196: The Myths of Dunkirk

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Dunkirk, legends, myths, realities, all wrapped into one. But also, it sort of does not matter. Come check out my keynote speech on the topic of Deception in February 2025: https://intelligentspeechonline.com/ Coupon Code: SECOND

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Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 196 - The Fall of France - The Myths of Dunkirk. This week a big thank you goes out to Pierce for the Donation and to Misael, Scott, Kyle, Tyler, and SMCally for choosing to become members. You can find out more about becoming a member over at historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members. The Dunkirk evacuations hold a special place in the history of the Second World War, particularly in Britain. The 330,000 British and French soldiers that were brought off the beaches and piers of Dunkirk far exceeded even the wildest hopes of the British leaders that ordered the evacuation to begin on May 26th, 1940. Over the following 10 days, through the tremendous efforts of many groups of sailors, soldiers, and pilots those evacuees were removed from their place in front of the German onslaught and taken back to either the United Kingdom or the French ports that were still outside of German control. In a war full of myths, Dunkirk is the epicenter for an entire genre of myths which would begin to form almost immediately after the soldiers returned to the home islands. There would be multiple accounts of the battle published during the war years, often in a memoir style and they were almost always pretty unreliable when it came to details. This is where you see ideas like the Little Ships, the small civilian ships that would take part in the evacuation, play a major role due to their propaganda value. However, in quantitative terms they played a relatively small role in the evacuation, only being present for a few days and not truly capable of bringing as many men off the beaches as the Royal Navy could over the course of the 10 days. The Royal Navy would assemble 40 destroyers to take part in the Operation Dynamo, the code name for the evacuation, and it would be those destroyers and their crews that would play the pivotal role. But the stories are great! Little ships, manned by common men, doing hero stuff, somebody should make a movie about it! Even those small boats were mostly crewed by sailors of the Royal Navy, and only a small percentage of them had civilians aboard. That is just one example of many, and then after the war the events at Dunkirk started to be used as some sort of almost victory, with one historian saying “This evacuation [Dunkirk] is probably the greatest escape from disaster in all history. Considering the performances of the preceding two weeks, it is amazing that forces so constantly in retreat could suddenly stiffen and hold during the crucial period of embarkation.” As more information has come to light over the years, interpretations and understanding of Operation Dynamo have changed, and modern accounts lack some of the hyperbole and exaggeration. But in some ways that history of how the story has been told and understood is as important as the events themselves. Dunkirk and the Popular Memory of Britain at War, 1940-58 by Penny Summerfield, which I highly recommend anybody to read anybody can for free on JSTOR, link is in the episode notes, but anyway Summerfield begins his article with this excellent quote: “The history of the contested inscription of Dunkirk in British culture emphasizes that at no point since the events occurred has the representation of the second world war been secure; the popular memory of the war is continually subject to construction, contestation and revision.” I also like this quote from Mark Connelly from his book We Can Take It “Few people have been bothered by the attempts to debunk the Dunkirk story; it is too entrenched in the national psyche. During the sixtieth anniversary celebrations in 2000 an editorial in the Daily Telegraph summed it up. Arguments on exactly what happened are ‘hardly relevant and not worth arguing about’, it noted, because although Dunkirk was a defeat, it was ‘not one without heroes’. For the British, Dunkirk is about heroism and a miracle. Others may wish to present all sorts of evidence to the contrary, but it cannot overtake what people ‘know’ about the episode because Dunkirk is taken as the entire history of the nation in miniature..” Sometimes events like Operation Dynamo are important not because of their impact on the war, or their lack of impact on the war, but instead the value that is assigned to them by the participants at the time and by the generations that follow. I think that Dynamo is a really good example of this, the miracle and the myths that have built up around it over the decades are just one part of the important story. The next two episodes will discuss the events around the evacuation of Dunkirk, in the air, on the ground, and at sea. But it is also important to remember that the events at Dunkirk of May 26 to June 4th, while important, were just one part of a much larger campaign that was raging around them. For the British Dunkirk is often seen as the beginning of the end of a disastrous adventure that had started on May 10th, but for the French it was simply the beginning of the end as their hopes of victory in Belgium came crashing down, and for the Germans it seemed almost like a sideshow compared to the preparations for their attacks further into France.

One of the major components of Operation Dynamo were the aerial efforts of the Royal Air Force. The French campaign had been a very hard time for the Royal Air Force, with the early efforts at bombing and close air support being incredibly costly in terms of overall aircraft. After just 5 days of the German offensive the British had lost nearly 250 aircraft either destroyed or damaged to the point where they had to be abandoned. The Germans had also captured most of the airfields that the RAF had been using in France . And with the beginning of Operation Dynamo the pilots and aircraft of Fighter command would be called on to provide air support for the evacuation. This was quite a bit more difficult than you might imagine due to the fact that all of the fighter cover for the evacuation had to come from fighters based in southeast England. By May 26th staging fighters out of England then having them fly sorties over France had become a bit more routine due to the fact that the Germans had been advancing so quickly that the British were hesitant to actually send more fighter squadrons onto the continent due to the simple concern that they would be captured or destroyed by German ground forces. This fear was combined with another fear that would be so impactful during the later stages of the French campaign: a fear that if the fighters were sent to France there would not be enough for what came after, namely the defense of the British Isles from German attack and invasion. These fears would result in cross channel flying being an important part of British fighter activity. Because of its location in the fighter support for Operation Dynamo fell to the 11th Fighter Group commanded by Keith Park. The 11th would be best known for the central role that it would play in the Battle of Britain, but its actions against the Luftwaffe would begin during the events in France. From May 10th to May 26th the group would lose 54 pilots over the course of 112 offensive patrols over France, which would leave it with just 200 aircraft to provide support over Dunkirk. And that was 200 aircraft at the start of the operation, and it was very well known that there were very limited replacements available, which meant that the longer cross channel patrols were happening the fewer aircraft would be available due to simple mechanical attrition, not even considering enemy action. But support would still be provided, and so the pilots would just have to deal with some of the challenges involved, like flying over 50 miles from their bases, mostly over the English channel. Here is Pilot Officer Peter L. Parrott of 145 Squadron to give his thoughts: “I don’t think one had much time to think about the problems, we all hated flying over the sea on one engine. We didn’t really have any previous experience on which to base a judgement of any sort, or reason to make any deduction. It was just that a fight was on and we were ready.” During the days that followed an interesting phenomenon occurred over Dunkirk, and it would play an important part of the later stories of the evacuation. Those stories involved the fact that the ground forces and the sailors generally felt that there was not enough fighter cover. Now of course those groups would probably never have been satisfied with the fighter protection provided, if even a single German aircraft was able to reach the beaches, but there was also the problem that there were sometimes planes there but they could not see them. Before I read this quote I will also just say that during the Second World War differences in altitude were very important when it came to airborne combat. Aircraft that were at a higher altitude had significant advantages due to the speed that could be gained by diving down on an enemy as well as the speed that was lost by any aircraft that was trying to gain altitude. With that fact in mind, here is Pilot Officer H.M. Stephen of the 74th Squadron of the RAF: “What Dunkirk did for air fighting was that it moved the fighting, which we had always thought we would do from around 7,000 to 10,000 feet, straight to over 20,000 feet in about four days. For every time we went over we said, right we must be higher than they are so we’d go up another 4,000 feet and when we got there they would be about 2,000 feet above us. In no time at all air fighting changed from the traditional pattern where one could see the ground to right on top where you couldn’t see it at all. This is one of the reasons I’m sure the Army has often said, ‘Where are these fighter pilots?’ They were there all right but they couldn’t see them.” I love this quote because it gives some insight into the process of evolution that would occur on a day to day basis during the war, one side would do one thing, and the other side would adapt, and this would happen in many different areas throughout the war. In this case it also robbed the men on the ground from the comforting assurance that the British fighters were in the sky and protecting them. It also introduced another challenge for the pilots, because the higher they had to fly the longer it took them to reach that altitude and then the shorter the time that they could spend over France. This meant that trying to maintain a fighter presence could only be done by increasing the number of sorties that pilots were flying, because the flight time and the number of planes were both fixed numbers.

During the first few days of the evacuations the war in the air would not hit the level of intensity that it would in the days that followed. This still meant that German and British planes were meeting each other almost every single day, and often multiple times per day. Typical of the accounts is this one from Flight Lieutenant J.A. Leathart of 54 Squadron: “The squadron ran into the biggest cloud of fighters that I’d seen so far. They were all Messerschmitt 109’s and 110’s with Ju88’s and there must have been pretty nearly 100 of them. They seemed like a swarm of bees. We went in, however, and tore off a chunk each. My recollections of that show are a bit hazy because we were fighting upstairs and downstairs between 1,000 and 15,000 feet and I was blacking out fairly often in the pull-outs after diving after a Hun. But I’m certain I got three and the rest of the squadron wasn’t doing too badly because at one time the air seemed to be full of burning aircraft.” Remember, it is always important to take any information about a pilots victories with a tremendous grain of salt, through no real fault of their own it is very difficult to keep track of exactly who was shooting who when the aircraft were making passing at hundreds of miles an hour which resulted in destroyed enemy aircraft being attributed to multiple different pilots simultaneously. Weather was also an important factor during the entire campaign and so you often get days like the 26th of May where the British would fly several sorties in the early morning, but then have to cancel trips over in the late morning due to cloud cover, before resuming them in the early afternoon, to then cancel those later in the day due to rain. During all of these sorties, of which pilots would fly multiple in one day, whether or not the encountered German aircraft was complete chance. The general structure of the German attacks was established during these early days though, with German bombers attempting to bomb the city of Dunkirk and the British ships that were evacuating soldiers. These bombers were primarily the Dornier 17 and the Heinkel 111, but the Stuka and Junkers 88 were also used. The German fighters were either the ubiquitous Bf-109 as well as the Messerschmitt Bf-110. The 110 was a so called heavy fighter, in that it had two engines which gave it a higher top speed, and a crew of 3. It would prove to be very vulnerable to the more nimble British fighters, a situation that would become much more apparent in the months after Dunkirk in actions over Britain. This is the account of Flight Lieutenant Ellis of 610 Squadron who would have a run in with some Bf-110s, which he refers to as Me-110s “On our first patrol over Dunkirk on 27th May, we spotted a lone Heinkel 111 which A Flight attacked while I, with B Flight, kept a look-out for enemy fighters. The whole of A Flight had a go at the Heinkel but all except Brian Smith opened fire at too great a range. Flying Officer Smith eventually closed in and claimed it as destroyed but as we watched this my flight was set on out of the sun from a clear blue sky by a squadron of Me110’s. For a few minutes the sky was full of aircraft milling around chasing each other. I pursued a 110 and had no difficulty in turning inside him. As soon as I opened fire the rear-gunner stopped firing and the aircraft rolled over and dived down vertically. Almost immediately I chased a second 110 and closed in to about three hundred yards. I hit him in the starboard engine which was on fire but had to break off when I saw in my mirror another 110 on my tail. By this time I was twenty miles or so inland from Dunkirk.” Not every British pilot was at lucky as Ellis, and just on the 27th there would be 18 British fighter aircraft shot down in missions over Dunkirk, however about half of the fighter pilots that were shot down in these early days of the campaign would be able to bail out of their aircraft and eventually make their way safely to Dunkirk for evacuation. Along with the well known Hurricanes and Spitfires the British Defiant turret fighter would also make its presence known over Dunkirk. The Defiant was called a turret fighter because its only armament was a turret mounted behind the cockpit which was manned by a gunner and had 4 machine guns. The concept for such a fighter was based around the assumption that German bombers would be attacking Britain without fighter escort, making the greater flexibility of the turret a powerful feature which would allow for much easier attacking on German bombers. It was never really designed to operate in an environment with an enemy fighter presence, but they were one of the squadrons available, and there were a lot of German bombers if they could get to them. One day in which they did really get to them was on the 29th when a Defiant squadron was able to get in the middle of an attack of Stukas. This was an ideal hunting ground for the Defiants, and a rare situation in which they were able to operate in the environment that they were designed for. They would claim 37 victories with 18 of them being Stukas, although that number was probably less than half of that. Overall, the first 4 days of the evacuation operations, from May 26th to May 29th can be see as a period when, in the air at least, both sides could claim victories. Both sides lost aircraft, but German bombers were still able to launch their attacks successfully. But in the days that followed the action in the air would intensify.

The Royal Navy was instructed to begin Operation Dynamo for the evacuation of British and French forces a bit before 7PM on May 26th. By this time, in contrast to the extreme focus being placed on Dunkirk by the British, the Germans were already beginning to focus on other operations. For them, the actions in the north had become a mopping up operation, with British and French counter attacks no longer a real threat it was just a matter of time before they were defeated and either surrendered or were destroyed. This meant that back at German high command they were already focusing on Case Red, which would be the attack launched into the rest of France during June. On the administrative side this meant that command of reducing the British and French forces in the north was handed over to Bock’s Army Group B, which had started the war attacking into northern Belgium, while Rundstedt’s Army Group A, and all of the German armor divisions were shifted to prepare for future operations. While history’s eyes would be focused on the events in the Dunkirk perimeter a critical role was played by the German and French forces around the French city of Lille. In the areas around the city the Belgian surrender in the early hours of May 28th had allowed the Germans to trap French forces and over the next 2 days they would tie down a total of 7 German divisions, crucial forces that might have prevented the creation of a continuous perimeter around Dunkirk. On the 29th the resistance around Lille would collapse with some French forces surrendering while others would manage to escape to the north. The Belgian surrender also caused problems for the defenders of Dunkirk, but they would be able to frantically move some British and French forces to plug the gaps left by the Belgian surrender before the Germans were able to take advantage. During this time there would be some actions by the German Panzer divisions, but the decision would be made to pull them out of the line in preparation for Case Red. For the German military leaders this made complete sense and they made the decision for strictly military reasons. Once they shifted in mindset to the actions in the north being mopping up battles, it seemed pointless to subject the German mobile forces to attrition against a defeated enemy, particularly in ground that was not ideal for their operations and when another operation loomed in the future. The 9th Panzer division would be the only one that remained in the area around Dunkirk, joined by the infantry of General Kuchler’s 18th Army which was pretty exhausted after having been on the move since the start of the campaign. This was one of the reasons that the evacuation would have so much time to proceed, because once a solid perimeter was put in place it was difficult for the Germans to get the men and material together to really attack against determined opposition. The perimeter was the weakest on the eastern side due to the Belgian surrender, but it also in this area that it had the most amount of flexibility. These factors, would combine with assurances by Goring that the Luftwaffe could destroy the forces in Dunkirk would thrust the air operations over Dunkirk into a new level of importance. But the important thing to remember with that fact is that it was not just because the German military leaders were underestimating the defenders of Dunkirk, or the possibility of evacuation, but also because they were very concerned about future operations to defeat France. It was the preparations for Case Red, more than anything else, that took the Panzer divisions away from Dunkirk.

Back in London, preparations for the evacuation operations would continue to ramp up on May 26th and 27th. On the first two days of the operation the collection of soldiers had primarily been done by cross channel ferries and some armed boarding vessels of the Royal Navy. It was very clear that these vessels would not be able to get all of the troops off of the beaches and so more ships were brought together over the course of the 27th from two different sources. The larger and more important would be an increased number of Royal Navy destroyers which would be able to take men off of the quays, and then a call on the 27th for the requisitioning of small vessels which was possible because of a registry that was in place of such vessels just in case they were needed by the British military.