But even if degaussing kept ships safe from the dreaded magnetic mines, they would still need somewhere to embark troops – and the most practical embarkation point, so long as it remained viable, was the mole, which at high water could fit sixteen good-sized ships. Queues from the mole often stretched far back into the town. Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker (sent to Dunkirk on Wednesday 29 May to work with Tennant as Senior Naval Officer afloat) remembers watching an unending stream of exhausted men moving forwards, lit up in silhouette by huge flames. Sometimes, he writes, they would break into a tired run, and sometimes they would ‘just plod blindly on towards safety’. The distinctive noise that accompanied their progress was the muffled tramp of boots and the clatter of rifles.
Once on the mole, with the rise and fall of the tide, it proved difficult to board the ships. At low tide, the naval destroyers sat so low in the water that larger passenger ships sometimes lay up between them and the mole, acting as floating platforms. At other times, the men would lower themselves on ladders, walk gingerly across on planks, or – despite the risks of drowning, broken bones, and being crushed between ship and piles – would simply jump. And even when the tide was more accommodating, the wooden walkway’s unbroken protective rail meant that everybody, even the stretcher cases, had to clear an obstacle before boarding.*
At eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 29 May, the Isle of Man steamer Manxman arrived at the mole to find it completely deserted of men. ‘It was very eerie,’ says a sailor on board, ‘streaming in with not a soldier to be seen.’ There was no one even to take Manxman’s ropes. But then, as the ship moved in closer, soldiers began to appear. An air raid had sent them hiding underneath the mole, desperately hugging and straddling the criss-cross piles, some chin-deep in the water. Once the bombing was over, they clambered back on top. This striking image is referenced in the film as Tommy and Gibson take shelter in the piling beneath the mole.
By Wednesday morning just over twenty-five thousand soldiers had been evacuated. Churchill’s desired figure of thirty thousand had not yet been met, but embarkations from the mole onto passenger ships and destroyers offered hope. Even given its problems, the mole allowed about six hundred men to board a destroyer in just half an hour – an exceptional rate of evacuation.
Until that day, most attacks on the mole had come from heavy artillery about seven miles to the west. But on Wednesday, the heavy smoke over the town was cleared by a northerly wind. The result was consistent heavy raids on the mole by Stukas and other bombers as well as strafing raids from Messerschmitts.
That afternoon, Crested Eagle came alongside the mole. A Thames paddle steamer, she was originally fitted with a telescopic funnel that retracted whenever she passed under London Bridge. Her peacetime job was to take holidaymakers from London to the seaside resort of Southend and further along the coast to Clacton and Felixstowe. Fitted with two anti-aircraft guns, she was pressed into wartime service on the Thames, before receiving orders, on Tuesday afternoon, to join Operation Dynamo.
As she sat on the seaward side of the mole, a ferocious Stuka attack – the third of the day – began. The mole was crowded with passenger ships, destroyers and fishing trawlers. Crested Eagle was berthed directly behind another paddle steamer, Fenella, diagonally across from two destroyers, HMS Grenade and HMS Jaguar, and opposite six trawlers moored together. Behind the trawlers sat a large transport ship and a French destroyer.
Ordinarily the mole was difficult for an aeroplane to spot. It may have towered over ships at low tide, and appeared substantial when viewed from the side, but from the air it amounted to a barely visible sliver. On this afternoon, however, with no cloud or smoke cover, and with large ships moored down its length, it was a very clear and tempting target for bombers. Near misses on Jaguar put her out of action; her troops were transferred elsewhere. Grenade was hit by several bombs. She caught fire, and desperate efforts were made to cast her off to prevent her from sinking and blocking a section of the mole. She drifted into the harbour channel and was finally towed into open water by a trawler, where she sank.
One man who watched this happen was Vic Viner, a naval beachmaster at Bray Dunes. Viner’s brother, Albert, was a leading telegraphist on Grenade, and Viner received permission to walk up to the harbour to greet him. Drawing near the mole, he witnessed the Stuka attack, and returning to Bray Dunes to continue his job, he had no way of knowing what had happened to his brother. In fact, Albert survived, and like many others from Grenade, he was moved onto Crested Eagle.
As the attack continued, a bomb landed directly on the mole, making a large hole. Almost immediately, another aircraft swooped low to machine-gun troops who had clambered onto the mole from Grenade. On the other side, meanwhile, Fenella, a mainly wooden paddle steamer of similar design to Crested Eagle, was hit on her promenade deck, before a near miss blew concrete from the mole through her hull. A third bomb blew out her engine room, and she sank at her berth.
Despite the chaos, the momentum of Operation Dynamo had to be maintained, and there were still undamaged ships beside the mole waiting to embark troops. Many men were now fleeing down the mole in panic, desperate to escape danger. In their way stood Commander James Clouston, a naval officer brought to Dunkirk to maintain order on the mole, and Lieutenant Robin Bill, responsible for the trawlers. Clouston and Bill, standing aloof in their naval blues and gold braid, were able to restore order – although they had to brandish their revolvers to do so.
‘We have come to take you back to the UK,’ said Clouston calmly to the mob of desperate soldiers. ‘I have six shots here, and I’m not a bad shot. The lieutenant behind me is an even better one. So that makes twelve of you.’ And then he raised his voice: ‘Now get down onto those bloody ships!’*
Clouston’s words seemed to calm the men down. Many of them turned around and boarded Crested Eagle – which throughout the chaos had not been hit.
The minesweeper HMS Pangbourne, meanwhile, was nearing the beaches when she, too, was attacked by a swarm of Stukas. A sub-lieutenant on board remembers hearing a voice shouting ‘Take cover!’ – before realising that the voice was his own. Deciding that the advice was good, he threw himself down on the wooden deck. He could not distinguish the scream of the bombs from the scream of the diving plane. And in that instant the world went mad:
I stagger to my feet and gaze at a picture of utter horror. Blood and flesh is everywhere; mutilated bodies that ten seconds ago were men I knew personally, are flung in grotesque heaps all about me . . . I climb with difficulty to where the gun layer is lying, his neck and stomach torn open, and his hand blown away. He is still breathing and moaning faintly.
When the sub-lieutenant moved on to the bridge, he learned that five bombs had landed close by, but none had scored a direct hit. Pangbourne had not been seriously damaged.
At this point the sub-lieutenant wiped his face – and noticed that his hand was covered with blood. He looked down and saw that his left trouser leg was even bloodier. Somebody then pointed out that the back of his jacket was missing. Slipping off the remains, he found that a slice of flesh had been carved away. Lowering his trousers, he found his leg full of shrapnel – and then he heard the sound of Stukas coming again. For a moment he enjoyed the thought that he was caught with his pants literally down, before he grew confused. He was in a cabin . . . someone was patching up his wounds . . . he could not see properly . . . there were a lot of people talking at once . . .
Beside the mole, meanwhile, Crested Eagle was casting off. Hundreds of troops on her upper deck, many of whom had transferred from Grenade, Fenella and the damaged trawlers, began cheering loudly. They were finally going home. Below decks lay the wounded, in varying degrees of disability. A sailor on board remembers: ‘The throb of the engines and the thump of the paddles gave us renewed hope, and a fresh breeze was most welcome as we swung clear and left for the trip back to Dover.’
Because of the falling tide, Crested Eagle could not sail directly towards Do
ver. She had first to head east, parallel to the shore. She sailed for some time past an unbroken stretch of sand crammed with soldiers – but as she came to Malo-les-Bains, she was spotted by another wave of Stukas. The sight of yet more dive bombers was demoralising, but hardly surprising; the conditions were allowing the Luftwaffe its most indulgent day, and a paddle steamer, with its huge wooden wheels, created a wake twice as wide as any other ship. As the planes dived, Crested Eagle’s guns jammed, and the bombs fell. Even the brief moments between attacks were filled by machine-gun bursts from the Stukas’ rear gunners as they pulled up and away.
Nearby was HMS Pangbourne. The wounded sub-lieutenant was now unconscious, but another sailor watched in horror as bomb after bomb fell on Crested Eagle, shattering her and setting her alight. He saw oil leaking from the vessel into the sea, and watched men in battledress with full packs jumping into the inches-thick fluid. Some drowned in it; others died when it caught fire, burning them alive.
A sailor on board Crested Eagle realised that she had been struck again when he ‘felt the ship shudder as if some giant hand had picked us up’. As fire took hold, he watched men running with the skin blasted from their bodies. A lieutenant passed, whom he identified by the emblem on his helmet – but not by his face. That was unrecognisable.
Lieutenant Commander Bernard Booth, Crested Eagle’s captain, managed to run her aground near Bray Dunes. Just before he did so, another sailor jumped into the sea, carefully taking off his shoes first, and swimming the short distance to the beach. Only once on land did he realise that the skin was hanging from his hands in melted shreds. Soldiers watched amazed as the ship, her hull burning red-hot for hours afterwards, joined them on the shore.
She is still there, a shocking skeletal presence, emerging from the sea at low tide. At the time of writing, one of her guns is exposed, waiting to be liberated by a ‘collector’ or by the French government. She is nowadays visited by mussel pickers and those paying their respects to the roughly three hundred men who died on her. One of these was Vic Viner’s brother Albert.
Ship losses were very heavy on Wednesday 29 May. Three destroyers and twelve other large ships were lost. And yet over 47,000 soldiers were rescued. By the start of Thursday 30 May, 72,783 men had been rescued in total – considerably more than the Admiralty had anticipated. But that night, a misunderstanding occurred with potentially disastrous consequences for Operation Dynamo.
At about 7 p.m., Ramsay’s Dynamo Room in Dover Castle received a telephone call from a naval officer present at Lord Gort’s headquarters in La Panne. The officer was, like Charles Goodeve, one of the Admiralty’s ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’, and he made the call without authority. He said that Dunkirk harbour was completely blocked by damaged ships, and that the evacuation must now be carried out entirely from the beaches.
This was not true – and it is unclear why he made the call. Perhaps he had been unduly panicked by the attack on the mole. A little earlier, in the midst of that attack, the Dynamo Room had received a garbled wireless message from a destroyer reporting that it was ‘impossible to embark more troops’ from the mole. This – at the time the message was sent – had been true.
Taking these messages together, Ramsay decided that the mole must now be out of action – but before he could act, he wanted confirmation. Just before 9 p.m., he wired Tennant asking him whether the harbour really was blocked. Tennant replied that it was not – but his message never reached Ramsay, who then sent a message to Admiral Abrial at Bastion 32: ‘I cannot get in touch with Captain Tennant. Can you inform me whether it is still possible for transports to enter harbour and berth alongside?’
Again, Ramsay received no answer. Rather than take any chances, he ordered all ships to the beaches. Throughout the night – while the weather was excellent and the Luftwaffe almost absent – only four drifters and one yacht came alongside the mole. The chance to evacuate fifteen thousand men, all of whom were ready to depart, was wasted.
The next morning, the evacuation proceeded as before, and ships returned to the mole. But it is clear from these mistaken messages (and others like them) that one of Operation Dynamo’s chief problems was communication. This is hardly surprising given the hurriedly improvised nature of the operation. Tennant had made his headquarters in a dug-out near the end of the mole. With him was a signals team, consisting of an officer, an NCO and twenty-four signalmen. Unfortunately, they had brought very little equipment with them: just some hand flags and an Aldis lamp, useful only for signalling to ships immediately offshore.
At first, Tennant’s wireless messages had to be transmitted either from the French station at Bastion 32 or from destroyers on the mole. Messages could only be received, meanwhile, at Bastion 32. On 30 May, Tennant took possession of a Marconi TV5 wireless transmitter/receiver set. It could – in theory – transmit by Morse or by voice. But for the first few hours of its life, it failed to transmit, and a few hours later it broke down completely due to sand in the generator.
Tennant’s next stab at rectifying the situation involved the establishment of a Royal Corps of Signals wireless station in a lorry next to Bastion 32. This was far more effective; it meant no longer having to rely on a handily sited ship or on French goodwill. It also meant that misunderstandings such as that of 29 May were far less likely to occur.
It is worth noting that while Tennant was struggling to communicate, Lord Gort’s headquarters in a villa at La Panne had an excellent cable telephone link with the Dynamo Room at Dover Castle.* Unfortunately, Tennant’s only method of communication with La Panne (or with any of the beaches) was by motorcycle dispatch rider, so this was of no use to him. And Tennant’s difficulty in contacting his beach parties was mirrored by the beach parties’ difficulty in contacting ships offshore. Communication could only be made using semaphore flags, or the headlamps of cars used as signal lamps.
On 30 May, Tennant received two field telephones with which he set up a link to Commander Clouston on the mole. The two officers may have only been a short distance apart, but for Tennant, the mole was the single most important element of Operation Dynamo. Clouston was also given a loudspeaker for issuing instructions, which showed its value during a lull in the evacuation when Commander Guy Maund, Tennant’s assistant, used it to urge on the troops: ‘Remember your pals, boys! The quicker you get on board the more of them will be saved!’
The result was instant. The soldiers broke into a run, and in just two hours, eight destroyers embarked 8,528 men, while four passenger ships embarked 5,649 more.
The overall communication picture reveals Operation Dynamo as the improvised – and often ramshackle – endeavour that it truly was. But this is hardly a criticism; it was an eventuality that no one had expected. As the people of Britain were learning to make do and mend, those responsible for their future were doing the same on a more pressing scale.
And because Dynamo was an improvisation, conflicting interests tended to arise. The Admiralty, concerned with the loss of so many destroyers in a single day on 29 May, ordered the withdrawal of its eight most modern destroyers from the evacuation. Just as Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force feared the loss of its Spitfires and Hurricanes, so the Admiralty feared the loss of its most effective ships.
For Ramsay, however, this was a disaster. He now had only fifteen destroyers at his disposal, and these ships were the backbone of Operation Dynamo. By the end of the evacuation, they would have brought off almost 30 per cent of all troops rescued – more than any other kind of ship. Thankfully, the decision was reversed the following day, returning the modern destroyers to full evacuation duties.
Destroyers, first developed at the end of the nineteenth century, were fast, heavily armed ships, well suited to Operation Dynamo – although their speed and size caused difficulty to smaller vessels in the crowded Channel. Lady Brassey, a Dover harbour tug, was very nearly struck by a destroyer steaming towards England at over 30 knots. A sailor on board watched troops on the destroyer’s fore de
ck, drenched and helpless, repeatedly deluged by waves as she surged forward oblivious to all around her.
Typically, six or seven hundred men would be crammed onto a destroyer, but there are plenty of accounts of crossings made with more than a thousand soldiers on board. Some destroyer captains deliberately jettisoned their torpedoes and depth charges so that they could take on more men. Leading Seaman Ernest Eldred remembers soldiers crammed into every inch of space on HMS Harvester. They were on the upper deck and the mess decks, in the engine room and down the stoke hole. ‘The only place we couldn’t have them,’ he says, ‘was round the guns.’ The destroyer had to defend itself, after all, and it might also have to fire at enemy batteries on shore.
So weighed down were the destroyers that low tide presented a problem, particularly when a ship’s depth-finding equipment failed – as happened on HMS Sabre.* The captain’s solution was to place a sailor on either side of the deck to ‘swing the lead’: that is to drop a line weighted with lead into the water to gauge its depth. The sailors would then sing out the depth in fathoms – ‘Mark 5!’ – just as sailors on the Mississippi had done in the last century.*
But if many soldiers came home on naval ships (minesweepers as well as destroyers), a similarly vast number – over a quarter of all those rescued – were brought back on civilian personnel ships. These included passenger ferries, car ferries, large pleasure boats (such as Crested Eagle), Dutch schuits (flat-bottomed boats designed for Dutch waterways), and countless other varieties of passenger and cargo ship. Twenty were cross-Channel steamers and cargo boats belonging to Southern Railway, five of which were lost. They could take an extraordinary number of soldiers: the Isle of Man ferry Tynwald, sailing from the mole at the very end of the evacuation, embarked three thousand soldiers at once.
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