The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  A week before the Belgian surrender, and after almost two weeks of crushing defeats on the Continent, Churchill asked Chamberlain to study “the problems which would arise if it were necessary to withdraw the BEF from France.” On Monday, May 20, staff officers went through the motions of outlining a tentative plan. Assuming that Calais, Boulogne, and Dunkirk would be available, low-level planners believed they could evacuate two thousand men a day. The “hazardous evacuation of very large forces” was briefly mentioned, then relegated to the bottom of the agenda; its possibility seemed very remote. That changed in less than twenty-four hours. Tuesday morning, “the emergency evacuation across the Channel of very large forces” led the agenda, and Churchill ordered steps to “assemble a large number of small vessels in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast.” Transport officers from Harwich to Weymouth were directed to list all ships up to a thousand tons. The Admiralty appointed Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay to command the operation. It was code-named Dynamo. He was immediately given thirty-six ships, most of them cross-Channel ferries. His headquarters, hacked out of Dover’s white cliffs, overlooked the troubled waters.

  By the twenty-sixth, London was in despair. At seven o’clock that evening the Admiralty, on Churchill’s instructions, sent out the message: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.” On the twenty-eighth, with the evacuation from Dunkirk under way for almost twenty-four hours, Churchill warned the House of Commons to “prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings.” Privately he feared that “the whole root and core and brain of the British army” was “about to perish upon the field or be led into an ignominious and starving captivity.” The Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff informed him that, in their view, a full-scale attack on England was “imminent.” Yet, each of the three service chiefs—army, navy, and RAF—parsed the data at hand after his own fashion; none was reading the same tea leaves as the others.71

  The diary of the CIGS reflects Britain’s grim mood. On the twenty-third, Ironside had written, “I cannot see that we have much hope of getting any of the B.E.F. out.” Two days later he predicted, “We shall have lost all our trained soldiers by the next few days unless a miracle appears to help us.” Two days later his entry read: “The news in the morning is bad…. I met Eastwood [the commander of the 4th Division in France] on the steps of the War Office. He had come over last night and described things as very bad. He did not expect any of the B.E.F. to get off at all.” The following evening Ismay wrote, “The Prime Minister asked me how I would feel if I were told that a total of 50,000 could be saved. I replied without hesitation that I would be absolutely delighted, and Churchill did not upbraid me for pessimism.” As late as May 30, with the Luftwaffe swarming over the Dunkirk beaches, the King was told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. Ironside wrote: “Very little chance of the real B.E.F. coming off. They have now sunk three ships in Dunkirk harbour and so there is very little chance of getting any units off.”72

  Eight months earlier the Poles had lost all hope; the French were losing theirs; but with few exceptions the morale of Englishmen was actually rising. Blessed with that great moat between them and the Continent, they were defiant. On the afternoon of May 28, Churchill assembled the full cabinet—some twenty ministers—in his room in Parliament to tell them everything he knew about the fighting and what lay in the balance. Then he said, “I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering in negotiations with That Man.* And I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

  To his surprise, several men jumped up, ran to his chair, shouting, and clapped him on the back. Afterward he wrote: “I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed rather than give in. In this they represented the House of Commons and almost all the people. It fell to me in those coming days and months to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do, because they were mine also.”

  Hugh Dalton, long his opponent in the House, wrote: “He was quite magnificent. [He is] the man, and the only man we have, for this hour.”73

  In 1940 Dunkirk was an ancient seaport; many of the buildings facing the shore dated from the sixteenth century. Before the war, its ten miles of empty sand had attracted thousands of vacationing French and Englishmen, but when Lord Gort’s gaunt, exhausted, unshaven soldiers fell back upon it in those last days of May, the Luftwaffe had transformed it into a battered ruin. All the houses had been abandoned. The only sound came from crackling, exploding fires in the city. Buoys had been blasted from the water. Sunken ships blocked entrances to the harbor, which, by all the canons of seamen, had become a shattered, useless port. The wide beaches were within range of Calais-based Krupp artillery, which never let up. Tommies were also vulnerable to shrieking, dive-bombing Stukas and strafing Messerschmitt Bf 109s that were using as their beacon a billowing column of smoke from bombed oil tanks near the west pier. These tanks were to burn throughout the crisis, tainting the air with their foul stench. It was from this cauldron that the Royal Navy, all the available merchant ships, and British yachtsmen in private boats intended to rescue a quarter-million exhausted, bleeding men.

  Nor was that all. Apart from the sunken hulks and smashed docks, the harbor confronted mariners with other challenges. Fifteen-foot low tides left a long, shallow foreshore bare for a half mile to seaward, which meant that no vessel could approach closer than that. Neither could Dunkirk be approached directly from the Straits of Dover. Instead, seamen had to navigate an 800-yard-wide deepwater channel that ran parallel to the coast for many miles. The only ameliorating feature of the port, and it was a frail one, was a mole, or breakwater, that sprang in a great curve from an eleventh-century fortress and extended 1,400 yards seaward. This jetty was the East Mole. Most breakwaters are made of stone. This one was a narrow wooden structure barely wide enough to accommodate three men walking abreast. Bringing craft alongside it would be both difficult and, because of the tides, hazardous. Moreover, the East Mole had not been built to survive the stresses of berthing ships alongside it. No one knew whether it could survive the strain.

  By the morning of May 26, the navy had assembled a ragtag armada of 860 vessels in Dover. Of Britain’s 160 destroyers, almost half were attached to the Home Fleet, and only forty-one were available. These had been augmented by appealing to all yacht clubs along the coast and by commandeering everything afloat in English waters. In addition, French, Belgian, and Dutch skippers had volunteered, bringing the argosy total to 900 boats. On May 26, they were anchored three-deep along the Dover quays: trawlers, river barges, schooners, minesweepers, fireboats, corvettes, hospital ships, fishing sloops, launches, paddle wheelers, smacks, coasters, lifeboats, scows, tugs, the London fire float Massey Shaw, the ferries Brighton Queen and Gracie Fields, Channel packets such as the Princess Maud, and every variety of pleasure craft. Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour was there, with him at the helm. So were the launch Count Dracula; the yacht Sundowner, piloted by Commander Charles H. Lightoller, the senior surviving officer of the Titanic; and the Yangtze gunboat Mosquito. The Earl of Craven was going to sea as third engineer on a tug. The Honorable Lionel Lambert had armed his yacht and was sailing with his chef. And Captain Sir Richard Pim of the Royal Navy, the commander of the prime minister’s map room, was commanding a Dutch schuit. Churchill looked around, demanded, “Where’s Pim?” and was elated when told.74

  Just crossing the Channel, forty miles wide at this point, was harrowing for amateurs. The sea was choppy, and since the outbreak of the war, lightships and lighted buoys had been blacked out, and the enemy was continually mining these waters. The navy swept three narrow lanes; vessels that strayed from them, and some did, went down. Lying off the French
coast between shoals, awaiting their turn to go in, helmsmen tried desperately, in narrow waters, to take evasive action against the German aircraft, which seemed to be everywhere. Then, when they went in, or as far in as they could get, they saw the long serpentine lines of Tommies stretching over the dunes. To the crews of boats entering after sunset, weaving between the sunken hulks, the beaches seemed to be swarming with fireflies. These were the lighted cigarettes of infantrymen awaiting a ride home. Some men stood waist-deep in water for hours, praying for rescue, but though bombed and machine-gunned, none broke.

  During the first day of evacuation—Monday, May 27—small craft dodged in, picked up as many men as they could, and ran them out to the destroyers and Channel ferries, which formed the backbone of the fleet. This continued throughout the nine days and nights of Dunkirk, but only eight thousand soldiers were evacuated that Monday. Clearly the little craft could not do the job alone. The beach master decided to bring the ships in and test the flimsy East Mole. It held. It wasn’t the best of moorings; at low tide, men had to jump to decks, and when a rough sea rushed against the pilings, sucking, swirling, and widening the distance to be covered, each leap became a gamble. Some Tommies lost and sank to their death. The Germans bombed the jetty again and again. One morning it took a direct hit from a low-flying bomber. Ships’ carpenters patched it. Another bomb hit the hull of the paddle wheel steamer Fenella below the waterline just after she had been boarded by six hundred troops. She sank immediately, taking them with her. Nevertheless, the mole did all that could have reasonably been asked of it.

  As did the little boats. Repeatedly they ran aground; soldiers would push them off and vault aboard. Sometimes overloaded craft capsized, drowning the heavily laden Tommies. Some crewmen brought collapsible boats; soldiers tried to paddle with their gun butts; it didn’t work; they tried their luck elsewhere. Makeshift piers were put together with trucks, wreckage, and driftwood. The skipper of a minesweeper raised his bow as high as possible, came in at twelve knots, and dropped two stern anchors as he beached. Nearly three thousand men used the ship as a bridge to deeper water, where other vessels awaited them. As the Luftwaffe found more victims, oil slicks made rescue filthy work, and flames from burning ships illumined the harbor from sundown to dawn. German bombers also littered the harbor with more sunken hulks. One destroyer was hit while waiting at the mole. She caught fire and drifted out, blocking the harbor entrance until a trawler towed her aside.75

  Ashore, there was some concern about the French soldiers. Those on the perimeter were fighting magnificently, but idle poilus had become a problem. “French Army now a rabble,” Brooke wrote in his diary on May 29, “and complete loss of discipline. Troops dejected and surly, refusing to clear road and panicking every time German planes come over.” That, he believed, was one reason the evacuation was slow. Another was an insufficient number of small boats. He asked Gort to pressure the Admiralty. Instead Gort sent two emissaries to the prime minister: Lord Munster, his aide-de-camp, and a junior officer, John Churchill, the prime minister’s nephew. Young Churchill arrived at Admiralty House that same evening, “soaking wet,” as he later recalled, “and still in full battle kit.” Winston and Clementine, both in dressing gowns, greeted him fervently. “Johnny!” his uncle said delightedly. “I see you have come straight from battle!”76

  Churchill wanted to know why his nephew was so wet: “Have you come straight out of the sea?” Johnny said that he had, and would be returning immediately. Lord Munster, immaculately attired in staff dress and jackboots appropriate to the function, received less attention, though Churchill agreed to prod the Admiralty. All who recall the incident remember not the message but Churchill’s enthusiasm for the war. “We felt,” recalled General Sir Ian Jacob, “that he would have liked to be fighting on the beaches himself.”77

  Altogether six destroyers were sunk and twenty-six damaged during the ten days of Dunkirk. Another 112 vessels went down, including the Mosquito and the Gracie Fields, lost on her way home with 300 Tommies. At times men on boats crossing to Dover had to make their way through the floating corpses of their comrades. The progress, or lack of it, was discouraging; by the night of May 28, only about 25,000 soldiers had been evacuated, and on June 2, the heavy air attacks forced suspension of daylight action. Nevertheless, the operation continued, favored by fair weather, and now they had the hang of it. Operation Dynamo, conceived in despair, with faint hope that a small fraction of the army could be saved, was astonishing the world.

  On May 28, the number of evacuees was low: 17,800. “All this day of the 28th,” Churchill wrote afterward, “the escape of the British army hung in the balance.” On May 29, however, the figure was 47,310; on May 30, 53,823; on May 31, 68,014; on June 1, 64,429; and on June 2, 26,256. That was supposed to be the end of it, but Admiral Ramsay made one last perilous attempt to lift off the gallant French rearguard, and he returned with 26,175 polius. Altogether, Dynamo had rescued 338,226 Allied soldiers, 112,000 of them French, although a greater number of French troops turned and went home, to take their chances.

  Behind them they had “left their luggage,” as Churchill put it: 2,540 artillery pieces, 90,000 rifles, 11,000 machine guns, nearly 700 tanks, 6,400 anti-tank rifles, 20,000 motorcycles, 45,000 trucks and other vehicles, and vast ammunition dumps.78

  But the great thing, for the English public, was that the men were back. They had heard stories of the heroic rearguard action. “Then,” Mollie Panter-Downes told readers of The New Yorker on June 2, “it was learned that the first war-stained, exhausted contingent had arrived on British shores, and the relief and enthusiasm were terrific.” Churchill never much liked The New Yorker, deriding it as The New Porker (he had a moniker for everyone), but here came Panter-Downes with journalistic testimony to the heroics in England. He could not have bought more favorable press.79

  Still, the news added up to disaster. On June 4 Churchill told the House the story of Dunkirk. “Wars,” he told them bluntly, “are not won by evacuations” and “what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.” Nevertheless, he said, Dunkirk was “a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valor, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by recourse, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity.” Britain would “outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”

  Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail…. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.

  And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old.80

  In his diary Jock Colville wrote: “Went down to the House to hear the P.M.’s statement on the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was a magnificent oration which obviously moved the House.” Next day the News Chronicle called the address “a speech of matchless oratory, uncompromising candour, and indomitable courage.” Harold Nicolson wrote his wife, Vita Sackville-West: “This afternoon Winston made the finest speech that I have ever heard.” She wrote back: “I wish I had heard Winston make that magnificent speech! Even repeated by the announcer it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine. I think one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress; they are never words for words’ sake.” That evening, in a broadcast to the United States, a constituency that Churc
hill desperately needed to reach, Edward R. Murrow, the CBS man in London, said: “He spoke the language of Shakespeare with a direct urgency which I have never before heard in that House.” Later, the historian Brian Gardner wrote of the address that it had “electrified not only his own country, but the world. With it, Churchill won the complete confidence of the British people, which he had never before enjoyed. Whatever was to happen, Churchill’s place in the national life was assured; he would never be in the wilderness again.”81

  Churchill also worked a challenge to Hitler into his address: “When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone, ‘There are bitter weeds in England.’ There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.”82

  None were more bitter than Churchill.

  Charles Corbin, the French ambassador, was alarmed. He called at the Foreign Office to ask what the prime minister had meant by declaring that Britain would, if it came to that, carry on alone. He was told that he had meant “exactly what he had said.” That, members of Corbin’s staff told diplomatic correspondents, was “not exactly encouraging the French to fight on against fearful odds.”83

  The French were getting nervous. As they saw it, the British army had bolted, leaving them to the enemy’s mercies. Of course, the evacuation would have been unnecessary if the French strategy had not been hopelessly wrong or if Weygand had not been a liar. Moreover, the original intent of the operation, as seen by Gort, Churchill, and Ironside, had been to extricate the BEF and then land it in the south, rejoining their allies. The loss of their equipment meant they had to be refitted, but Churchill intended to then send the troops back, and Reynaud, Weygand, and the French high command knew it. Even as Dunkirk wound down, Churchill had landed two fresh British divisions below the Somme. Nevertheless, he had been aware of the uneasiness across the Channel. On May 30, he had decided to convene a meeting of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre in Paris the following day. With him he would take Clement Attlee, Pug Ismay, and Sir John Dill, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Ironside staying behind as the new commander in chief of Home Forces, to organize English defenses against the invasion threat. Spears would meet them at Villacoublay Airport.84