First Hand Accounts of Dunkirk
On 12th May, 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of France. The German Army employed 136 divisions and 2,500 tanks in its invasion of France. The French, supported by Belgian and British troops, had a total of 125 divisions and 3,600 tanks. The Germans were dominant in the air with 3,000 aircraft against the allies 1,400.
By 14th May, 1940, the German tanks led by General Heinz Guderian had crossed the Meuse and had opened up a a fifty-mile gap in the Allied front. Six days later they reached the Channel. When he heard the news, Winston Churchill ordered the implementation of Operation Dynamo, a plan to evacuate of troops and equipment from the French port of Dunkirk, that had been drawn up by General John Gort, the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).
General Gerd von Rundstedt had doubts about the aggressive tactics of Heinz Guderian and argued that his tanks should halt until infantry divisions could catch up so that a conventional assault could be made on Allied troops. Adolf Hitler agreed and this decision stopped Guderian cutting off the escape of the British and French troops from Dunkirk.
Between 27th May and 4th June, 1940, a total of 693 ships (39 Destroyers, 36 Minesweepers, 77 trawlers, 26 Yachts and a variety of other small craft) brought back 338,226 people back to Britain. Of these 140,000 were members of the French Army. All heavy equipment was abandoned and left in France.
----------------------------------------------
On 1st June, 1940, C.H. Lightoller, a retired naval officer who served on The Titantic, took his yacht Sundowner to help bring soldiers back from Dunkirk. One son, Pilot Officer H. B. Lightoller, had already been killed in the war. Another son helped him on board the Sundowner.
"For some time now we had been subject to sporadic bombing and machine-gun fire, but as the Sundowner is exceptionally and extremely quick on the helm, by waiting till the last moment and putting the helm hard over - my son at the wheel - we easily avoided every attack, though sometimes near lifted out of the water.
The difficulty of taking troops on board from the quay high above us was obvious, so I went alongside a destroyer where they were already embarking. I got hold of her captain and told him I could take over a hundred (though the most I had ever had on board was twenty-one). He, after consultation with the military C.O., told me to carry on and get the troops aboard. I must say that before leaving England, we had worked all night stripping her down of everything movable, masts included, that would tend to lighten her and make for more room.
I now started to pack them on deck, having passed word below for every man to lie down and keep down; the same applied on deck. I could feel her getting distinctly tender, so took no more. Actually we had exactly a hundred and thirty on board. They were literally packed like the proverbial sardines, even one in the bath and another on the WC, so that all the poor devils could do was sit and be sick. So that after discharging our cargo in Ramsgate at ten p.m., there lay before the three of us a nice clearing-up job. "
----------------------------------------------
Brian Horrocks wrote about returning from Dunkirk in his autobiography, A Full Life (1960)
If you ask anybody what they remember most clearly about the retreat to Dunkirk they will all mention two things - shame and exhaustion. Shame-as we went back through those white-faced, silent crowds of Belgians, the people who had cheered us and waved to us as we came through their country only four days before, people who had vivid memories of a previous German occupation and whom we were now handing over to yet another. I felt very ashamed. We had driven up so jauntily and now, liked whipped dogs, we were scurrying back with our tails between our legs. But the infuriating part was that we hadn't been whipped. It was no fault of ours. All I could do as I passed these groups of miserable people was to mutter " Don't worry-we will come back." Over and over again I said it. And I was one of the last British most of them were to see for four long years.
----------------------------------------------
General Franz Halder, German chief of staff, kept a diary during May, 1940.
18th May, 1940: Every hour is precious. F H.Q. sees it quite differently. Führer keeps worrying about south flank. He rages and screams that we are on the way to ruin the whole campaign. He won't have any part in continuing the operation in a westward direction, let alone to the south-west, and still clings to the plan for the north-westerly drive.
24th May, 1940: The left-wing, which consists of armoured and motorized forces and has no enemy in front of it, will be stopped dead in its tracks upon direct order from the Führer. The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe.
26th May, 1940: Brauchitsch is very nervy. I can sympathize with him, for these orders from the top make no sense. In one area they call for a head-on attack against a front retiring in orderly fashion, and elsewhere they freeze the troops to the spot where the enemy rear could be cut into at any time. Von Rundstedt, too, cannot stand it, and has gone up forward to Hoth and Kleist to look over the land for the next armoured moves.
30th May, 1940: Bad weather has grounded the Luffwaffe and now we must stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy getting away to England under our noses.
----------------------------------------------
A British artillery officer produced an anonymous account of what it was like waiting on the beaches at Dunkirk on 30th May, 1940.
The whole front was one long continuous line of blazing buildings, a high wall of fire, roaring and darting in tongues of flame, with the smoke pouring upwards and disappearing in the blackness of the sky above the roof-tops.
Along the promenade, in parties of fifty, the remnants of practically all the last regiments were wearily trudging along. There was no singing, and very little talk. Everyone was far too exhausted to waste breath. It was none too easy to keep contact with one's friends in the darkness, and amid so many little masses of moving men, all looking very much alike. If you stopped for a few seconds to look behind, the chances were you attached yourself to some entirely different unit.
A group of dead and dying soldiers on the path in front of us quickened our desire to quit the promenade. Stepping over the bodies we marched down the slope on the dark beach. Dunkirk front was now a lurid study in red and black; flames, smoke, and the night itself all mingling together to compose a frightful panorama of death and destruction.
----------------------------------------------
Douglas Bader, a member of 222 Squadron, attempted to protect Allied forces leaving Dunkirk. We were all flying around up and down the coast near Dunkirk looking for enemy aircraft which seemed also to be milling around with no particular cohesion. The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping. One felt one could walk across without getting one's feet wet, or that's what it looked like from the air. There were naval escort vessels, sailing dinghies, rowing boats, paddle-steamers, indeed every floating device known in this country. They were all taking British soldiers from Dunkirk back home. The oil-tanks just inside the harbour were ablaze, and you could identify Dunkirk from the Thames estuary by the huge pall of black smoke rising straight up in a windless sky. Our ships were being bombed by enemy aeroplanes up to about half-way across the Channel and the troops on the beaches were suffering the same attention. There were also German aircraft inland strafing the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force fighting their way out to the port.