2nd June 1940 – Tatter’d Colours

About an hour after the setting of the sun came the familiar drone, as the Luftwaffe came along and dropped flares, so they could see us. The sky was alight as they dropped their bombs. Where the boats came in, there was a little nucleus at the head of the water, and then a great queue, running up from the dunes behind, perhaps a quarter of a mile long. The idea was just like a London bus queue. Nobody told us to do that – it seemed the decent thing to do.

There must have been about ten or twelve of these queues running up. When we were halfway up in our queue, the bombing started, and one man ran to the head of the queue when he saw a boat coming. A naval officer turned on him and said, ‘Look, go back to the place you’ve come from – or I’ll shoot you.’ He said it very loudly for everybody to hear, and the man went back with his tail between his legs.

When we got on board, an officer came round and said, ‘We shall shortly be sailing for Blighty – England, Home and Beauty.’ I went down into the hold, where I was put into a hammock, because I was dead – we all were.

(Captain Anthony Rhodes, 253 Field Company Royal Engineers, from Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices)

In the account of this day, Sunday 2nd June, something must be written of the loss of Commander Clouston, RN, who had for six days been doing noble service on the jetty at Dunkirk. On the Saturday night he returned to Dover to report upon the situation and to receive final orders for the great lifting of troops planned for Sunday night. He left Dover on Sunday in a motor-launch with a naval officer and some seamen. A second motor-launch came with them. On their way back to Dunkirk they were attacked by enemy aircraft, who put his motor-launch out of action and left her in a sinking condition. Commander Clouston waved to the men in the second launch to get away before they were sunk. Soon afterwards, this second boat was hit. Commander Clouston refused to desert his men, clinging round the wreck of their boat.

With the naval officer who was ultimately the only survivor of his Company, he then left his wrecked launch to try to swim to a boat seen a couple of miles away. Becoming weary long before he could reach this boat he turned to swim back to the water-logged launch, and was never seen again. His companion, after swimming for two or three hours, reached the boat he had sighted and with great difficulty got on board her. She proved to be a ship’s deserted cutter. In this he drifted for some time till picked up by a French trawler which had lost her way in the Channel. He undertook to navigate this trawler back to Ramsgate, and did so, reporting at Dover dressed in clothes borrowed from a French sailor.

Commander Clouston had been of the utmost service in helping the escape of nearly two hundred thousand men under frightful conditions of strain and danger. It was a grief to many that he did not live to see the lifting brought to an end.

(John Masefield, Nine Days Wonder)

Even though they must have known that the end was near, they never grumbled, nor were they afraid; they even went so far as to ask permission of Commander Clouston before removing their tin hats. When I left them clinging around the wreck, although already suffering from exposure, they were singing and discussing old times together. Commander Clouston’s example must have helped them all, as it helped me. Although exhausted himself, he continued to chat, encourage and white lie to the end.

(The account of the naval officer who survived, from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)

Sylvia, a motor yacht, was crewed by her civilian owner, who on his return with a full load of men said ‘I have seen the sea red with human blood, severed arms and legs, a sight I shall never forget. If she goes down, I shall go with her.’ He refuelled and went straight back to Dunkirk, returning the next day with another full load of men and a completely crippled boat.

(Ships’ stories from several sources including the website of the Association of Little Ships of Dunkirk. More little ships’ stories throughout the nine days)

Louie comes agog. Her brother Harry [West] came back on Monday. It pours out – how he hadn’t boots off for 3 days; the beach at Dunkirk – the bombers as low as trees – the bullets like moth holes in his coat – how no English aeroplanes fought. At Dunkirk many men shot themselves as the planes swooped, Harry swam off, a boat neared. ‘Say Chum can you row?’ ‘Yes’, he said, hauled in, rowed for 5 hours, saw England, landed – didn’t know if it were day or night or what town – didn’t ask – couldn’t write to his mother – was despatched to his regiment. He looted a Belgian shop & stuffed his pockets with rings which fell out in the sea; but 2 watches pinned to his coat survived. He saw his cousin dead on the beach; & another man from the street. He was talking to a chap, who showed him a silk handkerchief bought for his joy lady. That moment a bomb killed him. Harry took the handkerchief. Harry has had eno’ war, & is certain of our defeat – got no arms & no aeroplanes – how can we do anything?

(Virginia Woolf’s diary. More about Harry West tomorrow, 3rd June)

Sheila Parish, a FANY driver, remembers driving ambulances to fetch the survivors of HMS Arcadia, sunk by a U-boat in the retreat from Dunkirk, the four hundred aboard her singing ‘Roll out the barrel’ as they drowned. ‘The men who survived were in a terrible state, their bodies and clothers burned with flaming oil when they jumped into the sea.’

(Sheila Parish, FANY, from Anne de Courcy’s Debs at War)

I was stationed at Plymouth for Dunkirk and was told to go and meet some boats coming in, on one of which was King Zog of Albania and his family, and take him to London. I took the biggest car I could find, set off and found the King with his sisters and his baby son on the quayside. He told me that he would accompany his men in the lorry containing his crates of luggage and that we should meet at the railway station. There I took him to the ticket office to buy tickets for his group of sixty and he was asked for the requisite sum of money. He said: ‘I have no money at all.’ The ticket collector said: ‘Well, if you’ve no money you can’t travel.’ The King turned and ordered some of his men to open one of the crates. From it, he picked out great handfuls of jewels and handed them to the ticket collector. The poor man was horrified, but he let them travel.

(Sheila Parish, FANY, from Anne de Courcy’s Debs at War)

Earlier on the morning of 2nd June, hospital staff at the 12th Casualty Clearing Station [the Chateau] were woken by what Major Philip Newman described as ‘a terrific crash’. A shell had hit the front room of the Chateau, the former operating theatre, injuring about a dozen of ‘the poor chaps’ whom Newman found there. ‘Everywhere patients were yelling.’

Newman took the chance to tell General Alexander about the ‘hopeless’ situation at the chateau. Alexander immediately had a message sent to Ramsey in Dover asking for hospital ships. Unfortunately, though the message was sent en clair [ie not in code] in the hope that the Germans would intercept it, and would not bomb ships on a mercy mission, the two hospital ships which attempted to reach Dunkirk later that day were both attacked. One sank, the other returned, damaged, to England.

(from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk. More on Philip Newman and the fate of the wounded in the Chateau tomorrow, 3rd June)

2nd June. We set off once more [on the Royal Daffodil]… and were attacked by six enemy aircraft. I had previously seen the Paris sunk. I saw the German aeroplanes machine-gunning the boats which contained nurses and medical personnel. The six enemy aircraft flew over us and dropped six aerial torpedoes.

Five of these missed, but the sixth hit the ship, passed through three decks, entered the engine room, and went out through the starboard side before exploding just clear of the ship. The engines stopped and the aeroplanes machine-gunned the ship with tracer bullets, which started small fires. The ship began to make water through the hole made by the bomb and listed to starboard. Gear was shifted to the port side and the port boats were lowered to the deck and filled with water. This raised the starboard side enough to lift the hole just clear of the water.

Mr J Coulthard, the chief engineer, and Mr W Evans, the second engineer, took all the beds they could find and used them to plug the hole. Mr Evans stood up to his neck in the water in the engine-room holding open the bilge-valve while Mr Coulthard kept the pumps going. With a diesel-engine ship this was a great risk; but the Royal Daffodil managed to get back to Ramsgate, running very slowly with three parts of water to one of oil in the system, and was able to land all the troops she had taken on board.’

(Altogether in seven days at Dunkirk the Royal Daffodil carried off 8000 troops. Captain G Johnson’s account of these truly heroic deeds at Dunkirk is in the IWM archive; the last part of this account is from AD Divine’s Dunkirk, Sunday June 2nd, where he continues:)

It is difficult to speak too highly of this feat.  The sheer seamanship of it is beyond praise.  To lift the ship’s side clear out of the water needed determination and courage of a high order.  The bravery of her engineers who, with the almost pathetic inadequacy of mattresses and planks, staunched that great hole in her side is superb.

(AD Divine was at Dunkirk on this day on board White Wing, a 30-foot river cruiser, with Rear-Admiral Taylor. His account was written ‘at the time’:)

Having the Admiral on board, we were not actually working the beaches but were in control of operations. After we had spent some time putting small boats in touch with their towing boats, the battery off Nieuport began to drop shell on us. It seemed pure spite.

A salvo of shells got one of our troopships alongside the Mole. She was hit clean in the boilers and exploded in one terrific crash. There were about 1000 Frenchmen on the Mole. We had seen them crowding along its narrow crest, outlined against the flames. They had gone out under shell-fire to board the boat, and now they had to go back again, still being shelled. It was quite the most tragic thing I have ever seen in my life. We could do nothing with our little dinghy.

While they were still filing back to the beach and the dawn was breaking with uncomfortable brilliance, we found a navy whaler. We told her people to come aboard, but they said that there was a white motor-boat aground and they would have to fetch off her crew. They were terribly slow, and we waited. It was my longest wait, ever. When they found the captain of the motor-boat, they stood and argued with him and he wouldn’t come off anyway. Damned plucky chap.

(from AD Divine’s Dunkirk. That captain eventually got his motor-boat Singapore refloated on the rising tide and left with three French officers in addition to his crew and some British soldiers they found ‘floating around’, plus three lifeboats in tow, which they found mid-Channel.)

The calmness of the average non-military citizen is magnificent. Although on the day of Leopold’s capitulation [King Leopold III’s surrender of Belgium to the Germans precipitated the necessity for the BEF’s retreat and the whole Dunkirk scenario] a German wireless commentator painted a colourful picture of London as a panic-stricken city, the truth was considerably less picturesque. Once over the shock, Londoners sensibly forgot Leopold and thought only of the men he’d left behind him, fighting an heroic rearguard action to cover the retreating troops’ movements. Then, after a seemingly interminable period of suspense, it was learned that the first war-stained, exhausted contingent had arrived safely on British shores, and the relief and enthusiasm were terrific.

No one seems to think much beyond these arrivals at the moment. It isn’t yet known how many haven’t come back.

(Mollie Panter-Downes, 2nd June 1940, from one of her Letters from London for The New Yorker, published in London War Notes.)

Tired, half-clad, often with their clothes saturated through having to wade out to the rescuing steamers, the Army returns. More heroism and more ingenuity are exercised over this haphazard evacuation than over any other in the history of the world. If the peace of Europe had been sought with half this energy, war would have been eliminated ten or more years ago. A batch of the rescued, marching through Waterloo station, are cheered until the glass roof rings with the sound.

(Vera Brittain, England’s Hour)

The one thing I shall never forget, though – the picture that will always haunt me – was the look in the faces of the men while we were filling up another boatload. Would there be room for them in this lot  –  or  – ? You could see anxious eyes counting the heads in front and calculating chances. Then, as we paddled away, loaded to the gunnel, the face of the man left at the head of the queue – the man who had just missed – grinning resolutely, and wishing us luck, and wondering in his heart if we should be able to manage another trip!

(Ian Hay, volunteer seaman, from his account in the Imperial War Museum archive)

Many soldiers were still struggling to reach Dunkirk, Lt. Julian Fane and Corporal Eldridge among them. ‘It was only at dawn on 2 June, after four nights on the run, that they finally reached the first of the canals running round the Dunkirk perimeter.  On the far side, there was a scuttled boat that had not quite sunk. After Corporal Eldridge had swum across and brought it back. They set up a kind of ferry service, with men clinging to the half-submerged boat, while it was pulled back and forth across the canal with string. They were only just in time.’

(Lt. Julian Fane and Corporal Eldridge, Glosters, from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk.)

On either side, scattered over the sand in all sorts of positions, were the dark shapes of dead and dying men, sometimes alone, sometimes in twos and trees. No assistance that availed anything could be given to these dying men. The living themselves had nothing to offer. They just pressed forward to the sea, hoping that the same fate would not be theirs.

There was still another dread haunting us. Should we be able to get off the beach before dawn discovered us, and those waves of German bombers that we had watched the previous day diving over Dunkirk had us for a target?

“I’m not too comfortable in my mind about things,” Boyd muttered to me.

We came at last to the water’s edge.

“I don’t like the look of the Mole,” said the Major. “You saw the shelling going on at the land end. They know it’s packed with troops waiting to be taken off.  It’s sure to get a bad time. Shall we try to get off from the beach? Wade into the water and take our chance in one of the queues?”

We tacked ourselves on to the rear of the smallest of the three queues, the head of which was already standing in water up to the waist.  Half an hour passed.  Suddenly a small rowing boat appeared. The head of the queue clambered in and were rowed away into the darkness. We moved forward, just stood there silently staring into the darkness, praying that a boat would soon appear.

(from Return via Dunkirk by Gun Buster, whose ordeal finally ends tomorrow, 3rd June. His comrade Boyd, master of the understatement, was BG Bonallack, author of The Retreat, the poem I set on Thames to Dunkirk. More on BG ‘Boyd’ Bonallack here.)

Nurse Nancy Harker, who we met on 27th May in Calderstone’s hospital in Lancashire for the wounded from Dunkirk was still in ‘a long-drawn-out nightmare. The stench of gangrene still comes back to me.’ She also remembered how ‘the wounds that cried out for immediate treatment had to wait for days.’ Her favourite Dunkirk survivor was Bert Heath, whose right leg had been amputated in France, due to gunshot wounds, and his right arm had to go too as soon as he reached Calderstone’s. He quickly won over Nurse Harker by nicknaming the leg’s stump ‘Baby’ and by promising her that as soon as he was given a ‘peg leg’, he would race her up and down the ward. She was less sympathetic to three Frenchmen who arrived on stretchers only to leap up as soon as they were inside to declare that they had been shamming to get away. Although they may well have lived through traumas every bit as dreadful as those haunting the British wounded, they were sent to Coventry by the nurses and abandoned in the laundry cupboard. ‘No time for them,’ wrote Nurse Harker in her account. ‘Only saw them when I went to get linen.’

(Nancy Harker’s story from Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk)

The Soldier’s Death

Trail all your pikes, dispirit every drum,

March in a slow procession from afar,

Be silent ye dejected Men of War!

Be still the hautboys, and the flute be dumb!

Display no more, in vain, the lofty banner;

For see! where on the bier before ye lies

The pale, the fall’n, the untimely Sacrifice

To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honour.

(Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, 1661 – 1720)

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Tomorrow, 3rd June – Towards the end

30th May 1940 – The view from the air

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.)

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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)

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Tomorrow, 31st May 1940 – Lovely on the Water

28th May 1940 – Out there

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 Medway Queen 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

The old guns

barked into my ear. Day and night

they shook the earth in which I cowered

or rained round me

detonations of steel and fire.

One of the dazed and disinherited

I crawled out of that mess

with two medals and a gift of blood-money.

No visible wounds to lick – only a resolve

to tell the truth without rhetoric

the truth about war and about men

involved in the indignities of war.

In the silence of the twilight

I hear in the distance

the new guns.

I listen, no longer apt in war

unable to distinguish between bombs and shells.

As the evening deepens

searchlights begin to waver in the sky

the air-planes throb invisibly above me

There is still a glow in the west

and Venus shines brightly over the wooded hill.

Unreal war! No single friend

links me with its immediacy.

It is a voice out of a cabinet

a printed sheet, and these faint reverberations

selected in the silence

by my attentive ear.

Presently I shall sleep

and sink into a deeper oblivion.

(Herbert Read, from The Hundred Years’ War, ed. Neil Astley, Bloodaxe 2014)

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Tomorrow, 29th May 1940 – Nightmare