WHEN W. STANLEY BERRY reported to the London offices of Admiral Sir Lionel Preston on the morning of May 17, he didn’t know quite what to expect. A 43-year-old government clerk, he had just been engaged as the Admiral’s assistant secretary, and this was his first day on the job.
Admiral Preston was Director of the Navy’s Small Vessels Pool, a tiny blob on the organization chart that supplied and maintained harbor craft at various naval bases. Useful, but hardly glamorous. It was not, in fact, prestigious enough to be located in the Admiralty building itself, but rather in space leased in the adjoining Glen Mills bank block. Berry had no reason to suppose that he faced anything more than mundane office work.
He was in for a surprise. Six sacks of mail were waiting to be opened and sorted. These were the first answers to a BBC broadcast May 14 calling on “all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between 30 and 100 feet in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within 14 days. …” The call had been prompted not by events in Flanders but by the magnetic mine threat. To counter this, the country’s boatyards were absorbed in turning out wooden minesweepers. Finding its normal sources dried up, the Small Vessels Pool was requisitioning private yachts and power boats to meet its own expanding needs.
Stanley Berry dived into the job of processing the mountain of replies to the BBC announcement. He and the Admiral’s Secretary, Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander Harry Garrett, sorted them out by both type of vessel and home port. Garrett, a Newfoundlander, found himself getting a crash education in British geography.
This same day Winston Churchill for the first time began thinking of the possibility of evacuation. No one was more offensive-minded than Churchill—nobody prodded Gort harder—but every contingency had to be faced, and his visit to Paris on the 16th was a sobering experience. Now he asked Neville Chamberlain, former Prime Minister and currently Lord President of the Privy Council, to study “the problems which would arise if it were necessary to withdraw the BEF from France. …”
At a lower level, other men were taking more concrete measures. On May 19 General Riddell-Webster presided over a meeting at the War Office, taking up for the first time the possibility of evacuation. There was no feeling of urgency, and a representative from the Ministry of Shipping felt that there was plenty of time to round up any vessels that might be needed.
Calais, Boulogne, and Dunkirk would all be used, the meeting decided. The basic plan had three phases: starting on the 20th, “useless mouths” would be shipped home at a rate of 2,000 a day; next, beginning on the 22nd, some 15,000 base personnel would leave; finally, there was just possibly “the hazardous evacuation of very large forces,” but this was considered so unlikely that the conferees did not waste their time on it.
The Admiralty put Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay in charge of the operation. He was Vice-Admiral, Dover—the man on the spot—the logical man in the logical place. He had 36 vessels, mostly cross-Channel ferries, to work with.
Next day, the 20th, when Ramsay called a new meeting at Dover, events had changed everything. The panzers were pointing for the coast … the BEF was almost trapped … Gort himself was talking evacuation. “The hazardous evacuation of very large forces” no longer sat at the bottom of the agenda; now “the emergency evacuation across the Channel of very large forces” stood at the top.
The situation was still worse when the same group met on the 21st, this time in London again. Another plan was hammered out; more neat, precise figures. Ten thousand men would be lifted every 24 hours from each of the three ports—still Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. The ships would work the ports in pairs, no more than two ships at a time in any of the three harbors. To do the job, Ramsay was now allotted 30 cross-Channel ferries, twelve steam drifters, and six coastal cargo ships—a bit better than yesterday.
By the following day, the 22nd, everything had changed again. Now the panzers were attacking Boulogne and Calais; only Dunkirk was left. There would be no more of these meticulous plans; no more general meetings of all concerned. Ramsay, an immensely practical man, realized that the battlefront was changing faster than meetings could be held. By now everybody knew what had to be done anyhow; the important thing was to be quick and flexible. Normal channels, standard operating procedures, and other forms of red tape were jettisoned. Improvisation became the order of the day; the telephone came into its own.
Ramsay himself was at his best in this kind of environment. He was a superb organizer and liked to run his own show. This quality had nearly cost him his career in 1935 when, as Chief of Staff to Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, commanding the Home Fleet, he felt the Admiral had not given him enough responsibility. Always outspoken, he asked to be relieved and ended up on the Retired List. He stayed on the shelf for three years, enjoying horses and a tweedy country life with his wife Mag and their three children.
Then, with the sudden expansion of the Navy on the eve of World War II, he had been called back into service and put in charge at Dover. He knew the area well, had been skipper of a destroyer in the old Dover Patrol during the First War. At first the new job had not been too taxing—mainly antisubmarine sweeps, mine-laying, and trying to work out ways to counter the enemy’s new magnetic mines. The German breakthrough changed all that—Dover was only twenty miles from the French coast, practically in the front lines.
His staff was small but good. Ramsay did not suffer fools gladly—never was the cliché more applicable—and his officers were expected to show initiative. He was good at delegating responsibility, and they were good at accepting it. His Flag Lieutenant James Stopford, for instance, waged a monumental single-handed battle to get a direct telephone connection with Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. It would cost £500 a year, the Admiralty complained, but Stopford persisted and finally got his way. Now, with the BEF pinned against the French coast, this phone line was a priceless asset.
As Vice-Admiral, Dover, Ramsay lived and worked at Dover Castle, but his office these days was not part of the magnificent ramparts and keep that towered over the port. Rather it was under the Castle, buried in the famous chalk cliffs just east of the town. During the Napoleonic wars French prisoners had cut a labyrinth of connecting casemates in the soft chalk as part of England’s coastal defense. Now they were being used to meet the threat of a new, twentieth-century invasion.
An inconspicuous entrance within the castle walls led down a long, steep ramp, which in turn joined a honeycomb of passages. Down one corridor leading toward the sea, a visitor came to a large gallery, then several offices separated by plywood, and finally to the Admiral’s own office, with a balcony cut right into the face of the cliff.
It was not the sort of office normally associated with a vice-admiral. The floor was concrete, partly covered by a thin strip of threadbare carpet. A couple of framed charts were all that decorated the whitewashed walls. A desk, a few chairs, a conference table, and a cot in one corner completed the furnishings. But the room did have one amenity. The balcony made it the only place in the whole complex that had any daylight, except for a small window in the women’s “head.” Here the WRENS, as the distaff members of the Royal Navy were nicknamed, could stand on the “thunder-box” and enjoy a view of the Channel every bit as good as the Admiral’s.
By far the biggest room was the large gallery that had to be passed going to and from Ramsay’s office. Its main piece of furniture was a huge table covered with a green cloth. Here Ramsay’s staff gathered to organize the evacuation. A hard-driving naval captain named Michael Denny was in charge, presiding over a compact collection of sixteen men and seven telephones. During World War I this cavelike room had housed an auxiliary lighting system for the castle, and it became generally known as the “Dynamo Room.” By the same process of association, on May 22 the Admiralty designated the evacuation now being planned as “Operation Dynamo.”
The basic need was ships and men. It was clear that the 30 to 40 vessels originally allocated by the Admiralty wouldn’t be nearly enough. A closer estimate would be everything that could float. By now Ramsay had practically a blank check to draw whatever he needed; so the staff in the Dynamo Room went to work on their phones—calls to the Ministry of Shipping to collect available vessels along the east and south coasts … calls to The Nore Command for more destroyers … calls to the Southern Railway for special trains … calls to the Admiralty for tugs … medical supplies … ammunition … rations … engine spare parts … grassline rope … diesel fuel … blank IT124 forms … and, above all, calls for men.
It was a knock on the door at 4:00 a.m., May 23, that awakened Lieutenant T. G. Crick in his quarters at Chatham Naval Depot. A messenger brought instructions that Crick was to be ready for “an appointment at short notice”—nothing more. At 6:30, word came to report at once to the Barracks. On arrival Crick found that he was one of 30 officers required to go to Southampton and man some Dutch barges lying there. Why? They were to “run ammunition and stores to the BEF.”
These barges, it turned out, were broad, self-propelled craft of 200 to 500 tons, normally used to carry cargo on the network of canals and waterways that laced Holland. After the German invasion some 50 of them had escaped with their crews across the Channel and were now lying at Poole and in the Thames estuary.
Captain John Fisher, the salty Director of Coastal and Short Sea Shipping at the Ministry of Shipping, knew about these schuitjes, as the Dutch called them, in the normal course of his work. It occurred to him that with their shallow draught they would be ideal for working the beaches off Dunkirk. Forty of them were immediately requisitioned for “Dynamo.” The striped flag of the Netherlands came down; the Royal Navy’s white ensign went up. The Dutch crews marched off; British tars took their place. And with the change in flag and crew came a change in name. The British couldn’t possibly master a tongue-twister like schuitje; from now on these barges were invariably called “skoots.”
At the Ministry of Shipping the search for the right kind of tonnage went on. The burden of the work fell on Captain Fisher’s shop and on W. G. Hynard’s Sea Transport Department, which controlled all overseas shipping used by the military. In lining up additional ferries and personnel vessels, the problem wasn’t so difficult. The Department knew all the passenger carriers, had used them in getting the BEF to France.
But there weren’t enough ferries in all the British Isles to do the job. What other vessels might be used? What ships had the right draught, the right capacity, the right speed? The Department alerted sea transport officers in every port from Harwich on the North Sea to Weymouth on the Channel: survey local shipping … list all suitable vessels up to 1,000 tons.
Back at the Department’s offices on Berkeley Square, staff members Basil Bellamy and H. C. Riggs worked around the clock, napping on a cot in the office, grabbing an occasional bite at “The Two Chairmen” pub around the corner. Life became an endless chain of telephone calls as they checked out the possibilities. Would the drifter Fair Breeze do? How about the trawler Dhoon? The coaster Hythe? The eel boat Johanna? The hopper dredge Lady Southborough?
At this moment acting Second Mate John Tarry of the Lady Southborough had no idea that his ship was under such careful scrutiny. She looked like a vessel that was good for absolutely nothing except what she was doing—dredging the channel in Portsmouth harbor. There was no reason to suppose she would ever go to sea. She wasn’t even painted wartime gray. Her rust-streaked funnel still sported the red and yellow stripes of the Tilbury Dredging Company.
It was quite a jolt to Tarry when the company agent Anthony Summers came aboard one evening and called the nine-man crew together. There was trouble across the Channel, he explained, and the Lady Southborough was needed. Who would volunteer to go? Nobody knew what to expect, but to a man they volunteered.
All Portsmouth harbor was coming alive. Besides the Lady Southborough, four other Tilbury dredges were alerted. The Hayling Island ferries, Pickford’s fleet of small coasters, Navy patrol boats, the battleship Nelson’s launch—all bustled with activity, loading fuel and supplies.
Little ships would be especially important if it came to evacuation from the shore itself. The larger vessels couldn’t get close enough to the gently shelving Flemish beaches. During the past week Ramsay’s requirements for small boats had been widely (though quietly) circulated, yet at dawn on May 26 he still had only four Belgian passenger launches, several Contraband Control boats from Ramsgate, and a few Dover harbor craft. Early that morning Rear-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, held a meeting at the Admiralty, trying to speed things up. Among those present was Admiral Preston of the Small Vessels Pool.
The meeting had broken up and Preston was already back at the shop when the Admiral’s assistant secretary, Stan Berry, reported for work that morning. It was Sunday; most of the staff were off. Berry was looking forward to a quiet day, but the duty officer, Lieutenant Berrie, offered an ominous greeting: “Thank God you’ve come. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a pension!”
“Why?” asked Berry.
“I don’t know what’s up, but the Old Man is here.” Whatever it was, it must be serious. Peacetime customs die slowly, and admirals normally didn’t come to the office on Sunday.
Preston himself said nothing to clear up the mystery. He simply greeted Berry, asking where was the regular secretary, Commander Garrett? Berry explained that Garrett was off, but the arrangement was for him to call in every two hours.
“Tell him to report immediately.” And the Admiral ordered Berry to call in all the rest of the staff, too.
This was no easy matter. For instance, Lieutenant-Commander Pickering, in charge of drifters and trawlers, was in Brighton. When Berry tried to phone him, word came back that he had gone to the cinema. Which cinema? Nobody knew. So Berry had him paged at every cinema in town until he was finally located.
Messages were now flying all over England, breaking into the normal routine of ships and men. Surgeon-Lieutenant James Dow was having a very pleasant war on the minesweeper Gossamer, based on the Tyne. The hours were easy, shore leave generous, the local girls all attractive. Suddenly on May 25 an Admiralty signal intruded: “Raise steam with all despatch. Proceed to Harwich. Do not wait for liberty men, who will rejoin at Harwich.” The ship buzzed with rumors, but nobody really knew what was up.
At Liverpool the destroyer Somali had just docked after a battering in Norwegian waters. Sub-Lieutenant Peter Dickens was counting on a little break, but the Somali had barely tied up when he was handed an Admiralty message: report to Chatham Barracks immediately. That meant going to the other end of England—why?
Chatham itself was in turmoil—or as near to turmoil as a Royal Navy training base ever gets. Seaman G. F. Nixon was attending gunnery school when his battalion was ordered to fall in at 4:00 a.m. on the 26th. At 7:00 they left for Dover in busses, singing, “We’ll Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.” No one had a clue as to what was going on.
Deep within the white cliffs of Dover the staff of the Dynamo Room worked on. “No bed for any of us last night and probably not for many nights. I’m so sleepy I can hardly keep my eyes open,” Admiral Ramsay wrote his wife Mag on the 23rd. As he worked in his office, he would scribble a line or so between visitors, then stuff the letter into his desk drawer as some new crisis arose. Mag, in return, kept up a flow of gingerbread, asparagus from the garden, and tender words of support.
“Days and nights are all one,” he wrote her on the 25th, and indeed the men in the Dynamo Room had lost all track of time. The usual measuring rods were gone. Buried deep in their chalk cliff, they had no chance to know whether it was day or night. They had no regular meals—just an occasional sandwich or mug of tea taken on the run. There was no pace to their work; they were going flat out all the time. There was no variety; only a feeling of unending crisis that finally numbed the senses.
The strange fleet of ferries, hoppers, dredges, barges, coasters, and skoots now converging on Dover raised a whole set of new problems. First, they would have to be moored somewhere. Sheerness, on the Thames estuary, gradually became the main collecting point where the smaller ships were sorted out and prepared for the sea. Ramsgate became the final assembly point, where fuel tanks would be topped off, supplies loaded, and convoys organized.
Problems were solved, only to spawn new problems equally pressing. Mechanics had to be found who understood balky engines that defied the Navy’s experience … coal had to be obtained for some of the ancient coasters … 1,000 charts were needed for skippers who rarely went to sea. Routes could be marked on them, but data on the beaches was vague at best. Responding to a call for help from the Dynamo Room, Colonel Sam Bassett—head of the Interservice Topographical Department—toured London’s travel agencies, collecting brochures that might describe the French beaches in some detail. There had been nine months of war since the last holiday tripper made that sort of request; the clerks must have thought he was crazy.
Arms were another problem. This peacetime fleet had to have some sort of protection, and the Lewis machine gun seemed the best bet. But there was no single depot that could supply all Ramsay’s needs. They had to be scrounged from here and there—11 from London … 10 from Glasgow … 1 from Cardiff. . . 7 from Newcastle … 105 altogether.
If the Dynamo Room was a scene of “organized chaos,” as one staff officer later recalled, the majestic cliffs successfully hid the fact from the rest of the world. Dover never looked lovelier than it did this 26th of May. The guns could be heard rumbling across the Channel—Boulogne was gone; Calais was falling—but it all seemed very far away to the crews of the vessels riding peacefully at anchor in the Downs.
On the minesweeper Medway Queen, a converted paddle steamer lying just off the cliffs, Chief Cook Thomas R. Russell leaned against the rail, shooting the breeze with his assistant, a young man he knew only as “Sec.” It was strange, they decided, that the whole flotilla was in port this morning—no one at all was out sweeping. Right after breakfast a launch had made the rounds, picked up the captain, first officer, and wireless man from every ship, and taken them to the flagship for some sort of palaver. Now a naval barge eased alongside the Medway Queen and delivered case after case of food—far more than her 48 men could possibly eat. “Enough grub has been put aboard us,” observed Sec, “to feed a ruddy army.”
The men trapped in Flanders knew little more than the crew of the Medway Queen. Later this day, the 26th, Major-General E. A. Osborne, commanding the 44th Division near Hazebrouck, would get a quiet briefing from Brigadier G. D. Watkins of III Corps headquarters, but those of less exalted rank had to depend on rumor. Reginald Newcomb, a chaplain with the 50th Division, had a crony in Intelligence who hinted darkly that the BEF would make for the coast and embark for home—“that is, if Jerry doesn’t get there first.” Rumor spread through the 1st Fife and Forfar Yeomanry that they were going back to the sea, where they would embark, land farther down the coast, and attack the Germans from the rear.
Orders, when they finally came, were usually by word of mouth. In the varied units of the Royal Army Service Corps, especially, there was not much to go on, and many of the RASC officers simply vanished. The men of the 4th Division Ammunition Supply Company were merely told, “Every man for himself; make for Dunkirk, and good luck!” The No. 1 Troop Carrying Company was instructed to “get as near Dunkirk as you can, destroy vehicles, and every man for himself.” And again, for the 573rd Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, the familiar words: “Every man for himself. Make for Dunkirk.”
Often the orders came almost without warning. It was shortly after dawn in a small Belgian village when Sergeant George Snelgar, attached to a transport company, was awakened by voices shouting, “Get on Parade!” He heard the sound of marching feet, and looking out the window of the café where he was billeted, he saw his unit marching off to the vehicle park. Catching up, he learned that the orders were to smash their cars and motorcycles and go to Dunkirk. They couldn’t miss it: just head for that column of smoke.
At midnight it was harder. Corporal Reginald Lockerby of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park was groping north in a truck when an officer stepped out in the road and waved him down. He was heading right for the German lines 500 yards away. When Lockerby asked for directions to Dunkirk, the officer pointed to a star hovering above the horizon and said, “Just follow that star.” Others were guided by the gun flashes that lit up the night sky. By now they were on almost all sides. There was only one little gap to the north that remained black. That was Dunkirk.
Major Peter Hill, a transport officer, was one of the few who had a map. Not army issue—for some reason all rear area maps had been called in at the start of the campaign. What he did have was a map put out by the Daily Telegraph to help its readers follow the war.
Private W. S. Walker of the 5th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, could have better used an English-French dictionary. Coming to a signpost that pointed to “Dunkerque,” he wondered whether that was the same place as Dunkirk.
He need not have worried. Any road north would do, as long as it kept within the corridor held on the east by the Belgians and British; on the west by the French and the British; and at the foot—all the way south—by the French clinging grimly to Lille.
All the roads were still packed with troops in every sort of order and disorder—ranging from Welsh Guardsmen marching smartly with rifles at the slope to stragglers like Private Leslie R. Page, an artillery officer’s batman with the 44th Division. He had lost his unit when it scattered to dodge some strafing. Now he was plodding north alone, mixed with a crowd of soldiers and refugees. A big, open Belgian farm cart rumbled by. It was loaded with fleeing civilians, and there up front beside the driver, Page saw—of all people—his own father.
“What’s this, our Sunday school outing?” Page cracked as he climbed aboard for a brief family reunion. It turned out that the father, a warrant officer with the infantry, was just as lost as the son. Then the Luftwaffe struck again … the two were separated … and once more young Page wandered on alone. “Where are we going?” he asked someone and got the usual answer: “See that smoke in the sky? That’s Dunkirk. Make for it!”
There were women, too, in this great trek—not all of them ordinary refugees. A French liaison officer with the 2nd Ordnance Field Park brought along his mistress. Driver Gordon A. Taylor of the RASC tried to look after a young French girl he had found whimpering alone in the dark in a suburb of Lille. He managed to find a lorry, put her in it, and got her out of town. He felt quite the white knight and protector—until he lost her when the lorry got stuck in a traffic jam and they had to take to their feet. He never saw her again and would always wonder whether his “protection” did her more harm than good.
Private Bill Hersey of the 1st East Surreys had better luck. He had married the daughter of a French café owner in Tourcoing, and Augusta Hersey proved a determined bride indeed. As the East Surreys retreated through Roncq, she suddenly appeared and begged Bill to take her along. With the connivance of his company commander, Captain Harry Smith, Augusta was packed off in the headquarters truck.
Another war bride wasn’t as lucky. When Jeanne Michez married Staff Sergeant Gordon Stanley in February 1940, she became the first French girl to wed a member of the BEF. Stanley was attached to GHQ Signals at Arras; Jeanne moved into his quarters; and until May they lived an almost peacetime domestic life. When “the balloon went up,” he moved with Advanced GHQ into Belgium, and she went home to sit out the war at her mother’s café in the nearby village of Servins.
Jeanne Stanley knew very little of what was happening during the next two weeks, and she was astonished when suddenly one afternoon Gordon rolled up in a staff car with a machine gun mounted on the roof. The Germans were coming, he told her; they must leave right away. Jeanne flung a few things into a suitcase, plus two bottles of rum stuffed in by her mother. In an hour she was ready to go, dressed almost as if she was taking the afternoon train to Paris—blue dress, blue coat, matching blue broad-brimmed hat.
Off they went, the two of them up front and a corporal named Trippe in back. The roads were one huge traffic jam, and it didn’t help when Jeanne’s broad-brimmed hat blew out the window. Gordon stopped, and as he walked back to pick it up, the first Stukas struck.
They missed … the hat was rescued … the Stanleys drove on. They spent the first night in the car; other nights mostly in some ditch. Once they slept in the big barn of a Belgian farmer. He wouldn’t give them permission, but Gordon shot off the barn-door lock, and they settled in anyway.
Sleeping in the hay, diving into ditches to escape the Stukas, they got dirtier and dirtier. Once Jeanne managed to buy a bucket of water for ten francs, but most of the time there was no chance to wash. The broad-brimmed hat crumbled and vanished.
Eventually they reached the little French town of Bailleul. Here they stopped at the comfortable house of an elderly woman, Mlle. Jonkerick. Unlike many of the people they met, she was all hospitality and took them in for the night. Next day they moved on, still hounded by the inevitable Stukas.
Jeanne was now completely exhausted, her clothes in shreds. Gordon tried to put her in his battledress, complete with tin hat, but nothing fit. She finally told him that it was no use; she couldn’t go on. He took her back to Mlle. Jonkerick, who proved as hospitable as ever: Jeanne was welcome to stay till the roads cleared and she could return safely to Servins.
Now it was time to say good-bye. Gordon was a soldier; he had his duty; she understood that. Still, it was a hard moment, made just a little easier when he promised to come back and get her in two months. He would keep that promise, except for the part about two months. Actually it took him five years.
Jeanne Stanley was not the only one near the breaking point. A young lieutenant trying to lead a unit of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park got lost so many times he finally burst into tears. Corporal Jack Kitchener of the RASC found himself in a horrendous traffic jam, which turned into a pushing and shoving match between British and Belgian drivers. When a BEF officer tried to break it up, someone pushed him, too. He pulled his revolver and fired, hitting Kitchener in the left leg. “You've shot me, not the bloke who pushed you!” Kitchener exploded.
Private Bill Bacchus was driver-batman for a chaplain attached to the 13th Field Ambulance, and their trip north turned into an odyssey of bitterness and recrimination. Bacchus considered the padre a drunken coward; the padre charged Bacchus with neglect of duty and “dumb insolence.” Several times the padre drove off alone, leaving Bacchus to shift for himself. On two occasions Bacchus reached for his rifle, as if to use it on the padre. It seemed that even a man of God and his helper were not immune to the strain of defeat, the constant danger, the hunger and fatigue, the bombs, the chaos, the agony of this unending retreat.
Private Bill Stone had felt it all. He was a Bren gunner with the 5th Royal Sussex and had been in continuous action for two days holding off Jerry on the eastern side of the escape corridor. Now his section was ordered to make one more stand, giving time for the rest of the battalion to withdraw and reorganize farther to the rear.
They hung on for an hour, then pulled out in a truck kept for their getaway. It was dark now, and they decided to find some place where they could rest—they hadn’t had any sleep for three nights. They pulled up at a building which turned out to be a monastery. A robed monk appeared from out of the night, beckoned them to follow him, and led them inside.
It was another world. Monks padded quietly about in their robes and sandals. Flickering candles lit the stone passageways. All was tranquility, and the war seemed a thousand years away. The abbé indicated that it would be a pleasure to give food and rest to these new visitors, along with a party of Royal Engineers who had also discovered this heavenly oasis.
They were all led into the cloisters and seated at a long refectory table. Each British soldier had a monk to wait on him and attend to his needs. They had food and wine that the monks had produced themselves, and after days of army biscuits and bully beef, the meal was like a royal banquet.
There was only one hitch. The Engineers explained that they were going to blow every bridge in the area next morning. Stone and his mates would have to be on their way by 5:00 a.m. They didn’t mind; the stone floor of the cloisters seemed like a feather bed after what they had been through.
At dawn they were on their way. Driving over the bridges, they slowed to a crawl, lest they prematurely set off the demolition charges already laid. The men of the Royal Sussex were well clear of the area when the distant boom of explosives told them that their brief idyll was over and they were back in the war.
Along with blowing up bridges, canal locks, power stations, and other facilities of possible use to the Germans, the BEF was now demolishing its own equipment. To a good artilleryman, it seemed almost sacrilegious to destroy the guns he had so lovingly fussed over for years. As they smashed the breechblocks and destroyed the dial sights, many were openly crying.
Bombardier Arthur May of the 3rd Medium Regiment felt the agony even more deeply than the others. He had been posted to the same battery of howitzers his father had fought with in World War I, and this was a matter of infinite pride. Even the guns were the same, except that they now had rubber tires instead of the old steel rims. The battlefields were the same too. Armentières and Poperinge were familiar names long before this spring. In more ways than one, May felt he was following in Father’s footsteps.
But even in the darkest days of the First War things had never been so bad that the battery had to blow up its own guns. A gnawing conscience told him that somehow he had “let the old man down.”
There was little time for such sad reflections in the rush of self-destruction that now swept the BEF. In towns like Hondschoote and Oost Cappel on the road to Dunkirk, the paraphernalia of a whole army was going up in flames. Thousands of lorries, half-tracks, vans, heavy-duty trucks, motorcycles, Bren gun carriers, mobile kitchens, pick-ups, and staff cars were lined up in fields, drained of oil and water, with motors left running till they seized. Mountains of blankets, gas capes, shoes, wellingtons, and new uniforms of every kind lay burning in the fields. Passing one clothing dump about to be blown up, Lance Corporal W. J. Ingham of the Field Security Police raced in, ripped open a few bales, found his size in battledress, changed, and within a few minutes rejoined his unit—“the only well-dressed soldier in our mob.”
NAAFI stores—the source of the BEF’s creature comforts—lay deserted, open for the taking. Bombardier May walked off with his valise crammed with 10,000 cigarettes.
The chaplains, too, joined the orgy of destruction. Reginald Newcomb of the 50th Division kept busy smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines, while his clerk went to work on the company movie projector. Later, Newcomb burned two cases of army prayerbooks. It was Sunday, May 26, but there would be no Divine Service today.
The smoke that towered over Dunkirk twenty miles to the north was no part of any BEF demolition scheme. Hermann Göring was trying to keep his promise that the Luftwaffe could win the battle alone. For nearly a week the Heinkels, Dorniers, and Stukas of General Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 had been pounding the town. At first the damage was spotty, but on May 25 a giant raid damaged the main harbor lock, knocked out all electric power, and left the port a wreck, with its forest of cranes leaning at crazy angles.
Corporal P. G. Ackrell, a 42-year-old Ordnance Corps man, had been waiting to evacuate with other “useless mouths”; now his unit was hastily drafted to help unload an ammunition ship by hand. The derricks weren’t working, and the regular stevedores had vanished.
Toward noon Ackrell’s mind began drifting to other matters. The enemy planes were gone for the moment, and he noticed some inviting warehouses nearby. He drifted over for a look-around and spied some large cardboard boxes that seemed especially enticing. He opened one up, but it didn’t contain wristwatches or cameras or anything like that. It was full of marshmallows.
Making the best of things, Ackrell took a carton of marshmallows back to the dock, where they proved an instant hit. Returning to the warehouses for more, he discovered a barrel of red wine. He filled his water bottle, then began to sample it. Once again he remembered his friends and took some wine back to them, too. They liked it enough to go back for more, and by the end of the day barely half the ammunition had been unloaded.
Next day, the 26th, the men went back to work, and once again Ackrell’s eye began to wander. This time he found a freight car full of underwear. Still exploring, in another car he located some shoes that were a perfect fit. Once again he shared his good fortune with his friends; once again the dock work stopped. That evening the ship put to sea with part of her cargo still unloaded.
Discipline was gone. Dunkirk was a shambles, and clearly the port could not be used much longer. As the Luftwaffe roamed the skies unchecked, bombing at will, a small British naval party launched an experiment that somehow symbolized the futility of the whole air defense effort. Commander J. S. Dove had arrived on the 25th, ordered by the Admiralty to erect what was called “a lethal kite barrage” around the port area. The kites would be flown somewhat in the manner of barrage balloons and, it was hoped, would ensnare unwary German planes. To accomplish this purpose, Dove had on hand 200 “lethal kites” and a small staff of assistants.
There was not enough wind to fly a kite on the morning of May 26, but early in the afternoon the breeze freshened, and Dove’s crew managed to rig two kites from the top of the two biggest cranes in the harbor. One bobbed uselessly up and down, but the other rose majestically to 2,000 feet.
No one ever knew what would happen if a Stuka flew into it, because jittery Tommies, ignorant of the experiment and leery of anything flying in the sky, brought it down with a fusillade of small arms fire. Commander Dove stayed on to help with the evacuation; his little team joined the ever-growing horde waiting for transportation home.
The Luftwaffe continued its methodical destruction. On the morning of the 26th alone it dropped 4,000 bombs on the city, plastering the docks, the ships, the roads leading to the port, the disorganized thousands streaming toward it.
“Where is the RAF?” The familiar cry went up again and again. In their exasperation one column turned on a hapless stray wearing air-force blue, who had fallen in with Corporal Lockerby’s unit. He was no pilot—just a clerk from some disbanded headquarters—but that didn’t help him. The enraged troops pushed and threatened him—the symbol of all their pent-up bitterness.
The man seemed in such danger that Lockerby tried to find a spare army uniform for him to change to, but ironically the search was interrupted by yet another Stuka attack. By the time it was over, the man had vanished, perhaps looking for more congenial companions.
Yet the RAF was there, although often out of sight and not yet very effective. For several days Fighter Command had been shifting its carefully hoarded squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires to airfields closer to the Channel, planning for a major effort to cover the evacuation.
When 19 Squadron was moved from Horsham to Hornchurch on May 25, Flying Officer Michael D. Lyne was immediately struck by the totally different atmosphere. Horsham had been all practice—little trace of the war—but at Hornchurch the field was full of battle-damaged planes, and the mess buzzed with talk of combat and tactics. For a young pilot with only 100 hours in Spitfires, it was a sobering change.
Early morning. May 26, Lyne was off on his first patrol over the beachhead. There was no special pep talk or briefing; the squadron just took off for France, as though they did it every day. They met some Stukas and Messerschmitt 109’s near Calais, gave better than they took, but lost two of their own, including the squadron commander.
That afternoon Lyne was back over Dunkirk on his second patrol of the day. Off Calais they again met a squadron of Me 109’s, and Lyne himself came under fighter fire for the first time, without at first even realizing it. Mysterious little spirals of smoke whisked past his wings; then came the steady thump-thump of an Me 109 cannon. It finally dawned on him that he, personally, was somebody’s target.
Lyne managed to dodge, but shortly afterward found himself in a duel with two Me 109’s circling above him. Trying to maneuver, he stalled, then went into a spin as a bullet or shell fragment hit his knee. The radio conked out … the cockpit filled with glycol fumes and steam … his engine quit.
His first thought was to crash-land in France and spend the rest of the war in some POW camp. On second thought he decided he didn’t want that; instead he’d splash down in the Channel, hoping someone would pick him up. Then he decided against that too—“I didn’t want to get wet”—and finally, his spirits returning, he decided he just might be able to nurse the plane back to the British coast.
He made it—barely. Gliding in a few feet above the sea, he crash-landed on the shale beach at Deal in a cloud of flying rocks and pebbles. Bloody and oil-soaked, he staggered from the cockpit into a totally different world.
It was Sunday, and Deal beach was filled with strolling couples—military men in their dress uniforms, girls in their frilliest spring creations—all enjoying a leisurely promenade under the warm May sun. Barging into this dainty scene, Lyne felt he was more than an interruption: he was an unwelcome intruder, thoughtlessly reminding the crowd that only twenty miles away there was a very different world indeed.
He was right. The people of Deal and Dover—all England, for that matter—were still living a life of peace and tranquility. The government had not yet announced any emergency, and the distant rumble of the guns across the Channel was not enough to break the spell. It was a typical, peacetime weekend: a Dover town team defeated the officers of the Dover Detachment at bowls, 88 to 35 … the local football club lost a match to Sittingbourne … roller skaters whirled about the rink at the Granville Gardens Pavilion … the weekly Variety show announced a new bill featuring those “comedy knockabouts” The Three Gomms.
The mood was different at Whitehall. A chilling awareness gripped the government that Britain was now on the brink of an appalling disaster. Reynaud, in town for a conference with Churchill, was gloomy, too. He felt that Pétain would come out for a cease-fire if a large part of France were overrun.
The time had come to act. At 6:57 p.m. this Sunday, May 26, the Admiralty signaled Dover: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.”
At this point Admiral Ramsay had 129 ferries, coasters, skoots, and small craft to do the job, but more were on the way and the staff in the Dynamo Room was clicking smoothly. Still, it was a monumental task. The Admiralty itself did not expect to lift more than 45,000 men in two days. After that, the evacuation would probably be terminated by enemy action.
“I have on at the moment one of the most difficult and hazardous operations ever conceived,” Ramsay wrote Mag late that night (actually 1:00 a.m. on the 27th), “and unless the bon Dieu is very kind there are certain to be many tragedies attached to it. I hardly dare think about it, or what the day is going to bring. …”
Yet the biggest crisis at the moment lay beyond Ramsay’s control. The crucial question was whether more than a smattering of men could get to Dunkirk at all. Hitler’s “halt order” had been lifted; the German armor was rolling again; thousands of Allied soldiers were still deep in France and Belgium. Could the escape corridor be kept open long enough for these troops to scramble to the coast? What could be done to help the units holding the corridor? How to buy the time that was needed?