Dunkirk 1940: The Real Story of Operation Dynamo and the Little Ships
Updated: 6 days ago
At the end of May 1940, the British Army was trapped. Almost the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, along with tens of thousands of French soldiers, had been pushed back into a pocket of land around the French port of Dunkirk. In front of them was the sea. Behind them were German tanks. Above them, German bombers came and went all day.
In London, the government was preparing for the worst. Winston Churchill, who'd been prime minister for barely two weeks, was told the navy might be able to rescue 20,000 or 30,000 men. The rest, the backbone of Britain's only trained army, would be killed or captured.
Nine days later, more than 338,000 men had been brought home. Churchill called it a miracle of deliverance. It wasn't quite a miracle. It was a mix of German hesitation, French sacrifice, the Royal Navy, brilliant organisation, calm seas, and hundreds of small boats crewed by ordinary people. And its legend has shaped how Britain sees itself ever since.
Quick Answers
What was the Dunkirk evacuation? The rescue of British, French and other Allied troops from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in northern France between 26 May and 4 June 1940, codenamed Operation Dynamo.
How many soldiers were rescued? About 338,000, roughly a third of them French. Churchill and his advisers had expected to save only 20,000 to 30,000.
What were the little ships of Dunkirk? Hundreds of small private boats, from yachts and fishing boats to river launches and lifeboats, which helped ferry troops from the shallow beaches to bigger ships offshore or carried them back to England themselves.
Why was it called a miracle? Because almost nobody expected most of the British Army to escape. Churchill himself called it a miracle of deliverance, while warning that wars are not won by evacuations.
Why did the Germans stop outside Dunkirk? On 24 May, Hitler approved an order halting the German tanks for about three days. Historians still argue about why, but the pause gave the Allies vital time to organise the defence and the evacuation.
Blitzkrieg
When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, it sent an army to France, the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, commanded by Lord Gort. For eight months, very little happened. People called it the Phoney War.
That ended on 10 May 1940. Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and the British and French rushed north into Belgium to meet them. It was exactly what the Germans wanted. Their main attack came further south, where a huge force of tanks pushed through the thick Ardennes forest, which the French had thought was impassable for armour, and smashed through the French lines at Sedan.
From there, the German panzers raced west towards the Channel coast. On 20 May they reached the sea near Abbeville. The Allied armies in Belgium and northern France, including almost the entire BEF, had been cut off from the rest of France. Among the German commanders racing across France was Erwin Rommel, whose 7th Panzer Division moved so fast it became known as the Ghost Division.
The Retreat to the Sea
Gort tried to work with the French on a counterattack, but it was hopeless. On 25 May, with his army in danger of being completely surrounded, he made the decision that saved it. He would retreat to the coast and try to get his men home. Dunkirk, with its harbour and long sandy beaches, was the only real option.
Getting there was its own nightmare. Roads were jammed with refugees, broken-down vehicles and retreating soldiers, while German aircraft strafed the columns. Units fought desperate rearguard actions to hold the edges of the shrinking pocket. Some of the fighting was fierce and strange. Mad Jack Churchill, a British officer who went into battle with a longbow and a broadsword, is said to have shot a German soldier with an arrow during the retreat.
Some of it was atrocious. On 27 May, at Le Paradis, around 97 men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment surrendered to an SS unit and were machine-gunned in a farmyard. The next day, at Wormhoudt, around 80 British and French prisoners were murdered by SS troops. Further down the coast, at Calais, a British brigade held out until 26 May, tying up German forces that might otherwise have joined the attack on Dunkirk.
Hitler's Halt Order
Then the Germans did something that has puzzled historians ever since. On 24 May, with German tanks just a few miles from Dunkirk, Hitler approved an order from his general Gerd von Rundstedt for the panzers to halt. They didn't start moving forward again until 26 May.
Nobody is completely sure why. The tanks had been driving and fighting for two weeks and needed repairs. The marshy ground around Dunkirk was bad tank country. Hermann Göring had boasted that his Luftwaffe could finish off the trapped army from the air. And Hitler may have wanted to save his armour for the next stage of the campaign, against the rest of France. Whatever the reason, the pause gave the Allies precious time to strengthen their defences around Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, in London, the War Cabinet was in crisis. For several days at the end of May, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, argued that Britain should explore whether Mussolini's Italy could help broker peace terms with Germany. Churchill refused. If the army had been lost at Dunkirk, it's not hard to imagine the argument going the other way.
The Dynamo Room
The man in charge of getting the army home was Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay. He'd actually retired before the war, but had been recalled in 1939 to command the naval base at Dover. His headquarters was in a network of tunnels dug into the white cliffs beneath Dover Castle. One of the rooms had once housed an electrical generator, a dynamo, and that gave the operation its name: Operation Dynamo.
Ramsay and his staff had been planning an evacuation for days. At 6.57pm on 26 May, the order came to begin. The original hope was to bring out around 45,000 men in two days before the Germans closed in.
The problem was Dunkirk itself. The harbour had been wrecked by bombing and its docks were burning. The beaches stretched for miles, but they shelved so gently that large ships couldn't get anywhere near the shore. The troops would have to be ferried out in small boats, which was agonisingly slow.
Captain Tennant and the Mole
The breakthrough came from Captain William Tennant, the naval officer Ramsay sent to Dunkirk to organise things on the ground. Tennant noticed that the harbour had two long breakwaters, called moles, sticking out into deep water. The East Mole was a narrow wooden walkway on concrete piles, almost a mile long, and was never designed for ships to tie up against.
Tennant decided to try anyway. Destroyers and ferries came alongside the mole, and soldiers filed along its narrow planks, sometimes four abreast, and climbed down onto the decks. It worked. Over the rest of the operation, around 200,000 men were taken off from the mole, far more than from the beaches. On the worst days, ships were sunk alongside it, and the queue of men still kept moving.
The Little Ships
For the beaches, the navy needed small boats, lots of them. Back on 14 May, the Admiralty had asked owners of self-propelled pleasure boats to register them. Now officials scoured the south and east coasts and the Thames for anything that could float and carry men. Motor yachts, fishing boats, river cruisers, lifeboats, barges and paddle steamers were all pressed into service. Most were crewed by naval personnel, but many were sailed by their owners, fishermen and volunteers.
Hundreds of them went. The crossing could be anything from about 39 to 87 miles each way, depending on the route the ships had to take to avoid minefields and German guns. Once there, the smallest boats shuttled backwards and forwards between the beaches and the bigger ships offshore, again and again, often under fire.
One of the most remarkable crews was aboard a motor yacht called Sundowner. Its owner was Charles Lightoller, a retired seaman who'd been the most senior officer to survive the sinking of the Titanic. When the navy tried to requisition his boat, he insisted that if anyone was taking her, it would be him. With his son Roger and a teenage Sea Scout called Gerald Ashcroft, he sailed to Dunkirk on 1 June and brought back 130 soldiers, packed in like sardines, dodging German aircraft all the way.
The smallest of the little ships still in existence is the Tamzine, an open fishing boat less than 15 feet long. Many of the boats never came back. Others limped home riddled with bullet holes.
On the Beaches
For the soldiers waiting on the sand, Dunkirk was days of exhaustion, hunger and fear. The town behind them was on fire, and a huge column of black smoke from the burning oil tanks hung over everything. They queued in long lines that snaked down the beach and into the sea, sometimes standing up to their necks in water, waiting for a boat to reach them.
German aircraft attacked again and again. Soldiers dug holes in the sand and threw themselves flat when the Stuka dive-bombers came screaming down. Sand absorbed a lot of the blast, which saved many lives. Some men improvised piers out of lorries driven into the sea at low tide, so boats could come alongside.
Voices from the Beach
The men who were there remembered it in small, vivid details. James Bradley, a gunner in the Royal Artillery, later described lying on the sand while bullets went whistling overhead and mortar shells crashed around them. Reg Rymer, a private in the Cheshire Regiment, remembered German aircraft machine-gunning the boats and everything else in sight.
Arthur Divine, a journalist who crewed one of the little ships, wrote an account of what it was like to arrive off the beaches. He summed it up in four words:
"The din was infernal."
For many soldiers, the strongest memory was simply the exhaustion. Men who'd been marching and fighting for two weeks with almost no sleep collapsed the moment they were safe. One of them, Romeo Jenkins, who made it onto one of the last boats, said he fell asleep and the next thing he knew he was at Dover.
Back in England, the trains carrying the evacuated soldiers inland were met at every station by crowds handing out tea, sandwiches, cigarettes and postcards so the men could write home. Many soldiers had expected to be treated as a beaten army. Instead, they were welcomed home like heroes.
Not all of them were British. French, Belgian and Polish troops were there too, and so were four mule companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, who'd been sent to France to help with transport. Most of the Indian soldiers were evacuated, but one company was captured.
Where Was the RAF?
Many of the soldiers on the beaches felt abandoned by the air force. They saw the German bombers, but rarely saw British fighters, and some RAF men arriving back in England were jeered at or even attacked by bitter soldiers.
It wasn't fair. The RAF flew thousands of sorties over Dunkirk, but much of the air fighting took place inland or above the clouds, out of sight of the men on the ground. Squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes were flying from bases in southern England, which meant they could only stay over Dunkirk for a short time. The RAF lost over a hundred aircraft protecting the evacuation, and it held back enough of its fighters to fight the Battle of Britain a few weeks later.
The Cost
The Royal Navy paid a heavy price. More than 200 British and Allied vessels were sunk during the evacuation, including six British destroyers. HMS Keith, the flagship of the admiral commanding the ships off the beaches, was bombed and sunk on 1 June.
The worst single loss came in the early hours of 29 May. The destroyer HMS Wakeful had just left Dunkirk with around 640 soldiers packed below decks, so many that they were crammed into every space the crew could find. Just before one in the morning, a German E-boat fired a spread of torpedoes at her in the dark. One hit her amidships, and she broke in two and sank in seconds.
The soldiers below decks didn't stand a chance. Of the 640 men on board, only one survived. A handful of the crew were picked up from the water. And the disaster wasn't over. HMS Grafton, which had stopped to search for survivors, was torpedoed by a German submarine, and in the confusion a minesweeper rammed and sank a small drifter that had also come to help, mistaking it for an enemy boat.
Daylight sailings became so dangerous that from 2 June the evacuation was carried out mostly at night. The busiest day was 31 May, when around 68,000 men were brought out.
The army left almost everything behind. Tens of thousands of vehicles, around 2,500 guns and huge amounts of ammunition, equipment and supplies were abandoned in France. For months afterwards, Britain had barely enough weapons to arm the men it had saved.
The Last Men Out
The last British troops were taken off on the night of 2 to 3 June. The French rearguard, which had held the perimeter around Dunkirk with enormous courage, made it possible. On the final night, ships went back for as many French soldiers as they could reach.
At 9.30am on 4 June, resistance in Dunkirk ended. Tens of thousands of French soldiers who'd held the line were left behind and taken prisoner. Many French people felt, with some justice, that Britain had looked after itself first, and the bitterness lingered for years.
We Shall Fight on the Beaches
On 4 June 1940, Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons. He called the evacuation a miracle of deliverance, but he was careful not to let it go to anyone's head. We must be very careful, he said, not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.
Then he finished with one of the most famous passages of any speech in English, promising that Britain would fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills, and would never surrender. The speech wasn't broadcast live. Most people heard it read out by a BBC announcer that evening. But the words spread fast.
It Wasn't Over: The Lancastria
Dunkirk wasn't the end of the evacuations from France. Over 100,000 British troops were still further south, and in the middle of June the navy launched another rescue, Operation Aerial, from ports along the French Atlantic coast. Nearly 192,000 more servicemen were brought out, around 144,000 of them British.
On 17 June 1940, the Cunard liner Lancastria, converted into a troopship, was anchored off St Nazaire. She'd been built to carry about 2,200 passengers. Nobody knows exactly how many people were on board that day, but it was at least 5,000 and possibly far more, soldiers, RAF men and civilian refugees, including women and children.
That afternoon, German bombers attacked. The Lancastria was hit by four bombs and rolled over and sank in less than 20 minutes. Fuel oil spread across the water and caught fire. Survivors in the sea sang songs to keep their spirits up as they waited to be rescued, and around 2,500 were pulled out alive. The ship's Staff Purser later remembered that there was surprisingly little panic. Estimates of the dead range from around 3,500 to more than 5,000. It was, and still is, the worst maritime disaster in British history, with more deaths than the Titanic and the Lusitania put together.
Most people in Britain had no idea it had happened. Churchill banned any reporting of it, saying the newspapers had quite enough disaster for one day. The story only came out in late July, when it appeared first in American newspapers. Even then, it was quickly overshadowed by the war. It took nearly 50 years for an official memorial to be put up, on the seafront at St Nazaire, overlooking the wreck. It reads: We have not forgotten.
The Dunkirk Spirit
France surrendered less than three weeks later. Britain was on its own, and the Battle of Britain began that summer. The army saved at Dunkirk would go on to fight in North Africa, Italy and, four years later, in Normandy, where many of the same men landed on the beaches of France again.
Dunkirk became a myth almost overnight. The Dunkirk spirit, the idea of ordinary British people pulling together in a crisis and somehow muddling through, became part of the national character. The little ships became the heart of the story, even though most of the men were actually brought home by the navy's destroyers and ferries.
Bertram Ramsay went on to plan the naval side of the D-Day landings in 1944, before he was killed in a plane crash in January 1945. The surviving little ships are looked after by the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships, and every five years many of them sail back across the Channel to Dunkirk together. And the story has been told again and again, most recently in Christopher Nolan's 2017 film Dunkirk.
It was a defeat, and Churchill was right not to call it anything else. But it was a defeat that gave Britain the chance to keep fighting, and in 1940, that was everything.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into Dunkirk and the summer of 1940? These are worth a look.
Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. A gripping, detailed account of the fighting retreat and the evacuation, told through the men who were there.
The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord. A classic, highly readable history of Operation Dynamo and the little ships.
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