After One Final Trip, Dunkirk Veterans Surrendering to Time

LONDON —  Once more to Dunkirk, and then no more.

The men who escaped being slaughtered on French beaches in 1940, bucking up British morale at a moment of terrible defeat, have grown old. Death has thinned their ranks.

This year’s crossing of the English Channel for Sunday’s reunion will be their last, and the Dunkirk Veterans Assn. is disbanding.

“It is very, very sad that the association will no longer exist, but it is getting very difficult to run it as we are all getting on a bit,” said Joe Barnes, 74, the youngest member.

Barnes was a 14-year-old stowaway on the Thames tug Sun XII, one of hundreds of ships and boats that joined “Operation Dynamo” to save the trapped British troops between May 27 and June 4, 1940.

Dunkirk was a ghastly defeat for British and French, who were pushed into the sea by the swift-moving German army.

Winston Churchill, who had been Britain’s prime minister for only 10 days, was full of foreboding as he attended a prayer service in Westminster Abbey on May 26.

“The English are loath to expose their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain,” Churchill wrote in his history of World War II.

But 338,226 men escaped to fight another day, and the participation of hundreds of small civilian boats turned a rout into a story of British pluck and courage--the “Dunkirk spirit.”

And during those fearful days, the Royal Air Force demonstrated for the first time that it could beat the Luftwaffe--the silver lining that Churchill stressed in his “we shall fight them on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons on June 6.

“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations,” Churchill said. “But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted. It was gained by the air force.”

Christopher Seton-Watson, who was a lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery six decades ago, echoed that sentiment at a gathering of Dunkirk veterans at the Imperial War Museum in mid-May.

“We realize this was a shattering defeat--I mean, one couldn’t get away from that--but at the same time, the fact that we got out was, in a sense, a victory,” he said.

“The Germans could so easily have finished off the British Expeditionary Force, but they allowed it to return to England to reequip. Either Hitler did not really want to fight the British and was still hoping for a peace deal, or his attention was diverted by the much bigger prize of Paris.”

At the museum, veterans posed for pictures with the Tamzine, a 15-foot wooden-hulled fishing boat reputed to be the smallest of the Dunkirk fleet, which included 39 destroyers, 36 minesweepers, 77 fishing boats, 22 tugs, 372 small craft and an unknown number of lifeboats and similar little private boats.

The British labored mightily to retrieve their troops from Dunkirk, but the greatest individual contribution came from an unlikely man: Adolf Hitler.

On May 26, Hitler ordered his ground forces to halt, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt wrote in his memoirs.

“While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move,” von Rundstedt wrote. “I recommended to the Supreme Commander that five Panzer divisions be immediately sent into the town and thereby completely destroy the retreating English. But I received definite orders from the fuehrer that under no circumstances was I to attack.”

Hitler left the job to the Luftwaffe, which couldn’t maintain air superiority against the Royal Air Force. Bad weather helped the British, and the men stranded on the beaches were delighted to find that the sand absorbed the blast and shrapnel of bombs.

“You could get yourself dug in easy, and we just stayed there until there was a chance for the boat,” said Herbert Hulme, a Royal Artillery man.

Arthur Oates, a driver in the 145th Field Ambulance Brigade, recalled huddling from the Stuka dive bombers and other German planes strafing the beach and seeing the paddle steamer Crested Eagle hit.

“They were a few hundred yards from where we were, and we could see the soldiers coming over the side. Hopefully, they could swim. Being a nonswimmer myself, there was nothing one could do. It was a sort of detached moment. You just wandered about and thought, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do,’ ” he said.

William Stone, 99, the oldest living Dunkirk vet, was chief petty officer on the HMS Salamander, a Royal Navy minesweeper that rescued a thousand men in five crossings.

“It turned out to be my most terrifying time during the war. Bombs were falling. There were boys dying on the beach and boys dying on the ship,” Stone said at the May gathering.

A U-boat fired a torpedo at his ship, but it passed harmlessly underneath, he said.

On May 30, 1940, an Associated Press report from the Channel coast--the town unidentified because of wartime censorship--reported an influx of “powder-begrimed and bloodstained veterans.”

“They came in warships and transports, and their wounded came in hospital ships convoyed across the rough channel through showers of bombs. Some soldiers had not had time to shave for days. Uniforms were torn. Burnt powder covered their faces. Some were so tired they fell asleep as soon as they reached the special trains pulled onto the piers to take them off the transports,” the report said.

That day, 53,823 men were safely evacuated. The next day was the busiest of all, with 68,104 saved.

One of the boats out on May 31 was the yacht Sundowner, captained by C.H. Lightoller, the senior surviving officer from the Titanic.

Lightoller, who died in 1965, wrote in a memoir that his first rescue was at sea, taking on three soldiers and two of their rescuers from the burning 25-foot motorboat Westerly and continuing on to Dunkirk.

“I went alongside and took them aboard, giving them the additional pleasure of again facing the hell they had only just left,” he wrote.

Arriving at Dunkirk, steering past a sunken French transport, Lightoller took 130 men aboard a boat that had never carried more than 21 people.

The British left behind 7,000 tons of ammunition, 90,000 rifles, 2,300 artillery pieces and 82,000 vehicles.

Hulme recalled how his Royal Artillery unit dumped its weapons and walked 25 miles to Dunkirk.

“We took what emergency rations we could from the vehicle, and carried a few grenades. Kept me wire cutters in case I needed ‘em, and eventually arrived at the beach,” he said.

He laughed as he remembered his foremost concern at the time.

“It was a stupid thing--you don’t realize at the time--when I got to the beach, me feet were killing me. And I happened to have a spare pair of socks in me overcoat pocket, so between the bombing and the machine-gunning, I went down to the beach and had a paddle,” meaning he waded in the water.

“Took me shoes off, sat on the sand, had a paddle, put me clean socks on, back up to the dunes. A few hours later I was up to me neck in water so I could get a boat.”

Did he feel better? “Oh, I did. Me feet were lovely. That was the most refreshing part of the whole war, that was.”

On the Net:

Dunkirk Veterans:

https://www.war-experience.org/veterans/1940-dunkirk

Imperial War Museum:

https://www.iwm.org.uk