magnificent,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, ‘the man, and the only man we have, for this hour…He was determined to prepare public opinion for bad tidings…Attempts to invade us would no doubt be made.’ Churchill told ministers that he had considered the case for negotiating with ‘that man’ – and rejected it. Britain’s position, with its fleet and air force, remained strong. He concluded with a magnificent peroration: ‘I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
He was greeted with acclamation extraordinary at any assembly of ministers. No word of dissent was uttered. The meeting represented an absolute personal triumph. He reported its outcome to the war cabinet. That night, the British government informed Reynaud in Paris of its refusal of Italian mediation for peace terms. A further suggestion by Halifax of a direct call upon the United States was dismissed. A bold stand against Germany, Churchill reiterated, would carry vastly more weight than ‘a grovelling appeal’ at such a moment. At the following day’s war cabinet, new instructions to Gort were discussed. Halifax favoured giving the C-in-C discretion to capitulate. Churchill would hear of no such thing. Gort was told to fight on at least until further evacuation from Dunkirk became impossible. Mindful of Allied reproaches, he told the War Office that French troops in the perimeter must be allowed access to British ships. He informed Reynaud of his determination to create a new British Expeditionary Force, based on the Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire, to fight alongside the French army in the west.
All through those days, the evacuation from the port and beaches continued, much hampered by lack of small craft to ferry troops out to the larger ships, a deficiency which the Admiralty strove to make good by a public appeal for suitable vessels. History has invested the saga of Dunkirk with a dignity less conspicuous to those present. John Horsfall, a company commander of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, told a young fellow officer: ‘I hope you realise your distinction. You are now taking part in the greatest military shambles ever achieved by the British Army.’ Many rank-and-file soldiers returned from France nursing a lasting resentment towards the military hierarchy that had exposed them to such a predicament. Horsfall noticed that in the last phase of the march to the beaches, his men fell unnaturally silent: ‘There was a limit to what any of us could absorb, with those red fireballs flaming skywards every few minutes, and I suppose we just reached the point where there was little left to say.’ They were joined by a horse artillery major, superb in Savile Row riding breeches and scarlet and gold forage cap, who said: ‘I’m a double blue at this, old boy – I was at Mons [in 1914].’ A young Grenadier Guards officer, Edward Ford, passed the long hours of waiting for a ship reading a copy of Chapman’s Homer which he found in the sands. For the rest of his days, Ford was nagged by unsatisfied curiosity about who had abandoned his Chapman amid the detritus of the beaches.
Though the Royal Navy’s achievement at Dunkirk embraced its highest traditions, many men noted only the chaos. ‘It does seem to me incredible that the organisation of the beach work should have been so bad,’ wrote Lt. Robert Hichens of the minesweeper Niger, though he admired the absence of panic among embarking soldiers.
We were told that there would be lots of boats and that the embarkation of the troops would all be organised…That was what all the little shore boats were being brought over from England for…One can only come to the conclusion that the civilians and small boats packed up and went home with a few chaps instead of staying there to ferry to the big ships which was their proper job. As for the shore organisation, it simply did not exist…It makes one a bit sick when one hears the organisers of the beach show being cracked up to the skies on the wireless and having DSOs showered upon them, because a more disgraceful muddle and lack of organisation I have never seen…If a few officers had been put ashore with a couple of hundred sailors…the beach evacuation would have been a different thing…When the boats were finally hoisted I found that I was very tired and very hoarse as well as soaking wet. So I had a drink and then changed. I had an artillery officer in my cabin who was very interesting. They all seem to have been very impressed by the dive bombers and the vast number of them, and by the general efficiency of the German forces. The soldiers are not very encouraging, but they were very tired which always makes one pessimistic, and they had been out of touch for a long time. This officer did not even know that Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as Premier.
Pownall arrived in London from France to describe to the defence committee on 30 May Gort’s plans for holding the Dunkirk perimeter. ‘No one in the room,’ wrote Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat, ‘imagined that they could be successful if the German armoured divisions supported by the Luftwaffe pressed their attack.’ It was, of course, a decisive mercy that no such attack was ‘pressed’. In the course of the Second World War, victorious German armies displayed a far more consistent commitment to completing the destruction of their enemies when opportunity offered than did the Allies in similarly advantageous circumstances. Dunkirk was an exception. Most of the BEF escaped not as a consequence of Hitler’s forbearance, but through a miscellany of fortuities and misjudgements. Success beyond German imagination created huge problems of its own. Commanders’ attention was fixed upon completing the defeat of Weygand’s forces, of which large elements remained intact. The broken country around Dunkirk was well suited to defence. The French First Army, south of the port, engaged important German forces through the critical period for the BEF’s escape, a stand which received less credit from the British than it deserved.
On 24 May von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, ordered his Panzers, badly in need of a logistical pause, not to cross the Aa canal and entangle themselves with British ‘remnants’, as Gort’s army was now perceived. Hitler supported his decision. He was amenable to Goering’s eagerness to show that his aircraft could complete the destruction of the BEF. Yet, in the words of the most authoritative German history, ‘The Luftwaffe, badly weakened by earlier operations, was unable to meet the demands made on it.’ In the course of May, Goering’s force lost 1,044 aircraft, a quarter of them fighters. Thanks to the efforts of the RAF’s Fighter Command over Dunkirk, the German Fourth Army’s war diary recorded on the 25th: ‘The enemy has had air superiority. This is something new for us in this campaign.’ On 3 June the German air effort was diverted from Dunkirk, to increase pressure on the French by bombing targets around Paris.
Almost the entire RAF Air Striking Force was reduced to charred wreckage, strewn the length of northern France. It scarcely seemed to the Germans to matter if a few thousand British troops escaped in salt-stained battledress, when they left behind every tool of a modern army – tanks, guns, trucks, machine-guns and equipment. Hitler’s failure to complete the demolition of the BEF represented a historic blunder, but an unsurprising one amid the magnitude of German triumphs and dilemmas in the last days of May 1940. The Allies, with much greater superiority, indulged far more culpable strategic omissions when they returned to the Continent for the campaigns of 1943–45.
Ian Jacob was among those impressed by the calm with which Churchill received Pownall’s Dunkirk situation report of 30 May. Thereafter, the war cabinet addressed another budget of French requests: for troops to support them on the Somme front; more aircraft; concessions to Italy; a joint appeal to Washington. Churchill interpreted these demands as establishing a context for French surrender, once Britain had refused them. The decision was taken to withdraw residual British forces from north Norway. The prime minister determined to fly again to Paris to press France to stay in the war, and to make plain that Britain would dissociate itself from any parley with Germany mediated by the Italians. Next morning, as Churchill’s Flamingo took off from Northolt, he knew that 133,878 British and 11,666 Allied troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk.
The prime minister’s old friend Sir Edward Spears, viewed
