Encounter 40 · 40 of 42 · 26 May – 4 June 1940
The little ships
On 26 May 1940 Operation Dynamo began. Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay ran it from tunnels under Dover Castle. The first day lifted about eight thousand men. The pocket was still open.
Dunkirk
What they knew
- The pocket could close.
- The Navy could lift some, not all, from deep water.
- Shallow-draft boats could reach the beaches. Most of the first day’s lift was not yet those boats.
What they could not know
- How many days they would have.
- Whether Britain would then be invaded.
- What France’s remaining war would be.
The situation
The German advance had pinned Allied troops against the sea at Dunkirk. Operation Dynamo began on 26 May. Ramsay’s office was a tunnel. Alongside destroyers, a registered fleet of small civilian craft would cross the Channel. On the first day the lift was slow. Weather and Luftwaffe attention were not ornaments. This plate is an operation, nine days, not a kitchen door.
8,000
About the first day’s lift, 26 May 1940. English Heritage / Operation Dynamo. Painfully slow at first. It took several days to gather pace. The nine-day total is a different chair.
Ramsay’s tunnels at Dover. A cruiser, eight destroyers, twenty-six miscellaneous ships assembling on the first day. Over the nine days, more than two-thirds of those lifted came off the mole, not the beaches. Small civilian craft mattered. They were not the whole operation, and they were not a poster.
Wars are not won by evacuations.Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
What was at stake
An army, and the possibility of any later war. The men on the mole did not have a separate press.
The next move
They lifted. The first day: about eight thousand. The nine-day count is later in the same week.
What they had
- A navy
- A register of small boats
- A pause in the weather
- Tunnels at Dover
What didn’t work
The campaign in France as designed. Holding the line.
What happened
The usual figure, by 4 June, is 338,226. The little ships were hundreds, not a metaphor. Many large ships were sunk. Many men were not lifted. The men who got home were a remainder with a future still open.
Wars are not won by evacuations.
Private. No one else will see it.