Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [47]
This kind of misunderstanding occurred all down the chain of command. The British were anxious to evacuate, the French still had some obscure vision of holding on as a sort of fortress; the British insisted that they would form the rear guard, but the run of the perimeter was such that they were squeezed out by the French, who insisted anyway that they ought to form the rear guard, and then tended to blame the British for letting them do so.
When the evacuation was finally over, on the night of June 3-4, the Allies had managed, incredibly, to lift off about 335,000 men. The British had gotten off about 215,000 out of perhaps 250,000 trapped in the north. The French had taken off only 125,000 out of about 380,000. It was both a triumph of the human spirit and a military disaster.
No one expected to get off anything like that, and it is probable that they would not have done so, had they not been helped by Hitler. For two crucial days, from the 24th to the 26th of May, days which allowed the Allies to organize both their defensive perimeter and their evacuation, he had issued a stop order for his armor. This order has puzzled students of history for many years, and gave rise to suggestions that Hitler really wanted a deal with the British, that he liked Britain, and so on and so forth. The truth seems to be a great deal more mundane. For one thing, von Rundstedt was by that time already looking south, and wanted to conserve the armor for the forthcoming drive against the remaining French armies. For another, the area around Dunkirk was low-lying, and crisscrossed by canals and ditches, and therefore not thought suitable for armor. Hitler also thought, incorrectly, that the Luftwaffe was capable of isolating the perimeter and thereby destroying the bottled-up forces in it. Finally, there does seem some ground for believing that the Germans were indeed overawed by the magnitude of their own astounding success so far. That, however, is a long way from the imputations that have been put on the whole matter. At bottom, it was a sound tactical decision plus a misassessment of the capabilities of the Luftwaffe that caused the stop order. They would make that mistake again.
For practical purposes Britain was now out of it. The campaign of France would last another three weeks. During that time Churchill and his government would make strenuous efforts to keep the French in the war, but they would make no material contribution to it. The few British forces south of the Somme would soon be evacuated. There was indeed only one thing the British had left that they could have contributed: the fighter arm of the Royal Air Force. To have sent this over to France would have left the British Isles absolutely defenseless, and in spite of French pleas for it, the British steadfastly refused to commit it. The French therefore, though only a few of them were churlish enough to say it, increasingly took the attitude that Britain was willing to fight to the last Frenchman. They could not believe that Britain either could or would continue the war alone, and even while Churchill tried to keep them up to the mark, Britain’s weakness and inability to help told against his own arguments. There was little point in recriminations, and in pointing out that it was essentially