The Miracle of Dunkirk

by Walter Lord

They were as efficient as machines, but no machines could be so tired. Digging, fighting, falling back; day after day there was never time to sleep. The 1st East Surreys finally invented a way to doze a little on the march. By linking arms, two outside men could walk a man between them as he slept. From time to time they’d switch places with one another.

One British soldier outside the perimeter was still very much in the fight. Private Edgar G. A. Rabbets had been just another Tommy in the 5th Northamptonshires until the great retreat. Then a German thrust almost caught the battalion near Brussels. A fire-fight developed, and at one point Rabbets raised his rifle and took a potshot at an enemy soldier about 200 yards away. The man dropped in his tracks. “Can you do that again?” asked the company commander. Rabbets obligingly picked off another German. Then and there Ted Rabbets was designated a sniper, and henceforth he acted entirely on his own. He had no previous training for his new work, but did enjoy one unusual advantage: he had once known a poacher who taught him a few tricks. Now he could move so quietly he could “catch a rabbit by the ears,” and he could make himself so small he could “hide behind a blade of grass.” As a sniper, Rabbets soon developed a few trade secrets of his own: never snipe from tree tops—too easy to get trapped. Keep away from farmhouse attics—too easy to be spotted. Best vantage point—some hiding place where there’s room to move around, like a grove of trees. Following these rules, Rabbets managed to survive alone most of the way across Belgium. He tried to keep in occasional touch with his battalion, but usually he was deep in German-held territory—once even behind their artillery. From time to time he matched wits with his German counterparts. One of them once fired at him from a hole in ...

Charles Herbert Lightoller was another man who liked to do things his own way. No stranger to danger, he had been Second Officer on the Titanic, where his coolness helped save countless lives that famous night. Now he was 66, retired from the sea, raising chickens in Hertfordshire, but he still had that combination of courage and good humor that served him so well in 1912.

The entire Luftwaffe seemed to be waiting for him. Bombing and strafing, the enemy planes made pass after pass. Fortunately Sundowner could turn on a sixpence, and Lightoller had learned a few tricks from an expert. His youngest son, killed in the first days of the war, had been a bomber pilot and often talked about evasion tactics. The father now put his lost son’s theories to work. The secret was to wait until the last instant, when the enemy plane was already committed, then hard rudder before the pilot could readjust. Squirming and dodging his way across the Channel, Lightoller managed to get Sundowner back to England without a scratch.