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from the evacuation. The RAF was often cursed by soldiers and sailors for its supposed absence from the skies; every man at Dunkirk learned to dread the repeated Stuka attacks. Yet Fighter Command made a major contribution to holding the Luftwaffe at bay, at the cost of losing 177 aircraft during the nine days of the evacuation. As the Germans sought to impede Dynamo, their pilots declared themselves more hard-pressed by fighters than at any time since 10 May. The Luftwaffe’s effort against the departing British fell far short of Goering’s hopes and promises, and this was as much due to the RAF as to its own bungling. After 1 June the Luftwaffe redeployed most of its aircraft to harry the French, making the final phase of the evacuation much less costly than the first.

The towering reality was that the BEF got away. Some 338,000 men were brought back to England, 229,000 of them British, the remainder French and Belgian. The withdrawal and evacuation were widely held to be Gort’s personal triumph; but while the C-in-C indeed gave appropriate orders, success would have been unattainable had not Hitler held back his tanks. It remains unlikely, though just plausible, that this was a political decision, prompted by a belief that restraint would render the British more susceptible to peace negotiations. More credibly, Hitler accepted Goering’s assurance that the Luftwaffe could finish off the BEF, which no longer threatened German strategic purposes; and the panzers needed rapid refit before being urgently redeployed against Weygand’s forces. The French First Army conducted a brave stand at Lille, which contributed importantly to holding the Germans off the Dunkirk perimeter; it was understandable that British soldiers showed bitterness towards their allies, but Churchill’s army had performed little better than Reynaud’s in the Continental campaign.

Dunkirk was indeed a deliverance, from which the prime minister extracted a perverse propaganda triumph. Lancashire woman Nella Last wrote on 5 June: ‘I forgot I was a middle-aged housewife who sometimes got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old – like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy rubbish … Somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.’ The British Army salvaged a professional cadre around which new formations might be built, but all its arms and equipment had been lost. The BEF left behind in France 64,000 vehicles, 76,000 tons of ammunition, 2,500 guns and more than 400,000 tons of stores. Britain’s land forces were effectively disarmed: many soldiers would wait years before receiving weapons and equipment that rendered them once more fit for a battlefield.

It is sometimes supposed that, when the BEF quit the Continent, the campaign ended, which is a travesty. In each day’s fighting between 10 May and 3 June, the Germans had suffered an average of 2,500 casualties. During the ensuing fortnight, their daily loss rate doubled to 5,000. A soldier of the French 28th Division wrote defiantly on 28 May: ‘It seems that the Germans have taken Arras and Lille. If this is true, the Nation must rediscover its old spirit of 1914 and 1789.’ Some units remained committed to fight, some Frenchmen shrugged off the despair of their commanders. One of Brigadier Charles de Gaulle’s men wrote: ‘In fifteen days we have carried out four attacks and we have always been successful, so we are going to pull together and we will get that pig Hitler.’ A soldier wrote on 2 June: ‘We are really tired, but we have to be here, they shall not pass and we shall get them … I shall be proud to have participated in the Victory of which I have no doubts.’ Even some foreign governments were not yet convinced of France’s final defeat. On 2 June Mussolini’s foreign minister flaunted the Italian regime’s boundless cynicism when he told the French ambassador in Rome: ‘Have some victories and you will have us with you.’

In the last phase of the campaign,