The BEF played an important role in its own salvation. It had an extensive harbor and beaches, it was ringed by canals that acted as defense lines, and the sea dikes could be opened to flood the lowlying land and hamper the German tanks. Dunkirk was a fortuitous bridgehead for such an evacuation. It was a staggering feat.Ī number of factors combined to make possible this seemingly miraculous achievement. By 4 June more than three hundred thousand British and Allied troops had escaped from Dunkirk under the noses of the Germans.
In the meantime, the Wehrmacht attacked the perimeter around the town and the Luftwaffe pounded the harbor and the beaches. However, as the fighting troops arrived in the area, discipline improved and the rate of embarkation speeded up. Officers organizing the long queues were on occasion forced to maintain order at the point of a gun. The discipline of the rear echelon troops as they waited for evacuation was not always good. Dunkirk harbor became the main point of embarkation, but the nearby beaches were also used for this purpose, and a host of little ships, such as fishing boats and pleasure cruisers manned by civilian volunteers,įerried the troops out to the bigger ships that could not get in close to the shore. The Royal Navy hastily assembled a vast armada of some nine hundred ships to bring the troops home across the Channel. On 26 May, Operation Dynamo-the Dunkirk evacuation-began. General John Vereker, Viscount Gort, the commander in chief of the BEF, was authorized to withdraw his beleaguered force to the coast in order to be transported back to Britain. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which had advanced into Belgium to meet the German attack, was in danger of being surrounded and cut off. On 10 May, German forces invaded France and the Low Countries and within ten days had reached the Channel coast near Abbeville.
Dunkirk was the northern French port from which British and Allied troops were evacuated during the fighting that led to the fall of France in 1940.
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