The Evacuation of Dunkirk
The fate of the British army hung by a thread in May 1940, but ships large and small, military and civilian, came to the rescue.
1940
King George VI 1936-1952
© TheTurfBurner, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Built in 1932, this yacht (formerly owned by Sir Malcolm Campbell) was acquired by the Navy, and renamed ‘Chico’ in January 1940. She subsequently played a key part in Operation Dynamo, ferrying soldiers at Dunkirk to larger ships, and bringing others all the way home to Dover. Here, she is seen at Oban in Scotland in 2015.
Introduction
Just months into the Second World War, the bulk of the British army was holed up in Dunkirk in May 1940 with nowhere to run. In one of the great what-ifs of history, Adolf Hitler hesitated, handing the Royal Navy a week in which to mount a famous rescue mission.
AFTER Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the British Expeditionary Force, a thorn in the German side during the Great War, was again deployed to France. This time, however, the speed of the enemy’s advance through Holland and Belgium, bursting into France by the Ardennes, caught everyone by surprise.
On May 28th, 1940, the BEF and its commanding officers — in Winston Churchill’s words, ‘the whole root and core and brain of the British Army’ — found themselves crammed into Dunkirk on the French coast, facing annihilation. But ‘Operation Dynamo’ scrambled hundreds of civilian motorboats, fishing-boats and pleasure-craft across the Channel, to help the overstretched Navy bring nearly 340,000 British and French troops home by June 4th.
With the Luftwaffe patrolling overhead, almost 70,000 men and over 200 ships were lost; the Germans picked up most of the British army’s precious equipment and vehicles. It was, as Churchill said, both a ‘miracle of deliverance’ and a catastrophic defeat. Ten days later, the Germans marched triumphantly into Paris.
