#dunkirk evacuation

The Dunkirk evacuation or Operation Dynamo was the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between 26th May and 4th June 1940. The operation commenced after large numbers of Belgian, British and French troops were cut off and surrounded by German troops during the six-week Battle of France. In a speech to the British House of Commons on 4th June, Prime Minister Winston Churchill hailed their rescue as a ‘miracle of deliverance’.

They were the lost brigade, just a few thousand British soldiers, doomed by a mortified Winston Churchill to fight to the last man to hold up the Germans at the French port of Calais.

They courageously did as ordered, sacrificing their futures and lives to delay the advance of Hitler’s armies, buying time for the miracle evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk, just 30 miles up the coast, in May 1940.

And at last the heroic stand of the Calais garrison has been widely recognised, figuring prominently in Darkest Hour, the marvellous film starring Gary Oldman that depicts those desperate days when Churchill inspired the nation to defiance rather than surrender.

... When Hitler’s forces marauded through Belgium and France, his regiment, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles (known as the Queen Vics), was rushed across the Channel on what was always going to be a suicide mission. He was caught, as he put it in his notes, ‘with a one-way ticket and no passage home’.For four critical days 3,000 lightly armed British riflemen held at bay 25,000 crack troops of two fully-mechanised German tank divisions, while being constantly pushed back house by house in vicious fighting.Barrage after barrage of shells pulverised them. Waves of Stuka dive-bombers dropped their deadly loads. But, unlike French soldiers in the town — whose white flags and cowardice under fire would be a grievance for my father all his life — the British refused to surrender.As they fell back to the port, they could see the white cliffs of Dover bathed in sunshine 21 miles across the Channel. Three British destroyers cruised offshore. But the order to evacuate did not come.With backs to the sea, ‘we still fought on,’ he recalled, ‘having to withdraw yard by yard, being Stuka’ed unmercifully, mortared and shelled by German heavy tanks’

... There could be no more illusions about rescue and the Queen Vics decided ‘the only thing to do was to make the best of it’. An officer ordered a last counter-attack to take out a machine-gun nest giving them a heavy pounding, and rounded up a few soldiers, including my father.They fixed bayonets, he recalled, crept through the dunes and charged ‘like dervishes’. Screaming, he plunged his bayonet into a German soldier.It was an act of primeval violence that would always haunt him. ‘In ten minutes I must have gone back 2,000 years,’ he recalled with distaste. ‘We were complete savages. This was warfare at its most basic, undiluted by distance, fighting a single opponent whom one must kill to avoid being killed.’

Alec James in 1938

The Little Ships at Dunkirk, June 1940, by Norman Wilkinson.