![]() One soldier described it as an omen: ‘The pillar of smoke by day and pillar of fire by night which guided the Israelites, guided the BEF as well.’ The fighting elements of the BEF rapidly fell back to the sea, heading for the huge pillar of smoke billowing up from Dunkirk’s blazing oil refineries. By late May, elements of the BEF had reached a rectangular-shaped defensive enclave, 20 miles around and six miles deep, coalescing along concentric canals and waterways immediately west of Dunkirk and east to Furness and Nieuport on the Belgian border. The Dutch had already surrendered, four days after the start of the offensive. Over the next six days, he quietly laid down sea routes, organised control staffs, and concentrated shipping. ‘We hadn’t imagined that at all.’ Ten days after the start of the German offensive, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, as Flag Officer Dover, was presented with a hypothesis that the BEF may have to be evacuated. Twenty-nine- year-old James Hill, a staff captain with the HQ of BEF commander-in-chief General John Gort, remembered the panzer sprint heading for the coast: ‘We hadn’t quite envisaged them going right through the north and going around the flank like that,’ he claimed. Some 4,500 paratroopers jumped, 500 were landed by glider over the waterways, and 12,000 light infantry were landed by Ju 52 transport aircraft. It fielded three reduced-size panzer divisions, and unhinged the Dutch ‘Fortress Holland’ waterways defence strategy with the first major airborne landings in modern history. With 29 divisions, von Bock’s force was about two-thirds the size of von Rundstedt’s 46 divisions: a force to be reckoned with. In reality, though deception there was, the overall configuration of the advance would better be described as a massive double-offensive. Von Bock’s advance, being the lesser of two powerful thrust lines, is thus reduced to the status of a ‘feint’. Much of the standard narrative concentrates instead on the epic run by von Rundstedt’s Army Group A to the coast. Post-war historians have tended to underestimate the extent to which von Bock’s Army Group B, despite facing the bulk of the Allied armies, aggressively tore into the defences of the Low Countries with its Eighteenth and Sixth Armies. The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, as painted by Charles Cundall (1890-1971) for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Ten British divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) eventually managed to escape back to the UK mainland. The latter dashed to the Channel coast, emerging at Noyelles-sur-Mer, and trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in north-west France. The former unexpectedly emerged from the Ardennes, a forested area on the border between France, Belgium, and Luxembourg that was seemingly impassable to tanks. The Germans’ blitzkrieg advance across France and Belgium is often described as a ‘feint’ through Belgium by Generaloberst Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B, the bait for a trap sprung by Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt’s panzer-heavy Army Group A. The conventional Dunkirk narrative stems very much from Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War (published in six volumes between 19), and it has been embellished in similar vein ever since. They had reached the sea in May 1940 in fewer weeks than it took years for their fathers not to succeed in 1914-1918. For the British, it was a miracle of survival and deliverance for the Germans, it was one of achievement. German soldiers, too, constantly referred to the ‘Wunder’, or ‘miracle’, of reaching Dunkirk in wartime letters back home. The ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ is lauded in British history and folklore as a victory of human endeavour, celebrated each year with a profusion of TV documentary veteran accounts and memorial services. ![]()
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