The context of Dunkirk.

Before I review the recent film, what follows sets the scene for the historical event, details largely absent from the film.
Staff work is never celebrated and when it works, it passes unnoticed. The Royal Navy began planning for a mass withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force, including directly from beaches, six days before the first lift occurred. Procedures were elaborated, the wording of simple and clear orders hammered out and communicated, beach wardens designated and briefings written for them, auditing began of flat-bottomed small craft on RN vessels, estimates made of rates of embarkation per hour under fire, distribution of medicine and field dressings to RN ships begun, drafting medical personnel and assigning them to ships started, listing civilian craft in southern ports was started, decks were cleared on RN transports, and so and on. Operation Dynamo started long before the first Tommie got wet.
Operating at the limit of the range of fighter aircraft from England, the Royal Air Force flew more than a hundred missions over Dunkirk during the evacuation. However, no one could guess at the timing of German attacks and so The RAF was often absent when the Luftwaffe was present and vice versa.
Nearly all of those evacuated were taken off piers and moles on RN boats and transferred to warships. The sea around Dunkirk beaches, by the way, is shallow, meaning the larger ships had to stand well out, and it was a long transfer from shore to ship. Six or more RN ships were sunk by German air attacks with much loss of life. At the initiative of their captains, some French ships also loaded troops, and likewise some French ships were sunk.
The French defence of a line around Lille resisted for four days against a superior force holding ten German divisions off Dunkirk, and that reduced the pressure on the perimeter. In the end much of Lille was levelled by house-to-house fighting. The town of Dunkirk itself was obliterated by artillery fire. By the way. These battles are seldom mentioned in the British accounts of Dunkirk. By the way, Lille was the hometown of Charles de Gaulle and members of his family died in this struggle.
Nearly all of the little ships that participated in the exercise had Royal Navy personnel on board, though often a very junior cadet, partly this was to honour the legality of impressing the boats into service and indemnifying the owners and civilian crew. The little ships ferried men from the beaches to the ships, and some sailed directly back to England, like that of Mr Miniver. One estimate suggests six thousand men were evacuated directly to England by little, civilian water craft. I have seen that said as ‘only six thousand’ out of the more than 330,000. True that is less than .02 percent. But it is 6,000 individuals welcomed home from the cauldron and as a whole they amount to a light division which later any general later would be glad to have.
While there was planning and preparation, there was also disruption and confusion. Much fell to the initiative to those on the spot. That initiative worked as well as it did in large part because of the planning that set the scene.
French troops had fallen back onto the line Dunkirk – Ostend which was slowly collapsing. There was no plan for them to do anything but fight. Communication between French field commands and headquarters were cut, and communication among the field commands was likewise nearly zero. (Much of the responsibility for the loss of communication must go to French High Command which refused the use of field radios.) Without communication, without orders, responsibility fell down the chain of command ever lower in an army that did not prize initiative.
When the British evacuations began, the French troops in the area had no orders. Some individuals made up their own minds and tried to join in. The best way was to change coats by peeling one off a deadman and trying to look English.
At times French officers on their own initiative tried to board their men in units, and some were successful and others were turned aside. This refusal to board some of the French was reported to Prime Minister Winston Churchill by British army officers, and Churchill immediately ordered that there be no discrimination but rather first come, first boarded. This applied to the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, and even some Poles and Czechs who were there.
There was the germ of a plan, hatched by the French Under-Secretary of State for War in the Reynaud Government to withdraw to the Cotentin peninsula in Western Normandy. Troops evacuated from Dunkirk could be fed into that plan. That Secretary of State was General Charles de Gaulle.
The 100,000 French troops disembarked in England from Dunkirk spent only two or three days there. They were entrained to Bristol, Swansea, and other western ports and shipped to Bordeaux while the war continued.
While French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud wanted to fight on, the generals at the French meeting table were defeated. They convinced the majority of cabinet that further resistance was futile. The cabinet asked the President, a figurehead, to empower Phillipe Pétain to ask what terms the Germans would offer. That was his mandate when named prime minister of a one-man government. Instead he surrendered without any effort at negotiation. Doubtless negotiation would have failed but the effort might have bought a little more time and much more dignity. But that surrender without the effort rendered the legitimacy of his claim to government suspect to many.
While 200,000+ men of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated at Dunkirk, thousands of others were evacuated about the same time along the north coast, and later more than 100,000 others from the west coast of France. These other evacuations were less heroic and are not well known as a result but each was done in difficult circumstances. The shallow waters off Dunkirk kept the U-Boats away but not so off Bordeaux.
That Dunkirk became a moral victory has a simple but overlooked explanation. With the impulses of a democratic politician, Churchill who had become prime minister on the day Dynamo started, went to Waterloo Station in London to see for himself the battered and wounded troops returning from the south coast. As he walked among them, they cheered him and he they; he put his hat on his walking stick, and his resolve to fight on multiplied. Democracy at work. They were beaten but not defeated and he got the message.
At Dunkirk the decisions were many. When the Germans broke through at Sedan, one prong drove to the sea to cut off the British Expeditionary Force there and the two French armies in Belgium, while another drove at Paris to decapitate the French government. The French resistance was stiff in some places, like Lille, yet in other places it dissolved. The RAF decided to withdraw its aircraft from Frenchg airfields to England, lest their airplanes, fall into the hands of the advancing Germans, to save its assets to fight another day. This RAF withdrawal outraged many Frenchmen who hoped they would fight on, come what may. Here national interests diverged among the Allies. It seemed all or nothing right now for the French, but the English could wait to fight again another day.
Hmm, but the French did have an alternative, one that Reynauld proffered without success. To take the government into exile to Algiers and continue the war from the vast French Empire with the imperial army. There might have been another day for them, too. One of his generals had an airplane fuelled and ready to do just that.
While some French officers thought the British evacuation was a betrayal, that sentiment is largely hindsight. At the time, a withdrawal kept those troops, a third of them French, in the war and not in prison camps which was the fate of those who remained. Most of the defence of the Dunkirk perimeter fell to the French who held longer than the Germans had estimated they could.
That the Germans did not go all out against Dunkirk seems to be the conclusion. Why not? Partly because the strategic goal was Paris, and not Dunkirk. Most of the Luftwaffe efforts were directed to that end. As terrible as the Luftwaffe attacks on Dunkirk beaches and shipping were, most of its efforts went to paving the way for the advance on Paris.
It is also true that the German forces attacking Dunkirk were at the end of an attenuated and nearly exhausted supply line. Petrol, ammunition, medical care, medicines, fresh water, tires and treads, field dressings, food, oil, replacement parts, boot laces, all of these were depleted, as were the men. Machines were breaking down from two weeks of continuous use. The Germans had to slow down to recuperate and re-new energies. The horses that carried the vast bulk of the supplies were knackered.
There are other explanations that seem less credible. One is that Hitler gave the stop order, rather than just agreed to it, to open negotiations with England. Some connect this speculation to Rudolph Hess’s earlier flight. It seems a long bow. The best way to negotiate with England would be from strength by capturing the British Expeditionary Force which had in its ranks the vast bulk of England’s professional army at the time, that part which was not in the impregnable fortress of Singapore.
Another explanation is that Hitler wanted his genius recognised and gave the stop order to show the generals who was in charge. It fits the man, but it does not explain why the stop continued as long as it did. What explains the duration is the re-supply of the Wehrmacht and also that the forces in the north had a second-order priority compared to the forces driving onto Paris. This latter offensive is neglected by British accounts because their were no British troops involved, only French, of whom thousands died.
There was no hurry because the German supposition, based on its own staff work, was that most of the men trapped in and around Dunkirk had no where to go. What surprised the Germans was that the evacuation worked. Their staff work concluded that an evacuation would lift about 40,000 men plus of minus ten percent, and leave the rest. Ergo, the German General Staff did not see any reason to spend its assets at Dunkirk.
While the Luftwaffe attacked the evacuating ships at piers there were few U-Boat in those waters. Most were patrolling in the North Atlantic. German planning did not anticipate the concentration of Royal Navy shipping in the channel and so the Kreigsmarine added little to the effort. Moreover, the shallow waters of the English Channel are not U-boat friendly. But the British staff work had created the naval concentration in advance, including pulling ships back from the Norway campaign and stopping others from sailing to the Mediterranean.
Among the heroes of the Miracle at Dunkirk are scores of RN staff officers who worked around the clock for a week of more to set it up.
These ruminations were stimulated by the release of the recent movie but I did not bother to see it on the assumption I would find its inaccuracy annoying, curmudgeon that I am. No doubt others who saw it will now feel they know the history, having ‘seen the movie.’
No doubt the account above is incomplete and perhaps inaccurate in part, and corrections are welcome.