The Miracle of Dunkirk

by Walter Lord

It is customary to look on Dunkirk as a series of days. Actually, it should be regarded as a series of crises. Each crisis was solved, only to be replaced by another, with the pattern repeated again and again. It was the collective refusal of men to be discouraged by this relentless sequence that is important.

BEF, two French armies, and all the Belgians—nearly a million men—were now sealed in Flanders, pinned against the sea, ready for plucking.

Captain Tufton Beamish,

Poring over his maps, he gradually decided that the best bet was the 27-mile stretch of coast between Dunkirk and the Belgian town of Ostend. By the morning of May 22 he had covered every detail he could think of. Each corps was allocated the routes it would use, the stretch of coast it would hold.

Churchill, Ironside—all of them—clearly had no conception of the actual situation. Eight divisions couldn’t possibly disengage … the French First Army was a shambles … the Belgian cavalry was nonexistent—or seemed so.

So evacuation it was to be, but now a new question arose: Could they evacuate? By May 26 the BEF and the French First Army were squeezed into a long, narrow corridor running inland from the sea—60 miles deep and only 15 to 25 miles wide. Most of the British were concentrated around Lille, 43 miles from Dunkirk; the French were still farther south.

At 10:50 a.m. on the 23rd General Lieutenant Friedrich Kirchner’s 1st Division tanks started out from the old fortified town of Desvres. Dunkirk lay 38 miles to the northeast. The way things were going, they should be there tomorrow, or the next day.

They not only confirmed Rundstedt’s “halt order” of the previous day; they made it more explicit. The General had not specified any particular line to stop on, and some panzer commanders were already sneaking forward a few extra miles. Hitler corrected this oversight by spelling out exactly where the tanks were to hold:

Hitler would have none of it. The tanks must be saved for the future, and in the course of the discussion a new factor arose: he didn’t want the climax of the campaign to be fought on Flemish soil.

Gort hoped to minimize the shortage by concentrating his men in towns and villages just east of the canal. These strong-points—or “stops” as he called them—were to hold up the German tanks as long as possible.

Learning that the plane could be repaired, Gort asked Goddard to catch a ride in it to London that night and attend the meeting of the Chiefs of Staff the following morning as Gort’s personal representative. The Navy must be told that somehow a much bigger effort was needed. It would be improper for Goddard to speak directly to anybody at the Admiralty, and useless to speak to Ironside alone, but to speak to Ironside in the presence of the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, might accomplish something.

The Admiralty put Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay in charge of the operation.

There would be no more of these meticulous plans; no more general meetings of all concerned. Ramsay, an immensely practical man, realized that the battlefront was changing faster than meetings could be held. By now everybody knew what had to be done anyhow; the important thing was to be quick and flexible. Normal channels, standard operating procedures, and other forms of red tape were jettisoned. Improvisation became the order of the day; the telephone came into its own.

He knew the area well, had been skipper of a destroyer in the old Dover Patrol during the First War. At first the new job had not been too taxing—mainly antisubmarine sweeps, mine-laying, and trying to work out ways to counter the enemy’s new magnetic mines. The German breakthrough changed all that—Dover was only twenty miles from the French coast, practically in the front lines.

Vice-Admiral, Dover, Ramsay lived and worked at Dover Castle, but his office these days was not part of the magnificent ramparts and keep that towered over the port. Rather it was under the Castle, buried in the famous chalk cliffs just east of the town. During the Napoleonic wars French prisoners had cut a labyrinth of connecting casemates in the soft chalk as part of England’s coastal defense. Now they were being used to meet the threat of a new, twentieth-century invasion.

During World War I this cavelike room had housed an auxiliary lighting system for the castle, and it became generally known as the “Dynamo Room.” By the same process of association, on May 22 the Admiralty designated the evacuation now being planned as “Operation Dynamo.”