We have found some of the recollections of Mr C.W. Wenban from which we can piece together Challenges movements during the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Mr Wenban was a waterman who happened to be standing on the Royal Terrace Pier, Gravesend. He was asked if he was free to make up the crew of the Gravesend steam tug Challenge. He was told the job was probably connected with getting troops out.
Of course he said yes.
He went home to get a couple of shirts and a toothbrush and told his wife Dorothy what he was doing.
Before long he was aboard Challenge proceeding to Dover for orders. Once there under Gravesender Captain C. Parker they were told to collect a barge loaded with supplies and tow it across for the boys trapped at Dunkirk.
Mr Wenban recalled “We got to Dunkirk and received directions to put the barge ashore further along the shore. So we steamed along to the position they said, but instead of British troops we found Germans had occupied the ground. We quickly turned about back to Dunkirk harbour and this time we were told to go to La Panne. Challenge had just let go of the barge having run it at the beach at full speed ahead, when we watched a dive bomber come in to attack.
The plane went for the barge and dropped a bomb which blew the barge right out of the water. There were five army men on the barge. According to my information only one man survived, and he was a Gravesend man who I later met in Dover.”
Challenge carried out a few towing jobs for the Navy control before setting back under orders for Dover harbour.
“On our way back we found a damaged destroyer loaded with troops” continued Mr Wenban “We got a line to her and towed her back to port, where the troops were able to disembark safely.”
When entering Dunkirk waters for the first time the first vessel that the crew of the Challenge observed was her sister tug Contest which was also crewed from Gravesend. Both tugs where unarmed.
Back at Dover, a few more towing jobs where done. One task was to issue ladders around to Navy ships in the harbour. These were later used to enable thousands of troops to embark from the Dunkirk harbour arm down to the deck of the rescuing destroyer.
When a returning destroyer was rammed by a cross channel ferry at the entrance of Dover harbour Mr Wenban dived into the oily water and rescued two men from the water get them into a French naval Pinnace.
On the final night of the evacuation Challenge was one of the last craft to steam across the Channel to visit the beaches “We were under command of a naval officer this time, although the vessel was still under the red ensign.” Mr Wenban said "When we got there there was a lot of noise going on from German guns. There were many big fires. It was obvious that our little tug could do no more, although we told to try and bring back anything we could see. Our officer eventually ordered the tug back to Dover.”
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The above description ties in with other information we have.
We know that on the night of the 1st June she was in Dover harbour and at 2000 hrs she assisted in towing the destroyer Worcester which had be in a collision with The Maid of Orleans to the Prince of Wales pier along with the tugs Crested Cock, Sun VII and Sun XIII. (this must be the incident when Mr Wenban saved some men from the water) Then at approximately 2130 hrs she was ordered to steam to Dunkirk and "pick up or rescue anything " at 2300hrs she was off North Goodwin in a line with Ocean Cock, Crested Cock, Fairplay I, Sun VII, Sun XI and SunXII all heading towards Dunkirk with the same orders.
On the 31st May 1940 she was at Dunkirk berthing small craft in the harbour returning to Dunkirk the following day with some small craft in tow. More research is required to establish what else she did but one can imagine that she must have retuned to England with men on board.
Winston Churchill wrote
about Operation Dynamo in his book The Second World War, that was published in
1949.
Ever since May 20, the gathering of shipping and small craft had been
proceeding under the control of Admiral Ramsay, who commanded at Dover.
After the loss of Boulogne and Calais only the remains of the port of
Dunkirk and the open beaches next to the Belgian Frontier were in our
hands. On the evening of the 26th an Admiralty signal put Operation
Dynamo into play, and the first troops were brought home that night.
Early the next morning, May 27, emergency measures were taken to find
additional small craft. The various boatyards, from Teddington to
Brightlingsea, were searched by Admiralty officers, and yielded upwards
of forty serviceable motor-boats or launches, which were assembled at
Sheerness on the following day. At the same time lifeboats from liners
in the London docks, tugs from the Thames, yachts, fishing-craft,
lighters, barges and pleasure-boats - anything that could be the use
along the beaches - were called into service.
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.
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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. "
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
| Builder | Alex Hall & Co., Aberdeen No 633 1931 |
|
Length between verticals |
110ft |
|
Beam |
26ft 3ins |
Draft |
14ft |
|
Displacement |
239 tons (dry) |
Engine |
Triple expansion, 1150hp By A. Hall & Sons, Aberdeen Engine No 633 HP 16.5" IP 27" LP 45" stroke 30" |
|
Boiler |
Triple burner wet back Scotch type |
Fuel |
Heavy Oil Converted from coal in April 1964 |
| Oil Burning system by Todd | Installed April/July 1964, installation No 3503 |
|
Fuel capacity |
110 Tons |
|
Propeller
|
Four blade, iron 2 tons 10ft 6" diameter (the original weight was thought to be 7.5 tons but during dry docking the propeller was removed and found to weigh 2 tons when lifted from the dock with a crane) |
|
Tailshaft Seal (original ) |
KD601 size "C" 10 No 3691 or 3692. Two were made at the same time by Cedervall of Sweden, and delivered on 22nd December 1930, the other was for Contest. (see link page for Cedervall) |
|
Propeller (originally from Contest) |
Four blade, iron 7.5 tons 10ft 6" diameter |
Water Capacity |
16 tons aft, 4 tons each side, 10 tons? fwd |
Water Capacity Total |
34 tons |
Steam pumps x2 |
Thomas Lamont & Sons, Paisley No 15600 (fwd) No 15601 (aft) Both 6" x 4.5" x 6" 30 tons per hour |
|
Steam generator (110 volts) |
Shanks Engine No E42198 5.5" cyl 3" stroke Driving a Witton generator 110 Volts 68amps 7.5 Kw @ 550 revs |
|
Steam Windlass |
Emerson Walker No 62232 |
Steam steering engine |
Donkin and Co No 5995 |
| Circulating engine (condenser) | Drysdale No E 4390 |
| Diesel Generator |
Onan type 13.5MDKAD-137 rating: 13.5kVA, 230V, 50Hz, 58.7A, single phase |
| Telegraph | Ray and Co. London W. 1043 |
| Anchor | 7.5 cwt |
| Accommodation (9) |
Two cabins in the forward saloon for Master and Chief Engineer. Seven berths in the aft accomodation one is partitioned off for the Mate |
THE TRIPLE EXPANSION STEAM ENGINE
This engine, made possible by advances in metalurgy that led to stronger materials, used the same steam three times through a series of cylinders. The steam would be fed at high pressure into the first cylinder and be exhausted, at a reduced but still considerable pressure, into an intermediate cylinder where it did its work again. Upon exhaustion it went into a third (low pressure) cylinder where it used the last of its energy up.
The development of this type of engine was important for its use in steamships as by exhausting to a condenser the water can be reclaimed to feed the boiler, which is unable to use seawater. Additionally by maintaining a vacuum in the last stage and in the condenser more work can be extracted from the steam and efficiency improved over land-based steam engines where they exhausted their steam to atmosphere. Land-based steam engines could exhaust much of their steam, as feed water was usually readily available. Prior to and during World War II, the expansion engine dominated marine applications where high vessel speed was not essential. It was however superseded by the steam turbine where speed was required, for instance in warships and ocean liners. HMS Dreadnought of 1905 was the first major warship to replace the proven technology of the reciprocating engine with the then novel steam turbine.
ALL VESSELS LIKE CHALLENGE REQUIRE A LOT OF WORK AND MONEY TO KEEP THEM GOING
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