The end of the Dunkirk evacuation

In the early hours of 4 June 1940 the last ship carrying troops pulled away from the mole in the harbour of Dunkirk. A few hours later the Germans entered the town, and at 2.23 p.m. the British Admiralty announced the end of Operation Dynamo, which since 26 May had evacuated more than 338,000 troops to England. The last two nights belonged to the French: after the British had gone, it was French divisions that held the canals around the town and French troops that the ships took off. Several tens of thousands of them did not make it in time. Thousands of abandoned vehicles, guns and heaps of equipment were left behind on the beaches and quays of Dunkirk, while in Britain the legend of the “miracle of Dunkirk” was being born.

The date and the figures

It is often said that 3 June was the last day of Operation Dynamo, and the number evacuated is given as 224,686 British and 121,445 French and Belgian troops. The date needs to be made more precise. The last night of the evacuation was the night of 3–4 June. The last destroyer, HMS Shikari, left the east mole at about 3.40 a.m. on 4 June, and the Admiralty closed the operation that afternoon.

The figures also vary from source to source. According to the Admiralty’s daily returns, on which the British official history (Lionel Ellis) is based, 338,226 men were carried to England between 27 May and 4 June: around 198,000 British and 139,997 Allied troops, the great majority of them French, but also Belgians, Poles and Dutchmen. French records count 123,095 French evacuees. The figures given in war chronologies add up to more than 346,000, more than in the Admiralty returns. The British figure is most probably close to the total number of British troops taken from Dunkirk since 20 May, including some 28,000 rear-echelon troops lifted before the operation began, while the French and Belgian figure comes from a different set of returns. The Admiralty figures are regarded as the most reliable.

The last of the British

By 2 June few British troops were left in the bridgehead. After the losses of 1 June, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay halted the daylight evacuation, and the ships came in only at night, between dusk and dawn. On the night of 2–3 June the last British rearguard, about 4,000 men, sailed away. General Harold Alexander, who had commanded the remaining British forces since Lord Gort’s departure, made a last tour of the beaches and quays in a motor boat, calling through a loudhailer to ask whether any of his soldiers were still there, and then sailed for England himself. Captain William Tennant, who was directing the evacuation ashore, signalled to Dover that the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated.

But soldiers to whom the British owed a great deal were still on the shore. As French units falling back from the canal line streamed into the port, it turned out that there were too few ships, and some of them sailed away half-empty because the French had not reached the mole in time. The next day the British government, under French pressure and at the instance of Winston Churchill, who in Paris on 31 May had promised an evacuation on equal terms, decided to send the ships in once more.

The last night

By 3 June the bridgehead was very cramped. The Germans had come within three or four kilometres of the harbour, and their artillery was shelling the town and the roads. The perimeter was held by the remnants of the French 12th Motorised Infantry Division, whose commander, General Lucien Janssen, had been killed by bombs at Fort des Dunes the day before, General Beaufrère’s 68th Infantry Division, and detachments gathered from other shattered units. They were commanded by General Bertrand Fagalde, commander of XVI Corps, who answered to Admiral Jean-Marie Abrial, the French commander in the north. Without heavy artillery or air support, and heavily outnumbered, the French rearguard held the line all day.

In the evening the last convoys set out for Dunkirk: destroyers, ferries, minesweepers and French torpedo boats. Because of the crowded quays and the shelling, the evacuation went more slowly than planned. On 4 June another 26,175 men reached England, almost all of them French. Abrial and Fagalde left with their staffs in the final hours. Shortly before dawn the British scuttled old ships at the harbour entrance to make it harder for the Germans to use. Shikari, which had carried more than 3,000 soldiers in seven trips, was the last to leave the port.

The fall of Dunkirk

On the morning of 4 June troops of General Georg von Küchler’s German 18th Army entered the town. At about 10.20 a.m. the swastika flag was hoisted over the harbour quays. On the beach at Malo-les-Bains, where for nine days men had queued for the boats, the last soldiers of the 12th Division went into captivity. According to various sources, the number of French troops taken prisoner at Dunkirk was between about 30,000 and about 40,000. Many of them had fought on the canal line until the last night, when it was already too late to reach the ships. The Germans found the town largely in ruins. On the beaches from Dunkirk to De Panne in Belgium lay abandoned lorries, which had been used to build makeshift piers, dozens of sunken vessels close inshore, guns, rifles and horses.

In the campaign the British army lost almost all its heavy equipment, nearly all its tanks and tens of thousands of vehicles. The army in England had the men, but lacked the weapons to meet an invasion. The Germans took over the abandoned equipment and later used some of it in their own units.

The prisoners – French troops, and British ones captured earlier in the pocket – marched on foot, often for a fortnight or more, in columns to collecting points such as Trier, from where they were taken by rail to camps in Germany. Most of them spent five years in captivity.

Miracle or defeat

In Germany the fall of Dunkirk was proclaimed as the end of the great battle in Flanders and Artois. Adolf Hitler ordered flags to be flown throughout the Reich for eight days and church bells to be rung for three days as a sign of victory. German propaganda stressed the enormous numbers of prisoners and the booty, and spoke of the evacuation as the flight of the British, who had abandoned the French to their fate.

In Britain a different story dominated from the outset. As early as 2 June the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Walter Matthews, called the evacuation the “miracle of Dunkirk”, linking it with the National Day of Prayer of 26 May. The press wrote of “disaster turned to triumph”. On 5 June the writer J. B. Priestley, in a BBC radio broadcast, told of the little pleasure steamers that had sailed to Dunkirk, some of them never to return, and made them a symbol of ordinary England going to the rescue of its army. Churchill, although in his speech to the House of Commons on 4 June he himself called the army’s rescue “a miracle of deliverance”, warned in the same speech that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory”, because “wars are not won by evacuations”.

Historians stress that the miracle had very concrete causes: the halt of the German tanks on 24 May, the efficient work of Ramsay’s staff at Dover, calm seas, the French 1st Army’s defence of Lille and the resistance of the French rearguard in the final days. In France the memory was more bitter. The French long remembered that in the first days of the operation far fewer of them had been taken off than British troops, and that it was their soldiers who were left at the end. The writer Robert Merle, who was himself taken prisoner at Dunkirk, described those days in his novel Week-end à Zuydcoote, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1949.

Its place in the war

The fall of Dunkirk ended the first part of the campaign in the West. The Germans held the coast from the Netherlands to the mouth of the Somme. Belgium had capitulated a week earlier, and the best French divisions had been destroyed or captured. The day before, in Operation Paula, the Luftwaffe had already attacked airfields and factories around Paris in preparation for the next stage. On 5 June the Wehrmacht struck southwards across the Somme, and France, stripped of its best divisions and much of its equipment, held out for only three more weeks.

Within a few days the British sent most of the evacuated French troops back to France through the ports of Normandy and Brittany, where many of them returned to the front and, after the armistice, went into captivity. The British, for their part, kept the professional cadres of their army, which enabled them to rebuild it and, in the summer of 1940, to prepare the country for defence against an invasion whose fate was decided by the Battle of Britain. Yet tens of thousands of British troops still remained on the Continent, fighting on alongside the French on the Somme; they had to be evacuated from the ports of western France in the second half of June, and some of them, like the 51st Highland Division, went into captivity.