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Miracle at Dunkirk and Aftermath
Dunkirk (Spartacus Educational)
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 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.
Dunkirk (History Learning Site)
The advancing German Army trapped the British and French armies on the beaches around
Dunkirk. 330,000 men were trapped here and they were a sitting target for the Germans. Admiral
Ramsey, based in Dover, formulated Operation Dynamo to get off of the beaches as many men as was
possible. The British troops, led by Lord John Gort, were professional soldiers from the British
Expeditionary Force; trained men that we could not afford to lose. From May 26th 1940, small ships
transferred soldiers to larger ones which then brought them back to a port in southern Britain.
The beach at Dunkirk was on a shallow slope so no large boat could get near to the actual beaches
where the men were. Therefore, smaller boats were needed to take on board men who would then be
transferred to a larger boat based further off shore. 800 of these legendary "little ships" were used. It is
thought that the smallest boat to make the journey across the Channel was the Tamzine - an 18 feet open
topped fishing boat now on display at the Imperial War Museum, London.
Despite attacks from German fighter and bomber planes, the Wehrmacht never launched a fullscale attack on the beaches of Dunkirk. Panzer tank crews awaited the order from Hitler but it never
came. In his memoirs, Field Marshall Rundstadt, the German commander-in-chief in France during
the 1940 campaign, called Hitler's failure to order a full-scale attack on the troops on Dunkirk his first
fatal mistake of the war. That 338,000 soldiers were evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk would seem
to uphold this view.
Operation Dynamo (History.com)
On May 26th, 1940, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt made known the dire straits of
Belgian and French civilians suffering the fallout of the British-German battle to reach the northern coast
of France, and appealed for support for the Red Cross
“Tonight, over the once peaceful roads of Belgium and France, millions are now moving, running
from their homes to escape bombs and shells and machine gunning, without shelter, and almost wholly
without food,” broadcasted FDR.
On May 26, the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk in France. Ships
arrived at Calais to remove the Force before German troops occupied the area, and it was hoped that
45,000 British soldiers could be shipped back to Britain within two days. The German air force, though,
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had other plans. Determined to prevent the evacuation, the Luftwaffe initiated a bombing campaign in
Dunkirk and the surrounding area. British, Polish, and Canadian fighter pilots succeeded in fending off
the German attack in the air, allowing finally for a delayed, but successful, evacuation nine days later. But
the cost to civilians was great, as thousands of refugees fled for their lives to evade the fallout of the
battle.
British Evacuation of Dunkirk Turns Savage (History.com)
On May 27th, 1940, units from Germany’s SS Death’s Head division battle British troops just 50
miles from the port at Dunkirk, in northern France, as Britain’s Expeditionary Force continues to fight to
evacuate France.
After holding off an SS company until their ammo was spent, 99 Royal Norfolk Regiment
soldiers retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, just 50 miles from the Dunkirk port. Ships
waited there to carry home the British Expeditionary Force, which had been fighting alongside the French
in its defensive war against the German invaders. Agreeing to surrender, the trapped regiment started to
file out of the farmhouse, waving a white flag tied to a bayonet. They were met by German machine-gun
fire.
They tried again and the British regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to
an open field where they were searched and divested of everything from gas masks to cigarettes. They
were then marched into a pit where machine guns had been placed in fixed positions. The German order
came: “Fire!” Those Brits who survived the machine-gun fire were either stabbed to death with bayonets
or shot dead with pistols.
Of the 99 members of the regiment, only two survived, both privates: Albert Pooley and William
O’Callaghan. They lay among the dead until dark, then, in the middle of a rainstorm, they crawled to a
farmhouse, where their wounds were tended. With nowhere else to go, they surrendered again to the
Germans, who made them POWs. Pooley’s leg was so badly wounded he was repatriated to England in
April 1943 in exchange for some wounded German soldiers. Upon his return to Britain, his story was not
believed. Only when O’Callaghan returned home and verified the story was a formal investigation made.
Finally, after the war, a British military tribunal in Hamburg found the German officer who gave the
“Fire” order, Captain Fritz Knochlein, guilty of a war crime. He was hanged.
Fall of France (History.co.uk)
Just four days into the invasion German troops crossed the Meuse river, and had broken through
the French lines. Attempts by the Allies to launch counterattacks by air and land either failed with heavy
losses, or were thwarted by the pace of events. The British Expeditionary Force, along with the best units
of the French army, were still in the north and had seen little fighting. But the German breakthrough to
the south now forced them into rapid retreat to avoid being cut off with their backs to the sea. On 20 May
German tanks reached Amiens and effectively trapped the British, who now made for Dunkirk and an
unlikely attempt at evacuation to England.
In these desperate circumstances, an evacuation plan known as ‘Operation Dynamo’ was hastily
prepared in Dover by Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay. His strategy included an appeal for all civilian
vessels that could cross the Channel to help ferry the troops from the beaches to larger ships offshore, or
to evacuate them entirely. Between 26 May and 4 June - a period during which Hitler halted the advance
of his troops on Dunkirk - 200,000 British and 140,000 French troops were evacuated to England. Nine
allied destroyers and approximately 200 civilian vessels were lost during the evacuation, and the RAF
suffered severe casualties covering the operation from the air.
On 5 June, the Germans swung southwards and French resistance finally collapsed, although not
without heavy fighting. On 10 June, Italy opportunistically entered the war on Germany’s side. Four days
later, the French capital fell, provoking the flight of the French Government to Bordeaux. The
Government capitulated on 25 June, just seven weeks after the beginning of the invasion.
The British 51st Highland Division - stationed in the Maginot Line when the fighting started –
was forced to surrender at St Valéry. During the final evacuation of British troops from St Nazaire on the
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Atlantic coast, the troopship Lancastria was sunk with the loss of around 4,000 refugees, British troops
and crew. Reluctant to take the risk that the French Navy would end up under German control, Churchill
ordered the Royal Navy to present French warships at Mers-el-Kebir with an ultimatum to sail to Britain
or to a neutral port for internment. When this offer was rejected on 3 July, British ships bombarded the
fleet, killing 1,600 people. Although this operation did much to assure America of the strength of the
British purpose, it and the evacuation of Dunkirk did immeasurable damage to Franco-British wartime
relations.
Choice of Compiègne (Wikipedia)
When Adolf Hitler received word from the French government that they wished to negotiate
an armistice, Hitler selected Compiègne Forest near Compiègne as the site for the negotiations. As
Compiègne was the site of the 1918 Armistice ending the Great War with Germany's conflict cessation,
Hitler saw using this location as a supreme moment of revenge for Germany over France. Hitler decided
to sign the armistice in the same rail carriage, Compiègne Wagon, where the Germans had signed the
1918 armistice. However, in the last sentence of the preamble, the drafters inserted "However, Germany
does not have the intention to use the armistice conditions and armistice negotiations as a form of
humiliation against such a valiant opponent" referring to the French forces. Furthermore, in Article 3,
Clause 2, the drafters stated that their intention was not to heavily occupy North-West France after
cessation of hostilities with Britain.
In the very same railway carriage in which the 1918 Armistice was signed (removed from a museum
building and placed on the precise spot where it was located in 1918), Hitler sat in the same chair in
which Marshal Ferdinand Foch had sat when he faced the representatives of the defeated German Empire.
After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler – in a calculated gesture of disdain to the French
delegates – left the carriage, as Foch had done in 1918, leaving the negotiations to his Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces) Chief, General Wilhelm Keitel.
Adolf Hitler had a number of reasons for agreeing to an armistice. He wanted to ensure that
France did not continue to fight from North Africa, and he wanted to ensure that the French Navy was
taken out of the war. In addition, leaving a French government in place would relieve Germany of the
considerable burden of administering French territory, particularly as he turned his attentions toward
Britain. Finally, as Germany lacked a navy sufficient to occupy France's overseas territories, Hitler's only
practical recourse to deny the British use of them was to maintain a formally independent and neutral
French rump state.
According to William Shirer's book Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, French General Charles
Huntziger complained that the armistice terms imposed on France were harsher than those imposed on
Germany in 1918. They provided for German occupation of three-fifths of France north and west of a line
through Geneva, Tours and the Spanish border so as to give Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine access to all
French Channel and Atlantic ports. All persons who had been granted political asylum had to be
surrendered and all occupation costs had to be borne by France, to the tune of 400 million French francs a
day. A minimal French Army would be permitted. As one of Hitler's few concessions, the French
Navy was to be disarmed but not surrendered, for Hitler realized that pushing France too far could result
in France fighting on from the French colonial empire. An unoccupied region in the south, the Zone libre,
was left relatively free to be governed by a rump French administration based in Vichy, which also
administered the occupied zones albeit under severe restrictions.
France Surrenders, 1940 (Account of William Shirer)
“I look for the expression on Hitler's face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my
glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments
of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and
contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous,
angry - angry, you almost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep
of his high Prussian boot. He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you
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grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too - revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as
though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into
harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide
apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has
stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.
...It is now three twenty-three p.m. and the Germans stride over to the armistice car. For a
moment or two they stand in the sunlight outside the car, chatting. Then Hitler steps up into the car,
followed by the others. We can see nicely through the car windows. Hitler takes the place occupied by
Marshal Foch when the 1918 armistice terms were signed. The others spread themselves around him.
Four chairs on the opposite side of the table from Hitler remain empty. The French have not yet appeared.
But we do not wait long. Exactly at three thirty p.m. they alight from a car. They have flown up from
Bordeaux to a near-by landing field. ...Then they walk down the avenue flanked by three German officers.
We see them now as they come into the sunlight of the clearing.
...It is a grave hour in the life of France. The Frenchmen keep their eyes straight ahead. Their
faces are solemn, drawn. They are the picture of tragic dignity. They walk stiffly to the car, where they
are met by two German officers, Lieutenant-General Tippelskirch, Quartermaster General, and Colonel
Thomas, chief of the Fuhrer's headquarters. The Germans salute. The French salute. The atmosphere is
what Europeans call "correct." There are salutes, but no handshakes.
Now we get our picture through the dusty windows of that old wagon-lit car. Hitler and the other
German leaders rise as the French enter the drawing-room. Hitler gives the Nazi salute, the arm raised.
Ribbentrop and Hess do the same. I cannot see M. Noel to notice whether he salutes or not.
Hitler, as far as we can see through the windows, does not say a word to the French or to anybody
else. He nods to General Keitel at his side. We see General Keitel adjusting his papers. Then he starts to
read. He is reading the preamble to the German armistice terms. The French sit there with marble-like
faces and listen intently. Hitler and Goring glance at the green table-top.
The reading of the preamble lasts but a few minutes. Hitler, we soon observe, has no intention of
remaining very long, of listening to the reading of the armistice terms themselves. At three forty-two
p.m., twelve minutes after the French arrive, we see Hitler stand up, salute stiffly, and then stride out of
the drawing-room, followed by Goring, Brauchitsch, Raeder, Hess, and Ribbentrop. The French, like
figures of stone, remain at the green-topped table. General Keitel remains with them. He starts to read
them the detailed conditions of the armistice.
Hitler and his aides stride down the avenue towards the Alsace-Lorraine monument, where their
cars are waiting. As they pass the guard of honour, the German band strikes up the two national anthems,
Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles and the Horst Wessel song. The whole ceremony in which Hitler
has reached a new pinnacle in his meteoric career and Germany avenged the 1918 defeat is over in a
quarter of an hour."