Each year, every day from 26th May to 4th June The Dunkirk Project publishes this day’s news from Dunkirk 1940 live. Follow real people’s real stories day by day, with lots of new entries, updated features, and stories continuing beyond the evacuation. Just click on the date in the page menu top left of your screen.
Stranger than Fiction – highlighting extraordinary true stories from Dunkirk from our contributors, including some surprising elements: twelve pairs of silk socks, a jam sandwich and a tattered postcard, and a treasured newspaper clipping showing one of the last soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk.
FollowThames to Dunkirk page-by-page: by Liz Mathews, the largest book in the British Library draws together all the stories:
a vivid witness account from soldier poet BG Bonallack, a raw and powerful undercurrent from Virginia Woolf, a map of the Thames with the names of little ships that answered the call, and along the great strand of Dunkirk beaches, many of the 337,131 people who were rescued.
Thames to Dunkirk on film – an artist’s film takes a walk around the big book, in company with BG Bonallack and Virginia Woolf; with an article on the British Library’s blog.
And you can explore the making of the big book, in a feature about its inspiration and development from a dream to a continuing work in progress.
Postcard from Jimmy Owen Jones, Elspeth Owen’s father, to her mother on his return to England: Safe & well in England. Just in case the wire doesn’t connect.
We were told to embark as many people from the jetties as we could. Most of them were stretcher-cases and walking wounded. They looked like a beaten army – they weren’t really, but they looked it. We cleared the mess decks to make room for the stretchers. The walking cases were pushed into corners. There were two or three hundred of them on board, plus about sixty of us crew. We tried to feed them but we ran out of food. They seemed shocked and were very, very quiet. I don’t think they realised what was happening to them. A lot of them had never seen warfare. We got the chaps off at Portsmouth. Those that could walk marched off the jetty, heads up and shoulders back.
(Ordinary seaman Dick Coppeard, Royal Navy, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Things now became much worse. From midnight until five in the morning, the shelling increased to such a pitch that of the two hospital ships sent in for wounded, only one was able to go in to bring them off. The other lay off the harbour entrance for four hours, but could not get in. Four troopships tried to get in and failed. One entered at dawn, loaded up, and was returning, when she was heavily bombed. At five o’clock the enemy let loose a monstrous air attack all over the area. It lasted for four hours, with successions of aeroplanes thirty to forty strong; one Master Mariner made the note, ‘Over 100 bombs on ships near here since 5.30’.
At the home ports, 670 troop trains carried the soldiers away. Volunteer war workers provided mobile canteens to all these trains to give food, drink, sweets and cigarettes to all, and to send off telegrams for those who wished.
(John Masefield, The Nine Days Wonder)
When we got to Dover we were put into old customs sheds. In there were these ladies from the women’s services – the Red Shield Club – all the various ladies’ associations. I had no tunic – I’d lost it – and one of the elderly ladies took off her fur coat and put it round me whilst I sat down, and gave me a cup of tea. Then she produced a stamped envelope – stamped and sealed – and she said, ‘Right. Address it to go to your wife or whoever. Put the message on the back. Use it like a postcard – it will get there quicker.’
(Corporal Frank Hurrell, 3rd Field Army Workshop, RAOC, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Jimmy Owen Jones dated his card 31/5/40 but it was postmarked 30 May 1940, so he was perhaps understandably confused about the date. It probably arrived in Aylesbury on 1st June 1940.
2nd Lt Jimmy Langley of the 2nd Coldstream Guards, whom we last met on 30th May with his eccentric Brigadier, was wounded while part of the rearguard: ‘I had just fired five most satisfactory shots, and was kneeling, pushing another clip into the rifle, when there was the most frightful crash, and a great wave of heat, dust and debris knocked me over. A shell had burst on the roof.
There was a long silence, and I heard a small voice saying, ‘I’ve been hit,’ which I suddenly realised was mine. That couldn’t be right; so I called out, ‘Anybody been hit?’
A reply from behind – ‘No, sir, we are all right.’
‘Well,’ I replied more firmly, ‘I have.’
By the time 2nd Lt. Langley was wounded on 1 June, the La Panne casualty clearing station had been evacuated. That explains how he came to be lying in an ambulance in the driveway leading up to Chateau Coquelle in Rosendael, a large house that BEF soldiers knew as ‘Chapeau Rouge’ or the Chateau. This was the temporary base for the 12th casualty clearing station for wounded soldiers about to be evacuated to England. It was overflowing.
(2nd Lt Langley’s story from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk. More news of Jimmy Langley and the Chateau on 3rd and 4th June)
The homeward route was a wonderful sight. Hundreds of small craft of every description, making towards Dunquerque. The German bombers were busy dropping their loads all over the place. There were more than seventy enemy planes overhead dropping their bombs all round on us, like hail-stones, but our luck held good. We escaped undamaged. The gunner put in some great work with his gun and hit three enemy planes, two of which came down. I was just coming along Folkestone pier at 8.30 when a violent explosion occurred. Another lucky escape. A mine had gone off behind us. We had brought home 504 troops, seventy of them French.
(A shipmaster, quoted in John Masefield’s The Nine Days Wonder)
All the routes homeward were now under very heavy shell-fire. It was reckoned that the enemy had at least three batteries of six-inch guns near Gravelines along the coast to the west of Dunkirk, besides the heavy coastal guns in Fort Grand Philippe to the east. At six that evening the signal was sent from the harbour: Things are getting very hot for ships. It was decided that the harbour could no longer be used during daylight.
A naval officer had the heart-breaking task of telling the men waiting on the jetty that they would have to go back and wait for night to fall. In spite of the appalling fire the lifting on this day was a record; we took away 61,998 men. Our loss in troopships, destroyers and mine-sweepers sunk and damaged was very heavy.
Thousands of men stretched away behind us. But we failed to move forward. Only the wounded were got away that night. As the hours went by, the spirits of all must have been sinking. Mine certainly were. Sleep was impossible. It was just waiting, waiting, waiting.
(Gunner Lt Elliman, from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)
Sapper Alexander Graham King, the mad hatter, finally finished his self-imposed tour of duty entertaining the troops on the beach for seven days with his accordion, and got on board a ship for home.
(from the Imperial War Museum archive)
Dunkirk Phossils 67 – Basil, John and Kate Bonallack, by Charlie Bonallack: image from family photograph hand-painted on porcelain fired to 1280°c. This image is a detail: more Dunkirk Phossils here.
I went in the pub the first night I came back from France, and the landlord said to me, ‘Oh, we thought you’d been took prisoner.’ And old Bill, the postman, took one look along the bar. He said, ‘I told you if there’s only one bugger come back it’ll be him.’
(Senior Aircraftman James Merrett, Ground Gunner RAF, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Tamzine was the smallest boat surviving – an open fishing boat from Birchington measuring 14′ 7″, she can’t have held many men in each trip, but must have ferried hundreds from the beaches to the waiting ships. She’s now in the Imperial War Museum, surrounded by massive tanks.
(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days)
All sorts of craft were coming round the buoy, all fully loaded with troops. A batch of about twenty Belgian fishing-boats bore down, the leader asking us the way to England. I sung out the course, and told him to follow the other traffic and he would be all right.
(Observer quoted in John Masefield’s The Nine Days Wonder)
Aerial photo from IWM archive, taken from RAF reconnaissance plane in May 1940, of rescue ships and boats approaching Dunkirk waters
The Imperial War Museum Photo Library has a remarkable collection of photos taken at Dunkirk, some of them aerial photos taken from RAF planes showing the armada of little ships and the shoreline, some taken by photographers on the ships showing the queues of men up to their chests in the sea, some of the lines and formations of men on the beaches. There are the burning oil stores and the wrecked town, the Chateau and the debris on the beach.
Some photos were taken by German photographers and show the ruins of Dunkirk after the evacuation, some are of battered returning little ships being towed up the Thames towards Waterloo Bridge, others of soldiers on their way home. These photographs tell eloquent stories of their own, not least of the courage of the photographers.
(Seven photos from this archive can be accessed here.)
02.35 Anchored off the N. Goodwin Sands in response SOS from Golden Gift ashore high and dry with 250 troops on board. Took off troops in motor-boat in five trips and returned to Ramsgate to disembark troops.
11.00 Proceeded to Bray east of Dunkirk and anchored there 14.30. Shelling from Nieuport batteries. Embarked 900 British troops. Heavy air attacks and 6″ shelling throughout afternoon, necessitating shifting billet on two occasions.
23.30 Weighed. Two magnetic mines dropped by plane close to.
5.00 Disembarked troops.
Remarks. Embarking troops was carried out under difficult circumstances owing to heavy shelling, air attacks and swell running, which made boat-work very arduous. The spirit of the officers and men was excellent. Ratings volunteered from the stokehold for any duties required.
(Commander KM Greig DSO, RN from the log of HMS Sandown)
Little has been written about the doctors and nurses who dealt with wounded men rescued from Dunkirk. There were not enough beds for all of them in hospitals near the main ports in Kent so many casualties were transported to other locations around the country. Nurse Harker, then 29, never forgot the day she met the first Dunkirk hospital train that reached Whalley in Lancashire. As the train, covered with red crosses, steamed into the station, she asked a colleague, ‘Why ever have these poor things had to come all the way to the north of England after all they’ve been through?’
The answer stunned her. ‘Because hospitals in the south are being emptied for the invasion.’ During the first night after the sixty-four Dunkirk survivors were brought in, Nurse Harker and the other nurses were rushed off their feet trying to deal with their patients’ physical needs.
(from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk. More from Nurse Harker tomorrow 2nd June)
At Dover when we arrived, there were a whole series of trains. All the units had been dispersed and one hadn’t got any of one’s own men – one was isolated, and we were simply told, ‘Each of you get on the train and get up to London. You’ll find the RTO at Waterloo, and he’ll tell you you’ll have a couple of days to go home, and where you’re to assemble to join your new units.’
So we went up in the trains – they were full of civilians who got in and were going to their office in London. Sitting next to you, there might be a man who was going up to his bank. One very nice man, a civilian, pressed into my hand two half-crowns – which was rather nice.
(Captain Anthony Rhodes, 253 Field Company Royal Engineers, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
The light was going fast. She pushed the accelerator harder. She didn’t want to arrive in Bridport in the blackout. Suddenly as she turned the corner she was forced to change down to bottom gear by the mass of men jamming the narrow streets and strolling in the roadway. She pressed the horn to break a wedge through the khaki ranks.
A group strung out in front of her wheeled to face the car bringing it to a standstill. She was half aware that those on the pavement were standing still too, that she was surrounded by weary men in what she saw now was torn and stained battledress, their chins stubbled and their eyes red in the sooty rings of fatigue over the drawn cheeks. She saw too that they weren’t just tired but angry. The man in front of the bonnet with one stripe on his sleeve, opened his mouth in a soundless roar.
She had never seen a human being snarl, now there were faces all around her with the lips drawn back on tobacco-stained teeth. The soldier in front pounded on the bonnet. She knew the others were joining in, that the snarls were now half leers. She thought some of them were drunk. At any moment they might wrench the door open and drag her out. The squaddie beat his fist on the bonnet of the Morris again.
But one of his mates was pulling him off. The boy bowed a little towards her and waved the car on with an elaborate satirical gesture. She began to inch forward hearing the catcalls and feeling the car rock as others thumped on the side panels while she crawled between them. Then she was through the press and out into a clearer stretch of road. ‘East Street’ he’d said and there it was. She drew up outside the pub but was shaking too much to leave the car. She leaned against the glass side panel and realized that she had begun to cry. When Harry opened the door she almost fell into the street.
‘What’s up? Has anything happened?’
‘I ought to be asking about you. It’s just that I ran into a group of soldiers coming through the town. I thought they might be going to drag me out of the car and rape me or lynch me or something. They seemed so… angry.’
‘They are; bloody angry. They’ve been beaten. No army likes that. It’s being treated as a kind of victory here, plucked from the jaws of defeat, all that stuff, but they’ve been there and back. The beaches were hell but it was hell even getting through to them. Many of the chaps feel betrayed. Some of the officers left them to fend for themselves while they saved their own skins. All armies are like that in defeat, and victory too. There were nasty scenes as we withdrew and began the evacuation. Not everyone of course. Some units marched on board as if they were on the parade ground.’ He upended his glass. ‘Nothing’s been said here. And you mustn’t say anything either. To the rest of the world it’s got to look like a heroic and orderly withdrawal, not a rout, or Hitler will be down our throats even faster; he’s bound to try and invade if we don’t chuck in the sponge. The French will give in quite soon.’
‘We won’t, will we?’
(from Maureen Duffy’s Change)
I quote Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke: ‘Had the B.E.F. not returned to this country, it is hard to see how the Army could have recovered from the blow. The reconstitution of our land forces would have been so delayed as to endanger the whole course of the war.’
(Arthur Addis, from his account of his war experiences in a memoir for his family)
Within little more than an hour on 1st June we had lost three destroyers, a Fleet minesweeper and a gunboat, and four destroyers had been damaged. Almost immediately after this, the French destroyer Foudroyant was in her turn hit by the dive-bombers and in her turn sank. Two hours of disaster – nor was it the full tally of the day.
The rate of loss was too heavy. It could not continue. There was no question of goodwill involved: it was a question entirely of ship reserves; we no longer had the ships. It was decided that no further operations should take place in daylight along the beaches, as the rate of loss had become too heavy.
On this day we had lost in two hours the equivalent of the loss of a small campaign, a sharp naval action. With the ships had gone many of their own crews, and with them had gone very many more of the soldiers they had picked up at such cost of courage, of effort and of life. The wastage in drowning men alone was too great to be continued.
(from Dunkirk by AD Divine)
1st June. Set out, sent back due to heavy shelling from Gravelines, set out again 10pm, took 1600 troops from pier. It was rather awful as there were now so many wrecks in the harbour.
(Captain G Johnson, on board the Royal Daffodil. More from Captain Johnson’s extraordinary daily journeys to Dunkirk tomorrow, 2nd June)
‘And all on board her are safe and bound for home’ Tall ship – artist’s book by Liz Mathews, text by Valentine Ackland
from Night at Dunkirk
France under our feet like a worn fabric
Was little by little denied our steps
In the sea where the dead with seaweed blend
Bob the overturned boats like bishops’ caps
One hundred thousand men bivouac on
The sky’s rim and the water extends
Off into the sky the beach of Malo
There rises in darkness where horses rot
A sound like the stamp of migrating beasts
The crossing gate lifts up its striped arms
The hearts we have are but half a pair
I remember the eyes of those who embarked
Who could forget his love at Dunkirk?
The sand does not know the scents of spring
And now May dies on the Northern dunes
(Louis Aragon, June 1940, translated from the French by William Jay Smith. Thanks to Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books for sending me this poem.)
To read today’s comments, or add one of your own, please go to 1st June 1940 – Homeward in the menu top left, and you’ll find the comments and conversations relating to today’s news at the foot of the page.
Photo taken from RAF reconnaissance plane overlooking Dunkirk 1940, from the collection in the Imperial War Museum photography archive
Station Commander ‘Boy’ Bouchier assembled all the pilots in the billiards room in the officer’s mess, to tell us we had been assigned to take part in the protection of the British troops over Dunkirk. For fourteen days we went non-stop. I did something like thirty-seven hours in ten days. We just kept flying. We had no reserve pilots.
(Squadron Leader Al Deere, New Zealander, 54 Squadron RAF, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices. We’ve been hearing from Al Deere over the last couple of days about getting shot down over Dunkirk, leaving his wrecked plane on the sand-flats north-east of the town, getting stitched up with a needle and thread by a French handywoman, and encountering two discouraged Tommies in a cafe on his way to join the evacuation queue. His story continues on later pages.)
Dunquerque had been frequently and heavily bombed daily and nightly for some weeks; it was on fire in many places, and blazing to heaven from its oil tanks. For the next week, bombs must have fallen on or near it every five minutes. The enemy sent over immense flights, in the almost certainty of success. They had a perfect target beneath them, columns crowded on roads, shipping crowded in a channel, masses of men upon a beach. During the week there were three hundred and fifty thousand men shut in within a narrow compass with all their possessions; any bomb dropping was certain to be destructive. This was to be an annihilation.
(John Masefield, from The Nine Days Wonder)
The tide was fairly low. A steamer lay on her side at the water’s edge. The sandy beach was about 100 yards wide. Down the centre stood the line of men, three abreast. The smoke from the burning oil tanks drifted eastwards over the town. A few officers walked up and down. All was quiet. And then it started! A formation of high fliers came up from the west, and dropped stick after stick of bombs.This first attack was most unnerving. You felt so completely exposed on the beach. For a time some of us huddled under the hull of the wrecked steamer, but as nothing happened for some time, I called in all my men, and formed them up in the queue again for fear we should lose our place.
During the early evening I heard a Stuka coming down in a vertical dive right on top of me. I was by now dulled by hours of explosions so the the imminence of death aroused no great feeling of fear. Either the bomb would land on me, or it wouldn’t. I thought of Margaret in those few seconds of suspense, and she brought me a sort of peace of the spirit. The next moment: Crash! Darkness! And then a vision of falling sand in front of me. I realised I had been missed, and I could hear the plane climbing away over Dunkirk. The attack was over.
(Gunner Lt Elliman’s account from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)
The Constant Nymph, with Dr Basil Smith and his two ratings were off Dunkirk – ferrying load after load of French troops to the Dutch schuit Jutland. The excitement staved off hunger which was just as well – the Navy had given them a sirloin of beef and a sack of potatoes but the little boat boasted only a two-burner Primus.
(Richard Collier, from The War at Sea, ed. John Winton)
We got into Dunkirk around five o’clock in the evening – we hadn’t eaten and it was really chaos. The sand was littered with bodies and crowds of chaps all hoping to get off but there was no hope. They tried to organise queues, but it was very difficult. People were not only being Stuka-ed, but there was also panic on the beaches. On one occasion, a small boat came in – and they piled aboard it to such a degree that it was in danger of capsizing. The chap in charge of this boat decided he must take some action. He ordered one man who was hanging on the side to get away – but he didn’t, so he shot him through the head. From the people around there was no reaction at all.
It was bitterly cold at night. I came out of the water and I removed a corporal’s overcoat from a corpse on the beach. There was a very flimsy canoe, and two chaps paddled out in this canoe. A Stuka had come down and machine-gunned them, and they both leaned the same way – and they were both drowned. The canoe was upside-down, floating some way off the beach. Bill swam out and pulled it ashore, and we paddled out. HMS Whitehall came past us with its guns blazing away at those Stukas, threw us a line and we were pulled aboard.
(Sergeant Leonard Howard, 210 Field Company, Royal Engineers, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
The Tom Tit was ‘stolen on impulse and without authority’ by Ron and Alan Tomlinson, and in her they made 16 trips ferrying men to the big ships. The Tollesbury, a 1901 barge from the Thames near Erith went with all her crew who volunteered; the Windsong, another sailing boat, must have been at considerable risk, being not very swiftly manoeuvrable, reported as ‘ready for sea and able to take 30 passengers’ – she made several trips and brought many men home.
(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days, and HMM Medway Queen is the first of a new series of features on the heroic little ships.)
Our operations over Dunkirk fell into two main categories. One was that we would do a fighter sweep. We would sweep all the way round, behind the beaches and try and intercept any German aircraft coming up to attack the soldiers on the ground. In the other role, we would escort a bomber called the Blenheim, and be their fighter escort when they went to bomb targets that were related to the evacuation from Dunkirk. I think our ground crews were the people who got into more fisticuffs in local pubs, because after a few beers the soldiers would say, ‘Where were you?’ and our ground crews knew very well that we’d gone over there.
(Flying Officer Geoffrey Page, 56 Squadron, RAF, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Mrs Richardson told me of a friend of her husband’s dead on the beach at Dunkirk – not a wound – shock. News of Louie’s brother, the West boy [Harry] landed in a sailing boat at Ramsgate – hunting his battalion – no clothes – won’t go back he says; but gives no word of his wounds. Some say he’s the only survivor of his regiment.
(Virginia Woolf’s diary. More news of Harry West on 2nd June)
We met the men coming back and drove them to hospital. They were in torn, oily, wet uniforms – one officer had nothing on but a blanket and a monocle – and their faces were black and covered with oil. All the men said: ‘Where were our bloody planes? Never saw one.’
(Lavinia Holland-Hibbert, FANY, from Anne de Courcy’s Debs at War)
After the nightmare of the retreat, Captain Snook’s experience of the evacuation was not much better – ‘the din was appalling’. On the beach, he met five survivors of the destroyer Grenade which had just been blown up. Together they got into a little boat they found and set off for England, but the engine conked out halfway. Stranded for a while, they were eventually picked up by a trawler, and at last landed in Ramsgate.
(Captain HS Snook’s letters containing his account of Dunkirk are in the Imperial War Museum)
I will pay my tribute to these young airmen. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past not only distant, but prosaic, before these young men, going forth every morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power.
(Winston Churchill, 4th June 1940, in his speech to the House of Commons, reported by Sarah Gertrude Millin in World Blackout, her record of the first year of the war.)
Dunkirk Phossil 70 by Charlie Bonallack; image interpreted from aerial photograph taken from RAF plane in IWM archive, hand-painted on porcelain. For more, see Dunkirk Phossils by Charlie Bonallack.
Here in the sand we grovelled, with the burning town as back-drop, the flash of guns and bursting bombs as light and sound effects. Cold, hungry and despondent, we were sure we had been forgotten and deserted. With the first light of dawn the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht began, again, to hurl exploding horror at this sandy shore and at the ships, yachts, and all the other vessels of that noble company. For us there was a gruelling twelve-kilometre march along the loose sand to march into the sea up to our necks only to march out again, a hellish diversion to be repeated again and again.
(Ken Anderson LAC, from Robert Jackson’s Dunkirk)
Many German pilots whose planes were shot down over Dunkirk were killed by small arms fire as their parachutes floated down. One who survived was First Lt. Erich von Oelhaven, who landed among the dunes, was captured by soldiers, and after a day sheltering in a foxhole in the sand from his colleagues in the air, was taken at gunpoint to queue for a trawler on a makeshift jetty of abandoned trucks.
Observing that his armed guard was asleep on his feet, he escaped into the sea, and sheltered for hours between the jetty trucks, unable to stand as the tide came in, and floating with his head jammed in a pocket of air, while the Stukas and German artillery continued to pound the beach and the sea. He survived hunger, extreme thirst and concussion, for several days and nights until 4th June, when he emerged from hiding and collapsed onto the deserted beach, to be found later by German soldiers.
(Story from Robert Jackson’s Dunkirk)
The German planes, about forty big two-engined bombers, flew on steadily in formation. They appeared to be approaching the direction of the road. If so we were for it. They couldn’t miss the target of the crawling column inextricably mixed up with all these thousands of foot-slogging, weary troops. Already there were big bomb craters lining the sides of the road, showing us it had not escaped attention on previous occasions.
A mad rush for cover started. Men packed themselves into ditches, crawled underneath the wreckage of vehicles, flattened themselves down between the very grass blades in the fields, and stood up to their necks in the water of the canal. In the space of a few seconds the mass of humanity that had encumbered the road had utterly vanished. Not a soul was in sight.
(From Gun Buster’s Retreat via Dunkirk. More on Y Battery’s rearguard action as they finally approach Dunkirk tomorrow 31st May)
Brigadier Beckwith-Smith’s instruction as to how to deal with Stuka dive-bombers: ‘Stand up to them. Shoot at them with a Bren gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant. Give them plenty of lead. Remember, £5 to any man who brings one down. I have already paid out £10.’
(from Lt. Jimmy Langley’s account in Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk. More from Brigadier Beckwith-Smith on 3rd June)
The next day 30th left for La Panne east of Dunkirk. Reached there about 11pm and cruised about from 11 until 2am. It was most unpleasant as the whole place was on fire and the wind was blowing off-shore. [A fruitless trip, as the area was being so heavily shelled and bombed. The Royal Daffodil went back again the next day, nevertheless.]
(Captain G Johnson, on the Royal Daffodil. More from them tomorrow and every day until 2nd June)
How many men and women in this tiny country really listen with indifference to the hiccuping boom of the Nazi bomber as it passes overhead? The conquest of fear – and today it is conquered or effectively concealed by hundreds of thousands of decent citizens – is only the greater tribute to that unquenchable vigour of the human spirit which a whole nation displays. And for what? We in Britain are growing so accustomed to the demand made upon our endurance, our humour, and our self-control, that we have almost ceased to ask ourselves just why they are required. For what end is this people showing its superlative courage? For what purpose is it making, at incalculable cost, the emotional sacrifices involved in parting with children, abandoning homes, leaving husbands or wives in danger, closing down businesses, terminating professions, concluding social experiments which have embodied the hopes and dreams of a lifetime?
We are doing, permitting and enduring these things in order that we may destroy another great nation whose airmen, soldiers, sailors and civilians are also displaying superb gallantry and endurance. It may be that now we have no alternative but to fight on against the men and women who have endorsed and practised the militaristic creed which forces us to perfect the arts of destruction. But I who so dearly love my country and so deeply admire its brave and imperturbable people, refuse to admit that I am joining the defeatists when I inquire what would have happened if all the energy, courage and resourcefulness which is now dedicated to the work of destruction, had been given to seeking a solution for Europe’s problems while time still remained? This question has significance for the future.
(Vera Brittain, England’s Hour, written in the summer of 1940. More from Vera Brittain on 2nd June)
They say that in Europe there has never been a more beautiful spring. I look through a row of windows at a blue sky, at trees still green and many flowers, and I think they have these things now in Europe too. It seems to me quite inappropriate that men should be flying through these blue skies, travelling through these flowery fields, firing death at people in summer clothes. A man (high in the Colonial Service) told me after the last war how, one day in France, he went into the fields and picked some flowers and recited to himself, standing alone there in the woods, a poem of Keats, and then came back to his dug-out and made himself drunk; and he wept at the memory. Summer ought to be a closed season for killing people.
(Sarah Gertrude Millin, 28th May 1940, from World Blackout.)
–
from A Young English Airman
Often unseen by those you helped to save
You rode the air above that foreign dune
And died like the unutterably brave
That so your friends might see the English June.
Yet knew that your young life, as price paid over
Let thousands live to tread that track to Dover.
(John Masefield)
To read the comments, or to add one, please click on this day’s date in the menu above left, and you’ll find the comments at the end of the page.
Lucky Weather Paperwork by Liz Mathews, setting poem by Frances Bingham
29th May was a nightmare for the Royal and Merchant Navies, as ship after ship was sunk or put out of action. Lt Commander Rodolph Haig, in charge of the minesweeper HMS Lydd, one of four ships most involved in the tragic events near Kwinte Whistle Buoy reported:
‘Flares were sighted, and shouting heard close at hand. The light from an Aldis lamp revealed the bow and stern portions of HMS Wakeful appearing above water with men clinging to them. I immediately lowered a whaler and two carley floats. Shortly after this, HMS Gossamer, which was close by, ordered us to put my light out and drop a depth charge. I could not at once comply with the latter order as I was too close to the wreck, and would have killed the men in the water. I kept the ship moving while the whaler and carley floats were picking up survivors, and had just got 20 alongside when HMS Grafton appeared. I asked her if she would pick up the rest, and she asked us to circle round her in case of enemy submarines.’
Shortly afterwards, the Grafton was hit by a torpedo and then another explosion on her bridge killed her Commander Cecil Robinson. In the confusion, Comfort, a British drifter coming to the rescue was also hit; all of Comfort‘s crew and the survivors she had rescued from Wakeful were killed, though most of Grafton‘s crew and the troops on board were saved.
(Story from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)
We were fortunate – so fortunate. We have said thank you to England a thousand times for sending the little boats to take us to the big boats – the destroyers – to take us back to England. I was on the beach for two days, and it was so horrible. We seemed to be walking on dead bodies, not on sand. It is very hard to describe, just walking on bodies. At ten o’clock in the evening, we reached a little boat, which should usually take about six people, but there must have been twenty people already on it. We were very fortunate that the boat took us to an English destroyer. I shall never forget the captain, who was one of the nicest gentlemen you could wish to meet. He said, ‘Come on, Frogs, sit down and have something to eat.’ It was a good joke at that moment! He told us, ‘Eat whatever you want,’ and we sat down to eat – and it was better than any meal at the Savoy today – bacon, cheese, everything. It was a joy for us.
(Leon Wilson, French soldier retreating from Belgium into France, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
The famous London fire-boat, the Massey Shaw, went with a fire service crew, brought off sixty men and carried them to England. Later with a naval crew, she tendered-off some hundreds, then carried home forty-six and returned to the beach for more.
(John Masefield, The Nine Days Wonder.)
From about a mile away, still no aeroplanes, no bombs, no menace, though I could see a wrecked small craft, and then a bigger craft. Gradually we could see dark shapes against the sand – and then we saw that there were hundreds – thousands – of people on this sand, and stretching up to the line of houses which stood, presumably, on the road that ran along the coast. Mainly we noticed that they were columns of men stretching down into the sea. We didn’t really understand what this was at first – and then it suddenly occurred to us that these were columns of men waiting to be picked up. The first man in the sea was the next man to be picked up.
One of our auxiliaries, Shiner Wright, was a good swimmer, and he went from the Massey Shaw to a wrecked boat which was right inshore and tied a rope to the wreck so that we had a fixed line into the shallow water. They got a rowing boat that would hold very few people, and worked it along the line, pulling hand over hand. When we got organised this worked very well. In that way I think we took aboard 36 soldiers out of the water that night.
(Francis Codd, Auxiliary Fire Service in London, aboard the Massey Shaw, a shallow-draft fire-fighting ship based on the Thames, approaching the beach at Bray Dunes, a few miles east of Dunkirk. Francis Codd’s moving account can be heard in full in the Imperial War Museum.)
Dunkirk Phossil 69 by Charlie Bonallack. Image interpreted from source from IWM archive, hand-painted with pigment on porcelain. For more, see Dunkirk Phossils by Charlie Bonallack.
Six Leigh cockle boats that had never been further than Ramsgate – Defender, Letitia, Renown, Endeavour, Reliance and Resolute – brought home a total of 1000 soldiers – but they didn’t all come back; His Majesty’s yacht Gay Venture went flying the white ensign; the Elvin, an Estuary cruiser was refused for ‘civilian crew, ship too slow’, and went anyway, flying the red ensign. You can still take a trip on the Princess Freda, a Thames passenger vessel that still operates from Westminster Pier to Kew; and the Waverley, an 1899 paddle-steamer was lost on 29th May when returning with troops from Dunkirk – her replacement, built in 1946 is now the world’s last sea-going paddle steamer, and bears a brass plaque honouring her original.
The Medway Queen, another paddle steamer requisitioned for service as a minesweeper, achieved the record of seven trips and rescued an extraordinary 7000 men; stories from the Medway Queen are running throughout the nine days, and she’s the first in our new series focusing on the heroic ships of Dunkirk.
(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days)
My husband, who was in the Guards, was in the retreat, and he was picked up by a yacht with a lot of other Welsh guardsmen and brought back to England. They left every single thing they possessed except their guns – even their sleeping bags, their clothes, their equipment. They just got on board any ship that was able to take them back to England. At the time, knowing the French had given up the fight, and that the Germans were all along the coast of France, we really did think that any day they would be invading.
(Lady Anne Chichester, civilian worker in Hampshire, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Captain Strother Smith and his men had finally reached the vast queue on the beach: ‘The sea was almost as horrible a sight as the town. On we trudged in single file until we were on the boat.’ They were taken on board a converted passenger boat, had a bath and slept in a bed in a cabin – they were on the boat for about 12 hours from 4pm on Tuesday 28th. At 5.30am on Wednesday 29th, ‘we were landed and the nightmare was over.’ Captain Strother Smith was taken to a hospital at Aldershot suffering from complete exhaustion.
(From Captain NC Strother Smith’s account in the Imperial War Museum archive)
On the night of 29th/30th May we left Flêtre and then started our forty-mile trek to Dunkirk. We walked and ran throughout that night, and indeed, all the next day. One was continually making diversions to miss the enemy. I remember, there was a Captain Whitty, who had been shot through the chest – an amazingly brave man. He was leading quite a sizeable group of infantry, and for a while we tagged on. It was a case of every man for himself. It was chaotic. The Germans were very close, and people were being killed. At 21 years old, one hadn’t experienced death and people being killed. So it was a bit frightening.
(Sergeant Leonard Howard, 210 Field Company, Royal Engineers, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices. More from Leonard Howard tomorrow, May 30th)
Squadron Leader Al Deere, whom we left yesterday somewhere north-east of Dunkirk, his plane shot down on the sand-flats, being patched up with a needle and thread by an unnamed woman, sized up the situation and headed south-west for Dunkirk, where he knew the BEF was ‘retreating according to plan’:
“Somewhere en route to Dunkirk, I went into a small cafe where I saw two tommies. I asked, ‘Am I heading for the Army at Dunkirk?’
They looked at me and said, ‘What British Army? There’s no retreat, chum. There’s bloody chaos.’
Dunkirk was a complete shambles – burning buildings, abandoned vehicles and falling masonry.”
(Squadron Leader Al Deere, 54 Squadron RAF, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
On the 29th May, again for Dunkirk, proceeded to the pier and took off 750 troops. There was intensive bombing all the time, and on our return we were shelled heavily by the battery.
(Captain G Johnson aboard the Royal Daffodil, from his account in the IWM archive. More from the Royal Daffodil every day until 2nd June)
During the afternoon of 29th May the Luftwaffe targeted ten British ships which were tied up alongside Dunkirk’s mole. Between 3.30pm and 6pm, three air raids put seven of these ships out of action, including HMS Grenade, which sank blocking the harbour entrance.
(Story from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)
My first day at a temporary hospital in Leatherhead set up to cope with the rush of wounded from Dunkirk, was the most terrible experience. The retreat was in full swing and all sorts of patients were arriving who needed operations. Because the place had never been used as a hospital before the confusion was immense. People were saying: ‘Nurse, take this man to operating theatre number five on the trolley,’ or ‘Quick, get a blanket for this chap!’ and one had no idea where the blankets were kept or where the theatres were. Because of the black out one had to nurse at night holding a tiny torch – which meant that you had to go and check with your torch to see if anyone had died, there were so many serious cases.
(Ann Darlington, from Anne de Courcy’s Debs at War)
The wind had changed on the 29th. There was still through most of the day a surf running on the beaches, but now the smoke was coming off the town and from the burning oil tanks, and it was at times impossible to see the roadstead from the harbour. Finding the harbour entrance was a matter of great difficulty at various periods throughout the day, and over the beaches there hung a choking cloud. Nonetheless 38,000 men were lifted during the twenty-four hours. It was an incredible achievement – the fruit of courage, of endurance and of sheer brutal toil that is almost without parallel in history. The nightmares of the night seemed somehow to have extended themselves into the daylight hours.
(from Dunkirk by AD Divine, who witnessed the nightmare from the deck of White Wing. More from him throughout, including his view of Captain G Johnson’s Royal Daffodil on 2nd June 1940 – Tatter’d colours)
We sailed to Dunkirk six times altogether on the hospital ship St Julien but were only able to load stretcher cases twice as it was often impossible to get near either mole. We all felt helpless and desperately depressed on the empty trips back.
(Nurse Jo Kenny, from the BBC archive of WW2 People’s War Stories, on:
Another flock of bombers now appeared on their way to hammer the ruins of Dunkirk to a still greater degree of devastation. It was seven o’clock. The great pall of smoke spread wide a hundred feet over the town like Death’s hovering wing. It was a very forbidding spectacle. Looked at as a refuge, a sanctuary, a gate of escape, it was anything but inviting. We seemed to be heading straight for a holocaust; far worse than anything we had witnessed so far, the last ordeal. It was a picture that reduced one to silence.
(Gun Buster, from Retreat via Dunkirk, still en route for Dunkirk. More about Y Battery’s rearguard action tomorrow, 30th May)
The picture will always remain sharp etched in my memory – the lines of men wearily and sleepily staggering across the beach from the dunes to the shallows, falling into little boats, great columns of men thrust out into the water among bomb and shell splashes. The foremost ranks were shoulder deep, moving forward under the command of young subalterns, themselves with their heads just above the little waves that rode in to the sand. As the front ranks were dragged aboard the boats, the rear ranks moved up, from ankle deep to knee deep, from knee deep to waist deep, until they, too, came to shoulder depth and their turn.
(David Divine, Miracle at Dunkirk)
The docks at Dunquerque could now only be used by small vessels, as ships had been bombed and sunk within the Main Basin. Ships could still go alongside the wall in the tidal Basin, but the approaches to it were made almost impassable by the intense heat and the continuous bombing. There remained only the wooden East Pier, which might well give way under the strain of several thousand tons butting against it. Since embarkation from the pier alone would not suffice to lift the numbers in time, it was planned that the men should get into boats upon the beaches and be ferried to ships anchored in the channel off the shore. All ships coming near the coast were bombed. The losses in men were very great; in ships severe, and in boats enormous. No ship returned from the beach undamaged. Nothing but heroic industry and utter self-sacrifice kept the ships steadily plying to and fro.
(John Masefield, Nine Days Wonder)
The beach was one vast sea of bodies. I had never seen so much dejection. Soldiers felt that they had been left there. Some seemed to have given up, but personally I didn’t. There was one place I was going, and that was back to England. There was panicking, but most of us managed to keep our heads. One chap scrounged a tin of bully beef and laid it out like a picnic, tucked his napkin in, then apologised that he couldn’t supply the wine because the butler happened to be away that day.
(Corporal Henry Palmer, 1/7th Batallion, Queen’s Royal Regiment, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Sub-Lt Alfred Weaver had no sooner left Ramsgate than the Quijijana‘s engine caught fire; dousing it with the extinguisher, Weaver ploughed on, but the minute he sighted Dunkirk the old yellow-funnelled pleasure launch began shipping water. Finding the bilge pump inoperative, Weaver and his crew had to bale desperately with their service caps. For the first time, Weaver saw the brass plate affixed to the bulwarks – ‘Licensed to ply between Chertsey and Teddington’ – and understood. That stretch of the river Thames, he knew, measured only fourteen miles.
(Richard Collier, from The War at Sea, ed. John Winton)
There they stood, lined up like a bus queue, right from the dunes, down the shore, to the water’s edge, and sometimes up to their waists beyond. They were as patient and orderly, too, as people in an ordinary bus queue. There were bombers overhead and artillary fire all around them. They were hungry and thirsty and dead-beat; yet they kept in line, and no-one tried to steal a march on anyone else. Most of them even managed to summon up an occasional joke or wisecrack.
(Ian Hay, ‘one of the volunteers’, from The Battle of Flanders)
Dunkirk Phossil 68 by Charlie Bonallack. Image of troops on beach and dunes near Dunkirk May 1940 interpreted from photo in IWM archive and hand-painted on porcelain. For more, see Dunkirk Phossils by Charlie Bonallack.
‘The situation of the British and French Armies, now engaged in a most severe battle and beset on three sides from the air, is evidently extremely grave. The surrender of the Belgian Army in this manner adds appreciably to their grievous peril. But the troops are in good heart and are fighting with the utmost discipline and tenacity…
I expect to make a statement to the House on the general position when the result of the intense struggle now going on can be known and measured. This will not, perhaps be until the beginning of next week. Meanwhile, the House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings.’
(Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 28th May 1940, quoted in AD Divine’s Dunkirk. Churchill’s promised statement to the House on 4th June 1940 is quoted on that day’s page – Beyond Dunkirk.)
The Massey Shaw, the London fireboat moored at Blackfriars Bridge was among the first to arrive at Bray Dunes, east of Dunkirk – she made three trips altogether. Nineteen lifeboats went to Dunkirk, particularly useful because of their shallow draft, that allowed them to get close to the beaches, and their steadiness. The brand-new Guide of Dunkirk lifeboat, funded by the Girl Guides Association went straight from the boat builders; the Rosa Woodd & Phyllis Lunn, the Shoreham lifeboat paid for by a private legacy made three trips to Dunkirk; the Lord Southborough lifeboat went from Margate with a civilian crew, and RNLI lifeboats from all round the south and east coast and the estuary went, including Louise Stephens from Great Yarmouth and Aldeborough No 21 from the Isle of Wight. Lady Haig, a 27′ clinker elm and oak boat used as a privately owned lifeboat on the Goodwin Sands, the Thomas Kirk Wright an inland lifeboat from Poole Harbour, the Countess Wakefield and the Cecil and Lilian Philpott from Newhaven all brought many men home.
(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days, and more from the Massey Shaw tomorrow 29th May)
On the second night we went in, there was order. There was an officer at the head and he called out, ‘Coxswain, how many do you want?’ And I would tell him, and he would count them off. Any wounded they would pass over their heads, and you’d take the wounded off first.
(Coxswain Thomas King, HMS Sharpshooter, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Sapper Alexander Graham King, ‘the mad hatter’ played his accordion in his top hat to entertain the waiting troops on the beaches for seven days before he joined a queue himself. We do like to be beside the seaside, presumably.
(From the Imperial War Museum archive)
Words came tumbling from Rhayader now. He must go to Dunkirk. A hundred miles across the Channel. A British army was trapped there on the sands, awaiting destruction at the hands of the advancing Germans. The port was in flames, the position hopeless. He had heard it in the village when he had gone for supplies. Men were putting out from Chelmbury in answer to the government’s call, every tug and fishing boat or power launch that could propel itself was heading across the Channel to haul the men off the beaches to the transports and destroyers that could not reach the shallows, to rescue as many as possible from the Germans’ fire.
He said: ‘Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds, Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary… They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, and that is why I must go. It is something that I can do.’
‘I’ll come with ‘ee, Philip.’
Rhyader shook his head. ‘Your place in the boat would cause a soldier to be left behind, and another, and another. I must go alone.’
(from The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico)
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico with line drawings by Anne Linton, based on photographs in the IWM archive, some of which were published in John Masefield’s The Nine Days Wonder, also shown here
Pudge, a 1922 barge of the London and Rochester Trading Company went to Dunkirk by sail-power alone, its captain Bill Watson an old chap with gold earrings. Sir Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebird and Bluebird II both went, and Cabby, a wooden sailing barge that usually plied between the London docks and Whitstable. The New Britannic, a 1930 passenger boat from Ramsgate brought back 3000 men altogether; the Medway Queen, a 1924 paddle-steamer was one of the first to arrive at Dunkirk, bringing back 7000 men over seven runs. She picked up John Hayworth of Rochester in mid-channel, surrounded by bodies from his wrecked ship, and she was one of the last ships involved in Operation Dynamo, bringing back some of the troops from the rear-guard, including BG Bonallack.
(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days, and more on the MedwayQueen on 3rd June – Towards the end. ‘Memories of Dunkirk’, stories from the Medway Queen’s website are featured throughout the nine days news pages in the by-now familiar blue boxes.)
A megaphone asked if there was anyone who would volunteer to crew up a fishing boat, where some of the crew had been machine-gunned. This boy of 17 – who’d been sunk twice that day – volunteered immediately. He got cheered by the sailors and the soldiers who were on board. When we got alongside at Dunkirk and secured, a file of Scottish soldiers who were wearing khaki aprons over their kilts, came along led by an officer who’d got his arm in a sling. He called out to the bridge, ‘What part of France are you taking us to?’ One of our officers called back, ‘We’re taking you back to Dover.’ So he said, ‘Well, we’re not bloody well coming.’ They turned round and went back to continue their war with the Germans on their own. It was something remarkable.
(Ordinary Seaman Stanley Allen, aboard HMS Windsor, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)
Not all the volunteers had signed T124 – the form that made them Royal Naval Volunteers for a month – for they prized their independence too much. Some in any case were there despite official qualms: Stewardess Amy Goodrich, the only woman to be awarded a Dunkirk decoration, swore that so long as the nurses sailed in the hospital ship Dinard, she’d sail too.
(Richard Collier, from The War at Sea, ed. John Winton)
The following day, we left again, proceeded to Dunquerque and this time went alongside the pier to take off troops. We returned to Margate without incident [!] and landed the men on the beach.
(Captain G Johnson of the Royal Daffodil – more of his wonderfully laconic account tomorrow and every day until 2nd June)
Under bombs and guns, men are carried across the Channel, not only by troop-ships, but by private yachts, river tugs, harbour life-boats and coastal pleasure steamers – the ‘Saucy Sallies’ of the summer season. The rescuers are not wholly male. ‘Blast my sex!’ cries a girl who offers her private yacht, to be told that men alone are eligible. The powers-that-be turn a blind eye in her direction, and suspect that she finds her way to Dunkirk.
(Vera Brittain, from England’s Hour)
It was now that we saw for the first time the bombing of the beaches. The first wave of early evening bombers roared over us towards Dunkirk, two miles away. We watched them circle and dive. Then sounded the thud, thud of the explosions.
We weren’t altogether unaware of what was happening on the beaches. Our progress along the road had been at a snail’s pace, and we’d picked up a very good idea of the horrors going on from scraps of conversation with the infantry.
“Have you heard that they’re gunning ’em as well as bombing ’em?”
“Some have been on the beach three days before they got a boat.”
“Got safely on a destroyer and it was bombed. Most of ’em blown to bits…”
“I’ve just been told that they gun the fellows as they are swimming to the lifeboats.”
“What will it be like when we get there?”
“Shall we get there?”
“What d’you think our chance is?”
(from Return via Dunkirk by Gun Buster, whose story continues tomorrow 29th May)
Embarkation from Dunkirk (detail), drawing by EC Turner for jacket of Gun Buster’s Return via Dunkirk (published in 1940 by Hodder and Stoughton)
from Ode Written during the Battle of Dunkirk, May 1940
Each year, every day from 26th May to 4th June The Dunkirk Project publishes this day’s news from Dunkirk 1940 live. Follow real people’s real stories day by day, with lots of new entries and updated features.
Stranger than Fiction – highlighting extraordinary true stories from Dunkirk from our contributors, including some surprising elements: twelve pairs of silk socks, a jam sandwich and a tattered postcard, and a treasured newspaper clipping showing one of the last soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk.
FollowThames to Dunkirk page-by-page: by Liz Mathews, the largest book in the British Library draws together all the stories:
a vivid witness account from soldier poet BG Bonallack, a raw and powerful undercurrent from Virginia Woolf, a map of the Thames with the names of little ships that answered the call, and along the great strand of Dunkirk beaches, many of the 337,131 people who were rescued.
Thames to Dunkirk on film – an artist’s film takes a walk around the big book, in company with BG Bonallack and Virginia Woolf; with an article on the British Library’s blog.
And you can explore the making of the big book, in a feature about its inspiration and development from a dream to a continuing work in progress.
–
The Dunkirk Project 