Dunkirk is a small town off the coast of France that was the site of large-scale military operations during World War II. During the Battle of Dunkirk from 26 May to 4 June 1940, some 338,000 British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and other Allied forces were evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain as German troops approached them. The massive operation, which involved hundreds of naval and civilian vessels, was dubbed the "Dunkirk Miracle" and became one of the turning points in the Allied war victory.
Located in the north of France, near the North Sea coast on the Belgian-French border, Dunkirk is named after the city in Dutch, meaning ''Church on the Dunes''.' The Strait of Dover it is located in the southwest, just 21 miles from the English Channel between England and France.
Dunkirk (known in French as Dunkirk) and its surrounding areas have been the site of centuries of commerce and travel and countless bloody battles due to its coastal location near the borders of Europe's three great powers.
On May 10, 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium with a Blitzkrieg ("Blitzkrieg" in German), the three countries quickly succumbed to such a coordinated strategy, powerful air power, and highly mobile ground forces supported by armored tanks. The Germans occupied Luxembourg on May 10, the Netherlands on May 14, and Belgium at the end of the month.
Shortly after the start of the Blitzkrieg, German troops invaded France— not along the Expected Maginot Line of The Allies, but through the Ardennes Forest and steadily along the Somme Valley towards the English Channel.
As they advanced, German forces cut off all communication and transportation between the northern and southern branches of the Allies, pushing hundreds of thousands of Allied troops in the north into a smaller and smaller part of the French coast.
By 19 May, General John Gott, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), had begun weighing the possibility of withdrawing his entire forces from the sea to protect them from some annihilation by approaching Nazi forces.
Meanwhile, in London, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned under pressure on May 13 to make way for a new wartime coalition government led by Winston Churchill. At first, the British command opposed the withdrawal, and the French army wanted to hold on.
But as the BEF and its allies were forced to return to the French port of Dunkirk on the North Sea coast, just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the Belgian border, Churchill was quickly convinced that evacuation was the only option.
In planning the adventure, the Allies were helped by a surprising source: Adolf Hitler, who on May 24 ordered the German Panzer Division to halt its offensive toward Dunkirk.
Hitler's decision was attributed to fears by his generals that the Allies might launch a counterattack (such as the defeated counterattack south of Arras on May 21) and the insistence of Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering that his Air Force could prevent any evacuation attempt at Dunkirk.
Hitler again approved the attack on May 26, but by then the Allies had been given a critical time to prepare for evacuation.
On the evening of 26 May, the British began evacuating from Dunkirk, code-named "Operation Generator".
Lt. Gen. Bertram Ramsay led the effort, leading a team to work in a room deep in the cliffs of Dover that once contained a generator named after the operation.
During the Relentless Bombardment by the Luftwaffe caused the Allies to slow down the evacuation, Raf aircraft attempted to reach the beach, but the RAF lost many of its aircraft in the course of the battle.
On the first day, only about 7,500 people could be evacuated from Dunkirk, and the next day (May 28) about 10,000 people left.
With Dunkirk's beaches so shallow that Royal Navy ships could not reach them, the Allies called on smaller ships to transport troops from the coast to larger ships farther into the North Sea. Some of them were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were operated by their civilian owners and crew. The first members of this small fleet, some 800 to 1,200 boats, many of them fishing boats — later known as "small boats" — began arriving on the beaches of Dunkirk on the morning of May 28 to help speed up the evacuation and eventually help the Allies evacuate from Dunkirk.
Some of them were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were operated by their civilian owners and crew. The first members of this small fleet— later known as "small boats"— began arriving on the beaches of Dunkirk on the morning of May 28 to help speed up the evacuation.
Initially, Churchill and other British commands expected that evacuation from Dunkirk would only save at most about 45,000 people. But the success of operation Generator exceeded everyone's expectations. On 29 May, more than 47,000 British troops were rescued, and on 30 May, more than 53,000 were successfully evacuated, including the first French troops.
By the end of the evacuation, some 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops had left the beaches of Dunkirk – some 338,000 in all. When the Allied resistance ended on the morning of June 4 and German forces occupied Dunkirk, another 90,000 Allied troops, as well as most of beDF's heavy artillery and tanks, were left behind.
On 27 May, the Royal Norfolk Regiment stopped the German offensive before they ran out of ammunition, and 99 soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, about 50 miles from Dunkirk.
Waving white flags tied to bayonets, the trapped regiments agreed to surrender and began to line out of the farmhouse, where they were strafed by German machine guns.
They tried to communicate again, and the trapped regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to an empty venue, where they were searched and stripped of everything from gas masks to cigarettes. They were then pushed into a pit where the machine guns were placed in a fixed position.
Captain Fritz Noklein, a German officer, ordered: "Fire! Those Britons who survived machine gun fire were either stabbed to death with bayonets or shot by pistols.
Of the 99 members of the regiment, only two survived, all second-class: Albert Pooley and William O'Callaghan. They lay among the dead until dark, and then, in the midst of the torrential rain, they climbed to the farmhouse, where they cleaned their wounds.
With nowhere to go, they again surrendered to the Germans and became prisoners of war of the Germans. Pughley suffered serious injuries to his leg and was repatriated to England in April 1943 in exchange for some wounded German soldiers.
After returning to England, the terrible story of Pully was not believed. Only when O'Callaghan returned home and verified the story was a formal investigation was conducted.
After the war, a British court martial in Hamburg found Captain Knokkelin, who ordered the firing, guilty of war crimes. He was hanged for his crime.
While the German Blitzkrieg was undoubtedly a success (France would demand an armistice by mid-June 1940), the success of evacuating most of Britain's best-trained troops from their state of extinction proved to be a crucial moment in the Allied victory.
Germany had hoped that the defeat at Dunkirk would allow Britain to exit the conflict through negotiations, but instead the "Dunkirk Miracle" became a slogan during the war, an iconic symbol of the British spirit, leaving behind a legacy of pride and perseverance that persists nearly eight years later.
In his speech of June 4, 1940, Churchill warned: "We must be very careful not to attribute victory to this salvation." Wars are not won by evacuation. ”
In the same speech, however, he issued an impassioned statement expressing the determination of the British army to serve the country in the next five years of arduous war:
"We don't mark as failed. We will persevere to the end, we will fight in France, we will fight at sea, we will fight with growing confidence and with increasing air power, we will defend our islands, whatever the cost, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields and the streets, we will fight in the mountains; we will never surrender. ”
Despite the successful evacuation at Dunkirk, thousands of French troops were left and captured by the advancing Germans. A large amount of ammunition, machine guns, tanks, motorcycles, jeeps and anti-aircraft guns were also abandoned off the coast of Dunkirk.
As Western Europe was abandoned by its main defenders and German forces swept through the rest of France, Paris fell on June 14. Eight days later, Henri Pétain signed an armistice with the Nazis at Compiègne.
Germany annexed half of France, leaving the other half in the hands of their puppet French rulers. It was not until June 6, 1944, with the success of the Allied landings in Normandy, that the liberation of Western Europe finally began.