Inferno - Max Hastings [45]
The legend of Dunkirk was besmirched by some uglinesses, as is the case with all great historical events: a significant number of British seamen invited to participate in the evacuation refused to do so, including the Rye fishing fleet and some lifeboat crews; others, after once experiencing the chaos of the beaches and Luftwaffe bombing, on reaching England refused to set forth again. While most fighting units preserved their cohesion, there were disciplinary collapses among rear-echelon personnel, which made it necessary for some officers to draw and indeed use their revolvers. For the first three days, the British were content to take off their own men, while the French held a perimeter southwards and were refused access to shipping. On at least one occasion when poilus attempted to board vessels, they were fired on by disorderly British troops. Only when Churchill intervened personally did ships begin to take off Frenchmen, 53,000 of them after the last British personnel had been embarked. Most subsequently insisted upon repatriation—and thereafter found themselves forced labourers in Germany—rather than remain as exiles in Britain.
A British soldier based at Dover barracks, Donald McCormick, found little romance in his own contribution to the evacuation, described in a letter home on 29 May: “We … are woken & taken down to the docks at 1:45 a.m., where we undergo physical strain & mental torture until 8:30 carrying corpses about & loose hands & brains are all in the day’s work. I feel very upset & sometimes feel like crying when I am down there. It is all so pointless & I hate the callousness with which it is treated by the majority of our people who chiefly go down to see what they can pinch in the way of cigarettes & money.”
The navy suffered severely at Dunkirk, losing six destroyers with a further twenty-five damaged. Its worst day came on 1 June, when three destroyers and a passenger ship were sunk by air attack and four others crippled. Thereafter, the Admiralty felt obliged to withdraw its large warships 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 Göring’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 Göring’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