by Norman Gelb
Whether Hitler believed he was pushing his luck too far in trying to take almost the entire British army out of the war just a few weeks after launching his offensive, or whether he was convinced that Reichsmarshal Hermann Goring’s Luftwaffe could better be relied upon to batter the British into submission on the beaches, the panzers which had spearheaded the blitzkrieg were stopped in their tracks for a full three days.
For the British, who were becoming increasingly reconciled to the possibility of having to leave virtually all of their men on the beaches at Dunkirk, it was a totally unexpected and much welcomed reprieve. They quickly patched together a strong perimeter defence around their positions to slow the German advance when it got moving again and organized the most massive evacuation in history. Over a period of ten days, a flotilla of large and small vessels — destroyers and tugs, minesweepers and ferries, corvettes and yachts, trawlers and motor boats — ferried back and forth across the Channel, lifting men from the beaches and carrying them home to England while the German ground forces, trying to resume their forward momentum after their unwanted respite, battered away at them, and the Luftwaffe, bombing and strafing, sought to do the job Hitler’s armoured divisions would have been able to accomplish had they not been held back. Instead of the 35,000 troops the British War Cabinet hoped to be able to evacuate from France when the realities of the situation had become starkly clear, 225,000 British troops were brought back to England.
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A. D. Divine
The picture will always remain sharp-etched in my memory — the lines of men wearily and sleepily staggering across the beach from the dunes to the shallows, falling into little boats; great columns of men thrust out into the water among bomb and shell splashes. The foremost ranks were shoulder deep, moving forward under the command of young subalterns, themselves with their heads just above the little waves that rode in to the sand. As the front ranks were dragged aboard the boats, the rear ranks moved up, from ankle deep to knee deep, from knee deep to waist deep, until they, too, came to shoulder depth and their turn.
Some of the big boats pushed in until they were almost aground, taking appalling risks with the falling tide. The men thankfully scrambled up the sides on rope nets, or climbed the hundreds of ladders, made God knows where out of new, raw wood and hurried aboard the ships in England.
The little boats that ferried from the beach to the big ships in deep water listed drunkenly with the weight of men. The big ships slowly took on lists of their own with the enormous numbers crowded aboard. And always down the dunes and across the beach came new hordes of men, new columns, new lines.
On the beach was the skeleton of a destroyer, bombed and burnt. At the water’s edge were ambulances, abandoned when their last load had been discharged.
There was always the red background, the red of Dunkirk burning. There was no water to check the fires and there were no men to be spared to fight them. Red, too, were the shell bursts, the flash of guns, the fountains of tracer bullets.
The din was infernal. The batteries shelled ceaselessly and brilliantly. To the whistle of shells overhead was added the scream of falling bombs. Even the sky was full of noise — anti-aircraft shells, machine-gun fire, the snarl of falling planes, the angry hornet noise of dive bombers. One could not speak normally at any time against the roar of it and the noise of our own engines. We all developed ‘Dunkirk throat’, a sore hoarseness that was a hallmark of those who had been there.
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Sub-Lieutenant John Crosby, on the minesweeper Oriole
Everybody went aft to raise the bows as much as possible, and we went lickity-split for the shore and kept her full ahead until we jarred and came to a full stop. As we went in, we dropped two seven-hundredweight anchors from the stern, to kedge off with. The men waded and swam out and many of them had to be hauled over the rails. The snag was that when a rope was thrown to a man, about six grabbed it and just hung on looking up blankly with the water breaking over their shoulders, and it was a hell of a job getting any of them to let go so that the rest could get pulled aboard.
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Allan Barrell, Master of the coastal pleasure boat Shamrock
We stared and stared at what looked like thousands of sticks on the beach and were amazed to see them turn into moving masses of humanity. I thought quickly of going in, picking up seventy to eighty and clearing off. With the sun behind me I calculated I should find some east coast town. We got our freight ... when I realized it would be selfish to clear off when several destroyers and large vessels were waiting in deep water to be fed by small craft, so I decided what our job was to be. We could seat sixty men and with those standing we had about eighty weary and starving British troops, some without boots, some only in their pants, but enough life left in them to clamber on board the destroyers with the kind hand of every available seaman. Again and again we brought our cargo to this ship until she was full.
Navigation was extremely difficult owing to the various wreckage, up-turned boats, floating torpedoes, and soldiers in the water trying to be sailors for the first time. They paddled their collapsible little boats out to me with the butts of their rifles, and many shouted that they were sinking. We could not help them. I was inshore as close as I dared. ‘Stop shouting and save your breath, and bail out with your steel helmets,’ was the only command suitable for the occasion. Scores offered me cash and personal belongings which I refused, saying, ‘My name is Barrell, Canvey Island. Send me a postcard if you get home all right.’
Flying from bases in southeastern England, British fighter planes covered the Dunkirk evacuation — outnumbered, as they had been earlier in France and Belgium, but with a sense of purpose the earlier confusion had done so much to undermine. On the first day of the operation, the Air Ministry in London instructed Fighter Command to, ‘ensure the protection of Dunkirk beaches ... from first light until darkness by continuous fighter patrols in strength’. It was asking a lot, but Dowding did in fact hope to maintain continuous protective patrols over the evacuation area during daylight hours to deny the Luftwaffe a free field of fire over the men on the beaches. However, RAF losses earlier, the exhaustion of many of the pilots just back from France and his determination to maintain unimpaired reserves for the defence of Britain should the worst happen meant there were times when only a single squadron was in the skies near Dunkirk to take on and try to disperse the German attackers, and there were often intervals between patrols when there was no protective screen at all.
But the view of the men on the beaches that the ‘Brylcreem boys’ of the RAF had let them down (there were later incidents in which soldiers saved from Dunkirk and brought back to England beat up airmen they came across in pubs because of it) was misconceived. No doubt aerial protection for the troops would have been more thorough had Dowding been able and willing to spare more of his diminished number of fighter planes for Dunkirk patrols. But the men on the ground had no idea what was happening in the skies over and near Dunkirk, or why the German bombers were able to get through to bomb them, or why Fighter Command often seemed to be nowhere in evidence.
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Sergeant Bernard Jennings
What we tried to do was intercept the Germans inland, before they could get to the beaches. That’s why the soldiers thought we let them down. We didn’t. It was no use flying over the beaches at Dunkirk. By that time, the Germans would have been there to drop their bombs on the men below.
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Pilot Officer Steve Stephen
Our function was to get in the way of the German aircraft. It was no good patrolling over the evacuation beach if you were hoping to save the people underneath you. You had to be twenty miles further off to get in the way of the attackers before they reached the beaches. One of the first planes I shot down was, I think, a Henschel 126, used by the Germans for reconnaissance near Dunkirk. He was spying out the defences our army set up, to radio back his news to the panzers on the ground so they could move in. We caught up with this Germa
n around seven in the morning just behind Calais airport. There were three of us. I was the junior pilot. We saw him and went down to see what he was about. The first of us went screaming in and overshot him. Number two hit him with a cloud of bullets. It was then easy for me to go in to finish him off and he just went up in flames. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to see but our squadron lost nine or ten pilots in the Dunkirk operation.
Despite the hard feelings of the men on the beaches, the damage the Luftwaffe was able to inflict on them during the evacuation was substantially limited by RAF squadrons shuttling back and forth across the Channel to take on the enemy. By that time, the German air force, pushed hard by the tactical demands of Hitler’s generals, was also badly in need of a respite. But its planes were flying from captured fields in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, close to their targets on the beaches.
As was the case earlier in France, many of the British pilots were getting their first taste of combat. But had they not been there, the beaches of Dunkirk would be remembered as places of slaughter, rather than for the most monumental evacuation of military forces ever to have taken place.
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Pilot Officer Steve Stephen
When Dunkirk started, we thought all air fighting would be below 10,000 feet. The first time we went over, we went over at 1,000-8.000 feet. But we got attacked from above by German fighters. We looked up and there they were. They came down at us and we got beaten up. The following day, our squadron leader said, ‘We got jumped yesterday. We’re not going to put up with that again. We’re going in at 12,000.’ So we went in at 12,000 and met some Germans at 12.000 and got into a bit of a fracas. When we talked about it when we got back to base, we said, ‘You know, it’s odd. Twelve thousand was only just high enough.’ So the following day, we went in at 14,000. By the end of the week, air fighting had gone from 7,000 feet to over 20.000 — in just seven days. The Germans did this and we did that. We did that and the Germans did this. Air fighting moved from a low level right up, high into the sky.
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Sergeant Jim Hallowes
We had no idea how big would be the German formations we were going to meet over Dunkirk. The first one we came up against was eighty to a hundred 109s. We just got stuck in, compared notes later and wondered how the devil our small formation got away with attacking so many of the enemy.
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Pilot Officer Peter Brown
All of a sudden the sky was full of aircraft with black crosses on them. It was frightening. I realized for the first time that there was somebody up there really trying to kill me. It was a moment of truth. It was the first time we’d come up against the enemy. I had a tough time with one of those 109s. I dived away and went through the smoke coming up from below. When I came through on the other side, he’d gone. I’d also lost the rest of my squadron by then. I climbed up again. I climbed up to about 15,000 feet on my own which was really a stupid thing to do. It was asking for trouble. But I had to do it. It was a personal act. I was proving something to myself. I stayed up there for ten or fifteen minutes by which time I was getting short of fuel so I flew back to England. When I landed, I counted twenty-nine bullet holes in my plane.
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Flight Lieutenant Brian Kingcome
It was funny weather over Dunkirk. A lot of the time there you saw nothing but aircraft because you were sandwiched between layers of cloud. An aircraft would suddenly appear and disappear. When there were breaks in the cloud or you were below it, you’d see this great stretch of sand. You saw thousands of troops on it, marshalled and waiting to be taken off. You saw a flotilla of small boats coming in and out.
The evacuation of Dunkirk seemed inevitable. We were being thrown out of France. We’d made a mistake. We weren’t ready. The Maginot Line had collapsed. The military plans had gone awry. We hadn’t been prepared for the war.
It was very busy over Dunkirk. You didn’t have time to follow up an attack. You fired at something which disappeared, perhaps with some smoke coming out of it, into a cloud layer below you. But you knew when you’d hit a Heinkel because instead of pointing at you, the rear gunner’s gun suddenly went vertical. He had fallen over it.
You weren’t long over Dunkirk. The average flight was an hour and a quarter. By the time your squadron had taken off, rendezvoused with another squadron and flown over, you had maybe ten or fifteen minutes of fighting time before you had to hightail it home again. When you got back to base, you refuelled and stood by to be sent off again. We were over two or three times a day during that period.
At one stage, Fighter Command thought the Defiant was the answer to the Messerschmitt 109. It had a turret in the back with four .303 machine guns. It was quite lethal if you got in the way of it. They sent a Defiant squadron out over Dunkirk. When the Me 109s saw them, they thought they were Hurricanes and attacked them from the rear. The Defiants blew the 109s right out of the sky. When they came back, Fighter Command was delighted and sent the Defiants back. On the second trip, the 109s had learnt their lesson. They came up from underneath and the Defiants, which couldn’t fire downwards, were blown out of the sky.
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Pilot Officer Wally Wallens
The thousands of troops on the beaches were a fantastic sight. It seemed a colossally uncoordinated operation which I suppose it was at first. The blokes were hiding in the sand dunes from the German bombs. A lot were lying dead on the beach or floating in the water.
When we went back, before a relief squadron could take over from us, that’s when the German bombers would move in. The Jerries were listening to our radio talk. We finally realized what was going on. So we pre-arranged a simulated return to base with the controller at Dover. We said over the radio that we were returning early for various reasons and he said he’d try to get a relief squadron in as soon as possible. It was a set-up. We’d been running our planes on a very lean mixture, conserving our petrol. We swept inland instead of back out to sea. Thinking we’d gone, the Jerries came roaring in. They believed another squadron wasn’t likely to arrive for fifteen minutes or so. But we came right back and gave them a hell of a clattering. That was a good day’s work.
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Pilot Officer David Crook
Everybody’s idea was to go all out for the first Hun that appeared. This policy does not pay when you are fighting a cunning and crafty foe. The Germans frequently used to send over a decoy aircraft with a number of fighters hovering in the sun some thousands of feet above, who would come down like a ton of bricks on anybody attacking the decoy. This ruse almost certainly accounted for one pilot, Presser [Flight Lieutenant ‘Presser’ Persse-Joynt], and possible one or two others — the last anybody saw of Presser was when he was diving down to attack a Junkers 88, and there were definitely some Messerschmitts above.
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Flight Lieutenant R. D. G. Wight
Letter to his Mother during the Dunkirk operation
Well another day is gone, and with it a lot of grand blokes. Got another brace of 109s today but the whole Luftwaffe seems to leap on us — we are hopelessly outnumbered. I was caught napping by a 109 in the middle of a dogfight and got a couple of holes in the aircraft, one of them filled the office with smoke, but the Jerry overshot and he's dead. If anyone says anything to you in the future about the inefficiency of the RAF — I believe the BEF troops were booing the RAF in Dover the other day — tell them from me we only wish we could do more. But without aircraft we can do no more than we have done — that is, our best, and that’s fifty times better than the German best, though they are fighting under the most advantageous conditions. I know of no RAF pilot who has refused combat yet — and that sometimes means combat with odds of more than fifty to one. Three of us the other day had been having a fight and were practically out of ammunition and juice when we saw more than eighty 109s with twelve Ju 87s. All the same, we gave them combat, so much so that they left us alone in the end — on their side of the Channel too. This is just the work that we all do. On
e of my sergeants shot down three fighters and a bomber before they got him — and then he got back in a paddle steamer. So don’t worry. We are going to win this war even if we have only one aeroplane and one pilot left. The Boche could produce the whole Luftwaffe and you would see the one pilot and the one aeroplane go into combat ... The spirit of the average pilot has to be seen to be believed.
Flight Lieutenant Wight was killed in action leading three Hurricanes against sixty Messerschmitt 110s at the height of the Battle of Britain two months later.
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Squadron Leader Ted Donaldson
Combat Report, 29 May
Whilst carrying out high escort duties at 21,000 feet sighted five Me 110s in formation flying east towards Dunkirk (escort for some bombers being dealt with by another unit). Ordered attack and chose left-hand fighter. Dived down at 45° on to rear gun and fired 10 sec. burst ending astern. No visible effect. Broke away sharply left and climbed to cover green section. Something went wrong with 56 Squadron. They went off in a different direction (I believe oxygen failed in leader’s aircraft) and found myself alone with 4 Me 110s. I fought for about five minutes as hard I knew. Me 110 out-climbed and out-turned my Hurricane at that height (18,000-24,000 feet). Eventually one Me came up either side and above me and two stayed on my tail. There were no clouds whatsoever in the sky. I threw my aircraft all over the place and got in several bursts (inaccurately). There was no way out so I turned onto my back and allowed engine to stop with black smoke pouring out of the exhausts and petrol, glycol etc. pouring out of the vents. Then I pulled the stick back and dived 23,000 feet to the sea. The Me thought I was hit and fortunately did not follow. The belly of the Hurricane split but no other damage. Landed with five galls, of petrol left.
