As Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is released, a leading historian recounts the bombings and sinkings of 29 May 1940 that put the entire rescue – and the fate of 300,000 Allied troops – in peril

The “miraculous” rescue of the British army from the jetty and beaches of Dunkirk, in northern France, has entered the national consciousness as one of the heroic episodes of the second world war – an extraordinary escape from the jaws of a potentially disastrous defeat. Between 26 May and 4 June 1940, in the course of what was known as Operation Dynamo, more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated by an armada made up of Royal Navy destroyers and warships, pleasure steamers and hundreds of those famous little ships manned by civilian sailors.

The evacuation was needed because when Hitler’s army had invaded Belgium and France on 10 May, the German panzer divisions had cut through the French troops who had lined up alongside the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium, leaving the British army one thrust away from being surrounded.

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But cinemagoers queueing up to see Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, when it opens on 21 July, particularly those too young to have parents who lived through the war, may well not appreciate how close the exodus came to ending in ignominious disaster.

For many soldiers waiting to be rescued from the Dunkirk beaches, the first indication that their evacuation was not a foregone conclusion came when they saw that the ships that had been sent to whisk them away were being attacked by German planes.

The alarm this caused on 29 May, the worst day of the evacuation in terms of British shipping sunk by the Luftwaffe, was recorded by gunner Lieutenant Elliman, who reached Malo-les-Bains beach, north-east of the main Dunkirk jetty, known as the “mole”, that afternoon: “The destroyers pumped shells into the air, and disappeared behind 80ft high walls of spray thrown up by near misses. While these attacks were in progress, the Stukas were diving, zooming, screeching and wheeling over our heads like a flock of huge infernal seagulls.

“The first attack was most unnerving. You felt so completely exposed on the beach. For a time some of us huddled under the hull of a wrecked steamer, but as nothing happened for some time I called in all my men, and formed them up in a queue again for fear we should lose our place.”

That was bad enough. But eventually the planes switched their focus to the beaches. “I heard the Stuka coming down in a vertical dive right on top of me,” Elliman reported. “I was by now dulled by hours of explosions so that the imminence of death aroused no great feeling of fear. Either the bomb would land on me, or it wouldn’t. I thought of Margaret in those few seconds of suspense, and she brought me a sort of peace of the spirit. The next moment: Crash! Darkness! And then a vision of falling sand in front of me. I realised I had been missed, and I could hear the plane climbing away over Dunkirk. The attack was over.”

Elliman had been spared, but some of his men were less fortunate. He described how his medical orderly had his right cheek blown away. Two other men were killed. His telephonist was so shocked by the injuries he saw that, as Elliman put it, he went “wackers”, and had to be carried away laughing uncontrollably.

After the bombing ended, a different kind of torture had to be endured. Elliman and his men, along with thousands of other British soldiers, abandoned their original plan to get on a boat off the beach at Malo-les-Bains, and joined the queue leading to the mole.

“Thousands of men stretched away behind us,” wrote Elliman, “but we failed to move forward. Only the wounded were got away that night. As the hours went by, the spirits of all must have been sinking. Mine certainly were. Sleep was impossible. It was just waiting, waiting, waiting.”

The shortage of destroyers at the mole during the night of 29-30 May was the result of a mistake. German bombs had hit many of the ships beside the mole that afternoon, and a junior naval officer was so shaken by what he saw there that he panicked, and drove to La Panne, a resort north-east of Dunkirk, to telephone through his warning to England. According to this officer, the mole was unusable, and this effectively prevented ships going there that night. The true situation was only discovered the following morning, whereupon more ships were sent and the evacuation resumed.

The ferocity of the attacks on the ships off Dunkirk explains why some naval officers’ nerves were at breaking point. 29 May can only be described as a nightmare for the Royal and merchant navies, as ship after ship was sunk or put out of action. The first of the many sinkings that day took place in the early hours of the morning near Kwinte Whistle Buoy, north-east of La Panne, that marked the easternmost point on Route Y, the longest route leading from Dover to Dunkirk. There had been a disaster, the result of an almost unbelievable chain of events.

In the early hours, HMS Wakeful, a destroyer weighed down by its load of evacuated British soldiers, had been torpedoed by a German E-boat, causing the ship to break into pieces. Within 15 seconds both the bow and the stern had plunged headfirst into the water, taking all but one of the rescued soldiers with them, but leaving the two middle sections sticking up in the air with members of the crew clinging to them. Passing British ships moved in to assist them and those who were already in the sea, their heads bobbing about above the water like corks.

However, as HMS Grafton, another destroyer, approached, the rescue operation was being watched menacingly by Oberleutnant Hans-Bernhard Michalowski, commander of the U-boat U-62. Rather than taking pity on the shipwrecked sailors, he ordered his men to fire two torpedoes at them. One hit Grafton two minutes and 10 seconds later, according to the U-boat’s war diary.

After the torpedo had hit its target, the watching submariner noted with satisfaction that there was an explosion at the stern of the British warship. But they did not hang around to shoot up the second ship they had spotted. Fearing that the British ship proceeding towards U-62 might be a destroyer preparing to attack, Michalowski gave the order to dive, and in the words of the war diary, the U-boat “disappeared”.

U-62’s torpedo did not sink Grafton. It is what happened afterwards that transformed a tragedy into a disaster. One of the circling ships was Comfort, a British drifter. Her crew had picked up some of Wakeful’s survivors, including skipper Commander Ralph Fisher. But the blast from the explosion that blew off Grafton’s stern lifted the drifter out of the water. When she fell back into the sea, she was temporarily submerged, and Fisher was swept off her deck, back into the sea. He then watched aghast as HMS Lydd, a minesweeper, whose crew in the darkness had mistaken Comfort for a German vessel, charged towards his erstwhile rescuer. Afterwards he recalled shouting out: “For God’s sake stop. We are all English!” But it was to no avail. Lydd slammed into Comfort, cutting the drifter in half, and killing all who had been on board apart from Fisher and four other survivors.

As if that was not bad enough, the Luftwaffe chose 29 May as the day when it made its first determined attempt to disrupt the evacuation. In the process, 10 destroyers and eight personnel ships were sunk or put out of action in addition to an assortment of smaller vessels, many thanks to the Luftwaffe’s efforts.

The Luftwaffe’s most impressive series of attacks put out of action seven of the 10 British ships which were tied up alongside Dunkirk’s mole that afternoon. One of those damaged ships was the destroyer HMS Jaguar. She had taken on board about 1,000 soldiers, and was steaming away from the harbour when at about 4pm a bomb landed in the sea just a couple of yards away, and exploded. A terrifying roar ensued, as steam was let off from the ship’s fractured steampipes. Then the ship’s engines stopped and there was what one officer described as “a deathly hush” that was only broken by the cries of the wounded.

Another destroyer was on hand to tow Jaguar away, and to take her troops on board, but not before the survivors had seen the terrible injuries inflicted. Stoker Arnold Saunders saw one soldier with a leg blown off, his only hope of surviving being the assistance provided by a comrade, who was attempting to stem the bleeding by putting on a tourniquet. Another image that was remembered by many of the survivors was a man who had had half his head blown off. “His brains were literally hanging out,” Saunders recalled.

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But it was the burned men on some of the other bombed ships who appear to have suffered most. One of the worst cases was Bob Bloom, a 19-year-old sickbay attendant on HMS Grenade, which had been tied up at the mole alongside Jaguar while the latter ship was taking soldiers on board. At about 6pm, Grenade was hit by a bomb dropped by a plane flying with the third wave of bombers, and Bloom has described how he was affected: “I was coming down a ladder leading from the sickbay to the mess deck when a bomb went down the ship’s forward funnel and exploded. I was thrown up in the air and hit the deckhead. Then I fell back into the blast given off by the bomb. As it hit me, I put my hands up to my face to protect it. It felt as if I had been hit six times on the face with a whip. I was in such pain that I prayed to God to take me. But someone picked me up, and pushed me outside, and I ended up on the upper deck.

“There I saw one of the stokers I knew who was just sitting there with his seaman’s cap on. I said something to him, but then I noticed his ribs were sticking out through his chest. He was dead. I looked at my hands. The skin was hanging off both of them as if I was trying to pull gloves off. My face was stinging like mad. My lips were swelling up all the time. I did not realise this at the time, but my nose had all but disappeared. Only the septum was left. Then I heard someone shout ‘Abandon ship!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard and Fionn Whitehead in a scene from Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Photograph: AP

Bloom somehow jumped into the water over the side of the ship, and climbed up on to the mole. From there he staggered on to Crested Eagle, a paddle steamer moored to the other side of the mole. Shortly afterwards, having also taken on board wounded men from Fenella, another personnel vessel beside the mole, that had been hit, Crested Eagle got under way, only to be hit by four of the bombs dropped by yet another wave of bombers. Bloom, who was lying on a bunk bed in the restaurant area of the ship that had been transformed into a sickbay, quickly realised that he was in trouble again after the ship’s lights went out. Before he could be burned again by the fires ignited by the bombing, he jumped into the sea for the second time that day.

Crested Eagle was beached near Bray Dunes, the beach to the north-east of Malo-les-Bains, where she became one of the landmarks for small ships striving to find the beach, but in the meantime those in the water had to swim for their lives. “By this time, my face was so swollen that I could hardly see,” Bloom remembered. “But my life was saved by two soldiers who were hanging on to what looked like a barn door with a ring fixed to it. They hung on to it and kicked with their legs, while I sat on it holding the ring.”

Bloom was eventually rescued by another ship, which took him to Ramsgate. Not that he knew much about the journey. Mercifully, while he was lying in the wardroom, somebody slipped a morphine capsule under his tongue, whereupon he lost consciousness. He was already in England when he woke up. He had been laid out with other wounded men in a marquee. There he was reassured by a nurse who had him lifted on to a stretcher so that he could be taken to hospital. “You’ll be safe soon,” she told him as he was moved.

Bloom’s last words to her before he lost consciousness again were: “Will you please tell my parents I’m OK?”

A completely different atmosphere prevailed among the crew from the U-62 when their submarine subsequently docked at Helgoland on the way back to Wilhelmshaven.

According to crew member Kurt Wendler, the men attended a wild celebration at a restaurant called Aunt Anna. Even Michalowski, who normally did not socialise with his men, was so pleased at having sunk an Allied warship that he joined in the party. He bet one of the under officers that he could do a moving handstand down the eight-metre table where they were eating, and won the bet.

Their boisterous behaviour continued after dinner. On the way back to their billets, Michalowski had to rescue his paralytically drunk engineer who had broken into a bakery and covered himself with flour. However before leaving the restaurant, the proprietoress reminded them that they would not win the war by just sinking one ship. “If you sink any more ships, come back,” she told them, “and then everything’s on the house.”

The paperback, and a new audiobook, of Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk: Fight To The Last Man are published by Penguin; the audiobook is available on Audible. The paperback of his book on the Battle of the Somme will be published in November.

BATTLE STATISTICS

Number of British soldiers evacuated in course of Operation Dynamo: about

185,000

Number of French soldiers evacuated during Operation Dynamo: about

121,000

Additional British and French wounded evacuated: about 7,000

Number of destroyers put out of action during Operation Dynamo: 25

Total number of ships put out of action during Operation Dynamo: at least 170

Total of soldiers evacuated: at least 315,000

British casualties during fighting in France and Belgium: about 66,000

French casualties: approaching 300,000

Belgian casualties: about 23,000

Dutch casualties: about 10,000

German casualties: about 155,000

Number of British planes lost during fighting in France and Belgium: about

930

including about

475

fighters.