Those who prefer to believe in miracles will resent the idea that the headline filling story of Dunkirk’s evacuation, just ten years ago this month, was compounded more from the blunders of Hitler, Reynaud, and even of Churchill than from British valor. Those who prefer their history hidden under garlands should turn the page without reading.
Only those who take their history factually chilled may still wonder how a badly beaten British Army suddenly rallied to hold the Dunkirk beachhead during ten bitter days. How did the R.A.F., impotent to keep Nazi dive bombers off the neck of the British retreat in Belgium, suddenly maintain a protective “umbrella” over the concentrated target of a small port? What restrained the dread Panzer Corps, fresh from breaking France’s “most powerful army in Europe,” so that it failed to launch a single attack against Dunkirk’s heroic but weak perimeter?
Britain’s and America’s incredulous joy when the “miracle” occurred asked no explanation. For years afterward both nations were too engrossed in other crises to question past events, but there must be some who now ask, “Was it miracle or blunder?”
Ten years have relaxed security restrictions, propaganda is directed toward other targets, enemy sources of information have been tapped. Today Dunkirk, like all other epochal events in history, is no longer an inexplicable miracle where God momentarily neglected “the side with the most battalions” to intervene on behalf of “the right” (using the obsolete, not the current, political meaning of the term).
The alleged miracle of Dunkirk started to unfold publicly May 14, 1940, four days after the German armies crossed the Belgian Border. That afternoon the British Admiralty, without explanation, broadcast over radio networks an order requiring all owners of “craft 30 to 100 feet in length” to register them immediately.
The Admiralty had already taken its first step, cloaked in naval secrecy, four days previously when it summoned demolition experts to stations at Dover in preparation for destroying channel ports that would fall into enemy hands should the campaign just opening go wrong. What premonition, or was it an estimate of defeat, could have so stirred the experienced Sea Lords before the echoes of the first shots died out?
By dark on May 15 two German armored columns, aimed at Laon and Cambrai, had broken through the last French defenders. On the 16th, in a conference at Paris Headquarters Churchill learned the unpalatable truth. General Gamelin, nervously pacing the room at the Quai d’Orsay shaking his head, announced there was “no strategic reserve” anywhere behind the front. That military blunder without parallel is one key to Dunkirk’s disaster, if not to its “miracle.”
Churchill admits his share of the blame, having discovered the error only after correction was impossible. That only 10% of the Allied forces were British, that the whole was under French command singularly uncommunicative as to plans, explained but did not excuse British ignorance. That Britain had, in 10 months of war, sent only a dozen divisions, not one of them armored, to the Continent is another origin of Dunkirk. “Too little and too late,” infamous in World War II, exposes here perhaps its most glaring example.
French pleas the evening of May 16th brought the promise of Britain’s last 10 fighter squadrons, excluding only the 25 assigned as minimum for Home Defense. By telegram Churchill asked his Cabinet’s consent to this commitment. Events quickly proved ten more fighter squadrons utterly inadequate to stop the Luftwaffe.
On Sunday, May 19th, the Admiralty made an emergency request upon the Ministry of Shipping for a number of “degaussed” (protected against magnetic mines) coasting vessels to proceed to the Downs and report to the admiral commanding at Dover.
While Hitler’s armies neared the Channel Coast of France, complacent Americans thought in terms of a “phoney war” and a “Sitz-krieg.” The New York Times headlined: “President U. S. Chamber of Commerce warns US entry into European war might bankrupt country and lead to dictatorship.” But in Britain the Sea Lords, at least, had grasped the peril two days before Nazi panzers captured Abbeville. They desperately made the most of the inadequate tools of their trade provided by wilfully blind governments in years past.
At dawn May 21st German tanks seized Abbeville at the Channel coast mouth of the Somme, completely severing the British Expeditionary Force and the First French Army in Belgium from their base,- and from the main French forces. A mammoth trap had sprung.
Immediately a powerful armored column started northward along the coast to bar the B.E.F. from their remaining ports of escape. General Gamelin’s last order, before his relief by Marshal Weygand on May 19th, directed a simultaneous attack on the German corridor at Cambrai from the north and against the Peronne-Amiens area from the south. Theoretically it was the answer to the crisis. Practically it was impossible, when issued. Two British divisions, the 5th and 50th supported by a depleted tank brigade, momentarily worried the Nazi high command by their game counter-stroke before they were halted. There was no word of a French attack from the Somme, nor did the First French Army seriously attack Cambrai to the east. German air attacks had broken its desultory advance. Meanwhile, the panzer spearhead pressed on regardless of events in their rear. Boulogne fell the night of the 23rd. The garrison, of two British Guards Battalions, was evacuated by destroyers, taking along a handful of French troops.
On the 22nd three British rifle battalions and 43 tanks of England’s sole tank regiment under Brigadier Claude Nicholson debarked at Calais with a death sentence, “Hold at all costs” order, from Churchill himself. Thrown into an unequal battle, they fought mainly with small arms, much of their combat equipment so poorly loaded that it was never debarked.
Their courage and their fate match those of Thermopylae and the Alamo. Less than 100 survivors remained alive to see Nazi tanks rumble through the ruins of the Citadel toward the Belgian border at dawn on the 26th. A great nation had paid with 3,000 lives for 72 hours breathing spell. There was no “miracle” for these devoted men.
The battered remnants of the XVIth Corps of the First French Army, retreating from Walcheren Island (Holland), had reached the line Gravelines-St. Omer on May 23rd but needed time to ready itself for the shock of attack from the west. Calais’ defenders bought that time with their lives. The perimeter of Dunkirk was shaping up. The entire coast was lost by then, save the sandy dunes between Ostend, still in Belgian hands, and Dunkirk.
At midnight, May 27th, the day the first handful embarked from Dunkirk’s bombed harbor, King Leopold of the Belgians capitulated, after warning his allies of the impending action. Rude voices safe in America and England cried, “Betrayal.” Who had been betrayed?
The Belgian army had been destroyed as an effective fighting instrument before it surrendered. Its valiant battle is attested by the fact that the primary threat to Dunkirk beaches came from the West (Calais) flank, not the eastern, Belgian, one.
By the night of the Belgian surrender the British perimeter encircled Dunkirk along a U-shaped line from French held Nieuport inland to Valenciennes then curving back to join hands with other French troops near St. Omer to Gravelines. Some 400,000 men, service troops, wounded, unarmed stragglers, and staff officers were included. Perhaps half that number remained as combat effectives, out of ten British Divisions, the First French Army, and remnants of the Ninth.
When the evacuation from Dunkirk was decided upon, opinion as sanguine as that of Winston Churchill placed at 50,000 the number of troops who could probably be rescued. On the very eve of the event, no miracle was foreseen. How then did it occur?
Starting with the insignificant withdrawal of 7,669 men from Dunkirk Harbor on May 27th, the escape (it was no evacuation since all equipment save a modest amount of small arms were lost) grew in scope until, on May 31st, 68,014 men were embarked from the beaches plus the harbor, bringing to nearly 200,000 the number rescued at the month’s end. Only 15,000 of these were French.
Even then the rate slackened only gradually. Nearly 65,000 were embarked the first day of June so that by midnight “3,000 men with 7 anti-aircraft and 12 antitank guns” remained of the B.E.F. as a “rearguard.”
The most casual investigation belies the contemporary press reports that such a force was holding the Germans at bay. Nearly 100,000 French troops and naval land forces, commanded by Vice Admiral Jean Abrial under stringent orders from Admiral Darlan, were manning the Dunkirk perimeter with a valor utterly unlike that displayed by their comrades on the Meuse the previous fortnight. French forces were unquestionably sacrificing themselves for their allies. Neither German nor Allied news releases at the time gave them credit.
The Belgian Army had, in a measure, already sacrificed itself for the British, attracting the full fury of a score of German Divisions until the end, midnight May 27th. True enough, the British were in Belgium to protect her from the Nazi invasion, but the inadequate size of the B.E.F. made failure apparent from the start, unless Belgian and French Forces met the brunt of the assault.
Perhaps these considerations weighed heavily upon Mr. Churchill when, May 28th, he described the King of Belgium’s action to Parliament in terms more moderate than the frenzied shriek, “betrayal,” that emanated from the French premier, Paul Reynaud. The U. S. Press overlooked Churchill’s forensic skill to feature Reynaud’s more sensational statement. Public opinion unfairly condemned Leopold, adding to the myth a miracle achieved despite “betrayal” as well as material difficulties. .
In justice to Churchill and the British, the strenuous efforts of the British Navy and its civilian Flotilla during June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th must be considered. With Nazi pressure increased, the perimeter contracted until the slower but safer, because dispersed, embarkation from the beaches was no longer possible. Nevertheless 80,000 of the real, and French, rearguard were rescued, over 80% of them from the shattered, narrow harbor. Direct artillery fire limited operations in the last 48 hours to the period of darkness, so close had the enemy pushed toward the town.
It is no disparagement of the magnificent British sea effort, costing six destroyers, a like number of minesweepers, 24,000 tons of merchant shipping, and the appalling total of 170 small craft, “omitting ships’ lifeboats and privately owned craft of which no record is available,” to expand the incomplete contemporaneous accounts with a tribute to French and Dutch marine exploits. French, Dutch and even Belgian naval aid had been essential, afloat as well as ashore.
The official tally of allied soldiers rescued is recorded by the War Office to the individual man, 336,427, though strangely no breakdown, even approximate, gives the numbers by nationality. Deductions from reliable general statements, including Churchill’s Memoirs, place at less than 10,000 the Belgian list, 80-90,000 the French, with the remainder, roughly a quarter of a million troops, British.
Britain admitted 50,000 casualties in the entire campaign, the majority within the Dunkirk perimeter, and not less than 5,000 drowned in the Channel. These figures check the estimate of about 300,000 men in the B.E.F.’s original dash northward into Belgium. The remaining fourth of the 400,- 000 British troops in France were in rear areas, still to be involved in the final battle of France.
The British Government’s recognition of the gravity of the situation the last week in May is in no way better proved than by its “committing the Metropolitan Air Defense Force,” those sacred 25 squadrons Churchill adamantly withheld from the main battle, no matter what appeals came from Reynaud.
However, even that recognition cast no light upon the British’s own idée fixe of strategic bombing. That strange RAF complex had so impressed itself upon the nation that no voice was raised against the military crime of forgetting the “objective.” Instead of using her bombers to hamper to the utmost German armies pressing against the Dunkirk perimeter, planes were sent night after night to “destroy oil stores in Hamburg, Bremen, and Bergen, Norway.”
Not once is there reference to bomber command participating more directly in the Flanders Battle than a single communique: “British bombers attack 100 mile communication line of Nazis from mid-Belgium to Aachen,” New York Times, May 28th. The same night Cologne and the Ruhr were bombed so even that could not have been a full scale effort.
Air Marshal Harris proudly recalls these days: “The R.A.F. began the strategic bombing of German industry during the summer of 1940 on an infinitely small scale. The third week in May we bombed oil installations in Northwest Germany, on the 24th an important power station near Leipzig, on June 1st the Badischer Anilin factory was attacked.” Not one mention of Dunkirk or the campaign it culminated.
This, then, was the “miracle?” How can it be explained?
Liddell-Hart, rebounding agilely from his prewar thesis of the “impregnable defensive,” explains it (in German Generals Talk) with the simple hypothesis that Hitler forbade any determined attack on the evacuation, because “He did not wish to completely alienate the British by destroying their countrymen.” That there may be more depth to this ready write-off than Liddell-Hart succeeds in establishing will be acknowledged, but the unsupported assertions of defeated commanders is poor evidence before the court of history. When has a commanding general frankly admitted defeat without alibis? Who could be a better scapegoat for Von Rundstedt than the dead Hitler?
Still more unconvincing is an analysis of Rundstedt’s alibi. To Major Milton Shulman of the Canadian Intelligence the German Marshal reported, in October 1945, that Hitler’s refusal to permit armored attack on Dunkirk was based upon reports of total German tanks disabled during the campaign without figures on the large numbers repaired and restored to service. This, plus the fact that the “only map available to Hitler in Berlin showed the ground around the port flooded, unsuitable for tank warfare,” decided the Fuhrer. Shulman comments that a “little man studying a map hundreds of miles from the battle changed the course of history by rejecting the advice of his most brilliant commander.”
For these two weakly supported explanations Churchill’s Memoirs, written later and using more complete official records, substitutes “The armour was halted on the initiative not of Hitler but of Rundstedt.” Churchill uses Rundstedt’s own 1940 diary to convict him. Visited by Hitler on May 24th, Rundstedt asked to retain his depleted armor, which had travelled so fast and so far, for the final blow against the French, who, says the diary, “were fighting with extraordinary tenacity.” Hitler at the time agreed but early the following day sent, through Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief, orders to Rundstedt to continue the advance by the use of armor. Rundstedt, relying upon Hitler’s own, but previous, approval, did not pass on this directive to the Fourth Army Commander Kluge, who so violently protested the withholding of his armor that on May 26th Rundstedt partially released the ban but still enjoined that Dunkirk itself was not to be assaulted by armor. This same diary even includes a strong protest by the Fourth Army’s Chief of Staff against allowing the British to escape. “We are not keen on finding these men, newly equipped, up against us later.”
However unintentional, German contributions to the escape were important factors in the “miracle.” Who on the German side was responsible? Making Hitler the scapegoat is the more sensational answer, but reflection inclines the blame toward a field commander’s mistaken appraisal of the tasks remaining before him.
As to the facts: It is clear that German armor did not attack the Dunkirk perimeter, however much it deserves credit for driving the Allies into that corner. Then there is the failure of the Luftwaffe to annihilate that concentrated target during the nine days of the evacuation.
For the first we must not overlook the influence of the two-day delay won by the British Guards’ defense of Boulogne. The bulk of the German armor was included in the “left hook” force coming up from Abbeville and thus was involved in that delay. Von Reichenau’s Sixth Army had been stripped of Panzer divisions on May 14th to reenforce von Kluge’s armored spearheads.
Behind Boulogne, three heroic infantry battalions, supported by a handful of tanks, held Calais for 72 more despairing hours and perished almost to a man in its defense. To this last stand Churchill accords the praise, “Calais was the crux, its defense enabled the Gravelines water-line to be held, without which neither Hitler’s vacillations nor Rundstedt’s orders could have prevented complete disaster.” As far as it goes that is indisputable.
The German tanks were held at Calais for three days. But Calais is only 25 miles from Dunkirk, and a bare 12 from Gravelines. Yet those victorious tanks never assaulted the Gravelines position. Admiralty accounts of destroyer gun fire against coastal roads cannot explain German armor’s failure to progress so short a distance.
The second count, Luftwaffe ineffectiveness, like the first is a fact, reason for which is divergently assigned. For two weeks German dive bombers shattered whatever resistance rallied to delay the Wehrmacht’s advance. Now, offered a concentrated target, it harassed only without destroying.
Undoubtedly Dunkirk was the first time the Luftwaffe had been seriously opposed in the air. The element of surprise was lost. The Luftwaffe could no longer concentrate overwhelming numbers against defenders spread thin over hundreds of miles. The last minute addition of London’s 25 fighter defense squadrons, adamantly withheld from the breakthrough battle despite French pleas, shortened the odds.
Finally, in extensive aerial combat the dive bomber, designed for troop support after command of the air had been won, was relatively easy prey for British Hurricane and Spitfire fighters. Luftwaffe heavy bombers consequently bore the main burden of offense against harbor and beaches which fighters could merely strafe. The high level bombing, disturbed by fighter opposition, as the whole course of the war was to prove, was relatively ineffective, and the ships at sea, though numerous, were mainly small craft seldom bunched up.
Not even the weight of bombs dropped was of annihilation amount. Ship captains’ logs during the nine day struggle frequently report “heavy aerial attack” and end with the entry “three (or less) bombs fell!”
Churchill’s Memoirs make much of bomb explosions “muffled in the soft sand” of the beaches, but two-thirds of the rescued were picked up in Dunkirk Harbor. Occasional commentaries remark the distance (for 1940 planes) of Dunkirk from Luftwaffe home fields; the proximity of England. Yet the 1940 radius of fighter action was about 75 miles, restricting British fighters to the East Kent airdromes, although the Nazis had available “scores of landing strips in the flat fields of Flanders.”
Nazi bombers unquestionably participated at Dunkirk but ignored their most remunerative targets. Dover and Margate, havens for the rescued, more crowded with ships than Dunkirk, were only 50 air miles from the French coast, yet were subjected to only trifling raids.
The Goodwin Light, marking the tortuous passage across the sand banks to Dunkirk, last avenue remaining after shore batteries commanded the deep channel paralleling the French coast, remained glowing on June 4th. There is no record of its having been attacked. Yet bereft of its guiding beacon many an Allied craft would have foundered in the darkness.
Consideration of all factors favors a new theory, not yet explored either in conversation with surviving Nazi leaders or by other means, deficient training and preparation of the Luftwaffe for its role. German air tactics up to May, 1940, had been as thorough, and as inflexible, as most German plans. The first great onset of every campaign, concentrating upon the destruction of enemy air fields and planes on the ground, had driven the foe out of the air. Every weapon of the Luftwaffe was devoted to the task. Heretofore it had resulted invariably in air supremacy. Thereafter the troop support plane, the clumsy Stuka dive bomber, was little challenged and readily accomplished its missions.
At Dunkirk there was either lack of time, capability, or probably a mixture of both, to strike at British fighter fields and wrest mastery of the air. In fact it was never attempted. As a result German bombers, both the heavy and the dive types, found themselves opposed by hostile fighters, numerically inferior but still numerous enough to inflict heavy losses by their superiority in speed, firepower, and maneuverability.
It was a rude shock. During the nine day struggle German stolidity could think of nothing better than blundering on in the same procedure that had won many victories but was inadequate to break even in this contest.
If, as Churchill theorizes, Hitler withheld his armor (contradicting an earlier remark that Von Rundstedt did that) it must have been because the Fuhrer expected his Luftwaffe to destroy the BEF unaided, “a mistaken but not unreasonable point of view.” Churchill’s military experience is too great for that comment to do him credit.
Unless the Luftwaffe had concentrated on British fighter fields and succeeded in driving those dangerous wasps from the air, it could not achieve destruction of the forces, land or sea, protected by those fighters. But Churchill permitted the diversion of British bomber effort to Germany and Norway instead of Flanders to partially neutralize the faulty German Strategy.
The vital question of who (or what) restrained the Nazi armor may remain forever a mystery. Only could the dead Hitler testify might it be revealed. There is inferential evidence, tempting to a psychologist, in Mein Kampf that Hitler was torn between hatred and admiration for Britain; that he yearned for an impossible Anglo-German alliance. Both Liddell-Hart and J. F. C. Fuller make much of this aspect in “deciding” why the Panzers remained idle.
Revelations in von Rundstedt’s diary are a contradiction of greater validity which destroys even Major Shulman’s more temperate conclusions. That diary is authentic. It was a contemporaneous account. Hitler hesitated but von Rundstedt bluntly halted. That last week in May the so-called “greatest Nazi field commander” failed to grasp the magnitude of the French collapse. He was in no position to comprehend the extent of internal dissension that played so big a part. He, rather than Hitler who had manipulated that fifth column effort, was the one to overestimate the severity of the battle certain to follow Dunkirk.
Whatever the cause, the Panzers’ abstention from the action is the major contribution to any “miracle” at Dunkirk. Other contributions: Belgian forces attracting the weight of von Reichenau’s Sixth Army until May 28th; French sacrifices in the rear guard fighting; superb improvisation by the British Admiralty; heroic efforts of British, French, and Dutch mariners; unbelievable technique by British destroyers, which themselves saved 100,000 men and worked a dozen minor miracles of their own; the superiority of British fighter planes; and, finally, faulty German air tactics—all these add up to the public misconception of a miracle.
Now, ten years later, we can view them in perspective. We can also see, if we but look, the errors which led to the initial disaster. Most prominent, and publicized, was the Western Democracies’ policy of appeasement, coincident with inadequate preparedness for war on any scale but particularly for modern air-supported, armored conflict.
Dunkirk was a miracle in the sense that an irreplaceable British army escaped to join its homeland’s defense against invasion. Britain’s margin of escape from such invasion might itself be called miraculous, with lessons even more pertinent to the present than Dunkirk.
Every scale of modern warfare marked the B.E.F. of 1940 for death or capture. We may term its escape “miracle” if we use the dictionary definition: “a deviation from the known laws of nature” or, in this case, of warfare. At Dunkirk, Allied errors invoked the disaster, German blunders mitigated it.
Yet there were no miracles at Bataan, Singapore, or Crete; none for our foes at Stalingrad or Tunisia. The lesson is clear. Free nations who depend upon enemy blunders to save them from the consequences of their own errors will seldom find miracles to save them.