The Dunkirk evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, rescued about 338,000 British and French soldiers (338,226 by the usual count1) from Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June 1940, about a third of them French. Most were lifted by destroyers and other large ships from the harbour's East Mole; the famous little ships ferried men off the beaches. Some 35,000 to 40,000 French soldiers of the rearguard were captured when the town fell on 4 June.
At the end of May 1940 the British Expeditionary Force, with French and Belgian armies beside it, was trapped with its back to the sea in a shrinking pocket around Dunkirk. Churchill and his advisers hoped to bring home perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 men2 before the Germans closed in. Nine days later more than ten times that number had crossed the Channel.
Dunkirk is remembered as a miracle, and in some ways it was. It was also a defeat, a feat of naval organisation, a debt owed to French soldiers who stayed behind, and a story whose most famous image, the flotilla of little boats, is true but not the whole truth.
Trapped against the sea
Germany attacked France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940. While the best Allied armies moved forward into Belgium, German armour broke through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse and on the evening of 20 May reached the Channel, cutting the Allies in two. The BEF's commander, Lord Gort, decided on 23 May to pull back and form a defensive perimeter, and three days later the War Office ordered the evacuation3. By then Dunkirk was the last port the Allies still held.
It was a poor place for a rescue. The harbour had been wrecked by bombing, the oil tanks were burning, and the beaches shelved so gently that large ships could not come close inshore.
The halt order of 24 May
The Allies were given time by their enemy. On 24 May Hitler, visiting Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group A, confirmed an order that halted the panzers on the line of the Aa Canal, only about a dozen miles from Dunkirk; the destruction of the pocket was left largely to the Luftwaffe, whose chief Hermann Göring had asked for the task the day before3. The tanks did not move again until 26 May.
Why the order was given has been argued about ever since. Rundstedt's staff feared for their worn-out tanks and a counterattack on their flank, Göring wanted glory for his air force, and some accounts claim Hitler meant to spare the British to make peace easier. Historians have reached no agreement, but the panzer general Heinz Guderian later named the decision as the one with the "most disastrous influence on the whole future course of the war.3"
Operation Dynamo
The evacuation was run by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, a retired officer recalled in 1939, from a room deep in the cliffs at Dover2 that had once housed a dynamo, which gave the operation its name. It began on the evening of 26 May. On the first day only 7,669 men were brought out4, and the plan still assumed that most of the army would be lost.
What changed the arithmetic was the harbour's East Mole, a long breakwater with a narrow walkway that was never designed for ships to moor against. Captain William Tennant, the senior naval officer ashore, began loading troops directly from it onto destroyers and ferries, and almost 200,000 men left that way2. The Royal Navy committed 39 destroyers, and the weather helped: for most of the nine days the sea was calm, and low cloud and smoke from the burning port often hid the ships from the bombers.
The little ships: role and myth
The beaches remained the problem. Large ships had to stay offshore, and men waited for hours in the dunes or waded out to their shoulders. The Admiralty appealed to the owners of small craft, and yachts, fishing boats, lifeboats, barges and pleasure steamers were brought round from the Thames and the south coast. The first of the little ships reached Dunkirk on 28 May.4 Many were crewed by naval ratings, but many crossed with their civilian owners at the helm.
Their main work was ferrying men from the beaches to the bigger ships waiting offshore, and they did it under fire, day after day. But the image of an amateur armada carrying the army home is a myth in its proportions: the little ships brought only a minority of the soldiers back2 to England themselves. The bulk of the army came home on destroyers, ferries and other large vessels, much of it from the mole. Both things are true, and the second does not diminish the courage of the first.
The rearguard and the cost
Dunkirk was held to the end by soldiers who knew they would not leave. French troops of the First Army fought on at Lille until 31 May5, tying down several German divisions, and French divisions held the perimeter during the final nights after the last British rearguard had gone on the night of 2 to 3 June. When the town fell on the morning of 4 June, 35,000 to 40,000 French soldiers, figures vary, went into captivity. Small Dutch and Polish contingents had also been caught in the pocket.
The price was heavy. Six British and three French destroyers were sunk4, along with over 200 other Allied craft. Over the whole campaign in France the BEF suffered about 68,000 casualties, including some 3,500 killed4, and it left behind almost all of its tanks, guns and vehicles. There is no single reliable count of how many men died during the evacuation itself, at sea, on the beaches and in the air.
Churchill's speech of 4 June 1940
On the afternoon the evacuation ended, Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons. He called the rescue "a miracle of deliverance" but refused to let the country mistake it for something else: "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.6" The same speech ended with the lines that followed Britain into the Battle of Britain that summer: "we shall fight on the beaches", and "we shall never surrender".
Why Dunkirk still matters
If the BEF had been captured, Britain would have lost almost every trained soldier it had, and it is hard to see how it could have stayed in the war. Instead it kept the men who would rebuild its army, including officers such as Bernard Montgomery, who commanded a division in the retreat and would return to France four years later on the beaches of Normandy. The "Dunkirk spirit" became a British byword for improvised courage. It is fair to remember it, as long as the memory keeps room for the destroyer crews, for the French who held the line and for the soldiers marched into five years of captivity.