The Miracle of Dunkirk: 70 years on

In what is still called 'the Miracle of Dunkirk' the story is told of how over 300,000 British troops were snatched from the beaches of France in an operation that was so fraught with dangers that success can only be attributed to a miraculous combination of circumstances.

by David E. Gardiner

MAY 1940 was a time of grave crisis for the British Empire and for the whole civilised world.

On 10 May Hitler had launched his blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. By the end of the second week in May the French defences had been broken. German panzer forces, led by Rommel and his 7th Panzer Division, burst through, and with lightning speed began a rapid advance across France and Belgium. Very soon Rommel's armoured pincer movement was threatening the British army with encirclement, and our forces were being obliged to withdraw.

Back at home Mr Churchill feared that it would be his hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history, whilst on 27 May the German High Command went so far as to boast that 'The British army is encircled and our troops are proceeding to its annihilation.'

With the entire front collapsing rapidly, the decision was reached at home to evacuate our forces from the Continent. But the only port from which to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force was Dunkirk, and that was already being seriously threatened by the Germans. Taking stock of the predicament, Churchill said in The Second World War. 'I thought—and some good judges agreed with me—that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked. The whole root and core and brain of the British army... seemed about to perish upon the field, or to be led into ignominious and starving captivity.' All therefore seemed about to be lost.

Britain had a godly Sovereign

The first miracle

The second miracle

The third miracle

The Little Ships

There were so many ships involved in the evacuation that this is the way in which Douglas Bader, the legless Spitfire fighter ace, who sped over with his squadrons from the fighter base at Martlesham, near Ipswich, to help cover the operation, described the scene in Fight for the Sky: "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. You could identify Dunkirk from the Thames estuary by the huge pall of black smoke rising straight up into a windless sky from the oil tanks which were ablaze just inside the harbour."

Yet still, to a very large extent, the German air squadrons were unable to intervene. Certainly not in force, nor in the way Hitler had anticipated, for so many of these squadrons still remained grounded. So much so that General Haider, Chief of the German General Staff, three days after the High Command had so proudly boasted that the British Army was about to be annihilated, was obliged to record in his diary on 30 May that 'Bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe, and now we must stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy getting away to England right under our noses.'

A strange immunity

Even though some squadrons did get through, it seems that yet another miracle happened.

Many of the troops on the beaches were favoured with a strange immunity. When about 400 men were being machine-gunned and bombed, systematically, by about sixty enemy aircraft, one man who flung himself down with the rest reported that, after the strafing was over, he was amazed to find that there was not a single casualty.
 
Another man, a chaplain, was likewise machine-gunned and bombed as he lay on the beach. After what seemed an eternity, he realized he had not been hit, and rose to his feet to find that the sand all around where he had been lying was pitted with bullet holes, and that his figure was outlined on the ground.

Amazing events

A Day of National Thanksgiving

Psalm124 sung in the churches

Footnote:

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