The fact is, therefore, that a ditched Spitfire stayed afloat long enough for a pilot to free himself, become trapped, free himself again and survive.
Graham Davies, of 222 Squadron, went out on dawn patrol on 31 May, but began to lose height after being hit by anti-aircraft fire. He remembered the advice of a Hurricane pilot that it was possible to land wheels down on Dunkirk beach due to the hard sand. Thinking that he might be able to fix his Spitfire and take off again, Davies landed to the west of Dunkirk, in order to avoid the thousands of troops to the east. But as he came down, he was fired on by the French guns at Fort-Mardyck. He landed safely nevertheless and, after meeting the artillery men who had shelled him, he eventually managed to set fire to his aircraft, and received a lift into Dunkirk.
At the end of the mole, Davies could see a minesweeper and a paddle steamer. German planes were strafing from time to time, and a bomber was dropping its load in the harbour. Dead bodies were lying everywhere. In the midst of this, an angry British soldier was storming back up the mole, furious that the Navy would not let him come aboard a ship with a German prisoner he was frogmarching around.
On the morning of 1 June, the weather cleared. The return of the Stukas en masse coincided with the return of the modern British destroyers. A number of unopposed Luftwaffe attacks were launched in the morning, resulting, as we have seen, in the sinking of HMS Keith as well as a number of other destroyers and naval ships. British soldiers seethed at their apparent lack of protection. Harold Bird-Wilson tells of Ken Manger, a fellow 17 Squadron pilot who bailed out of his Hurricane over the beach. Attempting to board a destroyer, he was bluntly informed by an army officer that ships were not for the Royal Air Force. But Manger, it turned out, was an excellent amateur boxer. He knocked the officer into the sea, and stepped gingerly on board. The following day, Manger was back in the air over Dunkirk.
Arthur Taylor of 13 Squadron received so many threats from soldiers that he hid his uniform. ‘I wore gumboots to cover the lower part of my Air Force uniform,’ he says, ‘and a black oilskin jacket to cover my Air Force jacket.’ Sufficiently disguised, Taylor was evacuated home. Flying Officer Peter Cazenove, meanwhile, who had been forced to land his Spitfire on the beach, was turned away from three different destroyers. ‘The Navy said that all accommodation was reserved for the Army, and the Air Force could go fuck themselves,’ Cazenove’s friend Tony Bartley wrote in a letter to his father. Cazenove was captured and ended up in a POW camp.
There are many reasons why soldiers did not see members of the Royal Air Force. For one thing, the RAF ended up employing large formations which meant gaps were necessary between patrols. For another, the Germans had observers behind Dunkirk who were able to call up attacks. This allowed the Luftwaffe to arrive shortly after the RAF disappeared. Third, the RAF was patrolling inland to cut the Germans off before they could reach the beaches. This makes sense. Once the Luftwaffe was over the beach, it was too late to prevent an attack. Fourth, the RAF was often flying at 20,000 feet or higher. At this height planes simply could not be seen from the ground. And fifth, since British guns were firing at almost every friendly aircraft that flew overhead, nearby soldiers would have mistaken these British aircraft for German machines.
Hilton Haarhoff’s squadron patrolled Dunkirk on the afternoon of 1 June. He noted that the beaches ‘were now nearly deserted, but the sand showed a mass of shell holes and shelter trenches which were hastily dug by our troops’. He was also able to see the line of lorries that had been driven out into the sea to form a jetty for the boats. On their way home, Haarhoff’s Hudson crew witnessed a dogfight between Spitfires and Stukas. The Stukas were attacking ships returning to Dover. Haarhoff saw one Stuka dive, release its bombs and rise again. ‘I looked for his target,’ he says, ‘an inoffensive tug towing a barge loaded with troops.’ A huge wall of water rose up in front of the tug, blotting it from view. ‘I did not expect to see the tug again,’ he remembers, ‘but in less time than it takes to tell, the tug was still steaming forward and the shower of water decreasing as it fell; the gallant little tug was quite unharmed and I gave it a cheer.’
The morning of 2 June started quietly for Fighter Command, with their patrols meeting little resistance. Tony Bartley remembers his squadron dropping to 9,000 feet – against orders – where it encountered thirty Heinkel 111s, destroying about eighteen of them. Even further below, Bartley could see Stukas diving. But the Stukas had not succeeded in thwarting the BEF’s escape. And they had made a liar of their commander-in-chief. It turned out that Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe could not destroy the British Expeditionary Force – whatever he had told Adolf Hitler.
On 2 June, 611 Squadron experienced their first day over Dunkirk. Squadron Leader John McComb remembers they had planned a drinks party for their wives in the mess that day. When the order came through to go to Dunkirk, they decided not to cancel the party, as ‘we could not have Hitler interfering with our drinking habits’. The squadron was about to take off on patrol when one of the pilots, Donald Little, leapt briefly onto the wing of McComb’s aircraft and asked him to feed his dog that night. McComb and his wife shared a cottage with Little and his wife, and another pilot, Ralph Crompton and his wife. ‘That morning,’ remembers McComb, ‘we ran into a cloud of Messerschmitts and got into all sorts of trouble and lost these two young pilots.’ The squadron arrived back in ones and twos. ‘Meantime the party had started, broken with a cheer as someone else turned up. Came the time when Lil Crompton realised with June Little that no more were coming back.’ The two young women asked for no help or support. ‘Without a tear or a word they quietly slipped out of the ante-room and went back to the cottage.’
Over the entire period of the Battle of France and the evacuation, 931 British aircraft (of which 477 were fighters) failed to return from operations, were destroyed on the ground, or were irreparably damaged. Over the same period, 1,526 airmen were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
For the period of the evacuation, the numbers are less precise. 11 Group gives a figure of 258 German aircraft destroyed. The 1953 Official British History offers a figure of 177 British aircraft destroyed or damaged, of which 106 were fighters. Whatever the precise figures, however, it seems clear that the Luftwaffe lost more aircraft during the evacuation than Fighter Command. And while mistakes were made by both sides, they were both severely hamstrung. The British by the fact that many of their aircraft were unavailable to them, the Luftwaffe by the fact that the task thrust upon them by their chief was unrealistic. And both sides were constrained by the battle’s distance from their airfields; they only had limited time in the air.
Ultimately, however, whether or not its task was realistic, the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy the British Expeditionary Force. It had failed in its stated aim for the very first time. And not only that, it failed to make a large dent in the Royal Air Force.
The RAF, on the other hand, had demonstrated that the much-feared Luftwaffe could be nullified. It had gained experience for the great air battle ahead. It had shot down large numbers of the enemy, and, with a great deal of help from the weather, it had protected the British Expeditionary Force. Most importantly – it had not lost.
So we can add, with some confidence, the final great element that contributed to the miracle of deliverance: the performance of the Royal Air Force.
Eleven
A New Dunkirk
Operation Dynamo is not well known in the United States. It is not particularly well known anywhere outside the United Kingdom. But that is a great shame – because it has huge international significance. If the BEF had been captured or destroyed at Dunkirk, Britain would almost certainly have been forced to surrender. She would then have become, as Churchill warned his Cabinet, a slave state, allowing Hitler to concentrate all his efforts on the Soviet Union. And without Britain as a partner, it is difficult to see how the United States could have opened a second front.
But let’s set any conjecture aside – because none is
necessary. Had Britain surrendered we would all be living in a very different world today. My family would not be alive because all the Jews would have disappeared from Britain many years ago. And without Britain to preserve freedom and the rule of law, the totalitarian norms of Nazi Germany would have bled throughout Europe. Barbarism, intolerance and coercion would be the natural order of things.
The closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics featured a vignette of Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, emerging from a model of Big Ben. Here we all are, the organisers seemed to be suggesting, enjoying a free Olympics, in a free United Kingdom, in a free world – and it’s all thanks to this man. Or thanks to this period, more accurately, these few weeks when Churchill held his ground and the British army got away.
That is the message at the heart of this book. The tale of the retreat and evacuation is not a parochial British story, that bit of history that happened before America and Russia joined in. It is the story of the global preservation of freedom, of the prevention of a new dark age. It deserves to be remembered.
And all this can be said before we have even discussed the return of the BEF to Britain. Once the ships were under way, the world still had a chance.
On ships on the way home, many men fell asleep. Some tried to find quiet corners where they would not be disturbed. ‘We’d arrive back in England, discharge everybody and get back to the beaches again,’ says Lieutenant Commander John McBeath of HMS Venomous, ‘and then a soldier would suddenly appear. He’d made the trip back to Dunkirk without knowing it.’
Leon Wilson, a French artilleryman, crossed to England on a destroyer whose captain welcomed the large French contingent on board with the words, ‘Come on, Frogs! Sit down and have something to eat!’
‘It was a good joke!’ says the magnanimous Wilson, who sat and ate properly for the first time in days. ‘I don’t think the Savoy could have given us such a meal.’
The vast majority of returning British troops understood that they had suffered a terrible defeat. Many felt that they had shamed their country. This attitude is demonstrated by the character Alex towards the end of the film. But a surprise was in store for those who felt this way. ‘In England, the reception was amazing,’ says Ian English, a Durham Light Infantry officer, who witnessed a public euphoria that made the returning soldiers feel like heroes. Humphrey Bredin boarded a train at Dover, fell asleep, and woke up at a place called Headcorn, where, he says, ‘the women almost gave us a party. They invaded the train with tea, coffee and buns.’ Anthony Rhodes was minding his own business when a complete stranger pressed money into his hand. ‘Well done, you lot! Jolly good job!’ shouted members of the Women’s Voluntary Service as Captain Gilbert White’s train passed by. Oranges and cigarettes were shoved through the carriage window at Private William Ridley. At one point he looked up to see ‘Welcome to the Dunkirk Heroes’ painted on the side of a building. When Sergeant Ted Oates had a chance, he wrote to his family: ‘We had a marvellous reception here & it seems as if we are heroes or something, I don’t know very much about all this.’*
For Bredin, the public’s reaction was embarrassing. ‘We felt, damn it, that we’d run away!’ Ridley, too, talks of feeling ashamed. And plenty of soldiers were angry at what they saw as betrayal, by the politicians, by their officers or by the army itself.
On 2 June, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, was loudly booed as he addressed troops at Aldershot. At around the same time, Basil Dean, head of Ensa, sat in a Bridport pub listening as ‘seething’ soldiers outdid each other with accounts of their experiences. One man complained loudly that the junior officers in his unit had grabbed the vehicles and fled to the French coast, leaving the NCOs and men to look after themselves. Others angrily backed him up. In mid-June, eighteen-year-old Colin Perry was told by a soldier of how his officers had deserted their men when their ship was sunk by Stukas. And seventy-seven years later, Maurice Machin of the Royal Army Service Corps remains furious about what happened: ‘They say Dunkirk was a victory. It wasn’t – it was a disorganised mess. If it hadn’t been for the British people coming to our aid, I would have died along with many more.’* George Purton is more subdued in his criticism, but his point is similar. ‘We were sent,’ he says, ‘into something we could not cope with.’
Yet the public reaction to the evacuation, whether miracle or disorganised mess, was neither contrived nor imposed. It was a spontaneous demonstration of relief. Friends and relatives were safe, and the war was going to continue. Nurse Eileen Livett began looking after returning soldiers at her hospital in north London. She considered them heroes ‘because we all realised, here at home, how tight the situation was . . . It was really touch and go.’ This was the mood that Winston Churchill tapped into so effectively when, speaking to the House of Commons, he admitted that wars might not be won by evacuations, but that ‘a miracle of deliverance’ had been achieved.
For some people, Dunkirk became a personal inspiration. It made Nella Last feel part of something ‘undying and never old . . . I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and the rescued.’ For long-time pacifist Dennis Argent, it was the spur to changing his beliefs. He could now imagine the circumstances where killing an enemy ‘can be obviously and directly the means of saving the lives of civilian fellow-workers, and maybe even friends and family’.
In a speech given several months after Operation Dynamo, the historian Lord Elton described Dunkirk as the turning of a tide. People were now learning ‘that the things which really mattered were not the complicated and exclusive things. It was not the stocks and shares or exclusive nightclubs which mattered now, but having a roof and a meal and the sound of children’s laughter around one.’
Elton’s impression of Dunkirk as a national wake-up call may be slightly simplistic (and extremely sentimental) but there is no doubt that the British social and political climate began to change at once. Before Dunkirk, the government could not afford to provide free milk to mothers and children. On 7 June, it introduced a scheme offering precisely that. Money was suddenly no object.
Days later, Harold Nicolson, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Information, delivered a paper to the Cabinet describing how the old order was changing. ‘Every effort must be made,’ he wrote, ‘to provide real equality of opportunity for the younger generation.’ In reply, Lord Halifax, a relic of another age, acknowledged that human values now seemed more important than financial purity.
If Britain were to survive, after all, she would need the help of her ordinary people as never before; she would need them to fight, to work long hours in factories, to volunteer their services in aid of the war effort, and to tolerate all manner of regulation and restrictions.
In return, there would have to be compensations. Her people would be offered better wages and increased protection. But their newfound importance would also gain them a greater stake in society. This was acknowledged, on 1 July, in a leader in The Times:
If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production (though this too will be required) than of equitable redistribution . . . The new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual.
A fight to resist Nazi iniquity, it seemed, made little sense if Britain failed to acknowledge her own inequalities. Dunkirk turned abstract ideas like freedom and equality into realisable goals, which the wartime government would shortly start to embed into British life. The sudden shock of Dunkirk was the spark for the creation of modern Britain.
None of this would have come as much consolation, however, to those taken prisoner in France, o
r brought back wounded. At her hospital in Barnet, Eileen Livett tended to men suffering terribly. One young man in his late teens, of whom she was very fond, had third-degree burns. He had been in such good physical condition before being wounded that the burns started to heal very quickly. But when Livett removed the bandages around the man’s head, his charred ear came away with the dressing. The following day, Livett was off duty, and when she returned to the hospital she was told that the young man had died. The dressing around his eyes had been removed – and he had discovered that he was blind. ‘Although he was healing so beautifully,’ says Livett, ‘the shock was just enough to really finish him.’
The fact is that Operation Dynamo did not bring home the entire BEF. More than 140,000 British troops remained in France. Some had failed to reach Dunkirk, while members of 51st (Highland) Division – sent to help man the Maginot line – remained south of the Somme, cut off from the remainder of the BEF by the German advance. The division continued fighting after Operation Dynamo, but was surrounded by the Germans and captured on 12 June at St Valery-en-Caux.
On the very same day that 51st Division was being marched into captivity, two fresh divisions – 52nd (Lowland) Division and 1st Canadian Division – were arriving in France as part of a second British Expeditionary Force, sent to help the French resist the Germans. This 2nd BEF, however, was never likely to succeed. Its own commander, Lieutenant General Brooke, wanted to evacuate his troops after only two days, but Churchill was so keen for France to stay in the war, and so concerned about the effect of another evacuation on French morale, that he ordered the divisions to stay where they were. Then, on 14 June, German troops entered Paris. It became clear that the French were truly beaten, and the order was finally given for the 2nd BEF to evacuate from Bordeaux, Cherbourg, St Malo, Brest and St Nazaire.
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