Some of the “little ships” of Dunkirk being towed home.
Some of the “little ships” of Dunkirk being towed home.
ALTHOUGH ADMIRAL RAMSAY was doubtful about continuing the evacuation beyond the night of June 1–2, and General Alexander still more so, it would be continued, incredibly, for two more days, by that point largely to take off as many French troops as possible. Most of those in the know politically, and all of the British generals, had by now written off the possibility of the French Army being able to hold a line against the Germans, with the significant exception of the prime minister, whose stubborn belief in the French will to fight continued, despite the warning signs of collapse. For the moment that line was intended to be on the Somme and Oise fronts, but even General Weygand, the French commander in chief, did not pretend that it could be held for long, if at all—and with good reason, since it was merely an imaginary line drawn on the map rather than a solid, well-prepared defensive line, and only signified the French government’s hope to hold on to Paris, provided that the British could produce a minimum of three more divisions and that “the maximum British air strength,” as Weygand put it, was sent to France at once. These demands produced an agonizing discussion in the British War Cabinet about the possibility that France might be forced to make a separate peace and that Britian would be left alone, to face the Germans. “This would mean the establishment in France of a Government friendly to the Nazis. . . . We might eventually be faced with a French Government, not merely out of the war, but actually hostile to us.”
The notion that France might not only surrender but even change sides was so daunting that it must have been with some relief that Churchill ended the meeting and went off to deal with the perennial problem of the debts of his son, Randolph. Randolph Churchill had inherited many aspects of his father’s personality, but lacked the genius, the fierce ambition, and the disciplined work habits. Churchill himself had always lived far beyond his means, run up gambling debts (father and son both had a fatal weakness for casinos), persistently failed to pay his bills, and drunk more than was good for him, but Randolph’s character was further spoiled by rudeness, poor judgment, and an inflated view of his own importance; nor did he have the moments of charm, wit, and sentimentality that sometimes won over even Churchill’s bitterest political enemies.
The next two weeks would see the French tragedy played out to its fatal conclusion, with the fall of Paris on June 14 and the French surrender three days later. The British could not strip Fighter Command of the aircraft that would shortly be needed in the Battle of Britain, nor was it possible to reequip the men who had been evacuated from Dunkirk and form them into new divisions in time to help France. French appeals to President Roosevelt merely produced vague offers of moral support, while British and French appeals to Mussolini not to join the war had no effect on the Duce, who was determined to enter it in time to share in the pickings. In the meantime, if the French were to be kept in the war at all, the evacuation, however difficult, had to continue. By now it could only be carried out from Dunkirk harbor by night, and even then the risk to ships was enormous—“it was clear that the rate of loss could not continue.” German artillery was now in reach of all the approaches to Dunkirk, and eight of the big personnel-carrying ferries had already been sunk, as well as six destroyers. The outer port was by now itself a danger for all ships; it was littered with wrecks and wreckage, and the innumerable cut lines and cables would often wind themselves around propellers, immobilizing the vessel. Destroyers and vessels of a similar or larger size could only leave the port by backing out astern through the narrow opening in the breakwaters, a challenging maneuver in the dark, let alone under artillery fire. The destroyers themselves were vulnerable—to get a thousand men on board one, everything that was not immediately necessary, like mess tables “and all possible moveable gear,” had to be thrown overboard and the watertight doors that normally sealed off each compartment of the ship opened to make room for more men, thus a hit from a single bomb or a shell could flood the whole ship and sink her. Under these conditions it was agonizing for the captain of a vessel to wait in the harbor when troops failed to turn up because of a failure of communications or, in the case of the French, fatal disorganization.
By dawn on Sunday, June 2, most of the British troops had been evacuated—by then consisting of the rear guard who had been fighting hard without interruption for three days to hold what remained of the beach and the eastern side of the town. From the ships the sound and flash of nearby rifle and machine-gun fire remained constant throughout the night, indicating that the enemy was now closing in on the port. Naval officers went ashore in the dark to urge the troops along to the breakwater, one of them making his way through the gutted, ravaged streets around the port playing “a set of bagpipes as a summons to the weary men.”
As the French troops being evacuated began to outnumber the British, the inevitable language problems and national differences began to make themselves felt. To quote A. D. Divine, DSM, who was there, “It was impossible to explain to inland Frenchmen the intricacies of small-boat handling on a failing tide. Among certain units discipline had broken down, and it was equally hard without an absolute command of the language to stop them from rushing the boats and settling them firmly in the sand. It was impossible to stop late-comers jumping into overloaded boats. There were not a few cases of small craft that left the beach and sank as soon as they reached deep water and the tumultuous wash of the destroyers.” It should be noted, in all fairness, that many British naval officers and yachtsmen made the same complaint about British soldiers on the beach, and that members of the fighting formations disparaged the behavior of line of communication on troops. There was in any case much tighter discipline on the mole than on the beach, where men had to wade out to sea and struggle to get on a boat. Despite all these difficulties, however, nearly 27,000 people were evacuated on June 2 alone.
Still, it was not enough. In order to move the French troops off it was necessary to continue evacuating even after dawn on Monday, June 3, many of them lifted from the beach in small boats, yachts, and fishing vessels. Admiral Ramsay had intended to end the evacuation during the night of June 2, but when he learned that elements of the French rear guard were still covering “the retirement of the British rearguard,” he overruled himself. “We cannot leave our allies in the lurch,” he wrote, “and I must call on all officers and men detailed for further evacuation tonight, and let the world see that we never let down an ally.”
Complaints that British warships had waited under fire on the night of June 2 to take off French troops, but because these never arrived were obliged to go back to Dover empty, made their way up to Churchill, who telegraphed Premier Reynaud in Paris, urging him “to make every effort in co-operation with us to evacuate their men as quickly as possible.” By now, the last three thousand of the British rear guard had already been embarked, Major-General Alexander and Captain Tennant, the senior naval officer, made a tour of the harbor and the beaches in a fast motorboat to make sure that nobody who could reply in English was left, then returned to the mole to board a destroyer for home in the early hours of the morning.
Despite the peril to ships and boats Admiral Ramsay made a last major effort on the night of June 3–4, taking off a further 26,175 men for a grand total of 338,226, of whom 139,921 were French. The last ship to leave was the destroyer HMS Shikari, at 3:40 in the morning of Tuesday, June 4, with German infantry firing only a few streets away from where she was moored. Most of the remaining French troops were by now totally out of ammunition.
General Alexander, when he reported to Anthony Eden, secretary of state for war, received his congratulations, but replied, with what his biographer Nigel Nicolson describes as “engaging modesty,” “We were not hard pressed, you know.” Certainly “engaging modesty” would be a hallmark of Alexander’s throughout his long career, during much of which his good manners and modesty were always contrasted, as they still are by historians, with Montgomery’s brash boastfulness, but in fact Alexander was right. The Germans could have pressed much harder—a couple of panzer divisions could have broken through to the beach and the harbor and prevented the evacuation altogether by May 31, but the Germans were already looking toward June 5, the date set by Hitler for Case Red, the advance of nine armies, consisting of 140 divisions (including all the panzer divisions), intended “to annihilate the allied forces still remaining in France. . . . Operational enemy reserves in considerable numbers need no longer be expected. It will therefore be possible first to break down under heavy assault the hastily constructed enemy front south of the Somme and the Aisne and then, by rapid, deep penetration, to prevent the enemy from carrying out an ordered retreat or from forming a defense line in [the] rear.”
Against this formidable force, now rested and fresh, the French could assemble only forty-three divisions, some of them still in the process of formation, many of them depleted, tired, and beset with poor morale, plus the thirteen immobilized “fortress divisions” of the Maginot Line, which were as useless in the coming battle as toy soldiers, three badly depleted armored divisions, three useless cavalry divisions, one British infantry division—the 51st (Highland) Division—a detached British brigade, and the much reduced British 1st Armored Division.
Destroyed French heavy tank.
Had the Allied commander in chief been a general of genius rather than the timid and defeatist Weygand, and had the British been willing to risk their whole air force, the outcome would still have been the same: a swift and catastrophic French defeat. Even the evacuation from Dunkirk of nearly 140,000 French soldiers would have no effect on the battle—except for the few who would eventually join de Gaulle, they were shipped back to France just in time for the French surrender, and so spent the rest of the war as prisoners in German camps, contributing their number to the nearly two million French POWs held by the Germans—equivalent to about 10 percent of the adult male population of France.
It should be borne in mind that despite French claims that the British abandoned their ally, a charge that only intensified after the surrender by Vichy propaganda, the reality is that almost half of those evacuated from Dunkirk were French. On June 3 Churchill addressed what Hugh Dalton, minister of economic warfare, called “a squash of ministers,” by which he meant the much larger full cabinet, as opposed to the War Cabinet, and spoke with great frankness, as recorded by Dalton.
He had thought of nothing but the dead, wounded, and long dreary processions making their way to prison camps and starvation in Germany. The French? They will ask us for help and we must give them more than we can spare, which will still not be all they ask. We must not denude this island. “We’ve got the men away but we’ve lost the luggage.” The French insisted on the post of honour at the end, and so “after a seemly wrangle we brought the Cameron Highlanders away. Otherwise they were to have stayed and died at the end.” The PM wants to be able to say to the House tomorrow, “If I wavered for a moment, all my colleagues in the Government would turn and rend me.” No one raised any objection to this.
Churchill voiced his thoughts more fully to the assembled ministers than to the War Cabinet. There was still plenty of waverers in his own party and at least one in the War Cabinet, but even to them the return of the BEF from Dunkirk demonstrated that neither Hitler nor the German War Command was infallible, and that though the German Army was formidable it was not, perhaps, unstoppable, as well as the indisputable fact that the Royal Air Force had proved itself at least the equal of the Luftwaffe and that the Royal Navy’s supremacy and resourcefulness remained undiminished. So long as the fight was at sea or in the air, Britain still had a chance to survive, and no German invasion was likely to succeed without German command of the sea and the air over the Channel. There was, in fact, a glimmer of hope, however small and faint, even if France collapsed, which the prime minister was not as yet willing concede.
Three of the armada of “little ships.”
The “squash of ministers” may have been a rehearsal for what was to come the next day—one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, certainly the one containing the most memorable (and often remembered) of lines. It is a curious blend of realism and exhortation, as if he wanted to encourage people and at the same time caution them against assigning to Dunkirk “the attributes of a victory.”
“Wars are not won by evacuations,” he warned them, and in a speech of nearly four thousand words, lasting over half an hour, he related with remarkable frankness the story of the debacle that had fallen upon the BEF and the French First Army, rising at the end to that most defiant of perorations:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue of the old.
Here, in a nutshell, was his strategy, just as he had explained to his son Randolph—to struggle and survive at all costs and however long it might take until events brought the United States into the war, even if Britain was alone. Here too was his message to the British people—that they must prepare themselves for the possibility of French surrender (without in any way letting France “off the hook”), and for the long, hard, lonely fight that he had predicted in his short speech of May 13.
His old friend Josiah Wedgwood wrote to him on June 4, “That was worth 1,000 guns & the speech of 1,000 years,” and it was scarcely an exaggeration. Churchill had turned words into weapons, and in the days ahead those words would do more than anything else to sustain the British cause, at home and in the United States.
The novelist Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband that the speech “sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine,” and even today there are still people alive who feel the same way. Yet few people actually heard him give it. The words were read aloud by an announcer on the BBC that night—Churchill did not get around to recording the speech in his own voice until 1949, and even then, that recording does not do justice to his delivery of it in the House of Commons, the majestic voice, the dramatic pauses that made listeners wait spellbound for the end of a phrase or a sentence, the deep descent of his voice to emphasize the last word of a sentence or paragraph. “One feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind [his words] like a great fortress,” Sackville-West wrote: “they are never words for words’ sake.” They were not accidental. Churchill’s speeches were carefully composed by him, typed in the form of blank verse on a typewriter with special large type, and carefully memorized and rehearsed until he was word perfect.
Many who heard him in the House felt the same emotion as Vita Sackville-West, while others noted that the cheers and applause from his own side of the House were still by no means equal to those that Chamberlain had received on his return from Munich. Churchill controlled the Conservative Party—the preeminent appeaser and former fervent supporter of Neville Chamberlain, chief whip David Margesson, enforced party discipline—but he did not yet have its heart.
That would come a month later, not for one of his great war speeches, but ironically for his announcement on July 4, 1940, that a British fleet had opened fire on the French fleet anchored at Mers el-Kebir in Morocco to ensure that these warships would not be turned over to the Germans or the Italians. The House at last greeted Churchill, who stood with tears streaming down his face, with heartfelt applause and cheers at the fact that Britain had at last acted with the bold, decisive use of force of a great power in what Churchill described with sorrow as “this melancholy action.” He would later describe it as a “hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned,” but however repugnant it was to have sunk an ally’s ships it carried a message heard clearly in Berlin and, more important still, in Washington—that Britain would henceforth follow in the spirit of Palmerston’s famous declaration that it had no permanent friends, only permanent interests, and would act with unapologetic ruthlessness in the defense of those interests, whether toward friend or foe.
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It should not be supposed that the whole country was infused with courage from top to bottom, nor that everyone’s spirits were buoyed by the evacuation from Dunkirk. “The Spirit of Dunkirk” came later, much later, as did the adoption of Churchill as the embodiment of defiance and victory. At the time, there were still plenty of people whose reaction to Dunkirk was ambivalent—it was a great relief that the majority of the BEF was home safe and sound (if without their weapons), but at the same time many people still feared a German invasion. It would take the Battle of Britain, from July 1940 to the end of September, to lay that fear to rest, but then came the Blitz, the German mass bombing of London and many other cities.
“Mass Observation,” organized under the Ministry of Information and soon known after Minister of Information Duff Cooper as “Cooper’s Snoopers,” carried out what would now be called “opinion polls” on a mass basis, as well as secretly reading huge volumes of people’s mail, and the conclusions were alarming—fear of an invasion was widespread, as well as resentment that the government was not telling the truth about how bad things were. This is partly because Britain remained largely unchanged since before the war—class consciousness, poverty, the sense that “the wrong people,” toffs, nobs, the rich, and the well educated were still in charge and as selfish and incompetent as ever, all these things were intensified by the war, not ended by it.
The huge difference in pay, comfort, accommodations, and respect in the armed services between commissioned officers and “other ranks” mirrored the same class rivalry that continued to thrive in British private life despite appeals to “national unity.” It had only been fourteen years since the “General Strike” in support of the miners had brought the country to a halt and exposed the bedrock of class distinction. “Working class” people in 1940 suspected that “the upper class” continued to dine well at their clubs and restaurants, and to evade most of the deprivations and irritations imposed by the government on the public, and they were not wrong. People who had country homes, or estates in the country, were able to get eggs and meat far beyond the scale laid down by rationing, and expensive restaurants continued to thrive for those who could attend them. Even the Blitz, when it finally began, seemed to recognize English class distinctions, since the area most heavily bombed at first was the East End of London, impoverished and working class. This was deliberate—the Germans hoped to stir up working-class discontent against the British government—but also accidental, since the great Port of London was a strategic target and easy for German airmen to find.
The spirit of wartime unity between the rich and the poor was not altogether a fiction, but it was nothing like as strong as it became portrayed later on in British propaganda, let alone in films and eventually television. Titles, accent, inherited wealth, a childhood and youth spent at the “right” schools and in what came to be known later as “Oxbridge,” still determined who got fed the best, who got a commission instead of serving “in the ranks,” and whose children were evacuated to the safety of Canada or the United States. British class warfare was ever so slightly suspended during the war, but by no means eliminated.*
Dunkirk fit into the British war narrative so well that it became myth even as it was going on. The fact that many officers at first got off the beach or the mole without their men was suppressed, along with the incompetence that had sent the BEF to France so poorly equipped for modern war or the political stupidity that had put the BEF under the command of General Gamelin in the first place. It was, however, the “little ships” that captured the minds of most people, with yachtsmen and Sea Scouts performing miracles, rather than the reality, which was that good planning by the Royal Navy was responsible for taking off the lion’s share of those who were evacuated. The deeply ingrained modern English preference for amateurs over professionals had something to do with this, and there was also a populist appeal in the notion that ordinary people, without rank or professional training, could play such a large role by simply sailing across the Channel and “pitching in.” “The Dunkirk Spirit,” somewhat sentimentalized, is still a potent factor in the way the British think of themselves, and of the difference between them and Continental nations.
All the same, not everyone was cheered by it, or regarded Dunkirk as a triumph. In May of 2016 a letter to the Times described feelings that were not uncommon in 1940.
Sir, seventy-six years ago this week the German army pushed out troops back to Dunkirk, where despite all odds most were rescued. As an 11-year-old I joined a crowd looking over the bridge at St. John’s station in Bedford. The platform was full of soldiers sitting on the ground, huddled together, 200 or more. Some had no boots, many without tunics, some wrapped in blankets, many were bandaged up. Moving among them were Women’s Voluntary Service members handing out drinks. The most memorable thing was the silence. These men had just been lifted from the beaches and were exhausted.
I went home and told my mother who cried out, “What will become of us?” Then she clutched me hard and burst into tears. I was too young to understand that invasion was probably imminent. Those were desperate days.
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* Clive Ponting’s much reviled history of 1940 is a compendium of such class differences, and how they continued to flourish in wartime.