Dan Snow's History Hit - The Miracle of Dunkirk

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

80 years ago, ships were gathering in Kent to begin the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force. Britain faced the prospect of the worst defeat in British military history and the loss of her entire military forces in Western Europe. Churchill called it "a colossal military disaster", admitting "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army" seemed to perish. The subsequent evacuation is one of the most famous stories to emerge from the Second World War. Joshua Levine worked as the Historical Advisor for Christopher Nolan’s epic adventure movie set during the Dunkirk evacuation, and he joined me on the podcast to explain what really happened at the "Miracle of Dunkirk". Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Downsides History Hit. 80 years ago now, ships are gathering in Kent to rescue the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler's panzers had smashed through Allied defences, were on their way to the Channel Coast, the British and French armies were about to be chopped in two, and it was clear that Britain was facing a gigantic defeat in Western Europe, possibly the worst defeat in British military history. The British army would need to be ferried back from the continent. How many of them could be brought back? How many of them could survive? Escape captivity was extremely uncertain. Britain faced the complete loss of her professional army in Western Europe. This became known as the evacuation from Dunkirk, which was

the port used on the coast and through which hundreds of thousands of British, French and Allied troops were eventually able to escape. Some called it a miracle. On the podcast today, I've got Joshua Levine. He's written the history of Dunkirk. He was the historical advisor on the Dunkirk film that so many of you saw. And he's a good friend of the podcast. He's back on now to talk about that remarkable campaign, that remarkable evacuation. If you want to see my documentary about Dunkirk, it's just gone up on History Hit TV. We've also got documentaries about Winston Churchill's great speech of the summer of 1940, all sorts of commemorations for what was going on in the summer of 1940. We've got the Battle

of Britain coming up as well. So please head over to History Hit TV. Please use the code POD1 and then you'll get a month for free and then you get the next month is one pound euro dollar. You can watch all of our hundreds of exclusive history documentaries on there, all the back episodes, the podcast, lots of material around the summer of 1940. Please do check it out and you can also join our Zoom live podcast record this week which is with Kate Lister. She's a sex historian. And we're talking about sex in the lockdown, sex in isolation. It turns out people have been isolating from disease for a long time. They've been having sex while they've been doing it. Who knew? So please listen

in this week. Look out in your inboxes or your spam folders. That invitation will be arriving for all subscribers to History Hit TV in the next few days. In the meantime, everyone, here is Joshua Levine. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Pleasure. It's really great to be here. Talk to me about the scale of the defeat that Britain and France were facing in mid to late May 1940, 80 years ago. Monumental. I mean, an absolutely astonishing defeat,

which I think was made potentially greater by the fact that nobody was expecting it. The war began. You had this long period of phony war where British went out to France and the soldiers, if you speak to the soldiers and you get their accounts, they were enjoying themselves.

It was like a holiday. People hadn't been abroad before and they were having all these new experiences. They were expecting the Germans to attack. The Germans did attack. The British went forward into Belgium to meet them. Everybody was kind of expecting a First World War type situation, a sort of war of attrition and two sides facing each other across trenches so everyone was ready for they didn't know what exactly but something that would last a long time and suddenly the germans tried this audacious move they outflanked the entire bef within days they'd reached the coast they almost'd almost surrounded them. It looked like the war was over before virtually any of the soldiers had a chance to fire a shot. So it was incredibly surprising

and disastrous on an unimaginable scale. What was the plan? Was there a plan? What stage did the British decide it was hopeless and to head for the beach and head for the port and just think we've got to get home? It's really interesting because you had a sort of disconnect between what was happening in France with the British leadership and then what was happening at home with Churchill and politicians and generals at home because in France you had people who were ready to retreat back to Dunkirk relatively early. You had Lord Gort, who was the head of the BEF, who was saying already on the 19th of May, he was putting together the idea of the possibility of a retreat. And then by the time the 25th of May, he ordered that retreat, which was an incredibly

brave thing to do, because you had Churchill, you had the generals in London, who were basically saying, no, no, we can keep this going. We can't believe it's over so soon. We've got to keep the French fighting with us. So what we've got to do is to start attacking the Germans. Lots of counterattacks, lots of ways to try and cut off the German armour before it had reached the coast. But really, the realistic person in all this was Lord Gort, because he didn't have a great reputation as a particularly imaginative man, but what he did hear was he put his foot down. He said, no, we have to retreat, we have to go back to Dunkirk, it's the only chance we have of survival.

If we get the British Expeditionary Force into Dunkirk, then we have a chance of survival. But if we don't, then things are over. So we have a big debt to Lord Gort, even though we don't then things are over so we have a big debt to lord gort even though we don't really remember him now you know people were talking in big grandiose terms about you know attacking the french here and starting a counter-attack here gort was the person who really in this sense in this one decision he made that we go back to Dunkirk, he was the architect of ultimate victory. And was that retreat orderly or was it sort of chaotic, floods of refugees, abandoning equipment?

Or were they able to conduct a fighting retreat? Like so many of these things, it depends who you speak to. I think primarily, for the majority of experience, it was chaotic. There was no plan for it majority of experience, it was chaotic. There was no plan for it. Nobody had expected it. So you had these soldiers tumbling back, not even knowing why they were retreating. So you had a lot of soldiers who were sent back, and they thought, well, perhaps our unit has done something wrong,

so we're being sent back, or perhaps there's been some sort of localised breakthrough, so we have to fall back to full level. What they didn't realise until the rumour mill really started was, no, actually, you're all going back, and you're going back for something you had absolutely no control over, something that's happening in the Sudan region, you know, well away from all this, something that's happening... I mean, the Germans didn't even bypass the mighty Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line, maginot line you know this is france's glory and the truth is that the germans didn't ever get through the maginot line what they did was they went through the supposedly impassable ardennes and once that was in motion then you had the soldiers just tumbling back any old how and you do have the occasional story of for example companies of guards actually moving back as a single unit beautifully dressed and in perfect order sloping arms and all this kind of thing that's the exception that proves the rule one or two elite units did sort of maintain their order but most people they were coming back any old way they could they were for foraging, looting, or getting by any way they could. They were coming back on,

in vehicles, on foot. They were finding horses. I found one account of somebody who came back on a cow. He managed to somehow manage to get a cow to follow a road for miles. And, you know, it really was every man for himself in a lot of cases and we do what we have to do to get back and they were allowed to get back because you had these heroes frankly who were manning first of all the corridor back to dunkirk and then the perimeter around dunkirk so keeping the germans at bay allowing that the great mass of the British Expeditionary Force to retreat into the port of Dunkirk. And once they reached the port of Dunkirk, how quickly and efficiently was that operation started to start pulling them off and onto naval vessels and back home to Britain? Well, you see, again, it was completely improvised. Nobody had expected this in advance.

So you had organising it from Dover Castle, from the Dynamo room in Dover Castle. You had Bertram Ramsey, old friend of Churchill, who was brought back into the Navy. You had Tennant, who was the naval man in charge actually at Dunkirk. And then you had various other people who were in charge of different zones. You had naval beachmasters who were sent to the beach to try and organise things. It was all done on a totally ad hoc basis. It was all being made up as it went along. So a really good example of that, the actual evacuation started on the 26th. It had actually been going for a few days before because what very unkindly were called the

useless mouths of the British ex-British reinforcements, the non-fighting men, had already been taken back for several days. On the 26th the actual evacuation began and the next day you had this man Tennant who arrived and he found this total chaos in Dunkirk, people just running amok really. He had to sort things out very, very quickly and the first thing he realised was that the port itself had been put out of action. So how were people going to get back? Well, OK, you had 10 miles of beaches. So the first thing was you had the large ships,

which are mostly destroyers and ferries, and large either naval or civilian ships coming in. But they couldn't come up to the beaches. It was very shallow so immediately realized he needed small ships that's what the small ships were for to bring people from the beaches to the larger ships but he also realized there simply weren't going to be enough people getting off the beaches so what he did on the night of the 28th of may was it's just brilliant actually he brought the mole into action. People have

heard of the mole but what the mole actually was was a huge great breakwater. It wasn't a jetty but it was a very very long breakwater. It was there to stop the harbour silting up and to keep the inside of the harbour calm. It was just a huge long wall which had a big fence on the top and a 15-foot tidal drive. He was basically the hopeless as a jetty. But he realised, this is all we've got. So he brought along a large ferry alongside on the night of the 28th, and he brought some soldiers up onto the top of the mole. And they got on as best they could.

Sometimes they used ladders, sometimes they jumped, sometimes, you know, basically however they could, they used ladders sometimes they jumped sometimes you know basically however they could they got on and it worked he got soldiers off so he realized right this is our answer this is how we're going to get people off and that's how the vast majority i mean you know only about 100 000 people came off the beaches the vast majority of people over 200 000 came off the mall and that was just a piece of innovative brilliance from this man, William Tennant. So it was ad hoc. It was kind of the way we often think the British are at their best,

you know, when they don't have time to plan, when they just have to make it up like that. Until the last eight weeks, I would have agreed with you there, buddy. That mole gets turned into a sort of giant quayside, I big queue of people remember from the film that you so brilliantly made how serious were german attempts to interrupt did they know what was going on could they see what was going on and were they bringing down all sorts of terrible artillery fire and aerial bombardment on this enclave around dunkirk they absolutely were and they were doing everything they could to stop the British getting away. There's this idea, it's kind of a conspiracy theory really, that sort of built

up over the years that Hitler was allowing the British to get away because Hitler viewed the British as racial equals, you know, they had their empire, we can have ours, let's carve up the world with them and let them get home from Dunkirk and we'll make peace with them. Not true. I mean, it's true that Hitler had a certain respect for the British that he didn't have for others, but it's not true that he allowed the British to get away. He was doing everything he could, you know, something like a third of the ships and boats that came across to bring people back were either sunk or put out of action. That's not him allowing the British to get away. He did whatever he could.

So you had the Stuka dive bombers coming down. You had the medium bombers bombing. You had shell fire. At night you had the Channel being mined. You had artillery from all angles coming in. They did basically everything they could except for attacking the British porch. They never attacked Dover and Ramsgate, which maybe they should have done, looking at it from their point of view, but everything else they absolutely did to try to stop the British. There's

not much you can actually say yes or no in this life, but I can tell you categorically, Hitler wasn't allowing the British to get away. Who started that idea that he allowed the British to get away? Hitler started that idea. And so as well as all these people getting off the beaches, do we need to think about a really serious battle going on as German forces and then pushing in on this perimeter? Who are those brave men? Why do we often forget about them? Well, we forget about them because I think it's so sort of emotive, the people getting off the beaches, the people coming home.

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listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And it's maybe not as glamorous a story, you know, the people on the perimeter. But my God, first of all, one thing to remember is that quite a few of them in the West were French. There was a lot of French people who were allowing the army to get away, although 100,000 of the people who went back to Britain were French. These were units who were chosen who were basically told, you fight to the death.

And there's an incredible story. The 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards, there's an officer, a subaltern called Jimmy Langley, who wrote an autobiography where he told this extraordinary story of being on this perimeter, fighting to the death, you know, everybody around him was being killed, and at one point you had all of these British troops pouring through his perimeter to safety in all kinds of states, terrible conditions. He says that at one point an officer from the unit next door to him, I think it was Border Regiment, came up and said to him and his commander,

said that we are now going to retreat. This was in the midst of the evacuation. His commander said to this officer, you are going to stay exactly where you are. And his commander said to this officer, you are going to stay exactly where you are. If you start to retreat, if you see that poplar tree over there, if you walk past that poplar tree in a retreat, then I will shoot you. And the officer went back and he was having some sort of conference with his other officers. He stepped beyond the poplar tree and Langley and his superior officer opened fire. And so this is how seriously the defence of that perimeter was taken. The people who were defending it were sacrificing themselves, essentially,

so that the British Expeditionary Force could get through and get back home. And look at the stakes. I mean, the stakes were so high. If the British Expeditionary Force didn't get home, what were you looking at? You were looking at the end of the war. So these people were sacrificing themselves for really, for something that was incredibly important. Talk me through how the evacuation goes. Initially, what were the hopes that they might get off a few people? And how does that sort of ambition scale up? At the very beginning, you had Churchill, who was thinking he maybe will get off 30, people and how does that sort of ambition scale up? At the very beginning you had Churchill who was thinking he maybe will get off 30,000. You had Ramsey, man in charge of the evacuation, thought 45,000 would be good. And as the days went by and as the corridor, so the

corridor through into Dunkirk and then the perimeter around Dunkirk were being successfully held. Hitler basically allowed Goering, who was the head of the Luftwaffe, to try to destroy the army within the perimeter. So he halted the tanks, Panzertanks. The Panzertanks were basically on the edge of Dunkirk. And for three days they were halted. And they were halted for quite good reasons, actually, initially. You know, first of all, the armour had got so far ahead of their supply lines and the infantry that they were in danger of being cut off themselves.

So there was a sense of, you know, halting them to allow the infantry, the supplies to catch up. Also, the Germans thought there was going to be a big attack still coming south of the Somme against the French, who hadn't yet surrendered. And they also thought, you know, tanks won't be great around Dunkirk. So there were good reasons for halting them. But they halted for three days. And Hitler's mind was basically made up when he spoke to Goering. And Goering said, don't let the generals have the glory they're not real Nazis they'll take the glory for themselves we the Luftwaffe I've been with you from the beginning we're solidly Nazi we will finish off the British Expeditionary Force and that's what Hitler allowed to happen as it turned out actually for a number of reasons not least of which was the heroics of the Royal

Air Force the Luftwaffe wasn't strong enough to finish off the BEF. But nevertheless, the nightmare the soldiers had, going back, retreating from one defensible position to another, you know, the river Esco, then into the perimeter, trying a counterattack, which was surprisingly successful, at Arras on the 21st of May. But the fact was this was an army in disarray and it was an army fighting another army which had its tailor you

know couldn't believe how well it was doing and believed that it was only a matter of time before it totally destroyed this other army which was on the skids so you had this totally mismatched fight and to an observer, if you were watching and you were having to put money on this fight, you would not have put your money on the British Expeditionary Force getting away, frankly. The odds were against them. So the harbour was out of action because of enemy bombardment. The mole was in use, this breakwater. How else were British troops getting away from Dunkirk? First of all, again, you had people trying to make up things as they went along.

So one thing people did on the beaches, because they weren't getting enough people off the beaches, they built these sort of lorry piers. That's brilliant. They basically had all these lorries. They had to leave all their vehicles behind anyway. So they took a lot of them and they deflated the tyres and they lashed them together and they pushed them out into the beaches and

that way by then putting planks on top they could create these sort of piers. The boats could then come in, take people off and take them out to the bigger ships. They sort of reached a point during the evacuation where they realised because they weren't getting enough people off the beaches they're going to have to do something so basically they went out and they got as many small ships you know the famous little ships as they possibly could and they got these mostly from the sort of area around the Thames and the south coast and we've got this sort of idea you know film Mrs Miniver this idea that people Clem Miniver was a character in the film you know drinking in the pub

and the call went out and he got into his little boat and he came over to Dunkirk and he took people back that's not how it was actually most of these little boats were commandeered they were just sort of stolen from basins and harbours and different places. And the Royal Navy were put in them. And so you had Navy crews who were taking them over to Dunkirk. It would be much better if the real owners had taken them because they didn't know what to do with them. They broke a lot of them. But what these little boats did, and a flotilla of them did arrive.

And you find these accounts of people, you know, pilots flying above or people on the beaches or people on larger ships saying, my god, you know, this amazing sort of weird little armada is arriving, hundreds and hundreds of little ships all coming across as one, full of naval people. Some people took their own boat but not many. The famous one is a man called Lightoller who was the senior surviving officer from the Titanic who then you know hadn't had enough excitement for one life so decided he was going to jump into action and bring his little boat across. So you had all these

ships coming across and their job as I said was not so much to take people back to England, their job was to come up to the beaches, to come in close, where you had these long queues of people, people queuing. And it's not one story. Some of these queues were really orderly. And some of them, there were people fighting and people fighting to get on board the little boats. There was no one story at Dunkirk. It was history as it always is. Everybody's reality was different. Every area of the beach, ten miles, ten days, hundreds of thousands of people, different everywhere. But some of these queues were very orderly, some of them

people were fighting to get on, but they were getting onto these little boats which were then taking them out to the bigger ships. And the bigger ships were then coming through the mine infested waters you know you had contact mines you had magnetic mines many of which were not now effective because of this amazing degaussing activity where they had run cables over most of these ships to counteract the magnetism don't ask me how this works but basically they counteracted the magnetism. So even though the Germans had put all of these magnetic mines under the surface, only two ships were sunk by magnetic mines. Whereas if they hadn't done this degausing, which rhymes with delousing deliberately,

then how many dozens of ships would have been sunk? Even hundreds of ships would have been sunk. So you had this incredible period where so many things, so many different elements came together. You had the Halt Order. You had the RAF defending. You had the degaussing. You had the people in the perimeter, the people in the corridor.

You had all these things coming together. You had the weather. If the sea had been rough, then the little ships wouldn't have been able to get in and people wouldn't have been able to get on board those little ships. But for the most part, not all the way through, but for the most part, it wasn't crinkly, as I heard people describe it. It was completely flat. But at the same time, you had cloud cover.

So the Luftwaffe wasn't effectively, for most of the time, able to come over and bomb. They couldn't see what they were doing. The Stukas couldn't come over and attack. So as far as the British getting away were concerned, this was absolutely ideal. Flat sea and cloud cover. Also you had the smoke from the refinery, which was covering everything, and that also was making it difficult for the Luftwaffe to see what was going on, so they couldn't come in and bomb for a lot of the time.

You know, it was just a whole sort of coming together of all these elements. For ten days, God was on the side of the British. So by the last day, early June 1940, 80 years ago, how many troops have been lifted off the mole and the beaches. By the end you've got 338,226 men taken off. Now bear in mind at the beginning you had Churchill hoping for 30,000, you had Ramsey hoping for 45,000. It's just astonishing and it really is astonishing. Tennant was able to wire at the end BEF evacuated and it was true the BEF had been evacuated. And what this meant was, well, it meant that the war wasn't over. It meant that you had

people to defend Britain, back in Britain. They may not have had any guns, they may not have had any vehicles, they may not have had any supplies, but they were back in Britain. It meant that the war could continue and Britain didn't have to sue for peace. At the same time, of course, you had Churchill, who during the Dunkirk period had been having his discussions in cabinet about whether to approach Hitler to make peace. I mean, Churchill, God only knows, made enough mistakes over his lifetime. But on this occasion, he put his foot down. He banged the table and said that, you know, if we go to this man now now we will become a slave state. And everybody agreed from, you know, the

entire political spectrum. Everybody in his wider cabinet agreed so he was able to go to the country and say we will not be coming to terms with Germany. So politically the country was holding out and incredibly fortunately militarily it had also held out. know the army the navy the air force those three arms had come together to create what Churchill was able to call a miracle of deliverance and he was very honest in his speech to parliament people think that famous speech was made over the radio wasn't it was made to parliament and then reported subsequently you know he talks about the fact it was a miracle of deliverance,

but we don't win wars through evacuations. So this really was only the very beginning. And in that talk he went on, because everybody was expecting an invasion. We forget that now. Everybody was expecting an invasion. And he talked about fighting on the beaches, fighting on the landing grounds. This is the guerrilla warfare that takes place once the Germans have got a foothold. And he was also in that speech talking about the new

world coming to the aid and deliverance of the old. So he was also already at this point calling out to America, for God's sake, where are you? We need you. Not tomorrow, not the day after. We need you now. It's such a fascinating period. So far as the British are concerned, a very fortunate period, but then they made their own luck. You know, they absolutely did everything they could in order to survive, and they got a stroke of luck, and they did survive, and we've just been celebrating the anniversary of VE Day, so we know how it ended. But it wasn't always looking as rosy as that. Certainly not.

Joshua Levine, that was great. Thank you so much. Your book is called? Dunkirk, The History Behind the Motion Picture. Brilliant. A motion picture that you advised on as well was absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. It's my pleasure.

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