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By Root 1438 0

behind 65,000 vehicles, 20,000 motorcycles, 416,000 tons of stores, 2,472 guns, 75,000 tons of ammunition and 162,000 tons of petrol. They destroyed as much as possible with petrol poured over food and grenades thrown down the barrels of artillery pieces, but essentially the soldiers of the BEF returned with little more than their rifles – indeed some officers said they would not be allowed to embark without them – and what they stood up in. The British Tommy of that period wore or carried a steel helmet of 2½ pounds in weight, a haversack of 5 pounds, an anti-gas cape of 3½ pounds, a respirator of the same weight, straps and belts ditto, two pouches containing sixty rounds each, weighing 10 pounds each, a bayonet and its scabbard of 1¾ pounds and boots of 4¾ pounds, and a rifle of nearly 9 pounds. Together these added up to 53½ pounds, or nearly 4 stone. The last man off the beaches at Dunkirk was Major-General Harold Alexander, commander of the 1st Division, who showed superb sangfroid throughout the evacuation. ‘Our position is catastrophic,’ a Staff officer told him there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘I don’t understand long words.’49

On 4 June, the day the operation ended, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons and the nation that they ‘must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ He did not deny that being expelled from the Continent was ‘a colossal military disaster’, but he did produce the most sublime passage of all his magnificent wartime oratory when he said:

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The words that Churchill used in these short, punchy sentences were all but two derived from Old English. ‘Confidence’ derives from Latin and ‘surrender’ comes from the French. In November 1942, the Conservative minister Walter Elliot told Major-General John Kennedy that after Churchill had sat down he whispered to him: ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight them with – we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles – empty ones of course.’50

Churchill’s public insistence on continuing the struggle represented a victory for him inside the five-man British War Cabinet, which for five days between 24 and 28 May discussed the possibility of opening peace negotiations with Hitler, initially via Mussolini.51 The proponent of this course, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, nonetheless always made it clear that he would not countenance any peace that involved sacrificing the Royal Navy or essential national sovereignty, but Churchill – eventually supported by the other three members, Neville Chamberlain and Labour’s Clement Attlee and Arthur Henderson – opposed holding any discussions, at least until it was seen how many troops could be evacuated from Dunkirk. Churchill was right; any public accommodation with Germany would have destroyed British morale, legitimized Hitler’s conquests, alienated American sympathy and allowed the Germans later to concentrate their entire might – rather than just the great bulk of it – against the USSR. Although the initial terms might have been favourable, in the long term a disunited Britain would have had to maintain an onerous level of defence spending for decades, or until such time as Germany was victorious in the east and turned to settle her scores against British bourgeois democracy. ‘The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war’, wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, ‘appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.’

Instead the Ministry of Information, in co-operation with the War Office and the Ministry of Home Security, put out a leaflet entitled ‘If the Invader Comes: What to Do –