“Miracle of Dunkirk”

8 May 2020 saw us celebrate the 75^th anniversary of VE Day.  However, we mustn’t forget the dark days of May and June 1940, eighty years ago.  The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were fighting a rearguard action to save the backbone of the British army, which was making its way into a small pocket surrounding the port of Dunkirk. 

Churchill described it as a colossal military disaster and hailed the rescue as a miracle of deliverance. Wars are not won by evacuations. The evacuation began on 26 May when 7,669 allied soldiers were evacuated. It was thought that at least 45,000 men could be brought home before the Germans reached the port. By 4 June 1940, the last day of the evacuations, the total number of allied forces taking from the beaches and harbour during ‘Operation Dynamo’, as it was called, was a colossal 338,226, including 123,000 French soldiers.  What is often forgotten is that there were still large numbers of the BEF in France, cut off to the south of the Somme by the German “race to the sea”. 

At the end of May, further British troops had  been sent to France with the hope of establishing a second BEF. The majority of the 51st (Highland) Division were forced to surrender on 12 June. By then, almost 192,000 allied personnel – 144,000 of them British – were evacuated through various French ports between 15 and 25 June under the codename ‘Operation Ariel’. The Germans marched into Paris on 14 June and France surrendered eight days later.

Not many people know that 100,000 French troops evacuated from Dunkirk were temporarily billeted in camps around south-western England, before being repatriated home.  British ships ferried these French troops to ports in Normandy and Brittany. For many French soldiers, the Dunkirk evacuation represented only a few weeks’ delay before being killed or captured by the German army after their return to France.

Of the 863 ships, big and small, that helped save the British Army, 243 were sunk. From 10 May, up to the surrender of France in June, 68,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force were lost, along with 445 tanks, 20,000 motorcycles, and 65,000 other vehicles. Tons of stores and ammunition were left behind. In the same period, the Royal Air Force lost 959 aircraft.  Despite what many troops thought, the RAF were actively trying to halt the German onslaught.

It is said that for every seven men evacuated, one was left behind to become a prisoner of war.