The Little Ships of Dunkirk

The beach stretched for miles, flat and sandy. It should have been a place for holidays. Instead, it was crowded with soldiers.

They stood in long lines that ran down the sand and into the sea, waiting, some of them up to their shoulders in water. Above them, smoke rose from the burning town behind. Every so often, planes roared overhead.

Then, out on the grey water, something appeared. Not a warship. A small motor boat. Then another. Then a fishing boat, a paddle steamer, a lifeboat, a sailing yacht. They were coming for the soldiers.

Trapped

In May 1940, early in the Second World War, the German army swept into Belgium and France with astonishing speed. The British army in France, together with French and Belgian troops, was pushed back towards the sea.

Within days, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were trapped in a shrinking pocket of land around the French port of Dunkirk. Behind them was the German army. In front of them was the English Channel. Britain was only about seventy kilometres away across the water, but there seemed to be no way to get them home.

The British government feared it might be able to rescue only a small fraction of them. If the army was lost, Britain itself might not be able to carry on the war.

Operation Dynamo

The rescue was given the code name Operation Dynamo, and it began on 26 May 1940. It was organised from deep inside the cliffs at Dover by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay.

Navy destroyers and large ships could take soldiers from the harbour at Dunkirk, where a long stone and wooden breakwater, called the Mole, reached out into the sea. But much of the harbour was wrecked, and the long beaches outside the town were far too shallow for big ships to come close.

Thousands of soldiers stood on those beaches. What was needed were small boats, shallow enough to come right in to the sand, take men aboard, and ferry them out to the bigger ships waiting offshore.

The call for boats

Even before the evacuation began, the Admiralty had asked owners of small motor boats to register them. Now, officials went up and down the River Thames and the south coast, gathering every suitable vessel they could find.

Hundreds of boats were collected: fishing boats, river ferries, cargo barges, lifeboats, pleasure cruisers, and private motor yachts with names like the ones on any holiday postcard. Many were crewed by navy sailors. But many were taken across by their own owners, or by fishermen and volunteers who knew how to handle them.

Few of these small boats had ever been designed to cross the open sea, let alone to go into a war zone.

Across the Channel

The little ships set out across the Channel, often in long lines, some towed by larger vessels. As they came close to France, they could see the black smoke of burning oil tanks rising over Dunkirk.

At the beaches, they nosed in as close as they dared. Soldiers waded out and were pulled aboard, soaked and exhausted. The boats carried them out to the waiting destroyers and steamers, then turned round and went back for more, again and again. Some of the little ships made the whole crossing back to England, packed with men.

One of them was a motor yacht called Sundowner, owned by Charles Lightoller, a retired sea captain who had survived the sinking of the Titanic many years before. With his son and a young Sea Scout, he crossed to Dunkirk and brought back well over a hundred soldiers on a boat built for a family.

It was dangerous work. Enemy planes attacked the beaches and the ships. Many vessels, large and small, were sunk, and many people were killed, both soldiers and those who came to rescue them. But for most of those nine days, the sea in the Channel stayed unusually calm, which helped the small boats greatly.

The miracle

When Operation Dynamo ended on 4 June 1940, about 338,000 soldiers, British and French, had been brought safely to England. The great majority were carried by navy ships and large vessels from the Mole. But the little ships had played a vital part, especially on the beaches.

That same day, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke to Parliament. He reminded the country that wars are not won by evacuations, and that the army had lost most of its equipment in France. But the soldiers were home. Britain could fight on.

People in Britain soon began to speak of the "Dunkirk spirit": ordinary people pulling together in a crisis, doing whatever they could with whatever they had.

Many of the little ships still exist today. Their owners belong to an association that cares for them, and every few years some of them sail back across the Channel to Dunkirk together, to remember.

Want to read more?

Walter Lord's The Miracle of Dunkirk is a vivid history based on many interviews with people who were there. Joshua Levine's Dunkirk tells the story through soldiers' and sailors' own memories. The Imperial War Museums hold photographs, recordings and objects from the evacuation.