Dunkirk

[paul guthrie]

New book with a different emphasis on the BEF units that guarded flanks of retreat corridor. You will be familiar with many of the locations from WW1 studies.

These units include 2d Bn KRRC at Calais. I have or had if he's died as I fear I met at Union Jack Club and met with again there when I came back to UK to see him. They were the last to leave Britain, 5 days fighting for Doug and 5 years POW.

I asked if he had ever seen acts of kindness from Germans really thinking of POW time. He said instead that when in inner Calais he & another Rifleman he did not know ran to a cellar with a Bren they thought somehow would save them, had it out a window of a cellar, saw a German boot kick it away, then heard a grenade armed, saw he saw cellar full of wounded and he did not throw it.

[Owen D]

Got it, read it, Brilliant.

Took it with me back in October when over there.

Cannot praise it highly enough.

[paul guthrie]

I agree Owen, a superb book, I have read several on the topic and this is much the best, hard to believe how little emphasis previously has been placed on the men who protected the corridor like my friend Rifleman Doug Hughes. If alive he's 87 and I have not heard from him in two years. When I met him I had one cap badge - and it was KRRC.

[nfh249]

Just finished this book and I would also recommend it. A view of the Dunkirk and the often overlooked other evacuations from a different perspective.

Regards,

Neil.

[Halder]

Just finished this book and I would also recommend it. A view of the Dunkirk and the often overlooked other evacuations from a different perspective.

Regards,

Neil.

I did this review for our June edition, which might be of interest.

THE word ‘definitive’ should be used sparingly when applied to works of history.

It is a fitting adjective for Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s magnificent Dunkirk: To The Last Man (Penguin, £25 ISBN 0-670-91082-1), a tour de force not merely of the legendary evacuation, but of the disastrous 1940 campaign in the West.

The Navy figures prominently, and not solely at Dunkirk itself.

Indeed, the evacuation of Dunkirk only came about because the other principal Allied ports – Boulogne and Calais – were in German hands by the dying days of May 1940.

Boulogne fell first, but not before HM Ships Keith and Vimy had run the gauntlet to rescue British troops.

The commanding officers of both vessels were killed in the action.

On Vimy, Don Harris jumped to help the mortally-wounded Lt Cdr Colin Donald.

“A bullet had inflicted a frightful wound to his forehead, nose and eyes. He was choking in his own blood.

“As I rose to my feet, more shots swept the bridge and the sub-lieutenant fell directly in front of me. He must have been dead before he hit the deck.”

Calais came next as the Germans tightened the noose around the ever-shrinking pocket of Allied troops, leaving Dunkirk as the only route of escape.

When the evacuation began, few men at the coal face realised the scale of the task facing them – until they sighted Dunkirk.

In HMS Jaguar, stoker Arnold Saunders looked out upon “a beautiful stretch of sand with what looked like shrubs on the beach”. The ‘shrubs’ started moving, forming lines. “It was then that we realised what our job was to be,” recalled Saunders.

The author is not a fan of myth and legend, the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’, the ‘little ships’.

He praises the RN for its courage during the evacuation, but also – rightly – gives the men who held the perimeter of the Allied pocket belated recognition.

The author also paints a florid picture of the hell of Dunkirk, aided by a rich tapestry of memoirs and recollections from survivors of all sides.

Maj Rupert Colvin of the Grenadier Guards thought he had found salvation aboard the tug St Abbs – until the Luftwaffe struck.

“Everyone made a rush for the side,” he recalled. “I took a deep breath, said a short prayer and thought this was the one end I least desired.”

For many of the soldiers packed aboard St Abbs, this was the second time that day they had been shipwrecked. “Men were dying every moment from cramp and their cries were pathetic,” remembered the major, who survived by clinging to another wrecked steamer.

The Germans jackbooted into Dunkirk on the morning of June 4, by which time more than 300,000 Allied troops had been safely carried to England – but at a terrible cost to the Royal Navy’s escort forces.

The port, a German Army staff officer observed, “is a complete mess”. The North Sea waves lapping the beach tinged the sand with oil from the sunken ships. “There are tens of thousands of cars, tanks, ammunition cases, guns and items of clothing.”

The story ends not on the dunes of Dunkirk, however, rather in the waters off St Nazaire and the controversial loss of the troopship Lancastria.

The tragedy far outstrips the sinking of the Titanic as Britain’s worst maritime disaster. And while death for the great liner’s passengers came in a couple of minutes

Flayed by burning oil, men who survived the initial sinking were “fried like sausages in a frying pan”.

Sebag-Montefiore has already produced a lively – and thorough – account of the struggle to crack the German Enigma code.

Dunkirk stands in a different league. The research is exhaustive: survivors interviewed, archives tapped in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland.

For all the research and footnotes – they run to nearly 100 pages – this is military history at its best.

Sebag-Montefiore offers a sweeping panorama of the Battle of France, from the men at the top to the foot soldiers and able seamen.

For nearly four decades, Alistair Horne’s magisterial To Lose a Battle has set the benchmark for all historians of the 1940 campaign.

Dunkirk: To The Last Man doesn’t quite surpass it – it ends rather abruptly and lacks a conclusion – nor will it be the final word on the evacuation, but it will take some beating.