Dunkirk War Walks

*

Nearly 60 years ago, thousands of men waited on this beach for days, under repeated attack from the air.

They were members of the British Expeditionary Force, now surrounded by the German army.

Most of their guns and their few tanks had been destroyed in battle or smashed to prevent capture.

They were running short of food and even drinking water was scarce.

Their only hope lay in rescue from the sea.

For the British, evacuation would be a miracle. For their French allies, it would seem like a betrayal.

For the men who were there,

soldiers and rescuers alike,

Dunkirk was an unforgettable experience.

I can remember very vividly, at that time, that the beach...

-all those sand dunes were black.

-Those...?

-All along there.

Totally black.

And at intervals, a black line came down to the water,

which was, sort of... four-abreast soldiers coming down.

It was a most amazing sight. And the boats were taking them off...

It was patently obvious to me at that stage

that we hadn't a hope in hell of getting a pennyworth of those chaps off.

# Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye... #

The men who ended up on the beaches at Dunkirk

had set off for France in September, 1939, full of naive optimism.

"To our shame," said Montgomery, then a divisional commander,

"we have sent our army into that most modern of wars

"with weapons and equipment that are quite inadequate."

For nine months, the BEF - the British Expeditionary Force -

settled into life in northern France - a life which, in retrospect, was a fool's paradise.

The German invasion began May 10, 1940, in the Netherlands and Belgium.

But the decisive breakthrough was at Sedan,

tearing a hole in Allied defences, and heading straight for the Channel.

This road crosses the Somme battlefield of 1916.

In those days, advances were measured in yards,

and their human cost is still counted in the cemeteries all around.

In 1940, the Germans broke through the gap like water through a dam

and surged down these long, straight roads of northern France

past memorials to another war.

The Germans had developed a new technique of warfare - Blitzkrieg.

Their tanks moved swiftly ahead of the infantry, supported by aircraft,

clearing a narrow path and moving faster than the Allies could react.

The German advance was relentless. The Allies collapsed before it.

On the 20th of May, the Germans reached the Channel coast here, just beyond Abbeville.

They'd advanced 40 miles in 14 hours and were astonished by their achievement.

One German commander wrote to his wife, "A blazing success.

"Now the hunt is up against 60 encircled British, French and Belgian divisions.

"Don't worry about me. As I see it, the war in France will be over in a fortnight."

The Allies were in chaos. Lord Gort was responsible for the BEF,

but was under French command, who'd just sacked a Commander-in-Chief.

On the 21st of May, the new French Commander-in-Chief, General Weygand,

called a meeting to coordinate a counter-attack. Nobody told Gort, who arrived only after Weygand left.

Gort had earlier written that the BEF was making "that retreat with which all British campaigns start."

He must now have wondered whether that retreat was becoming a rout.

Just over 20 miles away,

across the Channel in Dover,

they were also beginning to anticipate disaster.

These tunnels under Dover Castle were dug during the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1940, they were the headquarters of Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay.

By the time of Gort's aborted meeting,

Ramsay was already beginning to plan the evacuation of non-combatants from France.

Over the days that followed, this plan would swell into the rescue of an entire army from Dunkirk.

Its code name was inspired by one of these underground chambers - Operation Dynamo.

At this stage, Ramsay and the Prime Minister, Churchill,

only planned to evacuate maybe 20,000 men, a tenth of the force.

The British must not be seen to be running out on their allies.

At Calais, 3,000 troops under Brigadier Claude Nicholson,

were holding on to the town under constant bombardment.

By the 23rd of May, they were effectively under siege in the ancient citadel.

On the 24th of May,

Nicholson was told that they might be evacuated. Then he was ordered to hold on for Allied solidarity.

Churchill was determined to show his confidence in the Alliance.

Nicholson's men fought on, completely surrounded,

hopelessly outnumbered, but refusing to surrender.

Finally, the Germans forced their way into the citadel and captured Nicholson.

That evening, a message was sent from Dover:

"To officer commanding troops, Calais, from Secretary of State.

"I'm filled with admiration for your magnificent stand,

"which is worthy of the highest traditions of the British Army."

There was no-one here to receive it.

Gort's command post was in a little chateau at Premesques, west of Lille.

This was his own office. On the 25th of May, he was standing here studying the map.

The Germans had cut the Allied armies in half.

On his left, the Belgians had been fought to the very edge of collapse.

The French, on his right, were pressing him to participate in a counter-attack...

in which he had very little confidence.

A staff officer, Lt-Colonel Gerald Templer, had to walk through Gort's office to get to another room.

He described: "I walked in to see Gort in a very typical attitude, legs apart and hands behind his back,

"wrestling with his God and his duty at a moment of destiny."

By 6.30 that evening, Gort's mind was made up.

He cancelled the British contribution to the attack and ordered a retreat on Dunkirk.

The rout had begun.

Thousands of troops were retreating, abandoning and destroying their equipment as they went.

There was no way out except by sea.

The fall of Calais left Dunkirk the only point for an evacuation.

It was the third largest port in France a fortress in its own right, with a French Admiral in command.

But its fortifications were hopelessly obsolete, and were built to resist attack from land or sea.

This attack came from the air and left these docks in pieces,

their oil tanks blazing, casting a pall of smoke over the scene.

Dunkirk itself was in ruins. The plume of black smoke could be seen from Dover.

Troops could not be evacuated from the ruined harbour.

The only hope lay in the ten miles of beaches to the east of the town.

The BEF fell back on the beaches of Dunkirk like a balloon slowly losing air.

But it was very difficult actually getting men off from here.

The sand shelves so gently that big ships couldn't get in shore

but had to use their lifeboats, cutters or whalers to ferry men out.

Less than 8,000 men were rescued that first day.

At this rate, most of the BEF would be captured before it could be rescued.

On the beaches, queues of men stretched into the water,

those at the head already standing up to their chests in the sea.

A rowing boat would appear and the head of the queue would clamber in,

leaving those behind praying that another one would appear, and fearing that it would not.

Head and shoulders only above the surface - fixed, immovable, as if chained there.

Then a boat would appear,

but the men were too exhausted and weighed down by sodden clothing to clamber in unaided.

Once hauled aboard, there was a marvellous feeling of relief. What remained was the Navy's business.

One of the early arrivals at the beach was Bob Brooks, then a 20-year-old gunner.

I remember there was a NAAFI wagon on the beach. I was very thirsty.

And I drank two tins of evaporated milk.

And I was probably very sick! Which taught me a lesson.

Um... There were, well... a few senior officers doing their best - I must say that.

And they were organising people into lines.

And we remained there until the Stukas came over.

And then we all sort of, eh...

burrowed into the dunes, tried to make ourselves invisible.

And when the Stukas went we went back into line.

There was a long interval when no-one was being picked up,

and we were told that if we could swim, we should try and swim out to boats, which were quite a way out.

I did, and tried to climb a rope. I hadn't done that since school!

In the gym.

And I suppose the combination of tiredness

and the fact that we hadn't eaten anything for two or three days,

and the drag of the water...

I just about got myself out of the water and I couldn't climb any higher.

And so we had to drop off and come back to the beach.

When one got back to the beach, one had to go to the end of the queue.

The evacuation itself might be painfully slow,

but for men to have even a chance of reaching Dunkirk, others must keep fighting to hold the Germans back.

In fields and farmhouses, beside canals and in blockhouses,

small groups of men stood their ground to keep the Germans from Dunkirk.

The little town of Cassel, behind me, overlooks the Flanders plain.

It was held by a scratch force of British and French troops.

This bunker, part of a pre-war French defence line, was garrisoned by a platoon of the Gloucesters -

13 men under a young second lieutenant, Roy Cresswell.

They held out under constant attack for three whole days with no food and little water.

It was only when an ominous silence from Cassel told them that they were on their own that they gave up.

By that stage, the Germans were on the roof.

Roy Cresswell and his men spent the rest of the war in captivity. In a way, they were lucky.

In other cases, the old rules of war no longer applied.

Wormhoudt, about 12 miles from Dunkirk, was stoutly held.

Some of its defenders, most of them Royal Warwickshires, eventually surrendered to SS troops.

They were herded into a barn just behind them. The Germans threw grenades in...

and shot the survivors.

We don't know how many were killed

because the Germans scattered the bodies to conceal evidence of the massacre,

but at least 60 men died.

The journey to Dunkirk itself was fraught with danger.

Men were retreating, sometimes in disorder,

often without rations and with no orders other than "Make for Dunkirk. Every man for himself."

They were constantly under fire.

Even here, yards from the beaches, are the marks of the shell splinters that spattered the fleeing troops.

The ships answering the call to France also faced a dangerous journey.

They suffered repeated attack by air and were at the mercy of mines and torpedoes by sea.

Over 220 of them were sunk during Dunkirk, many with rescued soldiers on board.

Among the ships arriving at Dunkirk

was MTB - Motor Torpedo Boat - 102, then the fastest ship in the Royal Navy.

MTP 102 was the prototype of a new breed of small warship.

She was commanded by Lt Christopher Dreyer.

The soldiers were all desperately tired,

demoralised, frightened...

At intervals, ME-109s - the German fighters -

used to come flying along the beach and shoot up everything in sight.

And three Stuka bombers just set about us,

going back to Dunkirk, along here - just about where we are now. We were belting along.

Flat out. And she was very fast, this boat, in those days. She could do about 48 knots flat out.

If you did the telegraphs "full ahead" three times,

-it meant, like... "I really mean it."

-"Go like smoke."

-"Give everything." And he did.

But even so, a stick of three bombs disappeared from sight

under the transom there.

And that was very frightening.

The 22-year-old Lt Dreyer was shocked by the chaos he saw on the beaches.

One major problem for everybody

was that the soldiers piled on to the side of the boat...

crazy keen to get in and get away from this ghastly place,

and, em...tipped a lot of them over.

And there was, you know... an awfully sadly indisciplined performance, the whole thing.

And very slow and very inefficient.

Em... So that it was...it was...

To my mind, it was AWFULLY clear at the beginning

that that was no way to conduct the operation!

You'd never get this black horde off the beaches in that way.

On the 27th of May, less than 8,000 men were rescued and the port itself was still burning.

Then somebody noticed

that the two moles, or breakwaters, jutting into the sea were undamaged.

The eastern mole, by far the longer of the two, was especially promising.

But there were serious practical problems in using it.

The tide rises and falls by 15 feet.

It's a long way from the water to the top of the mole, even at high tide.

This section is modern. The original was flimsier,

with no guarantee that big ships could use it.

On the 28th, a passenger steamer, Queen Of The Channel, came alongside.

She got away with 1,000 men.

Bombers sank her in the Channel, but she proved the mole would work.

The mole transformed operations,

allowing up to 2,000 men an hour to be rescued,

piling off it directly on to destroyers and other large ships.

The surprisingly calm spring weather was another blessing.

The Germans had also inadvertently offered the BEF a crucial stay of execution.

They'd halted their advance, giving the British an extra two days.

But by May 28th, the advance had begun again.

On the same day, the Luftwaffe finally bombed the mole,

blowing a hole in it and sinking and damaging shipping on both sides.

For a while it seemed that the mole could no longer be used.

The beaches would have to play a fuller part,

and that would require more ships - especially little ones.

From Ramsay's headquarters, the message went out that the small ships were desperately required.

Ramsay had already been ordered to withdraw all modern destroyers from Operation Dynamo,

leaving him with only 15 old ones.

Churchill now declared that the British and French would be evacuated on equal terms.

That meant even more troops to be taken off mole and beaches alike.

Big ships, little ships all had their part to play.

The call for small ships was quickly answered.

Pleasure boats and tugs, fishing smacks and cabin cruisers,

sailing barges and motor yachts -

some manned by their owners, others by the Navy.

They sailed, most of them, up the Thames to Sheerness and on here to Ramsgate.

Here they were given charts and water before setting sail for France and the beaches of Dunkirk.

This is Sundowner. She was built in 1912 as an Admiralty steam launch

and in 1930 was converted into a private motor yacht for her new owner, Commander Charles Lightoller.

Lightoller had been an officer aboard the Titanic.

On June 1st, Lightoller, his son Roger, and an 18-year-old Sea Scout called George Ashcroft

took Sundowner to Dunkirk.

They stopped to take five men off a burning motor cruiser and went on to the mole under fierce air attack.

Lightoller got another 122 men aboard and set off for home.

Like all the ships, large or small, rescuing men from Dunkirk,

Sundowner was a tempting target for German dive bombers.

Another son, an RAF pilot shot down the year before, had discussed evasive tactics with his father,

and as German aircraft dived in to machine-gun Sundowner, Lightoller veered just before they opened fire.

He got back to Ramsgate safely, but wrote that with so many men aboard, many of them very seasick,

there was a nice cleaning-up job.

Not all the small ships arrived home safely.

The courage shown by their largely civilian crews was a powerful boost to British morale.

As Dunkirk continued to burn under constant bombing, the German troops came ever closer.

There were still thousands of men on the beaches and the dunes behind them, waiting to be rescued.

One Royal Artillery unit halted just behind the dunes and sent an officer forward to whistle up the Navy.

The officer thought his task was hopeless, but he found "Call to an unknown ship" in his signal manual

and dutifully stood up here and flashed it out to sea.

Against all odds, there was an answering flicker in the dark, and a ship duly appeared.

But time was running out and the Germans were now breathing down their necks.

This is the last ditch, the canal line that marked the defensive perimeter of Dunkirk.

By May 31st, it was all that stood between the Germans and the port.

The canal was filled with abandoned vehicles. The surrounding fields had been flooded to delay German tanks.

This sector was held by about 70 men

of the East Lancashire Regiment.

On the morning of the 1st of June, the Germans crossed the canal on both sides of them.

They'd been told to hold to the last round and they did exactly that. Almost half were killed or wounded.

The survivors escaped by wading up to their necks for over a mile down this side canal.

Actions like this bought time for thousands more to reach the beaches.

From there, they were ferried to England by men who were themselves feeling the strain of battle.

Back in Dover, the naval and civilian crews were now exhausted.

By the first of June, the crews of several passenger steamers were refusing to return to Dunkirk.

They were civilians and couldn't face another trip across the Channel with its mines, torpedoes and Stukas.

But they were replaced by Navy men and the stream of vessels across the Channel continued.

By June 2nd, over a quarter of a million soldiers had been rescued from Dunkirk.

Men arrived here in their thousands,

wounded on stretchers, French and Belgian soldiers, even German prisoners.

The shocked, the exhausted, but above all the enormously relieved.

Most of them landed in those docks and then crossed to the harbour station. And what a welcome they got.

"I thought we'd be shot for neglect of duty," said a Yorkshire gunner. "It looks like we're bloody heroes."

-Glad to be back, boys?

-> Sure!

Just before midnight on June 2nd, a signal from senior naval officer, Dunkirk,

was received here in Ramsay's headquarters.

It said simply, "BEF evacuated."

Yet it was not quite over. The French were still fighting around Dunkirk

and Churchill was anxious that they should not be sacrificed.

So Ramsay sent some ships back for one last try.

Among the ships which returned for that last night was MTB 102, still commanded by Lt Dreyer.

It was his seventh trip.

I must say, I was desperately tired by that time.

I kept dropping off and waking up suddenly and finding I was pointing quite in the wrong direction.

But by the last stages of the night, um... it really was quite a moving thing

because we were very conscious

that left behind there was a line of French soldiers who weren't going to get taken off.

And they didn't. And they just stood there in line, at attention...

absolutely immovable.

It was a very moving sight, that one.

Among the French soldiers waiting in Dunkirk was a young Jean Becaert.

By the morning of the 4th of June, the Germans had taken Dunkirk. The British had gone.

Behind them they'd left their dead,

and a France which, within weeks,

would surrender to the armies of the Third Reich.

On a clear day,

you can see France from Dover.

And in June 1940, Admiral Ramsay could stand on this balcony and glimpse the smoke over Dunkirk.

Operation Dynamo had been an outstanding success -

338,000 men brought safely across a mine-infested sea.

The myth of Dunkirk was born - a triumph snatched from the jaws of defeat.

But it was a triumph born out of disaster and Churchill knew it.

"We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory," he warned.

"Wars are not won by evacuations."

-WINSTON CHURCHILL:

-We shall defend our island...

and with the British Empire around us, we shall fight on, unconquerable,

until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of men.

We are sure that, in the end, all will be well.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 1997