British veterans gathered on the seafront at Dunkirk today to mark the 70th anniversary of the evacuation of more than 300,000 allied troops trapped on the channel port’s beaches by the German Blitzkrieg.
As the 50-strong group joined a multinational ceremony at the town’s Allied Memorial, dozens of the “little ships” which had ferried the soldiers back to England bobbed offshore after many of the skippers who were part of the rescue operation in 1940 returned to join the commemorations.
On the promenade, the flags of Britain, France, Czechoslovakia and Germany flew over the stone memorial as soldiers, veterans and dignitaries including Prince Michael of Kent observed a minute’s silence. A French military band played the national anthems, and a flame of remembrance was lit.
“Seventy years ago these sands were blood-soaked. They were running with blood,” said John Davis, who fought in the rearguard, finally escaping the beach on the third ship he tried to board. The previous two had been blown up.“Each half an hour there was a raid and always there were 30 to 50 wounded or dead and we had to get stretcher bearers and also take the dead off and give them some sort of resting place,” he said.
“We couldn’t bury them. We covered them with tarpaulins to give them some respect. After the fifth day I noticed the stench – the sweet smell of death. It was a glorious summer so we had this stench of death around us.
“I was kept busy but I was all the while aware of this smell and the smoke from the tanks that was drifting over. It was very, very traumatic. I’d only ever seen neighbours laid nicely in coffins. Now I’d seen headless and limbless torsos with stomachs ripped out. It was a shocking sight for a 19 year old.”
Another veteran, Private Ken Blake, said: “All these things are still in your mind. You don’t forget — you can’t forget.”
The six-day evacuation, called Operation Dynamo, began on May 29, 1940. German Panzer divisions pushing through Belgium and the Ardennes had cut off the British Expeditionary Force and beaten it back to Dunkirk, but in what history has noted as one of Germany’s first major tactical errors of the war, Hitler briefly halted the tanks, giving Britain a crucial opportunity to rescue its stranded army.
As the Allies fought a fierce rearguard action, some 800 small boats, including trawlers, lifeboats, paddle steamers, tugs, yachts and barges, many skippered by amateur sailors, responded to the appeal for help. As the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed the men on the beaches, they ferried troops over the shallow coastal waters to bigger ships or took them straight back to English ports.
Winston Churchill called Dunkirk “a colossal military disaster”, stranding “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army”. Their rescue, he said, had been a “miracle of deliverance”.
A total of 338,000 British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops were rescued. Some 11,000 died on the beaches and 40,000 were captured.
Today’s ceremony was one of a series being held in northern France to commemorate the anniversary, although veteran numbers are dwindling. The youngest of those present today were in their late 80s, and advancing age led the Normandy Veterans’ Association to disband 10 years ago following the 60th anniversary.
Yesterday a service was held at Esquelbecq, just outside Dunkirk, to mark the SS massacre of more than 80 British soldiers captured while defending the town. They were herded into a barn by the crack SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment, who blew them apart with grenades and machine-gun fire.
Source:The times
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