Paris fell on June On June 17, Rommel covered miles westward and on June 19 he captured Cherbourg. The French government, which had been in a state of crisis for weeks, signed an armistice on June It had taken the Germans just 18 days after Dunkirk to capture France. Britain now stood alone against the Nazis and many wondered whether it would be the next to concede.
Some members of the British government, beginning to regret the rise of the uncompromising Churchill, considered what sort of an agreement might be reached with the German leader. Hitler tentatively planned for a British invasion, code-named Operation Sea Lion, but he knew that such an incursion would be risky, difficult and very costly, and so he waited for a British peace offer. Churchill was having none of it.
He quickly replaced the equipment lost in France. He began currying a relationship with U. President Franklin Roosevelt, who signaled his intention to assist the British in any way he could. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
The assault failed to produce the desired results, with the British capital escaping serious harm. Instead, 20 German planes were damaged and another 60 shot down. To cut his losses, Hitler scaled back the raids in favor of the limited nighttime strikes known as the Blitz, which continued until May The RAF had stood up to the Luftwaffe and won. The threat of a German invasion was over. During the next five years, Churchill and the British leadership were able to expand the size of the British army, add new planes to the resources of the RAF, repair and replace the ships lost at Dunkirk and reestablish the British Navy as one of the most powerful in the world.
Without Dunkirk, none of this would have been possible, nor would Britain have been able to hold out until December and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the Americans into the war as a critical ally. When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, , three of the eight divisions that took part were British.
Two were dropped from the air and one arrived by ship and stormed the beaches beside its American allies. The victory that followed was sweet for all involved, but for the British, it was more than that. It was redemption. Contact us at letters time.
Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. The next day Churchill suggested amassing small ships for just such an instance, not realising the process had already begun. Small boats, of course, would be better able to cope with shallow water, avoid numerous obstacles and creep as near as possible to the beach, acting as a ferry service to run troops to larger destroyers and minesweepers waiting out at sea.
On 26 th May things took a turn for the worse concerning the B. A dangerous gap in the Allied defences was thereby opened, leaving just the rd Brigade of the 48 th Division between the Germans and passage into France along the coast, where the B.
The German troops who had already entered the country circled round south of the B. The Ypres-Comines canal became the Front Line, as troops were dispatched to hold off the German advance down the coast at all costs. If the Germans surged forward and reached the beaches before the B. Many men would lose their lives in this gallant endeavour, and the French units were essentially cut to ribbons before they surrendered on the 31 st.
Eventually the British troops, and what was left of the French army, retreated right back to surround Dunkirk, now considered the only possible route of escape, and remained to defend the perimeter. Every hour would now make a massive difference in determining how many men would ultimately make it home. Meanwhile, the 1 st , 2 nd , 42 nd , 44 th , 46 th , 48 th and 1 st Armoured Divisions were ordered to head to the Dunkirk beaches and embark for England. As they hurried forward, they were painfully aware that they were last in the queue for evacuation, and might have a long wait ahead of them, if they made it off the beach at all.
Captain William Tennant and the other on-the-spot organisers of the evacuation found themselves with a massive administrative headache. The sheer numbers of troops arriving at the beach all at once — which, while very long, was only a mile wide — meant that the men were forced to spread out further and further away from those in command, making it difficult to transmit orders, and the Germans had completely destroyed the nearby port.
That being the case, there were only two loading points to place troops into the boats from, a jetty to the west of the beach and a mole to the east. Lots of men became separated from their units, so it was hard to know who they should listen to and where they ought to be, and the sick and stragglers had to be sorted and cleared before the organised units got a look in. Even assuming the orders made it to the men, and they understood where they were headed, they faced a long journey over the pocked and debris-laden beach to get to the exit points, risking attack all the time from German planes that knew exactly what location they were aiming for.
There was some respite from the Luftwaffe on the 30 th May due to bad weather, and nights were safer, but otherwise the men were sitting ducks, especially as many had been told to destroy all weapons. The R. Twice as many men remained to be evacuated as had been originally thought, and the waiting crowd continued to swell.
Eventually the organisers, in sheer desperation, created a third jetty out of trucks parked deeper and deeper into the surf to speed the loading into small ships.
The captains of those ships risked their lives time and again, running the gauntlet of bombs and obstacles to reach the beach, then risking being capsized or sunk by the frantic troops and heavy equipment. The waiting troops suffered keenly from hunger and thirst, no rations having been provided, and became less and less alert as time went by.
They huddled down miserably into their self-dug foxholes, watching the destruction spread around them, and prayed for it all to be over. It was hard to believe that they had ever been human beings. I could not help thinking, as I half fell, half walked through the wet sand, of the funeral those boys would had at home, with tenderness and flowers.
Yet here they lay where they had died, like dogs that had been run over in the street. Eventually, as the Germans advanced, the key generals were pulled back to Britain, with just General Alexander being left to cover the rear of the retreating army. As they advanced, German forces cut off all communication and transport between the northern and southern branches of Allied forces, pushing several hundred thousand Allied troops in the north into an increasingly small sliver of the French coast.
By May 19, General John Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force BEF had begun to weigh the possibility of evacuating his entire force by sea in order to save them from certain annihilation by the approaching Nazi troops. Meanwhile, in London, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had resigned under pressure on May 13, making way for a new wartime coalition government headed by Winston Churchill.
At first, British command opposed evacuation, and French forces wanted to hold out as well. In planning this risky operation, the Allies got a helping hand from a surprising source: Adolf Hitler , who on May 24 gave the order to halt the advance of German panzer divisions bearing down on Dunkirk.
Hitler gave the tanks the go-ahead again on May 26, but by that time the Allies had gained crucial time to put their preparations in place. On the evening of May 26, the British began the evacuation from Dunkirk, using the codename Operation Dynamo. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay directed the efforts, leading a team working out of a room deep inside the Dover cliffs that had once contained a generator known as a dynamo giving the operation its name.
On the first full day, Operation Dynamo was only able to evacuate about 7, men from Dunkirk; around 10, got out the following day May Some to 1, boats, many of them leisure or fishing crafts, eventually aided in the evacuation from Dunkirk. Some were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were manned by their civilian owners and crew.
At the outset, Churchill and the rest of British command expected that the evacuation from Dunkirk could rescue only around 45, men at most. But the success of Operation Dynamo exceeded all expectations. On May 29, more than 47, British troops were rescued; more than 53,, including the first French troops, made it out on May By the time the evacuations ended , some , British and , French troops would manage to get off the beaches at Dunkirk—a total of some , men.
On May 27, after holding off a German company until their ammunition was spent, 99 soldiers from the Royal Norfolk Regiment retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, about 50 miles from Dunkirk. Agreeing to surrender, the trapped regiment started to file out of the farmhouse, waving a white flag tied to a bayonet. They were met by German machine-gun fire. They tried again and the British regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to an open field where they were searched and divested of everything from gas masks to cigarettes.
They were then marched into a pit where machine guns had been placed in fixed positions.
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