Operation Dynamo France

Legendary

Stand on the beach where over 338,000 soldiers were evacuated over 8 days as the German Luftwaffe attacked from above.

Photo by Florian Volk

The rescue was named after a room. Deep in the chalk cliffs under Dover Castle, there was a chamber that once held a dynamo, a machine for making electricity.

By May 1940 it held Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay and his staff, working around the clock on the biggest evacuation in military history.

Germany had invaded France on May 10. Within two weeks, German tanks had raced to the coast and trapped the British army, along with French and Belgian troops, in a shrinking pocket around the port of Dunkirk.

Their only way out was the sea. On the evening of May 26, the British government ordered the rescue, code-named Operation Dynamo.

Nobody expected much. Planners hoped to save maybe 45,000 men over two days.

Ramsay's team faced a problem. Dunkirk's harbor had been bombed into ruins, and big ships couldn't get close to the shallow beaches where the soldiers were waiting.

So the Royal Navy sent out a call for small boats. Fishing boats, yachts, ferries, lifeboats, and river barges answered, many of them crewed by their civilian owners.

These "Little Ships" ran back and forth between the beaches and the warships waiting offshore. German planes attacked constantly, and many boats were sunk.

The evacuation ran for nine days, until June 4. When it ended, 338,226 British and Allied soldiers had been carried across the English Channel to safety.

More than 800 vessels took part. Some sources count closer to 1,000.

The army had lost nearly all its tanks, trucks, and guns, but it had kept its soldiers. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it a miracle of deliverance.

Walk the wide sand beaches at Dunkirk, which still look much as they did in 1940, and visit the Operation Dynamo museum in the old fortifications nearby. If you're in England, take the guided tour through the wartime tunnels at Dover Castle, where the rescue was planned. Look for the Little Ships of Dunkirk themselves, many still afloat and returning to Dunkirk together every five years.