Today in History—May 26: The British and Allied Forces Escape at Dunkirk

It was May 1940, and months of “Phony War” had come to a shocking end with Germany’s blitzkrieg attack on the Low Countries and France. Tanks and aircraft shattered the Dutch lines, and within days the Netherlands was overrun. Queen Wilhelmina fled to London with the Dutch government-in-exile.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose name will forever be associated with the failed policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler, resigned and was succeeded by Winston Churchill. It would soon become obvious that Churchill had a rather different temperament.

On May 19, as British, French, and Belgian troops fell back, Gen. John Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), began to consider what an escape via the English Channel might look like.

An evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk seemed feasible but for one important detail: Gen. Heinz Guderian, arguably Hitler’s ablest tank commander, was driving on the city, and the BEF was still days away from the coast.

Then, on May 24, Hitler issued one of the most baffling commands of the entire war. Not only were Guderian’s forces to halt their advance, they were to withdraw to the other side of a line of canals some 15 miles from the city.

This pause gave the Allies critical breathing room. They fortified the pocket around Dunkirk, and on May 26, Churchill ordered the start of Operation Dynamo—the evacuation from the Continent.

Royal Navy Capt. William Tennant arrived at Dunkirk on May 27 and assumed command as “beachmaster.” The Luftwaffe had destroyed the harbor, so Tennant had to improvise. He realized that lifting troops directly from the beach would take too long, so he repurposed a three-fourth-mile breakwater as an improvised dock.

Nearly 8,000 troops were evacuated in the first 24 hours, and the tempo increased dramatically over subsequent days. While the Royal Air Force patrolled the skies, some 700 civilian craft—the “little ships” of Dunkirk—joined the rescue effort.

In the end, nearly 340,000 Allied troops were ferried to safety in England.