AS THE GROWL OF approaching planes grew louder, veteran Seaman Bill Barris carefully removed his false teeth and put them in his handkerchief pocket—always a sure sign to the men on the destroyer Windsor that hard fighting lay ahead. It was 5:30 a.m., June 1, and the early morning mist was already burning off, promising a hot sunny day.
In seconds the planes were in sight, Me 109’s sweeping in low from the east. Gun muzzles twinkling, some strafed the eastern mole, where the Windsor lay loading; others hit the beaches … the rescue fleet … even individual soldiers wading and swimming out to the ships. Normally the German fighters did little strafing. Their orders were to remain “upstairs,” flying cover for the Stukas and Heinkels. Today’s tactics suggested something special.
Tucked away in the dunes west of La Panne, Sergeant John Bridges of the 1st Grenadier Guards safely weathered the storm. Around him clustered six to eight other Grenadier Guards, the little group he had formed when the battalion dissolved during the night. At that time nobody knew what to do, and it seemed best to wait till dawn.
Now it was getting light, and the choice was no easier. Joining the trek to Dunkirk looked too dangerous. Bridges could see nothing but gun flashes and towering smoke in that direction. On the other hand, joining one of the columns waiting on the beach below looked futile. There were so few boats and so many men. In the end, Bridges opted for the beach; perhaps the group could find some shorter queue where the wait would be reasonable.
A pistol shot ended that experiment. An officer accused the group of queue-jumping and fired a warning blast in the general direction of Bridges’s feet. Undaunted, the Sergeant turned his mind to the possibility of getting off the beach without queueing up at all. Noticing an apparently empty lifeboat drifting about 100 yards offshore, he suggested they swim out and get it. Nobody could swim.
He decided to go and bring it back himself. Stripping off his clothes, he swam out to the boat, only to find it was not empty after all. Two bedraggled figures in khaki were already in it, trying to unlash the oars. They were glad to have Bridges join them, but not his friends. They weren’t about to return to shore for anybody. Bridges hopped out and swam back to the beach.
But now the group had vanished, scattered by an air raid. Only Corporal Martin was left, faithfully guarding Bridges’s gear. Looking to sea, they saw yet another lifeboat and decided to make for that. Martin, of course, couldn’t swim, but Bridges—ever an optimist—felt that somehow he could push and pull the Corporal along.
It would have been easier if Bridges had been traveling light. But he was dressed again, carrying his pack and gas cape, and there was much on his mind besides Corporal Martin. While in Furnes, their unit had been stationed in a cellar under a jewelry and fur shop. There was much talk about not leaving anything for the Germans to loot, and first thing Bridges knew, he had turned looter himself. Now his pack and gas cape were filled with wristwatches, bracelets, and a twelve-pelt silver fox cape.
The two men waded into the sea, Bridges trying to help Martin and hang onto his riches at the same time. Somehow they reached the lifeboat, which turned out to be in the charge of a white-haired, fatherly-looking brigadier, still wearing all his ribbons and red trim. He was skillfully maneuvering the boat about, picking up strays here and there. Martin was hauled aboard, and Bridges prepared to follow.
“You’ll have to drop your kit, Sergeant,” the brigadier sang out. Every inch of space was needed for people. With a lack of hesitation that surprised even himself, Bridges let it all go—bracelets, watches, jewelry, furs, and perhaps most important, the load on his conscience.
Pulled aboard, he took an oar, and with the brigadier steering, they gradually approached a destroyer lying not far away. Planes began strafing, and the man rowing next to Bridges was hit. They crawled on, and were almost there when an officer on the ship called out to stay clear. She was stuck on a sandbar, running her screws full speed ahead to get free.
The brigadier tried, but whether it was tide, current, suction, or plain inexperience, they were relentlessly drawn to the side of the ship. A rising swell caught Bridges’s oar against the hull, and through some play of physics he could never hope to understand, he was catapulted upward, clear out of the boat. He caught hold of a grid, which served as a ship’s ladder, and willing hands hauled him on board.
Next instant the lifeboat plunged down again and was caught under the racing screws. The boat, the brigadier, Martin, and everyone else were chewed to bits. Bridges looked back in time to catch a brief, last glimpse of Martin’s startled face as it disappeared beneath the sea.
He sank to the deck, leaning against the bulkhead. The destroyer turned out to be the Ivanhoe, and as Bridges began stripping off his wet clothes, a sailor brought him a blanket and a pack of cigarettes. He did not have much time to enjoy them. Once again the sound of aircraft engines warned of new danger from the skies.
The German bombers had arrived. Luckily, the Ivanhoe had at last wriggled free of the sandbar, and Commander P. H. Hadow was able to dodge the first attacks, delivered by level-bombing Heinkels. No such luck with the Stukas. At 7:41 a.m. two near misses bracketed the ship, and a third bomb crashed into the base of the forward funnel.
Down in the boiler room Private J. B. Claridge, who had been plucked from the sea at La Panne, was drying out his uniform when the ship gave a violent shudder, the lights went out, and a shower of burning embers fell about him. He was standing near a ladder to the deck, and he raced up through a cloud of swirling steam. He and another man were the only two to get out alive.
Sergeant Bridges watched from his resting place against the bulkhead. He was still stunned by his own ordeal, but he was alert enough to note that the Ivanhoe’s crew were beginning to take off their shoes. That could only mean they thought the ship was sinking.
He needed no better proof. Slipping off his blanket, he went over the side, naked except for his helmet, which he always managed to keep. He swam slowly away from the ship, using a sort of combination breast-and-side stroke that he especially favored. He could keep it up forever—or at least until some ship appeared that looked like a better bet than the Ivanhoe.
But the Ivanhoe was not finished. The fires were contained; the foremost magazine flooded; and the damaged boilers sealed off. Then the destroyer Havant and the minesweeper Speedwell eased alongside and removed most of the troops. As Speedwell pulled away, she picked up one more survivor swimming alone in the sea. It was Sergeant Bridges.
On the Ivanhoe the engineering officer Lieutenant Mahoney coaxed some steam out of his one remaining boiler, as the ship started back to England. Creeping along at seven knots, assisted by a tug, she made an ideal target and was twice attacked by the Heinkels. Each time, Commander Hadow waited until the first bombs fell, then lit smoke floats inside various hatches to simulate hits. The ruse worked: both times the planes flew off, apparently convinced that the destroyer was finished.
On the Havant, the troops transferred from the Ivanhoe barely had time to settle down before the Stukas pounced again. Two bombs wrecked the engine room, and a third landed just ahead of the ship, exploding as she passed over it.
The lights went out, and once again hundreds of soldiers thrashed about in the dark, trying to get topside. Havant took a heavy list, compounding the confusion. But once again help lay close at hand. The minesweeper Saltash came alongside, taking off some troops. Others transferred to a small pleasure steamer, the Narcissa, which used to make holiday cruises around Margate.
The crew of the Havant stayed on for a while, but for her there was no clever escape. The hull was ruptured, the engine room blown to bits. At 10:15a.m. Havant vanished into the sea.
“A destroyer has blown up off Dunkirk,” someone laconically observed on the bridge of the destroyer Keith lying off Bray-Dunes. Admiral Wake-Walker looked and saw a ship enveloped in smoke just off Dunkirk harbor, six miles to the west. At the time he didn’t know it was the Ivanhoe—or that she would survive. He only knew that the German bombers were back on the job, and might be coming his way next. It would be hard to miss the concentration of ships working with the Keith off Bray: the destroyer Basilisk, minesweepers Skipjack and Salamander, tugs St. Abbs and Vincia, and the skoot Hilda.
Sure enough, a compact formation of 30 to 40 Stukas appeared from the southwest. Every gun in the fleet opened up, and a curtain of fire seemed to break up the formation. But not for long. Shortly before 8:00 a.m. three Stukas came hurtling down, right at the Keith.
The ship heeled wildly. In the wheelhouse everyone was crouching down, with the helmsman steering by the bottom spokes of the wheel. Teacups skidded across the deck. Then three loud explosions, the nearest just ten yards astern. It jammed the helm, and the Keith began steering in circles.
Captain Berthon switched to manual steering, and things were beginning to get back to normal, when three more planes dived. This time Wake-Walker saw the bombs released and watched them fall, right at the ship. It was an odd sensation waiting for the explosion and knowing that he could do nothing. Then the crash … the teeth-rattling jolt … a rush of smoke and steam boiling up somewhere aft.
Surprisingly, he could see no sign of damage. It turned out that one of the bombs had gone right down the second funnel, bursting in the No. 2 boiler room far below. Power gone, plates sprung, Keith listed sharply to port.
Not far away, Lieutenant Christopher Dreyer watched the hit from his motor torpedo boat MTB 102; he hurried over to help. Wake-Walker decided he was doing no good on the crippled Keith, and quickly shifted to Dreyer’s boat. It was the Admiral’s eighth flagship in twenty-four hours.
On the Keith, now wallowing low in the water, Captain Berthon gave the order to abandon ship. Scores of men went over the side, including most of General Gort’s staff. Colonel Bridgeman was sure of only one thing: he didn’t want to swim back to La Panne. He splashed about, finally joined two sailors clinging to a piece of timber. Eventually they were picked up by the tug Vincia and taken to Ramsgate.
The Stukas were far from finished. About 8:20 they staged a third attack on the Keith, hitting her again in the engine room, and this time they saved something for the other ships nearby. The minesweeper Salamander escaped untouched, but her sistership Skipjack was a different story. The leader of the German flight scored two hits; then a second Stuka came roaring down. On the range-finder platform Leading Seaman Murdo MacLeod trained his Lewis gun on the plane and kept firing even after it released its bombs. The Stuka never came out of its dive, plunging straight into the sea.
But the damage was done—three more hits. Skipjack lurched heavily to port, and the order came to abandon ship. It was none too soon. In two more minutes Skipjack turned turtle, trapping most of the 250 to 300 troops aboard. She floated bottom-up for another twenty minutes, then finally sank.
The Keith lingered on, attended by a typically mixed assortment of small craft picking up survivors. After a fourth visit from the Stukas, the Admiralty tug St. Abbs came alongside around 8:40 and took off Captain Berthon and the last of the crew. Before leaving, Berthon signaled Salamander and Basilisk to sink the ship, lest she fall into enemy hands.
Both vessels replied that they were out of control and needed help themselves. Concentrating on his own ship, Berthon apparently didn’t see the Stukas pounding the other two. Basilisk especially was in a bad way. A French trawler took her in tow, but she grounded on a sandbar and had to be abandoned around noon. The destroyer Whitehall picked up most of her crew, then finished her off with a couple of torpedoes.
Meanwhile the Stukas staged still another attack on the abandoned Keith—the fifth of the morning—and at 9:15 they finally sank her. The sea was now covered with fuel from sunken ships, and the surviving swimmers were a pathetic sight—coated black with oil, half-blind, choking and vomiting as they tried to stay afloat.
The tug St. Abbs poked about picking them up, twisting and turning, using every trick in the book to shake off the Stukas. Besides survivors from the sunken ships, she took aboard Major R.B.R. Colvin and a boatload of Grenadier Guards trying to row back to England. About 130 men jammed the tug’s deck—some dreadfully wounded, others unhurt but sobbing with fright. An army doctor and chaplain passed among them, dispensing first aid and comfort. As the bombs continued to rain down, the padre told Major Colvin, “I have never prayed so hard before.”
Eventually the Stukas moved off, and St. Abbs steamed briefly in peace. Then at 9:30 a single level-bomber passed overhead, dropping a stick of four delayed-action bombs right in the tug’s path. They went off as she passed over them, tearing her bottom out.
Knocked down by the blast, Major Colvin tried to get up, but one leg was useless. Then the ship heeled over, and everything came crashing down. He felt he was falling into a bottomless pit, pushed along by rushing water, surrounded by falling coal. Next thing he knew, he was swimming in the sea some 50 yards from a lot of wreckage. St. Abbs was gone, sunk in just 30 seconds.
There were only a few survivors. Most had originally been on the Keith or Skipjack; this was their second sinking of the morning. This time they found themselves struggling against a strong tide that carried them along the coast, almost due east. They would soon be in German-held waters, but there seemed nothing they could do about it. Suddenly they saw a chance. A wrecked steamer lay directly in the way. The more agile swimmers managed to get over to her.
Passing under the stern, Major Colvin grabbed a gangway hanging in the water, and despite his bad leg, he pulled himself aboard. The wreck turned out to be the cargo liner Clan MacAlister, bombed and abandoned on May 29. She now lay partially sunk and hard aground about two miles off La Panne.
Some fifteen other survivors of St. Abbs also reached the hulk. Climbing aboard, they found themselves in a setting worthy of the legendary Mary Celeste. In the deserted deckhouse everything was still in place. Some sailors helped Major Colvin into a bunk, found him a couple of blankets and a set of dry clothes.
Midshipman H. B. Poustie of the Keith did even better. Covered with oil, he wandered into the captain’s cabin and found the perfect uniform for an eighteen-year-old midshipman: the captain’s dress blues, resplendent with four gold rings around the sleeves.
There was food too. Exploring the galley, someone came up with a light luncheon of canned pears and biscuits. To the tired and hungry survivors, it seemed like a feast.
The big question was: What next? Clearly they couldn’t stay here much longer. It was ebb tide, and the Clan MacAlister now stood high out of the water on an even keel. From the air she looked undamaged, and the planes bombed her vigorously. Soon, the enemy artillery would be in La Panne, a stone’s throw away.
One of the ship’s boats still hung in the davits, and Captain Berthon—late of the Keith and senior officer present—ordered it loaded with provisions and lowered. With luck, they could row to England.
They were just about to start when a Thames lighter hove into view. She looked like a far better bet, and the castaways attracted her attention with yells and pistol shots. The lighter transferred them to a cement carrier so lowly she had no name—just Sheerness Yard Craft No. 63. She was, however, staunch enough to get them home.
On the beach west of La Panne, the 1st Suffolks had a grandstand view of the Stuka attack on the Basilisk. Still farther west, on a dune near Zuydcoote, the staff of the 3rd Grenadier Guards watched the Keith’s ordeal. All the way west, the sailors on the mole saw another swarm of Stukas sink the French destroyer Foudroyant in less than a minute. Captain Tennant himself watched the assault on the Ivanhoe and Havant.
There was something distant and unreal about it all—especially the battles in the sky that erupted from time to time. Any number of separate vignettes were frozen in the men’s minds, like snapshots in an album: the thunderclap of a fighter and bomber colliding … a plane’s wing fluttering to earth … the flash of flame as a Heinkel caught fire … the power dive of an Me 109, right into the sea … parachutes floating down … tracers ripping into the parachutes. It was hard to believe that all this was actually happening, and not just the familiar scenes from some old war film.
To Squadron Leader Brian Lane and the fighter pilots of No. 19 Squadron it was very real indeed. On June 1 their working day began at 3:15 a.m. at Hornchurch, a small field east of London. Still half-asleep, they gulped down tea and biscuits and hurried out onto the tarmac, where the Spitfires were already warming up. The roar of the engines rose and fell as the mechanics made final adjustments, and the exhaust flames still burned bright blue in the first light of the new day.
Lane climbed aboard his plane, checked his radio and oxygen, made sure that the others were ready, and waved his hand over his head—the signal to take off. Once airborne, he listened for the double thump that meant his wheels were up, and cast a practiced eye over the various dials and gauges that made up his instrument panel. It looked as though he had been doing this all his life; actually he had been a civilian making electric light bulbs until a short time before the war.
In fifteen minutes he was crossing the English coast, heading out over the North Sea. A glance at his mirror showed the other planes of the squadron, properly spaced behind him, and behind them were three more squadrons—48 Spitfires altogether—roaring eastward toward the sunrise and Dunkirk.
Ten more minutes, and they were over the beaches, bearing left toward Nieuport, the eastern limit of the patrol. It was 5:00 a.m. now, light enough to see the crowds waiting on the sand, the variety of vessels lying offshore. From 5,000 feet it looked like Blackpool on a bank holiday.
Suddenly the Spitfires no longer had the sky to themselves. Ahead and slightly to the right, flying toward Nieuport on a converging course, twelve twin-engine planes appeared. Lane flicked on his radio: “Twelve Me 110’s straight ahead.”
The Germans saw them coming. On both sides the neatly spaced formations vanished, replaced by the general melee that so reminded the men on the ground of something concocted by Hollywood. Lane got on the tail of a Messerschmitt, watched it drift into his sights, and pressed the firing button that controlled his eight machine guns. Eight streams of tracer homed in on the 110. Its port engine stopped. Then, as it turned to get away, he got in another burst, this time knocking out the starboard engine. He hung around long enough to watch it crash.
That job done, Lane searched for more targets, but could find nothing. His tanks only had enough petrol for 40 minutes over the beaches, and now he was getting low. Flying close to the water, he headed back across the Channel and home to Hornchurch. One by one the other members of the squadron came in too, until finally all were present and accounted for.
As they excitedly swapped experiences on the tarmac, the squadron intelligence officer toted up the score—7 Me 110’s claimed; also 3 Me 109’s, which had apparently turned up at some point during the free-for-all. Slowly the pilots drifted into the mess. It was hard to believe, but it was still only 7:00 a.m. and they hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
It’s worth noting that this aerial battle did not follow the standard script. Usually a very few British fighters took on a very great number of German planes, but this time the Spitfires actually outnumbered the Me 110’s, four to one.
This was no coincidence. It was part of a tactical gamble. Originally Fighter Command had tried to provide continuous cover over the beaches, but the few planes available were spread so thin, the result was virtually no protection at all. On May 27, for instance, 22 patrols were flown, .but the average strength was only eight planes. The Luftwaffe easily smothered this effort and devastated the port of Dunkirk.
After that disaster the RAF flew fewer patrols, but those flown were much stronger. There was also extra emphasis on the hours when the beachhead seemed most vulnerable—dawn and dusk. Hence the 48-plane patrol led by Brian Lane, and he in turn was followed by another patrol of similar strength.
But the total number of planes always remained the same—Air Marshal Dowding wouldn’t give an inch on that, for he was already thinking ahead to the defense of Britain herself. As a result, there were inevitably certain periods when there was no protection at all, and on June 1 the first of these periods ran from 7:30 a.m. to 8:50 a.m.—that harrowing hour and twenty minutes when the Keith and her consorts were lost.
By 9:00 a new patrol was on the line, and the German attacks tapered off, but there were four more periods during the day when the RAF could provide no fighter cover, and the Luftwaffe cashed in on them all. Around 10:30 a.m. bombs crippled the big railway steamer Prague and turned the picturesque river gunboat Mosquito into a blazing wreck.
Then it was the Channel packet Scotia’s turn. As she slowly capsized, 2,000 French troops managed to climb the deck against the roll, ending up perched on her hull. The destroyer Esk plucked most of them to safety. No such luck with the French destroyer Foudroyant. Hit during another gap in fighter protection, she turned over and sank in seconds.
The carnage continued. During the afternoon a 500-pound bomb landed on the deck of the minesweeper Brighton Queen, killing some 300 French and Algerian troops—about half the number aboard. Later the destroyer Worcester and the minesweeper Westward Ho were badly damaged but managed to get home. Westward Ho had 900 French troops aboard, including a general and his staff. When she finally reached Margate, the general was so overjoyed, he decorated two members of the crew with the Croix de Guerre on the spot.
Seventeen ships sunk or knocked out of action. That was the Luftwaffe’s score this June 1. All day the human residue—the hollow-eyed survivors, the pale wounded on stretchers, the ragged bundles that turned out to be bodies—were landed on the quays of Dover, Ramsgate, and other southeast coast towns. The effect was predictable on the men whose ships happened to be in port.
At Folkestone the crew of the railway steamer Malines were especially shaken by the ordeal of the Prague. The two vessels belonged to the same line, and there was a close association between the crews. Some of the Malines’s men were already survivors of a ship sunk at Rotterdam, and Malines herself had been heavily bombed there. After two hard trips to Dunkirk she was now at Folkestone waiting for coal, when nerves began to crack. The ship’s doctor certified that three engineers, the wireless operator, the purser, a seaman, and several engine room hands were all unfit for duty.
Malines was ordered to Dunkirk again on the evening of June l, but with the crew on the edge of revolt, her captain refused to go. He was supported by the masters of two other steamers also at Folkestone, the Isle of Man packets Ben-My-Chree and Tynwald. They too refused to go, and when the local naval commander sent a written inquiry asking whether Ben-My-Chree would sail, her skipper simply wrote back, “I beg to state that after our experience in Dunkirk yesterday, my answer is ‘No.’”
Trouble had been brewing for some time, particularly among the larger packets and passenger steamers. They were still manned by their regular crews and managed by their peacetime operators. These men had no naval training whatsoever, nor much of that special élan that the weekend sailors and other volunteers brought to the job.
As early as May 28 the steamer Canterbury refused to sail. She had been there twice, and that was enough. The Dynamo Room finally put a naval party aboard to stiffen the crew. This worked, and a hurried call was made to Chatham Barracks for 220 seamen and stokers. They would form a pool of disciplined hands, ready for duty on any ship where the crew seemed to be wavering-
When the St. Seiriol refused to sail on the 29th, an officer, armed guard, and seven stokers went on board at 10:00 a.m., and the ship left at 11:00. On the packet Ngaroma the engineers were the problem. They were quickly replaced by two Royal Navy stokers, and an armed party of six hands was added for good measure. Ngaroma went back to work.
But these were individual cases. The dismaying thing about Malines, Tynwald, and Ben-My-Chree was that the three ships seemed to be acting in concert. A hurried call was sent to Dover for relief crews and armed guards, but it would be some hours before they arrived. All through the night of June 1–2 the three ships—each able to lift 1,000 to 2,000 men—lay idle.
Other men were losing heart too. When the tug Contest was commandeered at Ramsgate for a trip to Dunkirk, the crew deliberately ran her aground. Refloated, the engineer refused to put to sea, claiming his filters would be blocked by sand.
Off Bray-Dunes, Admiral Wake-Walker signaled another tug to help a stranded minesweeper. The skipper paid no attention, wanted only to get away. Wake-Walker finally had to train a gun on him and send a navy sub-lieutenant to take charge.
There was also trouble with the vessels of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The boat from Hythe flatly refused to go at all. The coxswain argued that he had been asked to run his boat onto the beach, and once aground he could never get off. He would not try at Dunkirk what he could not do at Hythe—apparently ignoring the fact that at Dunkirk the tide would do it for him.
He managed to talk the Walmer and Dungeness boats out of going too. In disgust the Navy then took over the whole RNLI fleet, except the Ramsgate and Margate craft. They had already sailed for Dunkirk with their own crews.
These lifeboat crews were no sniveling cowards. The coxswain of the Hythe boat had been risking his life in the service for 37 years, 20 of them in charge of the boat. He had won the Institution’s silver medal for gallantry. Yet there was something different about Dunkirk—the continuing danger, the inability to control events, the reality of being under fire. Such factors could undermine the resolve of even the staunchest men.
Nor was the Royal Navy immune. There was a tendency to feel that “it can’t happen here,” that naval training and discipline somehow insulated a man from the fear and uncertainty that beset civilian hearts. Yet this was not necessarily so. Morale on the destroyer Verity, shaky since May 27, seemed to collapse after a trip to Dunkirk on the 30th. Twelve men broke out of the ship, with six still absent on the 31st. Those who returned simply explained they couldn’t “stand it” any longer. Verity was ordered to remain in Dover harbor.
Acute fear could be like a disease—both physical and highly contagious. The minesweeper Hebe was hit perhaps worst of all. She had been a sort of command ship off Bray-Dunes; few of the crew slept for five days. On the evening of May 31 the ship’s sub-lieutenant collapsed, going into fits and convulsions. Next day, 27 members of the crew came down the same way. Finally, as Hebe returned to Dover on the morning of June 1, the ship’s surgeon collapsed too, mumbling that he could not face another trip to Dunkirk.
Rest was the answer, but rest was a luxury they couldn’t have. After especially grueling trips the Malcolm and the Windsor did get a day off, but usually the ships just kept going. The main hope for relief came from the steady stream of new vessels and fresh hands that kept pouring in.
The Navy continued to comb its lists, searching for officers who could be borrowed from other duties. Commander Edward K. Le Mesurier was assigned to the aircraft carrier Formidable, building at Belfast. Important, but he could be spared for a week. He arrived at Ramsgate at noon, June 1, and by 5:30 he was on his way to Dunkirk. He found he had exchanged carrier duty for command of a tug, a launch, and five rowboats.
Sub-Lieutenant Michael Anthony Chodzko was a young reserve officer attending navigational school at Plymouth. Buried in his books, he didn’t even know there was serious trouble until he was yanked out of class on May 31 and sent by train to Dover. Then, as the train ran along the chalk cliffs just before the station, he glanced out the car window and saw gunfire across the Channel. It was his first inkling of what lay ahead. Next morning, June 1, he was heading for Dunkirk with his first command—a small cabin cruiser called the Aura.
David Divine wasn’t in the Navy at all. He was a free-lance writer and amateur sailor who naturally gravitated to Dover at the end of May, because that’s where the big story was. Like the other journalists in town, he would stand in the grass that crowned the white cliffs and focus his binoculars on the incredible procession of vessels pouring across the Channel. But unlike the others, the sea ran in his blood, and the more he watched, the more he wanted to be part of this show.
It wasn’t hard to join. Through his naval writing he had plenty of contacts at the Admiralty, and by May 31 he had the necessary papers that put him in the Navy for 30 days. He went to Ramsgate, looked over the mass of small craft now piling up in the harbor, and picked out for himself a small motor sailor called the Little Ann. With no formal assignment whatsoever, he jumped aboard and began getting her ready for sea. He was soon joined by a kindred soul—Divine never learned his name—and the two of them, with a couple of others, set out for Dunkirk early on June 1.
Charles Herbert Lightoller was another man who liked to do things his own way. No stranger to danger, he had been Second Officer on the Titanic, where his coolness helped save countless lives that famous night. Now he was 66, retired from the sea, raising chickens in Hertfordshire, but he still had that combination of courage and good humor that served him so well in 1912.
And he still enjoyed life afloat. His 58-foot power cruiser Sundowner had been carefully designed to his exact specifications, and he liked nothing better than an occasional jaunt up and down the Thames with a party of friends. Once he even had 21 people aboard.
It was 5 p.m. on May 31 when Lightoller got a cryptic phone call from a friend at the Admiralty, requesting a meeting at 7:00 that evening. It turned out that the Navy needed Sundowner at once. Could he get her from the yacht basin at Chiswick down to Ramsgate, where a Navy crew would take over and sail her to Dunkirk?
Whoever had that idea, Lightoller bristled, had another guess coming. “If anybody is going to take her over, my eldest son and I will.”
They set out from Ramsgate at 10 on the morning of the 1st. Besides Lightoller and his son Roger, they also had aboard an eighteen-year-old Sea Scout, taken along as a deck hand. Halfway across they encountered three German fighters, but the destroyer Worcester was near and drove them away. It was just as well, because Sundowner was completely unarmed, not even a tin hat aboard.
Midafternoon, they were off Dunkirk. It was ebb tide, and as he drew alongside the eastern mole, Lightoller realized that the drop was too great from the walkway to Sundowner’s deck. The troops would never be able to manage it. Instead, he berthed alongside a destroyer that was already loading, and his troops crossed over from her. He loaded Sundowner from the bottom up, with Roger in charge below decks.
No one ever tackled such an unglamorous assignment with more verve than Roger. To lower the center of gravity, he made the men lie down whenever possible. Then he filled every inch of space, even the bath and the “head.”
“How are you getting on?” Lightoller called below, as the tally passed 50.
”Oh, plenty of room yet,” Roger airily replied. At 75 he finally conceded he had enough.
Lightoller now shifted his efforts to the open deck. Again, the troops were told to lie down and stay down, to keep the ship more stable. Even so, by the time 50 more were aboard, Lightoller could feel Sundowner getting tender. He called it a day and started for home.
The entire Luftwaffe seemed to be waiting for him. Bombing and strafing, the enemy planes made pass after pass. Fortunately Sundowner could turn on a sixpence, and Lightoller had learned a few tricks from an expert. His youngest son, killed in the first days of the war, had been a bomber pilot and often talked about evasion tactics. The father now put his lost son’s theories to work. The secret was to wait until the last instant, when the enemy plane was already committed, then hard rudder before the pilot could readjust. Squirming and dodging his way across the Channel, Lightoller managed to get Sundowner back to England without a scratch.
Gliding into Ramsgate at 10 that night, he tied up to a trawler lying next to the quay. The usual group of waterfront onlookers drifted over to watch. All assumed that the 50 men on deck would be Sundowner’s full load—an impressive achievement in itself. But troops continued to pour out of hatches and companionways until a grand total of 130 men were landed. Turning to Lightoller, an astonished bystander could only ask, “God’s truth, mate! Where did you put them?”
So the evacuation went on. Despite bombs and frayed nerves, 64,429 men were returned this June 1. They ranged from the peppery General Montgomery to Private Bill Hersey, who also managed to embark his French bride, Augusta, now thinly disguised in British battle dress. The number lifted off the beaches fell as the troops pulled back from La Panne, but a record 47,081 were rescued from Dunkirk itself. The eastern mole continued to survive the battering it took from bombs, shells, and inept shiphandling.
At 3:40 p.m. the small minesweeper Mare edged toward the mole, hoping to pick up one more load of British soldiers waiting on the long wooden walkway. Nothing unusual about that, but then something happened that was completely unprecedented. The captain of a British destroyer lying nearby ordered Mare to proceed instead to the western mole and embark French and Belgian troops. For the first time a British ship was specifically diverted from British to Allied personnel.
Mare crossed the harbor and found a Portsmouth steam hopper and drifter already working the western mole. Three more minesweepers joined in, and between them the six ships lifted 1,200 poilus in little more than an hour.
Such endeavors helped produce statistics that were far more significant than any single incident: on June 1 a total of 35,013 French were embarked, as against 29,416 British. At last Winston Churchill had some figures he could take to Paris without embarrassment. For the Royal Navy, bras-dessus, bras-dessous had become an accomplished fact.
All morning the top command at London, Dover, and Dunkirk watched the pounding of the rescue fleet with growing alarm. Around noon Admiral Drax of The Nore Command at Chatham called the Admiralty’s attention to the mounting destroyer losses. The time had come, he suggested, to stop using them during daylight. Ramsay reluctantly agreed, and at 1:45 p.m. flashed the message, “All destroyers are to return to harbour forthwith.”
The Malcolm was just starting out on one more trip across the Channel. No ship had better morale, but even Lieutenant Mellis’s bagpipes were no longer enough to lift the men’s spirits. The air was full of stories about sinking ships, and the general feeling was that Malcolm would get it next. Then, as she cleared the breakwater, Ramsay’s message arrived, ordering her back. Mellis felt he now knew how a reprieved prisoner feels.
The Worcester was just entering Dunkirk harbor, and her skipper, Commander Allison, decided it didn’t make sense to return without picking up one more load at the mole. Packed with troops, she finally pulled out at 5:00 p.m. and immediately came under attack. Wave after wave of Stukas dived on her—three or four squadrons of about nine each—dropping more than 100 bombs. They pressed their attacks home, too, diving as low as 200 to 300 feet. Miraculously, there were no direct hits, but near misses sent giant columns of water over the ship, and bomb splinters riddled her thin steel plates. By the time the attacks tapered off, 46 men lay dead, 180 wounded.
Watching Worcester’s ordeal from his command post at the foot of the mole, Captain Tennant decided this was enough. At 6:00 p.m. he radioed Ramsay:
Things are getting very hot for ships; over 100 bombers on ships here since 0530, many casualties. Have directed that no ships sail during daylight. Evacuation by transports therefore ceases at 0300. … If perimeter holds, will complete evacuation tomorrow, Sunday night, including most French. …
But could the perimeter hold another day? London had its doubts. “Every effort must be made to complete the evacuation tonight,” General Dill had wired Weygand at 2:10 p.m. At 4 o’clock Winston Churchill warned Reynaud by telephone that the evacuation might be stretched out a day longer, but “by waiting too long, we run the risk of losing everything.” As late as 8:00 p.m. Ramsay sent a ringing appeal to his whole rescue fleet, calling for “one last effort.”
At Dunkirk General Alexander originally felt the same way, but by now he wanted more time. He was determined to get the rest of the BEF home, yet on the morning of June 1 there were still 39,000 British troops in the perimeter, plus 100,000 French. Applying the equal numbers policy, that meant lifting at least 78,000 men in the next 24 hours—obviously impossible.
At 8:00 a.m. he dropped by Bastion 32 with a new withdrawal plan, extending the evacuation through the night of June 2–3. Admiral Abrial gladly went along: the French had always had greater confidence than the British in holding the perimeter. Toward evening Captain Tennant agreed too. There was no alternative once he made the decision to end daylight operations.
London still had its doubts, but in the end the chairborne warriors at the Admiralty and War Office had to face an unpleasant truth: they just didn’t know enough to make the decision. At 6:41 General Dill wired Alexander:
We do not order any fixed moment for evacuation. You are to hold on as long as possible in order that the maximum number of French and British may be evacuated. Impossible from here to judge local situation. In close cooperation with Admiral Abrial you must act in this matter on your own judgment.
So Alexander now had a green light. The evacuation would continue through the night of June 2–3, as he and Captain Tennant proposed. But success still depended on Tennant’s precondition: “if the perimeter holds.” This was a very big “if” and the answer lay beyond the control of the leaders in London, Dover, or Dunkirk itself.