Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  At 1 a.m. on Monday 27 May, Major Philip Newman, a surgical specialist with 12th Casualty Clearing Station, arrived in Dunkirk. With him were forty men in three lorries, and they had come to open a front-line medical unit in a chateau alongside a French field ambulance. Newman, until recently a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital in London, was resigned to the fact that while everybody else would now be going home, he and his colleagues would not. ‘There was an awful languid feeling among all of us,’ he writes, ‘in having to open up again and hold the baby.’

  His first impression of Dunkirk was of blazing buildings and exploding bombs. The Luftwaffe had already been bombing the town and the port for some time, but this was the day when they would be pulverised by continuous large raids. Newman settled down that night in an empty, but still beautifully furnished, terraced house, and at dawn moved to the chateau. There he began setting up his operating theatre in a room on the ground floor with large windows, good artificial lighting, and parking space outside for an X-ray van. Within minutes, ambulances full of wounded men began arriving.

  Anthony Rhodes arrived in Dunkirk at about six o’clock that morning. He remembered it from peacetime as a pleasant place, full of nice restaurants and shops to buy foreign gifts for friends. Now, the first thing he saw was the huge pall of smoke from the burning oil tanks that would characterise the evacuation, and which is recreated in the film. Like many of those who arrived in Dunkirk at the start of Operation Dynamo, he found a cellar near the harbour in which to shelter from the bombing. That harbour, after all, was the obvious point of evacuation.

  Rhodes believed that a cellar was the safest possible place to shelter from a Luftwaffe raid. Bombs would surely explode on the upper floors, leaving the basement untouched, and as he was beneath a three-storey house, he felt secure. But he felt less secure when he came out at the end of the first raid to find that an identical building opposite had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Anybody in its cellar would clearly have been buried alive.

  Norman Prior of the Lancashire Fusiliers also moved into a cellar on arrival. He took his boots off for the first time in a fortnight, lay down – and felt a small movement. When he looked up, he saw a Frenchman trying to steal the boots. ‘I just blasted him with a mouthful of whatever,’ he says, ‘it didn’t come to fisticuffs.’ He kept them on at all times after that.

  Many of those arriving in Dunkirk on that day, before the British authorities had taken proper control of the town, witnessed an anarchy inspired by fear and relief. Ernest Holdsworth, a lifelong teetotaller, found himself in a hotel cellar, drinking a mixture of rum, whisky and brandy. It was a nightmarish scenario – British, French and Senegalese soldiers, all together, singing, vomiting and passing out.

  On that day, Captain William Tennant, chief staff officer to the First Sea Lord, was sent to Dunkirk to assume the position of Senior Naval Officer Dunkirk. A navigational expert, diffident by nature, Tennant would be responsible for organising the distribution of ships and the embarkation of soldiers. He was encountered by a snarling mob of British soldiers, ready to challenge his authority. And he met soldiers smeared with lipstick and a drunk sergeant wearing a feather boa.

  Carrying on to Bastion 32,* the headquarters of Admiral Abrial (the commander of French forces at Dunkirk), Tennant met two senior British army officers and a naval commander, who informed him that the harbour was too badly damaged, and too vulnerable to air attack, to be used for Operation Dynamo. All embarkations would have to be made from the beaches. They also told him that the Germans would arrive in Dunkirk in twenty-four to thirty-six hours’ time. Faced with the reality that large ships could not come near the shore, and with the almost total lack of small boats to ferry the men from the beaches to these ships, his job appeared impossible. Churchill’s aim of rescuing thirty thousand troops seemed hopelessly ambitious.

  From Bastion 32, Tennant started sending wireless messages to Ramsay in Dover Castle. He asked for every available craft to be dispatched immediately to the beaches. In the Dynamo Room, all ships on their way to the harbour were correspondingly diverted. Tennant’s naval party, in the meantime, started rounding up the soldiers in cellars around the harbour and sending them to the beaches.

  One of these men was Anthony Rhodes. By now, air raids were coming every half-hour, and, apart from a brief and unsuccessful trip to find another shelter further out of town, Rhodes had spent all day in his cellar. It was far too dangerous, he decided, to be outside. But that afternoon, he heard a cry from the street for ‘Officers!’ Heading up to find out more, he was informed that no more evacuations would be made from the harbour, and was told politely to collect as many men as possible and escort them to the beaches. And so Rhodes – and almost everybody else in the town of Dunkirk – headed eastwards.

  The resulting crocodile of troops was duly attacked from the air. As the bombs fell, Rhodes flattened himself, face down, on the ground. And when the aircraft came back to machine-gun the survivors, he did the same again, noting that two men who had stayed erect to fire a Bren gun at the attackers were riddled with bullets.

  After the raid was over, Rhodes continued on to the beaches. Once there, he looked into the distance; he was impressed by the sight of so many thousands of men, some staring, some eating, some sleeping, waiting for the next ship or the next raid. He might be an officer, but army battledress was so generic that it was difficult for a stranger to distinguish him from the rank and file. It would be much easier, over the next few days, for naval officers, dressed in their striking blues, to assert their authority than it would be for men such as Rhodes. He walked a couple of miles, eventually settling down in the sand dunes at the beach’s edge. His wait had begun, for the large ships that would anchor offshore – and the small boats to ferry him there.

  The shortage of small vessels was a problem from the start of the evacuation. Not until 30 May did they begin to appear in any numbers. Until that time, the lifeboats and whalers of larger ships had to be used. But even when the boats were available, they suffered heavily. When the sea was at all rough, it was very difficult for soldiers to climb onto them from the shore. Beyond this, the boats were used so heavily that they became prone to mechanical breakdowns and the exhaustion of their crew. Indeed, many boats were requisitioned from their owners and operated by naval personnel who simply did not know how to handle them. And once a boat had been rowed out to a larger ship, it was often allowed to drift away rather than returning to shore to pick up more soldiers.

  Late on the night of 27 May, Captain Tennant noticed that while the Luftwaffe had been exerting itself in an effort to destroy the main Dunkirk harbour, it was neglecting to bomb the outer harbour. The result was that two long breakwaters – the eastern and western moles – were intact. These were not piers or jetties; they were huge concrete arms protecting the harbour, and preventing it from silting up. Tennant quickly spotted the potential of the eastern mole. It stretched almost a mile out to sea, it had a wooden walkway on top that could accommodate four men walking abreast, and soldiers could be brought there relatively easily from the beaches. On the other hand, it had a fifteen-foot tidal drop and was subject to treacherous currents, while there was no obvious method of berthing ships alongside it. But, figured Tennant, there was little to lose. And so the first crucial improvisation of Operation Dynamo was put into practice.

  A passenger ship – Queen of the Channel – was quickly diverted from the beach at Malo-les-Bains to the mole, and soldiers were brought alongside to clamber on board as best they could. At a little after four o’clock on the morning of 28 May, Queen of the Channel set out for Dover carrying 950 British troops. Tennant’s idea was clearly workable, and other ships were ordered to the mole. If the troops defending the perimeter could hold the Germans off a little longer, if the weather remained good, if plenty of ships and boats could be pressed into service, if the Luftwaffe could be prevented from destroying those ships and boats – as well as the mole – then Churchill’s ambitions mi
ght be met. By the end of Monday 27 May, 7,669 soldiers had been brought home, and the following day, it was hoped, many more would follow.

  All the time, more and more soldiers were arriving inside the perimeter. Some, like the Guards battalion seen marching up the mole in perfect order, arrived as a unit, but many came in dribs and drabs. And many, despite the appalling experiences they had endured and the dismal conditions they continued to face, were keen to bring home souvenirs of their time abroad. These ranged from those with hundreds of cigarettes jammed into their haversacks, keen to avoid customs regulations, to a man holding a large model seaplane intended as a present for his son. One soldier brought a motorbike onto the mole. ‘Can I get this on board your ship, mate?’ he asked a sailor, adding – as though that might convince him – that it had only done 280 miles. Given that the aim of Operation Dynamo was to bring as many men home as possible to defend Britain, and to allow the war to continue, it is hardly surprising that the sailor said ‘no’.

  Yet it still seems harsh to discover the fate of the pets befriended by soldiers as they retreated. Able Seaman Ian Nethercott, a gunlayer on board HMS Keith, was surprised by the stream of dogs that men tried to bring on board, and appalled by what happened to most of them. ‘As the men arrived with their dogs,’ he says, ‘the military police were shooting them and throwing them in the harbour.’ Every time this happened, a loud ‘boo’ went up from soldiers and sailors. Not even the sight of a dachshund puppy’s head poking from a haversack softened the military policemen’s hearts.

  Thankfully, however, not every dog was summarily executed. A terrier mongrel named Kirk (presumably after the port where he now found himself) came aboard HMS Windsor and was warmly welcomed by the crew. Kirk, who initially responded only to French commands, stayed with the ship throughout the evacuation, and was then placed in quarantine in England. At the end of his adventure, he was adopted by a country vicar, the father of a sub-lieutenant on the ship.

  Other animals spotted included a caged canary balanced on a man’s head as he queued in the water, and a black-and-white rabbit in a basket held by an inexplicably naked man. One soldier’s kitbag was full of watches intended for sale in England; that of another, who hoped to open a barber’s shop, was full of hair clippers. Many soldiers carried postcards and photographs of their time in France, but one particularly grisly souvenir was eight bullets prised from the body of a man shot for spying. And one of the saddest was spotted spilling out of a man’s tunic as he lay dead on the beach at Bray Dunes: several tiny dresses intended for his daughter.

  As soldiers arrived in Dunkirk, they passed others, men such as Jimmy Langley, defending the perimeter against German units trying to break through. But the Germans were trying to frustrate the evacuation in other ways. Shells fired by German batteries were a constant danger to those inside the perimeter, and the further the Germans advanced, the heavier the shell fire became. It was a particular problem to ships crossing the Channel. The shortest crossing between Dover and Dunkirk, known as ‘Route Z’, involved sailing close to the French shore between Calais and Dunkirk – but this was far too dangerous in daylight due to the batteries of German guns positioned along the coast. As a result, a much more northerly ‘Route Y’ was introduced. It was initially safer, but it increased the round trip from 80 miles to 172 miles – and it, too, came within the range of German guns when Nieuport was captured. A compromise route, ‘Route X’, soon became the only safe method of crossing during the daytime. With a round trip of 108 miles, it was relatively short, and since it avoided exposing ships to the shore batteries, it was relatively safe.

  Other methods of attack included motor torpedo boats and submarines which attacked ships as they crossed the Channel. (HMS Grafton, for example, was sunk by a U-boat.) And, of course, the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed soldiers on shore and ships at sea.

  The ships did what they could to avoid attack. They kept a strict blackout at night, meaning that they had to sail without navigation lights. And onshore, there was very little anti-aircraft defence, short of a few Bofors guns close to the mole and the beaches.

  The principal reason for the deficiency was the destruction of the heavy anti-aircraft guns defending Dunkirk – by the troops manning them. This extraordinary act had been the result of mistaken communication between two officers. The first officer had sent a message that wounded men should be taken to the beaches for evacuation. The message received by the second officer, however, was that all men should be taken to the beaches for evacuation. Believing that all his men were now returning to England, the second officer ordered that their guns be destroyed. Once this had been done, he marched up to Lieutenant General Adam, saluted, and proudly told him that all the BEF’s heavy anti-aircraft guns had been spiked. Adam was appalled and very nearly speechless. ‘You fool. Go away . . .’ he finally managed to say.

  One of the Luftwaffe’s most important – but lesser known – jobs was mine laying. Beginning seriously on the night of Tuesday 28 May, and focusing on points along Route X, mines were floated down into the sea by parachute. They might be buoyant contact mines, detonated by a ship pressing one of the mine’s protruding horns, or the more insidious magnetic mines, which could destroy a ship without the need for contact. Lying deep in the water, these consisted of an explosive attached to a magnetic mechanism set to detonate when any steel-hulled ship passed overhead.

  This potentially catastrophic weapon might have killed tens of thousands of soldiers during Operation Dynamo, and prevented tens of thousands of others from being rescued. It might, in fact, have changed the story of the evacuation. But, in the event, it sunk only two ships despite being heavily laid throughout the Channel.* The neutralising of the magnetic mine by a Canadian scientist working in London is one of the great – and least known – stories of Dunkirk.

  Charles Goodeve became, in 1939, the deputy director of the Admiralty’s Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, a coven of scientists and problem solvers known collectively as the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’. Goodeve shared a conviction with Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, that the application of science would have a huge impact on the war. Not everybody agreed. Arthur Harris, future chief of RAF Bomber Command, detested Churchill’s reliance on science. ‘Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide-rules?’ he once asked furiously.

  Churchill puffed his cigar calmly. ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s try the slide-rule for a change.’

  With Churchill’s support, Goodeve began trying to find an effective means of countering magnetic mines. He first suggested an improved method of sweeping them. This involved two boats, sailing in parallel, towing long cables behind them. A current would be passed through the cables, creating a magnetic field between the ships that would detonate any mines within.

  By chance, a magnetic mine had just been defused at Shoeburyness, allowing Goodeve the opportunity to examine its mechanism. As a result, he set up an elaborate experiment on a salt-water lake near Portsmouth. Acting as decoys, a number of sailors dragged model boats across the lake, watched by curious members of the public, as Goodeve and his assistants conducted the real experiment in a rowing boat. The electrical cables were submerged at the bottom of the lake while Goodeve sat in the boat with the mechanism from the defused mine. When a current was passed through the cables, creating a magnetic field, a dial on the mine’s mechanism started to flicker: the mine would have detonated had it been active. The experiment was a success.

  Known as the ‘Double L Sweep’, Goodeve’s method of clearing magnetic mines came into use in February 1940, making nearly three hundred mines safe over the next three months. Had this been his most significant achievement, it would have been impressive, as the Double L Sweep kept Routes X, Y and Z clear of magnetic mines throughout the Dunkirk evacuation.

  But Goodeve achieved far more. By blending expertise with creative thinking, he came up with a method of ‘wiping’ ships to make them impervious to magnetic
mines. Once wiped, they could sail over the mines all day long and suffer no harmful consequences whatsoever.

  The practice of ‘coiling’ already existed. It involved wrapping a ship’s hull with live copper coils to counteract its magnetic field. But not only was this a time-consuming and expensive process, there was neither enough copper coil nor the fitting facilities to deal with the vast number of ships needing protection. Goodeve came up with a far superior solution. If a large electrical cable, with a current of 200 amps, was passed up and down the ship’s sides, it had the same effect as coiling. But the procedure could be carried out cheaply and easily by the ship’s own crew.

  Goodeve suggested the idea to the Admiralty but received no response, so he decided to begin his own experiments. Starting with small boats, and progressing to larger ships, the experiments were successful, although it became clear that the altered magnetic field would be eroded very gradually by the vibrations of the ship’s engines and by the pounding of the sea – meaning that the ship would need to be wiped every six months.

  Goodeve called the process ‘Degaussing’, a name he came up with during a night of drinking; it paid homage to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the first calibrator of magnetic force – and it rhymed nicely with ‘delousing’. In the immediate build-up to Operation Dynamo, a remarkable four hundred ships of all shapes and sizes were degaussed in just three days by teams working round the clock. Over subsequent days, another thousand ships were wiped. This, combined with the Double L Sweep, kept British ships astonishingly safe from mines throughout the evacuation. The miracle of Dunkirk owes much to Charles Goodeve and the fortunate timing of his work. As he said after the war: ‘The battle of the magnetic mine was the first technical battle of the war and one in which Britain won a decisive and, to Germany, totally unexpected victory.’ And it set the tone for a war fought not solely by guns and bravery, but also by amps and volts and Arthur Harris’s beloved slide-rules.