The Battle of Dunkirk (code name Operation Dynamo) took place from May 25 to June 3, 1940.
Jostled by the Blitzkrieg engaged by the German army during the Battle of France, the British army as well as units of the French army had to retreat towards the north of France.
Surrounded in Dunkirk, they led a resistance intended to gain the time necessary for the embarkation of the bulk of the troops towards the United Kingdom. This was done using whatever ships the Royal Navy could muster to cross the English Channel, while the RAF fought in the skies to cover the operation. Troops and equipment that could not be embarked were captured by the Wehrmacht, but the successful rescue of the main body of troops may have saved the United Kingdom from an invasion that it would have found difficult to resist. /P>
Operation Dynamo
Caught in a vice by the German troops, and under the fire of their planes and their artillery, the Allied forces embarked at Dunkirk to join England.
On May 20, the situation is desperate; two panzer divisions commanded by Heinz Guderian reach Abbeville and the sea. The Wehrmacht thus manages to cut the Allied armies in two with, between the jaws of the pincers, a million French, Belgian and British soldiers trapped.
The German tanks continue their advance. On May 24, Guderian's advance guards established six bridgeheads on the Aa and reached Bourbourg; they had practically a clear field when an imperative order from General von Rundstedt, confirmed by Hitler, obsessed with the capture of Paris, stopped them dead until the morning of the 27th. The Allies took advantage of the windfall. They gather like a hedgehog to hold step by step a corridor extending from the Lille region to Dunkirk, over a hundred kilometers deep and thirty to forty wide.
To get free, the French general Weygand relies on a traditional counter-attack. The head of the British expeditionary force, General Gort, does not share this option. In the medium term, evacuation seems inevitable to him. The British war cabinet will prove him right. On May 26, the decision fell:“In such conditions, only one way out is left to you:to make your way west, where all the beaches and ports located east of Gravelines will be used for embarkation. The navy will provide you with a fleet of ships and small boats, and the Royal Air Force will give you full support…”. On May 28 at four o'clock in the morning, King Leopold III, head of the Belgian army capitulated, after the battle of the Lys, a decision violently contested in France and in England and by his own government, but also by his military adviser and several historians, in particular Professor Henri Bernard of the Belgian Royal Military School [1], who estimates that the Belgian army (600,000 men), even when it had started at the end of May, should have better coordinated its movements with the French and the British .
Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, head of the operation, set up his headquarters in a cellar in Dover Castle, where a generator had once operated. The company is called Operation Dynamo. It will last nine full days:from Tuesday May 26 to Thursday June 4.
On 29 May, the corridor had shrunk to a trickle:it now only goes, on the sea side, from the vicinity of Dunkirk to the small Belgian port of Nieuport, to the canals from Bergues to Furnes and from Furnes to Nieuport, on the earth.
On June 4, 1940, Operation Dynamo was completed; the swastika flag floats on the belfry of Dunkirk. In nine days, 338,226 combatants will be evacuated, in unprecedented conditions.
The noria of little ships
Gathering a small armada in such a short time is not easy. Never mind, the Royal Navy immediately detached 39 destroyers, minesweepers and a few other buildings. But this is not enough, because the low slope of the beaches forces large tonnage ships to anchor offshore. It is therefore necessary to mobilize ferries, trawlers, tugboats, barges, yachts and other even more modest craft, the now famous little ships. There come 370 equipped with at most two machine guns.
It is then necessary to organize this noria. Between Dunkirk and Dover, the most direct route is Route Z, 60 km long, but it is within range of the German guns near Calais. Route Y avoids this inconvenience except that it puts Dunkirk 130 km from Dover; what's more, it is a hunting ground for the Kriegsmarine's torpedo boats. The most passable route is Route X, 80 km long; however, it will not be cleared until May 29.
Despite the vigilance of the RAF, the main danger came from the air. On May 29, for example, 400 bombers, protected by 180 Messerschmitts, methodically pounded Dunkirk, strafing the beaches without forgetting to bomb the buildings cruising offshore. That day, the loss toll was so heavy that the Admiralty decided to stop the operation:in total, nearly 250 boats were sunk; torpedo boats beat two modern French torpedo boats, the Jaguar and the Sirocco. Fortunately the cloud ceiling, often very low, and the smoke from the fires bothered the Luftwaffe, which could only bring out its squadrons on 27, 29 May and 1 June.
Reboarding operations are inconvenient. There are too many men and not enough boats. To escape, you must either be accepted on board a ship docking at the east mole of the port (the current pier indeed juts out 1,500 meters into the sea), or reach the beach and move forward in single file. to a light craft that travels back and forth between the shore and the building offshore. The machine has broken in; on the first day, 7,669 men were able to reach an allied port, 17,804 the second, 47,310 the third, 53,823 the fourth.
On June 4 at 3:20 a.m., the Shikari, loaded to the brim with soldiers, left the mole for its last rotation. At 10 a.m., the German army invaded Dunkirk. Among the successful evacuations, let us mention that of the English barge BEATRIX MAUD, commanded by the French lieutenant Joseph HERON which succeeded, during the night and day of June 3 to 4, 1940, in evacuating nearly 340 troops and officers to Dover. They thus escaped captivity. Following this exploit, Lieutenant Jo Héron received the Croix de Guerre with silver star. (cf Cols Bleus n°548 of 05/31/1958)
In nine days, 338,226 combatants (including 123,095 French) were able to be evacuated on a sea of oil; the Wehrmacht captures some 35,000 soldiers; almost all are French, most of whom had participated in the rearguard fighting.
The evacuation of Dunkirk nevertheless aroused a certain bitterness among French officials. Weygand and others will blame the British in particular for having caused the failure of the counter-attack on Arras. Relations between the Allies, often quite confused, with perceptible communication difficulties at many levels, will henceforth be placed under the sign of distrust.
Monument to the dead.
War Memorial.
In London, one feels relief and gratitude:the fighters of Dunkirk are treated as victors and not as vanquished; on the landing platforms as in the stations, we celebrate them. Even Churchill takes care to temper the enthusiasm of his people, stressing that "wars are not won with evacuations" as heroic as they are. These words printed in the columns of the American newspaper New York Times the day after Operation Dynamo have retained all their acuity:“As long as we speak English, the name of Dunkirk will be pronounced with the greatest respect”.