On 31 May, she was supposed to bring Lord Gort and his staff back to England, but – as was not unusual – messages went awry and she instead found herself embarking soldiers from La Panne before returning to Dover. The next day, she brought Admiral Wake-Walker off HMS Keith and delivered him safely back to Dunkirk. When he then boarded her again to sail to Dover, she hoisted a dishcloth on which a St George’s cross had been quickly stained to serve as his flag. Once their duties were complete, she brought both Captain Tennant and General Alexander home to Dover for the final time, but she returned to Dunkirk on 5 June with Admiral Wake-Walker in order to make the harbour unusable for the Germans.
These, then, are the vessels present at a great historical event and at its fictional representation. In that representation, they play themselves. But there are many other vessels whose depiction in the film has a basis in reality. For example, we hear Commander Bolton asking a skipper whether he comes from Deal; he asks because the boat is a simple and elegant clinker-built Deal beach boat. During the evacuation, a Deal beach boat named Dumpling made seven trips backwards and forwards between the beaches and larger vessels before she was sunk by the wash of a passing destroyer. This was an ignominious end for a boat built at the time of Napoleon, and whose real-life skipper was over seventy years old. Another Deal beach boat present at Dunkirk – Lady Haig – lives on happily today.
It is not merely the boats that owe a debt to reality, of course. Viewers might, for example, see parallels between episodes in the lives of Tennant, Wake-Walker, Clouston and Ramsay. And George, the boy who sails across the Channel in the Moonstone, is a particularly interesting amalgam of a number of historical individuals.
One of these is eighteen-year-old Harold Porter, a crew member on board Renown, the cockle boat blown up by a contact mine with the loss of all hands. Harold was described in the Daily Mirror on 7 June 1940:
A boy of eighteen numbered among the heroes of Dunkirk was a failure at school. Through ill-health he never won a prize in the classroom or on the sports field. But one day he told his father, ‘I’m sorry I can never win any honours at school, but one day my name will be written on the roll of honour there.’
There are also parallels between George and Joe Reed, a fifteen-year-old deckhand on board New Britannic, the motor launch that appears in the film. Joe supposedly dived overboard a dozen times to bring wounded men to the deck as German aircraft were attacking. On 5 June 1940, his father told the Daily Express: ‘He was a brave boy. But my grandfather, my father and myself have gone across the Channel and it seemed to me that the boy could look after himself.’
Reg Vine, meanwhile, another fifteen-year-old, was a sea cadet whose mother had recently died and whose father had run off. One day in late May 1940, he was told by a sub-lieutenant that he would be ‘going to the seaside’ on a launch called Rummy II. The next day, he travelled down the Thames to Ramsgate, where he was issued with a rifle. The launch then headed out to sea, towed by a tug. Only now was Reg told that Rummy II would be rescuing British soldiers and that his role would be to row a lifeboat.
As the launch approached the coast, Reg heard more noise than he could ever remember hearing. He then saw body parts floating past – and he was sick. He tried to settle his stomach by imagining that he was in his uncle’s slaughterhouse, and that the bits of bodies belonged to animals.
Arriving at Dunkirk, Rummy II was sent to La Panne. The sea cadets on board, including Reg, spent their days rowing soldiers from the shore to their launch, which would then motor the men to larger ships further offshore. The whole process was a chain with Reg’s lifeboat at one end and a Royal Navy destroyer at the other.
As an interesting aside, Reg remembers seeing French soldiers stripping the dead bodies of English soldiers and dressing in their uniforms.
Gerald Ashcroft, meanwhile, was a sea scout and crew member on Sundowner, a 62ft naval pinnace. His skipper was Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to have survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The navy wanted to commandeer Sundowner – but Lightoller persuaded the relevant authorities that with his experience (he had commanded a destroyer in the First World War) he was the man to take her to Dunkirk. ‘I’ll warn you it’s not going to be a pleasure cruise,’ Lightoller told Gerald, ‘but if you’d like to come with us, we’d be pleased to have you.’ Sundowner would eventually rescue 130 soldiers from a stricken destroyer; Ashcroft remembers the men being very low when they came on board, continually saying that they’d let the country down. ‘But we tried to let them understand that they hadn’t let the country down,’ he says.
A final historical figure with parallels to George is Albert Barnes, who at fourteen was probably the youngest civilian involved in Operation Dynamo. At the time, he was working as a galley boy on the Thames tug Sun XII. As he was given no warning that the tug was leaving for Dunkirk, he had no time to tell his parents that he would be away. When he finally returned home, he took a bath and slept for twenty-four hours. ‘Then it was back to work as usual,’ he says, ‘scrubbing and cleaning and brewing up tea.’
Like all the characters in this film, it seems that George is not based on any one individual. He is an amalgam, a representative of a type of young man who existed in 1940.
One of these young men was seventeen-year-old Jim Thorpe. As I write, Jim is almost certainly the last man alive to have gone over to Dunkirk on one of the Little Ships. Born in November 1922, he now lives in Maryland in the United States. When I spoke to him in late March 2017, he explained that his brother, Arthur, was a boating enthusiast who lived alongside the River Thames. In late May 1940, Arthur got in touch asking Jim for help. ‘What do you need?’ asked Jim. ‘I need a man like you for the weekend,’ said his brother.
When the time came to leave, Jim still had no idea where they were going. ‘We’re going to help someone,’ is all that Arthur would say. But the weather was good, and Jim arrived safely on the French coast, surrounded by many other boats. He was impressed by the number of soldiers on the beaches and the fact that they were queuing up to their chests in water.
They took the boat as far inshore as they dared, and shut off the engine. Immediately men started trying to board. ‘It was a little bit on the frantic side,’ says Jim. ‘There were a lot of people trying to get on at the same time. So I would say, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!”’ Once the men were on board, Jim would tell them where to go, pushing them up front and clearing the back of the boat so that the engines could be started.
Jim remembers travelling across the Channel many times. He recalls German aircraft strafing the boat, and the soldiers on board firing back with their rifles. But did he realise the importance of the job he was doing?
‘No. You don’t think about that sort of thing. You think about – just get those men. They were trying to do something for us. You think, Let’s get them out!’
So far in our story, we have encountered various kinds of Little Ships and their personnel, but in the improvised and tumultuous environment of Dunkirk, there were some very strange vessels on the water, crewed by a remarkable range of individuals. As Robert Newborough was sailing away from Dunkirk in his Fleet Air Arm vessel, he spotted a canoe going the other way.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted Newborough.
‘I can take one other!’ explained the canoeist.
But perhaps the least reassuring mode of transport in the Channel was observed by the master of the steam yacht SY Killarney. He sailed past a French officer and two Belgian soldiers attempting to reach England on a door. And balancing on the door, between the three passengers, were six large bottles of wine.
Another unusual Little Ship, though for different reasons, was Advance, a motor launch crewed by three bearded civilians who looked very much like pirates. As somebody commented at the time, ‘Only the Jolly Roger was missing.’ But far more unusual than their appearance was the fact that within forty-eight hours of Advance’s return to England, two of her crew member
s had been detained by the police under Regulation 18B as members of the British Union of Fascists.
And yet for all the different sorts of people aboard the Little Ships, there were, it appears, no women. The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships certainly has no record of a woman – notwithstanding an article in The Times of 6 June 1940 headed ‘Women Among Volunteer Crews’. The piece alleges that at least one woman received permission to take a Little Ship across to Dunkirk. She did this, it claims, by telephoning the Admiralty in such a deep voice that she was mistaken for a man. There is, unfortunately, no corroboration for this story. There was a prodigious amount of unsubstantiated rumour flying about in the days after Operation Dynamo, and The Times seems to have been as likely to repeat gossip as anybody else.
Just as rumours can take hold in the aftermath of an event, so can received wisdom. Not so long ago, the received wisdom was that the miracle of Dunkirk was achieved solely by the legendary Little Ships, crewed by stout-hearted Englishmen, men such as Clem Miniver,* who left the pub on a warm summer’s evening, jumped in their boats, and returned two days later, tired and bearded, never to speak of the terrible things they had seen. This, of course, was a cliché, an exaggeration with little basis in fact. Yet the revisionist view that the Little Ships hardly rescued any soldiers, that they were an insignificant coda to an evacuation achieved by the Royal Navy, is equally misleading.
The reality is that the Little Ships, a surprising number of which were manned by civilians, played a vitally important role in Operation Dynamo. At a basic level, the entire evacuation was invigorated by the arrival of the flotillas. But beyond this, the Little Ships actually brought more soldiers home to England than has ever been acknowledged. This is because many Little Ships, packed with soldiers, were towed across the Channel by larger ships. When the procession reached England, each smaller ship would moor alongside the larger ship, the soldiers would climb from the smaller ship onto the larger ship and from there onto the dock, and the smaller ship would not be credited with rescuing anybody at all. It might not even be recorded as having taken part in Operation Dynamo.
Yet even if a Little Ship did nothing more than ferry men from the beaches to the larger ships, it was still responsible for rescuing every single man that it ferried. Without its contribution, that man would have remained on the beach to be captured by the enemy. Considered in these terms, the contribution of the Little Ships seems very significant indeed – and this is without tackling the theoretical question of how far Dunkirk Spirit was influenced by their story.
As the flotillas began to arrive on Friday 31 May, however, and the evacuation gained momentum, the perimeter around Dunkirk was shrinking. The immediate result was that six thousand men at La Panne had to march along the beach to Bray Dunes. Colonel Stephen Hollway of the Royal Engineers remembers standing on the beach at La Panne. He was told that there would be no more boats coming in. He then passed out, either from a shell blast or from exhaustion, and when he came to, early on Saturday morning, there was not a living soul left on the beach. The eastern beaches had been abandoned.
As far as the film is concerned, this is a telling moment. In a no-man’s-land such as this, Tommy, Gibson, Alex and the Highlanders settle down in the grounded Dutch trawler. Allied troops have disappeared and German troops are shortly to arrive. And while there is little evidence of Dutch ships (other than the ubiquitous schuits) taking part in Operation Dynamo, there is a record of a Dutch eel boat – Johanna – arriving in Dunkirk at the end of May.
On Friday 31 May, meanwhile, Winston Churchill flew to Paris in his customary Flamingo to meet members of the Allied Supreme War Council. The French and British sat around a table, facing each other, and Churchill was able to offer some rare good news. As of lunchtime, he said, 165,000 troops had been evacuated – far more than anyone had expected.
‘How many French?’ asked Weygand.
‘So far, only fifteen thousand,’ said Churchill. Not such good news.
Weygand wondered how he could face French public opinion with such a disparity. More French would have to be evacuated. Churchill agreed. Desperate to keep France in the war, he had already decided that Anglo-French relations must improve. From this point, he explained, British and French troops would embark in equal numbers.
A telegram was then drafted to send to Admiral Abrial in Bastion 32. It noted that once the perimeter had collapsed, British forces would embark before French forces.
At these words, Churchill exploded with righteous emotion. ‘Non! Partage – bras dessus, bras dessous!’ he shouted. His meaning was clear as he mimed two people clutching each other as they departed. But he went further. Carried away in the moment, he promised that the British would defend the perimeter to the bitter end to allow the French to escape.
In truth, this was never likely to happen. It was almost inevitable that the French would end up defending their own country as the British returned to theirs. Churchill’s promise would, in time, be remembered by the French as a classic example of English perfidy, as serious as the concealment of their intention to evacuate.*
Relations between British and French soldiers always depended on the individuals and the circumstances. There had undoubtedly been ill feeling on both sides, the French focusing on supposed British betrayal, the British on the apparently poor standard of the French army. And during the evacuation, that ill feeling often revealed itself. As represented in the film, French soldiers were prevented from joining queues and boarding boats. Robert Newborough remembers trying to pick British troops ahead of foreign troops. He believed it to be his duty. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘one got a bit ruthless and said, “British only!”’ Yet it seems that after Churchill’s order that French and British troops be evacuated together, genuine efforts were being made to follow his instruction. And despite the shrinking of the perimeter, Friday 31 May was Operation Dynamo’s most successful day in terms of evacuations. A total of 68,014 men were lifted, 22,942 from the beaches and 45,072 from the mole. The running total was now 194,620 men rescued.
The first loaded ship to depart Dunkirk the next morning was the Whippingham, an Isle of Wight paddle ferry with 2,700 troops on board. Such huge numbers suggest a knowledge that time was running short. And Whippingham very nearly capsized when shell fire caused troops to rush to the sheltered side of the ship.
A little later, at about 8 a.m., Admiral Wake-Walker was on the bridge of the destroyer HMS Keith, off Bray Dunes, when a formation of Stukas appeared in the distance. Three of them came down directly at Keith – and so began the first of five consecutive bomb attacks. The first ended in near misses, the closest bomb landing ten yards away. The second sent a bomb down the central funnel, blowing out the under part of the ship. Sitting nearby was MTB 102 – and seeing Keith’s difficulty, it drew near. Admiral Wake-Walker chose his moment and transferred across. The third and fourth attacks weakened her further, and at 9.15 a final attack sunk her. All that remained of HMS Keith was a large oil slick in which soldiers struggled, vomited and drowned.
Later that day, the decision was taken to abandon all daylight evacuation from the mole and the beaches. German batteries now commanded sections of the Channel and all necessary embarkations could be carried out under the relative safety of darkness.
Saturday was a mixed day for the Allies. Shipping losses reached their highest level, but the number of troops rescued was almost as high as the previous day. The number of soldiers evacuated was 64,429, of whom 47,081 were picked up from the mole. The accumulated total had now reached 259,049.
The end was in sight – but it is worth standing aside for a moment to try to imagine life within the perimeter during Operation Dynamo. Perhaps the greatest initial shock to a newcomer would be the noise. Dunkirk was very loud. Guns of all types were being fired, shells were flying overhead and bursting, Stukas (so long as they were fitted with sirens) were screaming. This would not all have been going on at once, of course, but the ambient noise was loud enough that
‘Dunkirk throat’, a relentless sore hoarseness, was a near-universal complaint.
A sound common on the beaches during quieter spells was a soft sighing, similar to the wind passing over telegraph wires. This was actually the sound of wounded men moaning. Singing could often be heard; popular songs at Dunkirk include ironic favourites like ‘Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Three Hundred Men Went to Walk, Walk along the Sand Dunes’ (to the tune of ‘One Man Went to Mow’). A patriotic favourite was ‘There’ll Always be an England’, while ‘Home on the Range’ was also popular. The French, meanwhile, could often be heard singing ‘La Marseillaise’.
Common expressions among soldiers included ‘It’s a Blighty move’, meaning ‘I’m going back to England’, and ‘Make for the black smoke’, meaning ‘Head for Dunkirk’. Whatever the men were discussing among themselves, bad language helped them to make their point. And one of the most startling noises heard at Dunkirk was the silence that came in the aftermath of an attack. ‘The quiet, when the firing ceased,’ writes an anonymous QUAIMNS nurse, ‘was more noticeable than the continuous noise had been.’
On Sunday 2 June, as the British effort reached its culmination, Major General Alexander was told to hold on for as long as possible so that the maximum number of troops could be evacuated. Captain Tennant believed that five thousand British troops remained, in addition to the four thousand men on the perimeter, who were currently withdrawing. Ramsay suspected that an additional two thousand men could be found hiding in the town (where some might have remained since Anthony Rhodes departed his cellar a week earlier). Nevertheless, it was hoped that they could all be evacuated within the next twelve hours.* With this aim, Tennant sent out a Nelsonesque call to destroyers and minesweepers: ‘The final evacuation is staged for tonight, and the nation looks to the Navy to see this through. I want every ship to report as soon as possible whether she is fit to meet the call which has been made on our courage and endurance.’
Dunkirk Page 24