnight, initially by Admiral Sir Lionel Preston, head of an obscure Admiralty department known as the Small Vessels Pool. On 14 May, Admiral Preston had placed an item on the BBC radio news (and in a yachting magazine) ordering the owners of self-propelled pleasure craft of a certain size to send their particulars to the Admiralty within fourteen days. This was the start of the requisitioning of yachts and motor boats – but it had nothing to do with the Dunkirk evacuation. At the time, Preston was seeking boats for various home defence purposes, including the sweeping of magnetic mines.
As the days passed, however, the prospect of an evacuation, at first barely feasible, became possible and then likely. And as the prospect hardened, so Admiral Ramsay made it known that large numbers of boats would be needed for an evacuation from the Dunkirk beaches. On 27 May, the day after the commencement of Operation Dynamo, the need became urgent. But sorting through the particulars sent in response to the BBC broadcast was time consuming. Instead, it was decided to take vessels directly from boatyards along the Thames and coastal estuaries. Douglas Tough, of Tough Brothers Boatyard in Teddington, was authorised by Admiral Preston to commandeer any boats he thought suitable. Some were already in his boatyard, others he found on his travels up and down the river. Some owners were happy to give up their boats, others put up a futile struggle. One man, convinced that his boat was being stolen, pursued it up the Thames and called the police.
In the end, Tough assembled over a hundred boats at his yard, while other yard owners and boat builders did the same. Admiral Ramsay’s staff was busy, meanwhile, finding boats elsewhere, from assault landing craft to ocean liners’ lifeboats. The boats were emptied of inessentials and towed to Sheerness, where crews were found – usually members of the Royal Navy who took temporary control of them.* The unfortunate result was that many boat owners who understood their own vessels were prevented from taking them to France, while retired or reserve naval personnel unfamiliar with small boats were sent in their place. The results were predictable: many of the boats succumbed to engine failure, while others sank in the shallows. On the evening of 28 May, another appeal was broadcast over the BBC, this time for civilians with knowledge of boats to come forward. The Admiralty was tacitly acknowledging its mistake. It did not merely need boats – it also needed people who could operate them effectively. Of all the improvised elements of Operation Dynamo, none was more homespun than the story of the Little Ships.
The log of one of these Little Ships, the Thames tugboat Sun IV, gives an indication how the system operated. On 31 May, she left Tilbury docks for Ramsgate, arriving just before noon. Early in the afternoon, while she was fitted with guns, two naval officers and several ratings came on board to sail her. She then departed for Dunkirk, towing nine small boats.
Several hours later, on her way to France, she was caught in the wash of a destroyer. As her entire port side was forced underwater, three of her ratings were thrown into the sea. One was quickly picked up by a nearby boat, while another drifted away shouting that he could not swim. Sun IV swung quickly to port, cast off her boats, and slowed down to look for the missing ratings. One was spotted and pulled aboard, but the other had disappeared. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, Sun IV collected her boats and rejoined the flotilla. She had recorded her first fatality before the French coast was even in sight. At 10.30 that night, she anchored off the beaches and began sending her boats to the shore. Between them, they picked up eighty-two soldiers who were brought on board. She then sailed back to Ramsgate, where the soldiers disembarked – and the process began again.
On the same day, a fleet of six cockle boats set sail from Leigh-on-Sea, manned by their civilian crews. One of these boats, Leona, was narrowly missed by a stick of four bombs as she sailed towards Dunkirk. ‘They were so close,’ says crew member Alf Leggett, ‘that I could see the yellow stencilling on them as they came down.’ Leggett and his fellow fishermen had never seen a bomb before, and they were so shaken that they all went together to the side of the boat and urinated overboard.
Another of the cockle boats, Renown, suffering engine trouble early the next morning, was receiving a tow from another cockle boat – Letitia – who was herself being towed by a coaster. As the procession neared Ramsgate in the dark, Letitia touched a contact mine primed with a delayed action fuse. She sailed past it unawares, but it exploded beside Renown, several fathoms behind. Wood splinters rained down onto Letitia’s deck, and the tow rope went slack. There was nothing left of Renown and her crew of four.
A third cockle boat, Endeavour, was also being towed that night due to a smashed rudder. She had successfully ferried soldiers from the beaches and the mole. She arrived safely in Ramsgate with a full complement of soldiers on board. She lives on today – and makes an appearance in Chris Nolan’s film.
In fact, a number of original Dunkirk Little Ships appear in the film, testament surely to the film’s integrity. It is testament also to the ships’ owners, to their many admirers, and to the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships that these vessels remain in such fine health. Endeavour is a good example; she sank in 1987 but was raised by members of the Nautilus Diving Club. With luck and a fair wind, she has a long future ahead of her.
Appearing alongside Endeavour in the film are the motor yachts Elvin, Hilfranor, Mary Jane, Mimosa, Nyula, White Heather and Papillon, the auxiliary ketch Caronia, the paddle steamer Princess Elizabeth, the motor launch New Britannic, and Motor Torpedo Boat 102. Their stories are worth recounting.
When retired lieutenant commander Archie Buchanan listened to the BBC news on the evening of Tuesday 28 May, he heard the Admiralty’s call for those with experience of marine engines and coastal navigation. In answer, he showed up at a Suffolk boatyard, where he was given command of the motor yacht Elvin and a crew comprising a retired fisherman and an author of maritime short stories.
The three men sailed around the coast without maps, the fisherman guiding Elvin from memory. They reached Ramsgate on Friday afternoon – and were promptly told to return to Suffolk. No sooner had they done so than Buchanan received a telephone call ordering them back to Ramsgate – but once there, they were prevented from sailing to Dunkirk. According to the authorities, Elvin was too slow to make the trip, and her crew too inexperienced to be trusted. By now, Buchanan and his crew were so frustrated with the treatment they were receiving that they set off anyway.
‘We had no idea what the operation was or what we were supposed to do,’ says Buchanan. ‘With our boat darkened we just followed the general flow of traffic across and then steered straight for the fires of Dunkirk.’
Despite a brief engine failure during the journey, Elvin came alongside the mole early on Monday morning. By this time, the majority of soldiers remaining in Dunkirk were French, and a poilu* called out, ‘Combien de soldats?’ Buchanan understood what the soldier was asking. How many men could come on board? And while he did not know the French word for twenty-five, he did know the word for thirty. ‘Trente!’ he shouted. Elvin duly filled up with too many soldiers.
Buchanan was hoping to transfer the soldiers to another ship on the way home, but Elvin was moving so slowly that all the other ships pulled away from her. ‘We had no idea where the swept channel was,’ Buchanan remembers, ‘but as we drew only three feet six inches and it was not low water we didn’t think that there was much danger from mines.’ Arriving safely back in Ramsgate with twenty-five French and eight British soldiers on board, it can be said with confidence that Elvin had done her duty. In fact, if a story has ever epitomised Dunkirk Spirit, then it is the story of Elvin and her motley crew.
Hilfranor (an unwieldy amalgam of her first owner’s three daughters’ names – Hilda, Frances and Nora) was one of the ships collected at Teddington by Douglas Tough, who ripped out her cabins in order to make more room for soldiers. When she reached Dunkirk, her frame was cracked by a Stuka bomb, and she was abandoned. But desperate French soldiers pushed her back into the water and set sail in her, bailing her out as they went until she began to sink on the Goodwin Sands. She was finally towed back to Ramsgate by a passing minesweeper.
New Britannic, built in 1930, is a 54ft motor launch with an open deck and a powerful engine. Licensed to carry 117 passengers, she sailed for Dunkirk from Ramsgate on the afternoon of Tuesday 28 May, arriving early on Wednesday morning. On arrival, she began lifting troops from the beach at La Panne, ferrying them to destroyers and passenger ships offshore. Her design made her ideal for the work, and it is thought that she ferried more than three thousand soldiers during the course of the evacuation. She is among the true workhorses of Operation Dynamo, vessels whose importance cannot be exaggerated. She returned to Ramsgate carrying eighty-three men on board.
White Heather carried fewer soldiers than New Britannic, but her experience was similar. She sailed to Dunkirk on 1 June, and ferried soldiers from the beaches to larger ships offshore, before making three round trips to England carrying troops. Renamed RIIS1, she was later owned by the commodore of the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships.
An Isle of Wight ferry before the war, Princess Elizabeth’s first job during Operation Dynamo was as a paddle minesweeper, clearing mines from the channel in front of the beaches on four occasions. This was an exceptionally dangerous job that led to the sinking of three other ships. On 29 May, together with six other minesweepers, she lifted soldiers from the beach at La Panne. She returned twice more to Dunkirk, finally bringing 329 French troops to England on 4 June, at the very end of the evacuation. Over the course of her four trips, she rescued 1,673 soldiers.
It is likely that many Operation Dynamo Little Ships will never be recognised, as their records no longer exist – if indeed they ever did. Papillon’s contribution is recorded only in fortuitously preserved notes belonging to a Dover naval commander. A requisitioned motor yacht, she sailed to Dunkirk on 2 June with a crew of four civilian volunteers – despite an official finding that her engines were defective. She returned to Dover the following day.
Caronia was a fishing boat, built in 1927, whose first summer haul of pilchards paid for her construction costs. Requisitioned by the navy, she is one of the Little Ships whose story is likely to remain unknown. Better documented is her role in the 1960s when she was used to ferry supplies to the pirate station Radio Caroline.
Mimosa, Mary Jane and Nyula are three other Dunkirk veterans whose exploits are relatively obscure. It is clear that Mimosa made three trips to Dunkirk and back under the command of Lieutenant Commander Dixon, while Mary Jane was a particularly comfortable and well-appointed boat for her time. Uffa Fox, a celebrated British yacht designer, described her as ‘one of the cosiest yachts I’ve ever slept aboard’. One wonders whether her state-of-the-art central heating was turned on for the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. Nyula, meanwhile, was first seen at the Motor Boat Exhibition at Olympia in 1933, where she was described as ‘a very shapely 40ft cruiser, quite one of the most interesting and sea-worthy boats at the show’. Following her service at Dunkirk, she was fitted with a First World War German gun.
MTB 102 is a remarkable survivor. Like a character in a novel who recurs at every pivotal moment, she pops up throughout the story of Operation Dynamo. Equipped with an early form of radar, she was instructed to report to Dover on the opening day of the evacuation. The following day, her crew was told by Admiral Ramsay to ‘nip over to Dunkirk and report to Captain William Tennant . . . to see what they could do to help’.
On 31 May, she was supposed to bring Lord Gort and his staff back to England, but – as was not unusual – messages went awry and she instead found herself embarking soldiers from La Panne before returning to Dover. The next day, she brought Admiral Wake-Walker off HMS Keith and delivered him safely back to Dunkirk. When he then boarded her again to sail to Dover, she hoisted a dishcloth on which a St George’s cross had been quickly stained to serve as his flag. Once their duties were complete, she brought both Captain Tennant and General Alexander home to Dover for the final time, but she returned to Dunkirk on 5 June with Admiral Wake-Walker in order to make the harbour unusable for the Germans.
These, then, are the vessels present at a great historical event and at its fictional representation. In that representation, they play themselves. But there are many other vessels whose depiction in the film has a basis in reality. For example, we hear Commander Bolton asking a skipper whether he comes from Deal; he asks because the boat is a simple and elegant clinker-built Deal beach boat. During the evacuation, a Deal beach boat named Dumpling made seven trips backwards and forwards between the beaches and larger vessels before she was sunk by the wash of a passing destroyer. This was an ignominious end for a boat built at the time of Napoleon, and whose real-life skipper was over seventy years old. Another Deal beach boat present at Dunkirk – Lady Haig – lives on happily today.
It is not merely the boats that owe a debt to reality, of course. Viewers might, for example, see parallels between episodes in the lives of Tennant, Wake-Walker, Clouston and Ramsay. And George, the boy who sails across the Channel in the Moonstone, is a particularly interesting amalgam of a number of historical individuals.
One of these is eighteen-year-old Harold Porter, a crew member on board Renown, the cockle boat blown up by a contact mine with the loss of all hands. Harold was described in the Daily Mirror on 7 June 1940:
A boy of eighteen numbered among the heroes of Dunkirk was a failure at school. Through ill-health he never won a prize in the classroom or on the sports field. But one day he told his father, ‘I’m sorry I can never win any honours at school, but one day my name will be written on the roll of honour there.’
There are also parallels between George and Joe Reed, a fifteen-year-old deckhand on board New Britannic, the motor launch that appears in the film. Joe supposedly dived overboard a dozen times to bring wounded men to the deck as German aircraft were attacking. On 5 June 1940, his father told the Daily Express: ‘He was a brave boy. But my grandfather, my father and myself have gone across the Channel and it seemed to me that the boy could look after himself.’
Reg Vine, meanwhile, another fifteen-year-old, was a sea cadet whose mother had recently died and whose father had run off. One day in late May 1940, he was told by a sub-lieutenant that he would be ‘going to the seaside’ on a launch called Rummy II. The next day, he travelled down the Thames to Ramsgate, where he was issued with a rifle. The launch then headed out to sea, towed by a tug. Only now was Reg told that Rummy II would be rescuing British soldiers and that his role would be to row a lifeboat.
As the launch approached the coast, Reg heard more noise than he could ever remember hearing. He then saw body parts floating past – and he was sick. He tried to settle his stomach by imagining that he was in his uncle’s slaughterhouse, and that the bits of bodies belonged to animals.
Arriving at Dunkirk, Rummy II was sent to La Panne. The sea cadets on board, including Reg, spent their days rowing soldiers from the shore to their launch, which would then motor the men to larger ships further offshore. The whole process was a chain with Reg’s lifeboat at one end and a Royal Navy destroyer at the other.
As an interesting aside, Reg remembers seeing French soldiers stripping the dead bodies of English soldiers and dressing in their uniforms.
Gerald Ashcroft, meanwhile, was a sea scout and crew member on Sundowner, a 62ft naval pinnace. His skipper was Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to have survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The navy wanted to commandeer Sundowner – but Lightoller persuaded the relevant authorities that with his experience (he had commanded a destroyer in the First World War) he was the man to take her to Dunkirk. ‘I’ll warn you it’s not going to be a pleasure cruise,’ Lightoller told Gerald, ‘but if you’d like to come with us, we’d be pleased to have you.’ Sundowner would eventually rescue 130 soldiers from a stricken destroyer; Ashcroft remembers the men being very low when they came on board, continually saying that they’d let the country down. ‘But we tried to let them understand that they hadn’t let the country down,’ he says.
A final historical figure with parallels to George is Albert Barnes, who at fourteen was probably the youngest civilian involved in Operation Dynamo. At the time, he was working as a galley boy on the Thames tug Sun XII. As he was given no warning that the tug was leaving for Dunkirk, he had no time to tell his parents that he would be away. When he finally returned home, he took a bath and slept for twenty-four hours. ‘Then it was back to work as usual,’ he says, ‘scrubbing and cleaning and brewing up tea.’
Like all the characters in this film, it seems that George is not based on any one individual. He is an amalgam, a representative of a type of young man who existed in 1940.
One of these young men was seventeen-year-old Jim Thorpe. As I write, Jim is almost certainly the last man alive to have gone over to Dunkirk on one of the Little Ships. Born in November 1922, he now lives in Maryland in the United States. When I spoke to him in late March 2017, he explained that his brother, Arthur, was a boating enthusiast who lived alongside the River Thames. In late May 1940, Arthur got in touch asking Jim for help. ‘What do you need?’ asked Jim. ‘I need a man like you for the weekend,’ said his brother.
When the time came to leave, Jim still had no idea where they were going. ‘We’re going to help someone,’ is all that Arthur would say. But the weather was good, and Jim arrived safely on the French coast, surrounded by many other boats. He was impressed by the number of soldiers on the beaches and the fact that they were queuing up to their chests in water.
They took the boat as far inshore as they dared, and shut off the engine. Immediately men started trying to board. ‘It was a little bit on the frantic side,’ says Jim. ‘There were a lot of people trying to get on at the same time. So I would say, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!”’ Once the men were on board, Jim would tell them where to go, pushing them up front and clearing the back of the boat so that the engines could be started.
Jim remembers travelling across the Channel many times. He recalls German aircraft strafing the boat, and the soldiers on board firing back with their rifles. But did he realise the importance of the job he was doing?
‘No. You don’t think about that sort of thing. You think about – just get those men. They were trying to do something for us. You think, Let’s get them out!’
So far in our story, we have encountered various kinds of Little Ships and their personnel, but in the improvised and tumultuous environment of Dunkirk, there were some very strange vessels on the water, crewed by a remarkable range of individuals. As Robert Newborough was sailing away from Dunkirk in his Fleet Air Arm vessel, he spotted a canoe going the other way.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted Newborough.
‘I can take one other!’ explained the canoeist.
But perhaps the least reassuring mode of transport in the Channel was observed by the master of the steam yacht SY Killarney. He sailed past a French officer and two Belgian soldiers attempting to reach England on a door. And balancing on the door, between the three passengers, were six large bottles of wine.
Another unusual Little Ship, though for different reasons, was Advance, a motor launch crewed by three bearded civilians who looked very much like pirates. As somebody commented at the time, ‘Only the Jolly Roger was missing.’ But far more unusual than their appearance was the fact that within forty-eight hours of Advance’s return to England, two of her crew members had been detained by the police under Regulation 18B as members of the British Union of Fascists.
And yet for all the different sorts of people aboard the Little Ships, there were, it appears, no women. The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships certainly has no record of a woman – notwithstanding an article in The Times of 6 June 1940 headed ‘Women Among Volunteer Crews’. The piece alleges that at least one woman received permission to take a Little Ship across to Dunkirk. She did this, it claims, by telephoning the Admiralty in such a deep voice that she was mistaken for a man. There is, unfortunately, no corroboration for this story. There was a prodigious amount of unsubstantiated rumour flying about in the days after Operation Dynamo, and The Times seems to have been as likely to repeat gossip as anybody else.
Just as rumours can take hold in the aftermath of an event, so can received wisdom. Not so long ago, the received wisdom was that the miracle of Dunkirk was achieved solely by the legendary Little Ships, crewed by stout-hearted Englishmen, men such as Clem Miniver,* who left the pub on a warm summer’s evening, jumped in their boats, and returned two days later, tired and bearded, never to speak of the terrible things they had seen. This, of course, was a cliché, an exaggeration with little basis in fact. Yet the revisionist view that the Little Ships hardly rescued any soldiers, that they were an insignificant coda to an evacuation achieved by the Royal Navy, is equally misleading.
The reality is that the Little Ships, a surprising number of which were manned by civilians, played a vitally important role in Operation Dynamo. At a basic level, the entire evacuation was invigorated by the arrival of the flotillas. But beyond this, the Little Ships actually brought more soldiers home to England than has ever been acknowledged. This is because many Little Ships, packed with soldiers, were towed across the Channel by larger ships. When the procession reached England, each smaller ship would moor alongside the larger ship, the soldiers would climb from the smaller ship onto the larger ship and from there onto the dock, and the smaller ship would not be credited with rescuing anybody at all. It might not even be recorded as having taken part in Operation Dynamo.
Yet even if a Little Ship did nothing more than ferry men from the beaches to the larger ships, it was still responsible for rescuing every single man that it ferried. Without its contribution, that man would have remained on the beach to be captured by the enemy. Considered in these terms, the contribution of the Little Ships seems very significant indeed – and this is without tackling the theoretical question of how far Dunkirk Spirit was influenced by their story.
As the flotillas began to arrive on Friday 31 May, however, and the evacuation gained momentum, the perimeter around Dunkirk was shrinking. The immediate result was that six thousand men at La Panne had to march along the beach to Bray Dunes. Colonel Stephen Hollway of the Royal Engineers remembers standing on the beach at La Panne. He was told that there would be no more boats coming in. He then passed out, either from a shell blast or from exhaustion, and when he came to, early on Saturday morning, there was not a living soul left on the beach. The eastern beaches had been abandoned.
As far as the film is concerned, this is a telling moment. In a no-man’s-land such as this, Tommy, Gibson, Alex and the Highlanders settle down in the grounded Dutch trawler. Allied troops have disappeared and German troops are shortly to arrive. And while there is little evidence of Dutch ships (other than the ubiquitous schuits) taking part in Operation Dynamo, there is a record of a Dutch eel boat – Johanna – arriving in Dunkirk at the end of May.
On Friday 31 May, meanwhile, Winston Churchill flew to Paris in his customary Flamingo to meet members of the Allied Supreme War Council. The French and British sat around a table, facing each other, and Churchill was able to offer some rare good news. As of lunchtime, he said, 165,000 troops had been evacuated – far more than anyone had expected.
‘How many French?’ asked Weygand.
‘So far, only fifteen thousand,’ said Churchill. Not such good news.
Weygand wondered how he could face French public opinion with such a disparity. More French would have to be evacuated. Churchill agreed. Desperate to keep France in the war, he had already decided that Anglo-French relations must improve. From this point, he explained, British and French troops would embark in equal numbers.
A telegram was then drafted to send to Admiral Abrial in Bastion 32. It noted that once the perimeter had collapsed, British forces would embark before French forces.
At these words, Churchill exploded with righteous emotion. ‘Non! Partage – bras dessus, bras dessous!’ he shouted. His meaning was clear as he mimed two people clutching each other as they departed. But he went further. Carried away in the moment, he promised that the British would defend the perimeter to the bitter end to allow the French to escape.
In truth, this was never likely to happen. It was almost inevitable that the French would end up defending their own country as the British returned to theirs. Churchill’s promise would, in time, be remembered by the French as a classic example of English perfidy, as serious as the concealment of their intention to evacuate.*
Relations between British and French soldiers always depended on the individuals and the circumstances. There had undoubtedly been ill feeling on both sides, the French focusing on supposed British betrayal, the British on the apparently poor standard of the French army. And during the evacuation, that ill feeling often revealed itself. As represented in the film, French soldiers were prevented from joining queues and boarding boats. Robert Newborough remembers trying to pick British troops ahead of foreign troops. He believed it to be his duty. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘one got a bit ruthless and said, “British only!”’ Yet it seems that after Churchill’s order that French and British troops be evacuated together, genuine efforts were being made to follow his instruction. And despite the shrinking of the perimeter, Friday 31 May was Operation Dynamo’s most successful day in terms of evacuations. A total of 68,014 men were lifted, 22,942 from the beaches and 45,072 from the mole. The running total was now 194,620 men rescued.
The first loaded ship to depart Dunkirk the next morning was the Whippingham, an Isle of Wight paddle ferry with 2,700 troops on board. Such huge numbers suggest a knowledge that time was running short. And Whippingham very nearly capsized when shell fire caused troops to rush to the sheltered side of the ship.
A little later, at about 8 a.m., Admiral Wake-Walker was on the bridge of the destroyer HMS Keith, off Bray Dunes, when a formation of Stukas appeared in the distance. Three of them came down directly at Keith – and so began the first of five consecutive bomb attacks. The first ended in near misses, the closest bomb landing ten yards away. The second sent a bomb down the central funnel, blowing out the under part of the ship. Sitting nearby was MTB 102 – and seeing Keith’s difficulty, it drew near. Admiral Wake-Walker chose his moment and transferred across. The third and fourth attacks weakened her further, and at 9.15 a final attack sunk her. All that remained of HMS Keith was a large oil slick in which soldiers struggled, vomited and drowned.
Later that day, the decision was taken to abandon all daylight evacuation from the mole and the beaches. German batteries now commanded sections of the Channel and all necessary embarkations could be carried out under the relative safety of darkness.
Saturday was a mixed day for the Allies. Shipping losses reached their highest level, but the number of troops rescued was almost as high as the previous day. The number of soldiers evacuated was 64,429, of whom 47,081 were picked up from the mole. The accumulated total had now reached 259,049.
The end was in sight – but it is worth standing aside for a moment to try to imagine life within the perimeter during Operation Dynamo. Perhaps the greatest initial shock to a newcomer would be the noise. Dunkirk was very loud. Guns of all types were being fired, shells were flying overhead and bursting, Stukas (so long as they were fitted with sirens) were screaming. This would not all have been going on at once, of course, but the ambient noise was loud enough that ‘Dunkirk throat’, a relentless sore hoarseness, was a near-universal complaint.
A sound common on the beaches during quieter spells was a soft sighing, similar to the wind passing over telegraph wires. This was actually the sound of wounded men moaning. Singing could often be heard; popular songs at Dunkirk include ironic favourites like ‘Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Three Hundred Men Went to Walk, Walk along the Sand Dunes’ (to the tune of ‘One Man Went to Mow’). A patriotic favourite was ‘There’ll Always be an England’, while ‘Home on the Range’ was also popular. The French, meanwhile, could often be heard singing ‘La Marseillaise’.
Common expressions among soldiers included ‘It’s a Blighty move’, meaning ‘I’m going back to England’, and ‘Make for the black smoke’, meaning ‘Head for Dunkirk’. Whatever the men were discussing among themselves, bad language helped them to make their point. And one of the most startling noises heard at Dunkirk was the silence that came in the aftermath of an attack. ‘The quiet, when the firing ceased,’ writes an anonymous QUAIMNS nurse, ‘was more noticeable than the continuous noise had been.’
On Sunday 2 June, as the British effort reached its culmination, Major General Alexander was told to hold on for as long as possible so that the maximum number of troops could be evacuated. Captain Tennant believed that five thousand British troops remained, in addition to the four thousand men on the perimeter, who were currently withdrawing. Ramsay suspected that an additional two thousand men could be found hiding in the town (where some might have remained since Anthony Rhodes departed his cellar a week earlier). Nevertheless, it was hoped that they could all be evacuated within the next twelve hours.* With this aim, Tennant sent out a Nelsonesque call to destroyers and minesweepers: ‘The final evacuation is staged for tonight, and the nation looks to the Navy to see this through. I want every ship to report as soon as possible whether she is fit to meet the call which has been made on our courage and endurance.’
At 5 p.m. a huge armada of ships set out from Dover to mop up the British Expeditionary Force – and to take as many French troops as possible. The first vessels reached Dunkirk at 6.45 p.m. and began boarding large numbers. From the mole, the Clyde steamer King George V brought 1,460 home, while the destroyer Venomous lifted 1,500. The last of the British rearguard, 2,000 men, was brought to England on the Channel Islands steamer St Helier. It left Dunkirk at 11.30 p.m. Captain William Tennant promptly sent the signal ‘B.E.F. evacuated’, and embarked for Dover in MTB 102.
But that did not mean that the evacuation was at an end. It continued in an effort to rescue as many French troops as possible. The very last ship to depart the mole, at 3.05 a.m. on 4 June, was the Isle of Man steam packet Tynwald with her astonishing haul of 3,000 men on board. Twenty thousand French soldiers were taken off that night, and the very last ship left Dunkirk at 3.40 a.m. with the Germans only three miles away. About 12,000 French troops remained to be taken prisoner.
At 2.23 p.m. on Tuesday 4 June, Operation Dynamo was terminated.