Over two weeks in 1940,
a military miracle unfolded here in Dunkirk.
The evacuation of 300,000 troops,
cut off and trapped by a rampaging German army.
But, it was very nearly a disaster that knocked Britain out of the war
and handed victory in Europe to the Nazis.
I'm JJ Chalmers, a former Royal Marine,
and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
Over three programmes, I'll be charting those momentous 14 days,
day by day, hour by hour.
In France, I'll be retracing the steps of those heroic men
who made the evacuation possible.
Artillery slammed off the bunker.
Using my own experiences,
I'll relive some of the horrors they faced.
Nothing prepares you for a moment of extreme trauma like that.
The real story of Dunkirk goes far beyond the familiar tales
of beaches and little ships.
I'm Raksha Dave, and I'm finding out
just how the rescue mission was planned and executed,
revealing how tenacity and ingenuity
overcame overwhelming odds.
23 people on this tiny boat!
This time, the Second World War has been under way for eight months,
and the British Army in France is retreating,
following Germany's ferocious Blitzkrieg attack.
They're battered and bloodied, and now must fight
against overwhelming odds
to prevent the Nazis cutting off their only escape route
back to Britain.
Only their heroism and sacrifice
will make the most extraordinary evacuation in history possible.
These are the 14 days that saved Britain.
Here, in Dunkirk, on June 2nd, 1940,
the last of over 200,000 British soldiers trapped in France
stepped onto a boat and headed home.
It was the culmination
of the greatest rescue mission in British history.
But, it was only made possible by events that began 14 days earlier
and 50 miles inland.
On 20th May, 1940, the exhausted men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment
were trudging across these very fields.
Like all the men of the BEF,
the British Expeditionary Force in France,
they'd been retreating for four days,
enduring a relentless German onslaught.
One of those soldiers was Private Ernie Leggett.
He said they were like vagabonds -
filthy, and reduced to drinking water from the ditches.
Leggett was 20, and from a tiny village in Norfolk.
His family were poor, and he joined the Army at just 15,
hoping for a better life.
A crack shot, he'd been in France since the outbreak of the war,
but now, for the first time, he was under attack.
Over to the North,
Private Leggett could see the town of Tournai burning.
It had been relentlessly dive-bombed by German aircraft
that were hounding British forces constantly during their retreat.
Leggett had seen many of his comrades, and countless
civilian refugees killed by the German bombers.
Now, I never faced an enemy that had aircraft,
but, having been on the other side, laying 500 metres away...
..to be on the receiving end of an earth-shattering deep explosion
that tears the landscape to pieces,
reduces buildings to rubble,
that is terrifying beyond imagination.
But today, Leggett and his pals
were about to have the chance to fight back.
Leggett and his regiment, the Royal Norfolks,
had been ordered to put up a stand
to make a defensive line in an effort to hold back
the relentless German assault.
The German invasion of France had begun ten days earlier.
The BEF were supporting the huge French army,
but Nazi tanks managed to punch a hole through the allies' defences
and raced towards the French coast.
The British Army became almost completely surrounded,
and retreated to the River Escaut.
Here, they'd make a desperate attempt to hold back the Germans.
This is the stretch of the Escaut that Private Leggatt
and his comrades from the Royal Norfolk Regiment
were ordered to defend that day.
Leggett set up his machine gun on the second floor balcony
of a disused cement factory.
The Germans would have to cross this river,
and it was his regiment's job to stop them,
or at the very least, delay them.
Now, as a defender, decisions you make ahead of the battle
make all of the difference.
It's the difference between achieving your objective or not,
and staying alive.
As Leggett set up his position,
he had no idea how desperate his situation was,
but the commander of the British Army in France,
55-year-old aristocrat General Lord Gort,
knew exactly how bad things were.
Gort was a hero
of the First World War.
He won the Victoria Cross.
He'd won the distinguished service order three times.
What he wasn't really, was a great strategist.
But on this occasion, Gort could clearly see his army needed
to pull back to the French coast, because if they couldn't stop
the Germans, evacuation to Britain would be their only option.
The job of Private Leggett and the rest of the regiment
lined out here along the Escaut,
was to hold back the Germans for long enough
that as many of the 200,000 soldiers of the BEF could retreat
the 50 miles back to French ports on the English Channel.
Back in London at the Admiralty,
they were discussing the disturbing possibility
of having to rapidly evacuate the entire British Army by sea.
It was decided a plan needed to be prepared,
to be used if necessary.
They wanted to be ready to lift 10,000 troops a day
from the three main Channel ports.
At this stage, you still have three ports in the hands of the Allies.
You've got Calais, you've got Boulogne, and you've got Dunkirk.
So, of course, the best of those, if there is going to be an evacuation,
is Calais, because that's the nearest to England.
But not everyone believed an evacuation would be needed,
especially the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
who'd been in power for just ten days.
When Churchill becomes Prime Minister on 10th May, 1940,
his entire rhetoric, his entire career,
was building up to this very moment.
There's no way that Churchill's first act as Prime Minister
is to run away.
That is simply not in his DNA.
But Churchill wasn't a fool,
and agreed that evacuation plans should be made, just in case.
The job of preparing for that possible mass evacuation
was given to 57-year-old Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay.
He'd only recently been recalled from retirement.
That evening, Ramsay held his first planning meeting here,
in his headquarters at Dover Castle in Kent.
Admiral Ramsay's HQ wasn't in the castle itself.
It's underneath it.
This secret complex of bunkers became the subterranean nerve centre
for the potential mission,
which was given the code name Operation Dynamo.
The first challenge Ramsay and his team faced
was sourcing enough ships
to carry out an evacuation on this vast scale.
I'm meeting historian Philip Weir in the actual room
where that first planning meeting was held.
This whole place must have been absolutely buzzing with people.
Yeah, May 20th. This was an incredibly busy day.
So, how did Admiral Ramsay plan for the evacuation?
He didn't know whether it was going to happen or not,
so what was he doing?
He sits down in here with his small team of staff,
and starts planning - the numbers of ships they're going to need,
calling the Ministry of Shipping,
calling in the Admiralty,
calling in absolutely everybody.
Although some Royal Navy ships will be available
to help with any evacuation,
Ramsay realised very quickly that these wouldn't be
anywhere near enough.
What he's now got to do is spread the net a lot wider
if he really thinks the whole army's got to come home.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
Because we're not just talking about hundreds of people.
We're talking about tens of thousands.
So what kind of ships was Admiral Ramsay looking for at this time?
What he's looking for is reasonably large ships that can go into ports,
tie up alongside, quickly fill up with people, and head out.
But Churchill hoped these ships would never be needed.
He was pinning all his hopes on men like Ernie Leggett
at the old cement factory,
who were preparing to face a savage German onslaught.
Clearly, in one sense, these soldiers are being sacrificed,
particularly as they're often being told to fight to the last man.
They're told, effectively, that they are being sacrificed
for the greater good.
Because if private Leggett and the other troops along the River Escaut
could hold back the German assault,
the following day, a counterstrike had been ordered
that could turn the tables on the Nazis.
It was an heroic and desperate plan,
but would it work?
On 21st May, 1940, the British Army's position in France
was becoming increasingly desperate.
They faced suffering such a terrible defeat
that victory in Europe looked like it could be handed to the Nazis.
The British were now almost entirely encircled by the rampaging Germans.
It seemed almost inevitable that within days,
over 200,000 British soldiers in France
would be overrun and captured, or killed.
Amongst the soldiers tasked with holding back the relentless
German advance was Private Leggett and his exhausted comrades
of the Royal Norfolk Regiment.
They were defending this stretch of river
in front of an old, disused cement factory,
and Leggett was on the second floor, manning a machine gun.
In the early hours, the German assault on the River Escaut began
with a brutal artillery barrage.
Then, German soldiers came into sight.
The bridge in front of Leggatt was damaged,
and the Germans began to repair it.
But, Leggett's commanding officer, Captain Barclay,
told his men to hold fire.
The Germans on the other side of the river had no idea
that the Norfolks were here.
Barclay waited as 25 Germans crossed the bridge
that they'd only just repaired,
before giving the order to open fire to his men
with a blast of his hunting bugle that he carried on him.
A hail of gunfire landed on the Germans,
mowing down all the men that had crossed the bridge,
and even some on the other side.
For seven hours, Leggett and the Royal Norfolks
valiantly held off the assault.
But now the Germans brought tanks and artillery up to the river.
A shell exploded right next to Captain Barclay
and severely wounded him in the gut.
However, he ordered that he be strapped to a door,
and four men would carry him
so that he could continue to oversee the defence.
As the fighting continued that afternoon,
Barclay was overcome by pain and passed out.
Whilst Barclay's selfless courage was unbelievable,
it also shows you just how significant the situation at large was.
He was wounded, his life hung in the balance,
but his mission meant that the lives of tens, if not
hundreds of thousands of men,
well, their lives hung in the balance too,
and it was their job to hold this line
and give them a fighting chance.
Despite their heroism,
the soldiers of the Royal Norfolks were being overwhelmed.
Of the 25 men who'd taken up positions
in the cement factory that morning,
only Leggett and three of his pals were still standing.
Suddenly, Leggett himself was hit by an explosion -
a mortar had come through the roof.
He said, "I couldn't move my legs
"and my back was absolutely numb from the waist down.
"All I saw was blood all over the floor."
A piece of shrapnel had passed right through 20-year-old
Ernie Leggett's body.
Sadly, I know only too well what that's like.
Nothing prepares you for a moment of extreme trauma like that.
The wash of emotions and feelings that comes across you
in a split second is like nothing I ever hope to experience
again in my life.
You're confused. You can't believe it's happened to you.
You are in pain.
And all of this is happening in a split second,
and it is happening when chaos continues to ensue around you.
Leggett and Barclay were taken from the front line,
and put onto hospital trains heading towards the coast.
Soon after, hundreds of German soldiers flooded across the river,
forcing the surviving Royal Norfolks to retreat again.
While the British were desperately fighting to defend the line
on the Escaut, the German tanks had continued to advance
in the South.
Soon, they reached the coast.
The British Army was now surrounded.
Then the Germans began pushing north towards the Channel ports.
If they could capture them,
the British would have no way to evacuate.
But Churchill still believed an evacuation may not be needed.
He was pinning his hopes on an alternative plan.
He ordered Gort to launch a counterattack,
and if it worked, it might just turn defeat into victory.
This plan was to punch through the Germans
and link up with the French forces to the South.
If they could pull it off,
the British would no longer be surrounded.
And the German forces that had reached the coast
would themselves be trapped.
If this counterattack could be a total success,
it would have been a very different ending to this story.
At 2pm on 21st May, 74 British tanks launched
the last ditch counterattack south of the town of Arras.
As the British tanks advanced,
they saw the countryside in front of them covered in German troops
streaming towards the coast.
They were a powerful Panzer tank division, led by the famous general
Erwin Rommel.
Erwin Rommel was a favourite of Hitler.
And this really was where he made his mark.
Supporting Rommel's tanks were soldiers from the infamous
SS Totenkopf division.
These were Nazi fanatics.
Many had only recently been concentration camp guards.
The German divisions were taken completely by surprise.
The British tanks tore through them,
causing panic, mayhem and destruction.
The SS Totenkopf soldiers suffered terrible casualties,
and many fled in panic.
It was an incredibly close call for General Rommel.
An officer stood right next to him was shot dead.
A British tank rolled right up to him,
but the driver had been killed,
and for the rest of the crew, rather than attacking, they surrendered.
But it is incredible to think just how different the history
of World War II would have been if Rommel had died that day.
But Rommel managed to rally his troops,
and the vastly outnumbered British just couldn't break
through the German encirclement.
As night fell, they were forced to retreat.
But, the Nazis suffered their first major scare of the war.
And now Dunkirk had become the only possible place
the British Army could escape back to Britain.
The Germans had continued to push north
towards the Channel port towns.
They had almost surrounded Boulogne,
and were rapidly closing in on Calais,
which looked certain to soon fall.
The only place an evacuation can ultimately take place from
is now Dunkirk.
You've now only got one port to evacuate
hundreds of thousands of men,
and of all three, frankly, Dunkirk is the least suitable,
I mean, for the obvious reason
that it's the furthest from England.
In Britain, Admiral Ramsay was rapidly having to adapt his plans
for an evacuation
that now seemed to be a matter of not if, but when.
I'm meeting historian Harry Bennett to find out more.
This is such a great view of Dover.
You can see the port, you can even see the coast of France
in the distance.
It's all too close for comfort.
Ramsay can see the flashes on the far side of the Channel.
He can hear the explosions in the distance,
and at night, you can see the flames of Calais.
He realises that things could unfold very, very quickly indeed.
But, with Churchill still hesitating to give the evacuation order,
Ramsay was taking the initiative.
He's already begun to realise that, if he goes through normal channels,
if he does it by the book,
it could be too late.
So, under his own authority, he begins to assemble
the kind of vessels which are capable of carrying men,
at least across the English Channel.
It must have been quite a sight.
How many vessels would have been stationed here?
Obviously, what they don't want to do is pack it so full of shipping
that it becomes an immediate target for the German Air Force,
because if Dover is heavily bombed, Dover becomes inoperable.
So you've actually got vessels which are sort of
up and down the coast here.
Places like Ramsgate, places like Sheerness.
They've been quietly assembled,
ready for when the order for Operation Dynamo is given.
So Churchill hasn't given him the order yet.
He's just getting all of his ducks in a row,
just getting prepared for imminent action.
I think Ramsay realises the way that this is going to go.
The longer that order takes to come,
maybe the less people we're going to have the chance to get away.
So there is a kind of element of frustration, I think,
on Ramsey's part, in terms of when will the order come?
On the ground in France, General Gort also believed
an evacuation was inevitable.
The counterattack had failed,
and the Germans were over the River Escaut.
The majority of the over 200,000 British soldiers were now
in headlong retreat towards Dunkirk,
which was 50 miles away.
These roads heading towards the port
were completely clogged with troops now.
Some of them were lucky enough to be in trucks, but for a lot
of them they were exhausted, on foot, marching.
It was painfully slow going.
Then, in some places, well, order was breaking down.
They were on the run effectively.
A lot of people were living off the land, you know,
they were short of supplies, short of ammunition.
Some were...moving back with their boots worn out
and their feet like liver.
This shattered, retreating British army had to somehow be protected
from the Germans, who were now pushing forward on all fronts.
And Gort came up with a plan.
He would create a 15 mile wide corridor
that could be defended on both sides by some of his soldiers.
He hoped these troops could hold back the Germans just long enough
for the majority of his army
to stream down the corridor to Dunkirk.
The soldiers given the unenviable task of protecting the corridor
were heading to their assigned locations, such as this hilltop
town of Cassel.
The plan was to fortify the town,
turning it into a defensive strong point
to protect the retreating army.
Well, it's clear from up here why Cassel is the perfect
location to defend.
You can see for miles around - any German troop movement
out there is going to be much easier to spot.
And with this extra elevation, your artillery has more distance
and is all the more lethal.
But, with the Germans advancing relentlessly,
the odds were heavily stacked against the British Army.
One of Lord Gort's senior commanders wrote in his diary,
"Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now."
The majority of the shattered British Army in France
was in headlong retreat along these roads,
hoping desperately to reach the port of Dunkirk
for a possible mass evacuation.
Exhausted and hungry, they were forced to loot food from bombed out
shops and houses.
Worst of all, as they trudged along these roads,
they were under endless attack from the air by the Luftwaffe.
Soldiers and civilians alike were taking terrible losses.
The Stuka dive-bomber was fitted with what was called
a Jericho's trumpet.
The specific siren under its wings,
and it made a wailing sound as air passed through it,
so it created that distinctive screeching banshee's wail.
These were really a devilish invention.
They were almost more a psychological weapon.
You could hear them coming before you could see them.
And some people used to go into their own heads
when they when they heard this terrible noise, knowing
that this...this death was coming down.
The British soldiers were defenceless against these
horrifying bombers as they continued their attacks.
One of the constant refrain from troops was,
"Where are the RAF?"
They felt abandoned,
and believed the RAF were failing in their duty to defend them.
To discover if this was the truth,
I've come to the Imperial War Museum, Duxford.
Duxford is home to a Spitfire that actually flew
during the Dunkirk retreat, and is still flying today.
I'm meeting author and historian Claire Mulley, who can tell me more.
Did the soldiers on the ground feel that the RAF had abandoned them?
It's true that the soldiers felt that,
but it's not true that that's what happened at all.
The RAF is doing patrols, but the men on the ground
didn't see them because there was a lot of cloud cover,
and the RAF were flying above the clouds,
and a lot of the patrols had gone much further inland and they were
just out of visibility.
So, what British aircraft were defending the troops?
This is the first time that we see the use of
the Supermarine Spitfire in operational action.
First time a Spitfire encountered a German Messerschmitt 109
was on 23rd May, 1940,
and it was piloted by this young 23-year-old New Zealander,
Alan Deere.
Alan Deere was this square-jawed 1940s hero.
He flew out in a Spitfire over the Channel towards Dunkirk
to provide cover, and he encountered and engaged a Messerschmitt 109.
So this is the cream of the Luftwaffe's fighting force.
The German pilot didn't really know what he was up against.
He banked around and went into a high ascent,
and Alan Deere just said that he signed his own death warrant
because the Spitfire's great asset was manoeuvrability.
And he engaged.
He took him straight out.
He took out a second 109 on the same mission. Wow!
He went back, they refuelled, came out a third time on the same day,
and a took out a third Me 109.
Extraordinary achievement - three hits on a single day.
It's pretty incredible, isn't it?
Sounds like something from Top Gun.
It's pretty remarkable.
Alan Deere that day really showed what the Spitfire could do.
If, all of a sudden, they have this amazing piece of tech
that can outmanoeuvre German fighters,
how did they not prevent the bombing of Dunkirk?
It's a matter of statistics.
The Luftwaffe completely outnumbered the RAF.
They just didn't have enough numbers.
Despite the RAF's valiant efforts,
by that evening in France,
the situation had become catastrophic.
British soldiers were still making their way to Cassel,
and other strong points along Gort's corridor.
From here, they hoped to protect the rest of the retreating army
flooding towards Dunkirk.
But, Dunkirk itself was about to fall.
The German tanks had continued to push up the coast.
Boulogne and Calais were now effectively surrounded.
The British continued to defend these ports
in hope of slowing down the Germans.
But the German tanks bypassed them,
and were now rolling almost unchecked towards Dunkirk.
It seemed this last escape route opened to the British Army
would be severed within a day.
But that evening, a miracle happened.
Hitler ordered his troops, who, at that point were surging
forward to Dunkirk, to stop.
And not only that, he dictated that they wouldn't push forward
for another three days.
Hitler was worried his Panzer tanks were now too vulnerable.
It certainly was a great stroke of luck for the British
because they could, probably would have been, overrun
had those tanks not stopped.
Hitler, certainly, was nervous about the fact
that, you know, these tanks could be put out of action.
So it did make sense - a certain amount of sense -
in the circumstances.
You'd just had the Arras counterattack,
which had shown how vulnerable these tanks could be.
Yeah, it's fine, you know, chucking a Panzer forward as fast as it can,
but everyone else has got to catch up.
You've got to get the fuel there, you've got to feed those people.
The more you're stretched like an elastic band,
the more vulnerable you are to counterattack.
Hitler feared if there was a second British counterattack,
it may succeed,
and Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe,
had convinced him he didn't need to risk his precious tanks.
Goering thought that he'd really, they wouldn't need
to launch the Panzers in for that final kill
because the Luftwaffe, particularly with its deadly Stuka dive-bombers,
could finish the job for Hitler.
Goering telephoned Hitler and said,
you know that with the Luftwaffe, we can destroy
the British Expeditionary Force.
We can destroy it in Dunkirk.
Hitler's order to halt reached the German front line troops
the following morning.
Just as the soldiers assigned to defend Gort's corridor
began to arrive at the strong point of Cassel.
They didn't know it, but now they had some breathing space
to set up their defences.
But, much of the town already lay in ruin.
The arriving soldiers discovered that the town had been horrifically
bombed by the Luftwaffe in the previous days.
As they entered through this medieval gateway,
they found a horrific and distressing scene.
The area was littered with corpses of mules,
and next to them, their Indian handlers.
They were troops of the Indian contingent,
who had been tragically targeted by bombing two days earlier.
The Indian contingent formed part of what was known
as the Royal Indian Army Service Corps,
and principally, these men were mule handlers.
The British Expeditionary Force was a highly mechanised army,
but really, when they got to France,
they discovered that the land was so boggy
that they couldn't use the trucks.
And so they had to look all the way to Empire and to India
to bring in the trained mule handlers 7,000 miles away
to assist them in sending supplies to front line troops.
These mule handlers had been retreating through Cassel
two days earlier,
also heading for Dunkirk.
Like so many others, many of them had fallen prey
to the Nazi dive-bombers.
The following day, the survivors of that Indian contingent unit
arrived here in Dunkirk.
While Churchill still believed the British Army should stay
and fight in France, the wounded and support soldiers,
like the surviving mule handlers, were already being evacuated.
The men were told to leave behind their mules,
and this was quite a tragic moment for them.
They would have formed a very close bond with them,
almost as though the mule was their pet.
The men were truly distraught
to have to leave behind these animals that they were so fond of.
And even in Dunkirk, they were still being ruthlessly targeted
by the Luftwaffe.
One of them, Lance Corporal Chowdhury Mohammed,
described what they suffered.
"The German planes were like terrible birds
"flying overhead, firing on us.
"I haven't slept for 15 days.
"We didn't think we'd come out of there alive.
"The whole of Dunkirk was alight."
Private Ernie Leggett, who'd been badly injured defending
the cement factory on the River Escaut,
finally made it to Dunkirk that day. He was sheltering in the sand dunes.
Leggett was coming in and out of consciousness,
but he described what he remembered.
"I woke up on a stretcher, with nothing on an old blanket
"and dirty bandages.
"It was hazy.
"I remember bombs were dropping very close,
"and people jumped on top of me to protect me from the blasts.
"That's comradeship."
Actually, one of the only memories I have from the day
that I was wounded was one of my friends crouching over the top of me
to protect my wounds from getting full of more debris and dirt.
That wasn't from bombs dropping.
That was from the downdraft of a helicopter coming in to evacuate me
because that's the big difference.
And also, when I was hurt, within one hour,
I was on the operating table in a hospital.
Leggett, on the other hand, days later is on a beach,
and, whilst he's made it to the beach,
his journey is far from over, and he still very much in danger.
Luckily, that afternoon, Leggett was evacuated home
on a hospital ship.
The ship the Indian contingent unit were supposed to take
was sunk by German bombers,
but they also made it safely back to Britain on a second ship.
The vast majority of the 200,000 plus British soldiers hadn't even
made it to Dunkirk, and Churchill was still refusing
to order their mass evacuation.
For now, their lives hung in the balance.
In the medieval hilltop town of Cassel,
40 miles inland from Dunkirk,
troops of the Royal Gloucestershire Regiment
were digging in, preparing to face a vicious German assault.
Their mission was to protect General Gort's corridor,
down which the majority of the British Army
were streaming towards Dunkirk.
They were ordered to fight to the last bullet, or the last man.
There were defending points where they had the upper hand.
The Germans had to attack them, and they were dug in.
But they were aware that there was a great chance
that they weren't going to get away, that they were going
to have to sacrifice themselves.
One 22-year-old junior officer,
Second Lieutenant Roy Creswell,
was ordered to take his platoon of 12 men
to defend this huge, half-built bunker just north of Cassel.
So, this place was meant to be an anti-aircraft defence,
but when Creswell arrived, it hadn't been finished.
In fact, unlike today, there wasn't even a door.
Wow.
Well, when the British first arrived here, what they found
is it was full of civilians, French and Belgian refugees,
who were taking shelter.
Now, unfortunately, they had to ask them to leave
as they readied the position for the impending German onslaught.
The halt order had been holding the Germans back.
You have these Panzer divisions
that were absolutely straining at the leash to go.
But the British and the French didn't know
that the German tanks and troops had halted.
For soldiers like Lieutenant Roy Creswell,
and the 12 men based in this bunker,
they were expecting to be attacked by an overwhelming force
at any moment.
And they knew they were expected to fight to the last man,
or the last bullet.
Back in Britain, the public weren't aware quite how desperate
the situation was for soldiers like Roy Creswell.
But, even the heavily censored papers couldn't completely conceal
the catastrophe unfolding in France.
The people of Britain know this is difficult,
you know, we are in a really, really difficult situation.
A national day of prayer had been called that day.
Millions, including Churchill, attended services across the country
to pray for Britain's deliverance from the Nazis.
It's a real insight into the mind of the country
at this particular moment.
To me, this is a sense that all that remains now is hope.
I think it's quite telling
that Churchill goes from this church service,
where all that's left is hope - hope is invoked...
..and he gives the order
for the start of Operation Dynamo.
So now the evacuation can begin.
PHONE RINGS
At 6:57 that evening, Ramsay and his team in their bunker
under Dover Castle received an order from the Admiralty,
saying Operation Dynamo is to commence.
They'd had just seven days to prepare for the biggest evacuation
in military history.
So, when Churchill does finally give the off,
what's the first ship that goes over?
Within two hours, just after 9:15 that evening,
the first ship, Mona's Isle, is sailing from below us,
down here, headed for Dunkirk.
And what kind of ship is Mona's Isle?
She's an Isle of Man steam packet company steamer.
She used to carry pleasure passengers to and from
the Isle of Man,
and she's going to bring the first mass contingents home.
How many soldiers did Ramsay and Churchill
believe they could evacuate?
Simply as many as possible.
They thought maybe the low tens of thousands -
maybe 35,000 -
something like 10% of the force.
10%? That's... The chances aren't great, are they?
Yeah. That's going to be an horrendous scale of loss.
While the vast majority of the British Army
were still retreating down Gort's corridor towards the coast,
here in Dunkirk, thousands of shattered soldiers had started
to stream into the town.
At 4am, Mona's Isle made it into Dunkirk's harbour.
The harbour had been damaged by German bombing,
but it was still usable.
Mona's Isle tied up on the quayside,
and, as the skies lighten, Dunkirk came under its most intense
aerial bombardment so far.
Goering's planned annihilation of the port from the air had begun.
Mona's Isle managed to make it away with 1,420 soldiers on board
and headed home.
But, the Germans were now just 15 miles down the coast.
Their artillery opened fire on the ship.
Then, she was attacked by the Luftwaffe.
Mona's Isle limped back across the Channel,
but 23 people on board were killed, and a further 60 were wounded.
This was a terrible foretaste of the deadly pounding
that rescue ships would take in the coming days.
Next time...
Carnage is unleashed as the enormous evacuation begins.
Ships lined up here were sitting targets for German bombers.
It's a ruin, it's a smoking pit.
I get a small taste of the horrors the British faced...
I'm only out here for a couple of minutes.
These men were out here for nights on end.
..and witness the ruthlessness of the Nazis.
Bullets tore through the crowd of men, the troops.
Will the British soldiers ever make it home?
Over two weeks in 1940, a military miracle unfolded here in Dunkirk -
the evacuation of 300,000 troops cut off and trapped
by a rampaging German army.
But it was very nearly a disaster that knocked Britain out of the war
and handed victory in Europe to the Nazis.
I'm JJ Chalmers, a former Royal Marine
and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
Over three programmes, I'll be charting those momentous 14 days,
day by day, hour by hour.
In France, I'll be retracing the steps of those heroic men
who made the evacuation possible.
Artillery slammed off the bunker!
Using my own experiences,
I'll relive some of the horrors they faced.
Nothing prepares you for a moment of extreme trauma like that.
The real story of Dunkirk goes far beyond the familiar tales
of beaches and little ships.
I'm Raksha Dave, and I'm finding out just how the rescue mission
was planned and executed,
revealing how tenacity and ingenuity
overcame overwhelming odds.
23 people on this tiny boat!
Last time...
More than 200,000 British soldiers in France were encircled
by the Germans and forced into a headlong retreat to Dunkirk,
the last possible port where they could evacuate back to Britain.
This time... As the British fight desperately to prevent
Dunkirk being overrun...
..the biggest naval evacuation in military history begins...
Ships lined up here were sitting targets for German bombers.
..but soon faces disaster.
These are the 14 days that saved Britain.
27th May, 1940,
17 days after the German invasion of France,
more than 200,000 troops of the BEF,
the British Expeditionary Force, were surrounded,
most still streaming towards Dunkirk and its beaches.
They were squeezed into a shrinking pocket
by the rampaging German blitzkrieg through France.
This, the port of Dunkirk,
was their only remaining escape route.
Calais had already fallen to the enemy,
so a plan to get the soldiers back to Britain,
codenamed Operation Dynamo, had just begun.
Admiral Bertram Ramsay was the Navy officer
in charge of Operation Dynamo.
Described as a dapper, brisk little man,
he was an organisational genius.
He was based in a complex of bunkers under Dover Castle.
Ramsay feared, at best, only 45,000 troops could be evacuated
in the brief time he'd have before Dunkirk was overrun by the Germans.
But things hadn't started well.
The first ship he'd sent had left Dunkirk that morning,
but it was bombed.
23 men on board were killed and 60 were wounded.
The next four ships that Ramsay sent came under intense fire from the air
and from German artillery guns.
The Germans were only ten miles down the coast from Dunkirk.
One of the ships was sunk
and the other three were forced back to Britain.
His evacuation plan was already in disarray,
and soon things would get even worse.
The commander of the British forces in France was General Gort.
The majority of his shattered army was still struggling
towards the coast, short of food and ammunition,
and the Germans were closing in.
What Gore has to do is to basically form a kind of a corridor,
a safe corridor, that his troops can use
to get from Belgium, you know, through to Dunkirk.
The safe corridor he created
stretched 70 miles inland from Dunkirk.
Gore positioned his men on the west side along the Bassee Canal
to defend it from the advancing German army.
Then he positioned additional troops in key towns
to provide a second line of defence.
Gort knew that a lot of these units would be overrun.
A lot of them would have looked at this as though,
"Yes, I am going now to be sacrificing my own life
"for the good of the army,
"for the good of my country."
As Operation Dynamo began 30 miles north in Dunkirk,
one of the regiments tasked with holding back the Germans
was dug in here along the Bassee Canal.
They were the Royal Norfolk Regiment
and they had already sustained terrible casualties
whilst defending a cement factory on the River Escaut
just a week before.
The few hundred survivors from the beleaguered regiment
were sent here to again face the German assault.
Morale amongst the men was surprisingly high,
especially considering that German aircraft were dropping
propaganda leaflets like these ones.
Had lines like, "Look at this map. It gives you the true situation!
"Your troops are entirely surrounded.
"Stop fighting! Put down your arms!"
Or, "Do you really believe the nonsense
"that Germans kill their prisoners?
"Come and see for yourselves the contrary."
Now, the British did make use of these, but as toilet paper.
The Royal Norfolks had been allowed a brief respite,
because Hitler had ordered a three-day halt
to the German advance to enable his troops to reinforce.
But that morning, the Germans would begin their assault again -
their aim to wipe out the British
before they could make it to Dunkirk.
The Germans on the opposite side of the canal
who were preparing to attack
were from the fanatical SS Tokenkopf.
Now, the pride of these supposedly elite Nazis had been badly damaged
just days before, as they had run off in disarray
following a British assault.
Now they were hellbent on revenge.
At 10am, the assault began on the Bassee Canal.
Through weight of manpower, the SS managed to get across the canal,
but in the process suffered terrible losses.
The Royal Norfolks were pushed back, fighting field to field,
desperately protecting Gort's safe corridor.
Around 100 survivors of the Royal Norfolks retreated to here,
at their headquarters at Duriez Farm, about a mile from the canal
and 33 miles south of Dunkirk.
This is where they found themselves surrounded by the SS.
One of them was 26-year-old Bill O'Callaghan.
He joined the army at 18 and was a radio operator.
Knowing this was their last stand,
he destroyed his equipment.
Bill and the other survivors now faced a desperate fight.
The SS were out to avenge their losses.
The Royal Norfolks were determined to follow their orders to fight
to the last man or the last bullet
in order to give the British Army a chance to escape to Dunkirk.
This was going to be a grim fight.
Soldiers like Bill O'Callaghan were fighting to protect
their thousands of exhausted comrades streaming towards Dunkirk.
But at that moment, Dunkirk was being annihilated.
As the bedraggled British troops made their way along these roads
to Dunkirk, they watched as the town ahead of them was hit
by wave after wave of German bomber.
A massive plume of black smoke rose up into the sky
that could seen from miles around.
Goering had assured Hitler his Luftwaffe could blast Dunkirk
and its port to rubble,
so trapping the British.
Dunkirk on the 27th, it was basically a living hell.
Something like 4,000 bombs are dropped.
About a third of the citizens of Dunkirk, about a thousand died.
It's a ruin. It's a smoking pit.
You've got all these French and British troops packed into cellars.
Bombs are raining down on top of them.
During breaks in the bombing, soldiers looted booze from bars
and rampaged through the streets.
And as a result, all was chaos.
But most critical of all, the port is under such intense bombardment
that most of the ships were having to turn away.
In fact, only two made it into the harbour that afternoon.
Admiral Ramsay's evacuation plan, already in disarray,
had now literally been blown out of the water.
Now the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers
heading to Dunkirk faced a terrible fate -
either captivity or death.
Only a miracle of deliverance could save them now.
The evacuation of the British Army here
through Dunkirk had only just begun,
but was already facing disaster.
The thin line of defence protecting the troops
streaming down Gort's corridor towards the town was collapsing.
On 27th May, the thought was they had maybe two days
to conduct the evacuation,
at which point the Germans would take the town and it would be over.
That would mean hundreds of thousands of British troops
being captured.
This catastrophic loss would put huge pressure
on the new British prime minister, Churchill,
to capitulate, handing victory in Europe to the Nazis.
By the early afternoon of the 27th,
it looked as if the Germans wouldn't even need to take Dunkirk.
The port was being systematically destroyed from the air.
Ships couldn't even get in to evacuate the troops
who had managed to make it here.
It seemed as if Churchill's estimate
of getting 30,000 troops back home to Britain was over optimistic.
With the bombed-out port out of action,
the only possible option was to somehow evacuate everyone
from the nearby beaches.
In his bunker under Dover Castle,
the officer in charge of the evacuation, Admiral Ramsay,
now had to work out how this could be done.
I've come back here to meet historian Philip Weir.
With Dunkirk's port destroyed,
how was Ramsay going to get all of those men home?
Ramsay had already had in his plan the possibility
that he would have to take people off the beaches,
but this is incredibly difficult for large ships.
They can't get in terribly close,
because the beaches at Dunkirk are a nice, gentle slope.
So if you try and get a big ship in there, it can run aground
and essentially just get stuck.
That's dangerous.
So Ramsay needs a lot more small boats
that can get right up onto the beach and get people out.
Using small boats may have seemed obvious, but it wasn't that simple.
As they couldn't carry many men, they'd need a huge number.
And the boats weren't Ramsay's only problem.
With all that mayhem happening at Dunkirk,
how does Ramsay get to grips with it?
Well, he needs to have people on the ground working for him.
He needed a representative over there,
and Captain William Tennant, who is sent to Ramsay
to go out to Dunkirk to get things a little more under control...
Tennant was a 50-year-old First World War veteran.
Leaving behind his Whitehall desk job,
he boarded a destroyer with a team of 170 men
and headed towards the deadly inferno that was now Dunkirk.
It seemed almost certain to be a one-way journey.
After a day of intense fighting...
..the British rearguard was still trying to hold back the Germans
advancing on Dunkirk.
The situation was desperate.
Private Bill O'Callaghan
and the remnants of the Royal Norfolks
were holed up in their headquarters at Duriez Farm.
The village of Le Paradis was surrounded
and they were completely outnumbered
by fanatical SS troops hellbent on revenge.
The farmhouse was set alight by incoming mortars.
The commanding officer ordered everyone out, including O'Callaghan.
Under heavy fire,
they headed to this neighbouring barn to join the others
already fighting here.
Around 100 soldiers valiantly held off the SS for hours
until their ammunition ran out.
Bill O'Callaghan recorded what happened.
They tied an old towel around the end of a rifle
and stuck it out of this very door.
Shortly after, the firing stopped
and the men processed out.
However, the first 12 men to appear were mown down by the SS.
Then the firing stopped again.
Next, the SS marched O'Callaghan and the other survivors
along this road to the neighbouring farm.
We know from testimony from Bill O'Callahan what happened here.
Him and his friends were led into this paddock,
and, as he entered, he noticed that there was a machine gun set up
somewhere over there at that tree line.
Now, as he was led up the side of this building
and he came to within line with it,
but the gun was to his right,
they opened fire.
GUNFIRE
Bullets tore through the crowd of men, the troops,
and he dove for cover.
As he went down, he put his arm in front of him.
One of the rounds grazed him and gave him a flesh wound,
and he was lying there surrounded by his friends
who were groaning in agony.
It almost seems fitting that you come here and it's raining
and the weather is miserable,
because this place, this is a place of misery.
Bill listened as the SS shot and bayoneted anyone still alive.
Miraculously, they passed by Bill.
He and his comrade Bert Pooley were the only survivors.
They hid for four days,
then surrendered to regular German soldiers,
who treated them humanely as prisoners of war.
27th May. I hadn't quite realised.
I was actually injured on May 27th,
albeit 71 years later.
And also, unlike the 97 souls here,
I was fortunate.
I didn't pay the ultimate sacrifice.
While the Germans had now broken through the defences
along the Bassee Canal,
they now faced Gort's second line of defence -
towns that had been turned
into strong points, such as Cassel.
Cassel is a really great place to fortify.
It's on top of a hill.
You've got all the main roads to Dunkirk going near it or around it.
So if you can hold Cassel,
you're going to be a real thorn in the side of the Nazis.
But Dunkirk may not be worth defending.
In the early evening, William Tennant, who'd volunteered
to be the senior naval officer in Dunkirk, landed in the town.
He said, "The sight of Dunkirk gave one a rather hollow feeling
"in the pit of the stomach,"
and it seemed Tennant faced a hopeless task
for which he was completely unprepared.
No-one even knew he was now in charge.
One of Tennant's men cut out the initials SNO,
Senior Naval Officer,
using foil from a cigarette packet,
and then, using the oil out of a sardine tin,
Tennant pasted it
onto the front of his helmet.
Let's give it a go.
Right.
What do you reckon?
In the Marines, we used to say, "Improvise, adapt and overcome."
I think that's the epitome of it.
But there were far greater problems to overcome.
As he looked over the docks, Tennant confirmed they were beyond repair.
Tennant sent a message to the HQ in Dover, saying,
"Please send every available craft to the beaches
"east of Dunkirk immediately."
But almost all the available ships
were too big to get into the shore
to pick up the troops.
17 miles inland, the Germans had now reached Cassel.
British soldiers had fortified every suitable building...
..including this half-built bunker.
It was just north of the town and was being defended by 13 men,
led by Second Lieutenant Roy Creswell.
It would feel relatively safe in a position like this,
but it does have its problems and its vulnerabilities.
Once a round comes through one of these slits,
well, that's going to start bouncing around inside.
I cannot imagine the tension in this bunker
as Cresswell and his men prepared for a German attack
that would come any minute.
Cresswell spotted the first Germans on the horizon
and opened fire.
Artillery slammed off the bunker!
The Germans began to attack over the field
as Cresswell and his men unleashed a hail of bullets
from the firing slits.
One of the Germans managed to make it round to here
and began to bang on the door
before being killed by a grenade thrown from this window.
You can tell from looking at the damage
that the Germans threw absolutely everything they had at this.
There are big blasts from pieces of artillery,
but when you look at things like this,
this is done by a rifle, and you can tell it,
because when you look at this metalwork here, you can see
where the round has passed right through the steel frame of this.
I mean, you can only imagine what it was like to be inside there
as artillery shells just burst off it.
It would have been shaking. Thunderous sounds.
And looking at it now, it does give you a sense
of what these guys would have been facing over the next three days.
The bravery of soldiers like Cresswell had delayed the Germans
long enough for tens of thousands more men to reach Dunkirk.
But with the port destroyed.
William Tennant was trying to organise evacuation
from the beaches,
but he didn't have enough boats small enough
to get into the shore.
It seemed hopeless, but then Tennant had a brainwave.
There was an alternative -
the stone breakwater that protected the port
and became known as the East Mole.
In 1940, a maintenance walkway ran along the breakwater
at the mouth of Dunkirk's port.
It jutted out into deep water,
and Tennant thought large ships
just might be able to moor alongside to load troops.
It wasn't designed as a jetty.
It was subjected to very strong currents
and had a tidal rise and fall of about 16 feet.
It was going to be very difficult
for ships' crews to manoeuvre alongside,
but, so far, it was undamaged.
A 10.30pm, Tennant gave the order for a ferry to approach the mole
and attempt to moor up.
The plan had to work,
because on this first day of the evacuation,
only 7,669 soldiers made it home.
At this rate, it would take a month
to evacuate the British Army -
time they didn't have.
It was thought that the Germans could only be held back
for two more days at most.
The situation for the British Army in France was desperate.
The British had slowed the German advance
by using strong points like Cassel,
but they were now being squeezed
into a shrinking pocket on the Channel coast.
Thousands of exhausted soldiers
were streaming onto the ten miles of beach east of Dunkirk,
but there weren't enough boats small enough
to get into the shallows,
and the port was destroyed.
Captain Tennant was here on the East Mole, the breakwater
that juts out into deep water.
And at 3am, he was beginning a risky experiment
to see if he could bring large ships in to moor alongside,
so they could get troops out.
The Queen of the Channel ferry attempted the task.
With some difficulty, she managed it.
950 troops were quickly loaded
and set sail for England.
Tennant was elated.
The mole worked.
He radioed Dover at 4.36am
and told them to send as many ships as possible to here,
directly to the East Mole.
But space was limited,
so they should continue to send ships to the beaches around Dunkirk
to load troops there as well.
But now there was a glimmer of hope,
because he could load troops directly onto large ships.
The mole was so crucial, because loading soldiers
from the beach was slow and dangerous.
You had people pouring onto the beaches
in every kind of physical state you can imagine.
You had people who were so hungry
that one man was seen try to trying
to eat the leather strap of his helmet.
You've got an enormous number of threats in the air
for those stranded on the beach.
And what defence do the BEF have?
I mean, they've just got their own rifles.
You had also periods where things were quiet,
where the sun was out, where people were enjoying themselves,
playing football, playing cricket.
The whole world was on those beaches
and every experience was had.
This is the uniform worn by most of the BEF soldiers
who were streaming down onto these beaches around Dunkirk.
It is the standard British battle dress.
It's a bit itchy,
but actually the make-up of the uniform
and the equipment, in particular,
like this webbing with ammunition pouches,
water bottle, a bayonet, isn't that dissimilar
to what I used to wear when I served in the early 2000s.
But actually it's the material that it's made out of -
that's the big difference. I reckon if this gets wet,
well, it's going to take a very long time to dry out.
Being cold is one thing,
but being cold and wet, well, that's just a misery.
As the troops marched their way towards Dunkirk,
they lugged with them their food and belongings in packs like this,
but they would have to be ditched now,
because there would be no room for them on the ships.
The beach filled with their discarded equipment,
the promenade clogged up with their abandoned vehicles.
The only way to get troops from the beach to the big ships offshore
was on small boats
that could come into the shallow waters,
but very few of them were available -
only the big ship lifeboats or rowing launches,
and they were scarce in number.
When the little boats did arrive,
getting out to them wasn't easy.
It involved wading out into freezing water right up to your neck
and waiting for one to arrive to save you.
And most of the soldiers couldn't swim.
Right.
Here goes nothing.
I have actually done this before.
I used to have to practise it in the Marines.
But we knew the boats were coming.
You brace every time one of these waves hits.
HE EXHALES
Listen, I'm only out here for a couple of minutes.
These men were out here for nights on end.
It's not very pleasant, even to do it nowadays.
There was often disorder on the beaches -
people fighting to get on board,
people even having to shoot others
to stop them trying to jump a queue.
You've got too many men trying to get on these little rowing boats.
Sometimes they capsize.
They're overloaded. Sometimes they only make one trip.
You know, the oars get washed away.
The process was too slow.
The Navy needed lots more little ships.
Admiral Ramsay, commanding the evacuation,
was urgently searching for suitable boats.
On 28th May, attention turned to the River Thames.
I'm heading to the Tough Brothers boat yard here in Teddington,
which played a key role in finding
those desperately needed little ships.
I'm meeting Matt Allchurch, who now owns the boat yard.
Tell me about Tough Brothers boat yard.
So, the Tough Brothers were a firm of boat builders
who were based here for generations
in the building behind us.
And during the war, they had 600 men
working here building boats for the war effort.
So, then, on May 28th, 1940,
Douglas Tough gets a phone call.
What did he have to do?
Well, he was asked then to collect little ships from along the Thames.
Here he had 14 boats
that were already suitable to go out to Dunkirk.
Why were these small ships suitable?
The ships, particularly on the Thames,
are quite shallow-draught.
And, of course, what they wanted to do was to have boats
that could get in close to the beach to rescue the allies,
and the way the boats on the Thames are built, they're ideal.
One of those Dunkirk little ships
is still owned by Douglas Tough's granddaughter - Helen Tough.
You must have heard some incredible stories about that day.
I mean, how did he get all of those little ships?
Well, he had a tug and they just literally went up the river
picking up boats.
If the boat was deemed to be usable,
then it was requisitioned.
If you objected, it was requisitioned.
There is a story that a woman went out shopping, came back.
The boat had gone, with her cat on it.
Was she actually living on the boat? She was living on the boat.
Wow. And somebody else saw someone taking the boat
and ran after it all the way to Teddington Lock
and declared it had been stolen,
to find that it had been requisitioned.
And then when they came down here, the boats are stripped.
So, your grandfather was just getting rid
of everybody's belongings inside.
It must have been quite a sight
to just have all of this stuff lying around.
Yes, but the boats had to be cleared.
You couldn't take a fully laden boat across.
Douglas Tough assembled over 100 boats
and they were sailed by volunteers
or pulled by tug down to Ramsgate.
In Dunkirk, as the second day of Operation Dynamo neared completion,
the desperate need for more ships,
and the dangers they faced, was becoming terribly apparent.
Just about every available square foot of space on any of these ships,
you know, had men on it.
Wherever you could put a human being, that's where they were.
You were not home and dry when you got on that boat
to take you back home, because you have got numerous threats.
You've got mines that have been planted by the Germans.
You've got U-boats with torpedoes.
You've got U-boats that can scuttle you.
Not forgetting what's flying overhead, of course,
and what can potentially be fired off the coast.
If you're on an overcrowded, massive boat that gets hit by a torpedo
or gets bombed, that's not a place you want to be.
That night, the destroyer Wakeful was sunk.
640 soldiers were on board.
All but one were killed.
Despite this horrific loss,
nearly 18,000 soldiers were evacuated
on the second day of Dynamo -
around 6,000 from the beach
and 12,000 from the mole.
It was better,
but with over 150,000 British soldiers still in France,
it wasn't nearly good enough.
17 miles inland,
the British were still clinging on to the hilltop town of Cassel.
They'd withstood wave after wave of attack,
but suffered terrible losses.
The bodies of British soldiers
were now strewn in these streets.
It had been a relatively quiet morning
for Lieutenant Cresswell and his 12 men based here
in this bunker just outside Cassel.
They were running short on food
and most of their water had been given to an injured mate
who had been wounded the day before.
Then, at 9am, Cresswell was astonished
to see an injured British officer
stumbling towards them from the German lines.
The unfortunate man had been hauled out of an ambulance
and ordered to help capture the bunker.
READING: The man shouted, "Wounded British officer here."
When he reached the bunker,
he looked down at the dead German nearby
and said loudly to Cresswell, "There are many English and Germans
"like that around here,"
then glanced up meaningfully at the roof of the bunker,
an action which seemed to indicate Germans were on the roof.
At that, he hobbled off.
The Germans had used this distraction to get onto the roof,
where they poured petrol through a hole, soaking some wood
the defenders had used to block it,
then tossed in a grenade.
EXPLOSION
In a true British stiff upper lip,
Cresswell wrote in his report of the fire,
"They failed to drive us out, but had at least improved
"the warmth inside, which was appreciated,
"for it had been very cold inside."
The fire smouldered for hours,
but the men survived and their job was now done.
The Germans had managed to bypass Cassel
and had continued their advance towards Dunkirk.
Cresswell and his men were now cut off behind enemy lines.
When they realised the battle had moved past Cassel,
Cresswell and his men surrendered.
They spent the next five years as prisoners of war.
Those who were told to defend Cassel were basically told,
"You're going to have to defend this until the last bullet
"and your last drop of blood."
And that's more or less what they did.
Figures like Cresswell, through his astonishing bravery,
is buying time for his fellow members of the BEF,
and so by 29th May,
you've got almost everybody back,
or into Dunkirk,
and it's thanks to the actions of people like Cresswell.
There'll be people watching this programme right now
who would not be alive today were it not for the actions of Cassel
which saved their grandfather, allowed him to get home,
have a lovely wedding, have some babies - lo and behold.
That's the story.
Hundreds of thousands of British and French troops were now trapped
in this sliver of land,
squeezed up against the English Channel.
But it wasn't just the German ground forces that threatened them.
On the beaches, they were easy prey for the Luftwaffe bombers.
Their only hope now was if the pilots of the RAF
could somehow hold them off.
By 29th May...
..a last-ditch line of defence
had been set up just outside Dunkirk...
..and hundreds of thousands
of shattered British and French soldiers lined the nearby beaches.
But this concentration of men made an easy target
for the Luftwaffe bombers.
The only thing standing between them and annihilation
was the Royal Air Force.
That morning, low cloud was hampering the German bombers,
but the RAF was still on patrol.
At the Imperial War Museum at Duxford,
I'm meeting Clare Mulley to find out how the Air Force
and 22-year-old Spitfire pilot Alan Deere were faring.
Things are going really badly for the troops
on the ground on the 29th.
But what about the RAF?
Are they suffering many losses as well?
Horrendous - on the ground and in the air.
A squadron is normally 12 aircraft
and they were often flying with just eight aircraft at this point.
And what about our man Alan Deere? How's he doing?
He'd been going out daily.
He'd actually been hit in the wing once
and just managed to glide back to the UK,
but he was coming out again. Yeah.
But surely his luck must be running out. Yes.
Well, 3.30 in the morning, Alan is woken
from his desperately needed sleep and gets in his aircraft
and flies out again to provide cover
for the troops on the beaches at Dunkirk.
And almost immediately he is engaged in a one-to-one battle.
He's actually up against a light bomber.
And he shoots at it, hits it,
but the rear gunner takes him out.
His plane is hit in several places, including in the engine.
He sees a beach about 15 miles from Dunkirk,
and he heads for it.
And he manages a pretty impressive forced crash landing,
but he does knock himself unconscious against the windscreen
as he lands.
He regains his consciousness
and he realises he still strapped into what is now a burning Spitfire.
He manages to get himself out,
and he's got quite a big gash to his head.
He's really not in a good way.
Al Deere crash-landed here on this stretch of beach.
It was at the very edge of the narrow pocket of territory
still in British hands.
The Germans were only a few miles away up the beach,
but even RAF pilots hadn't been told just how bad the situation was,
so A Deere began to blithely walk up the beach away from Dunkirk
towards the nearest port - Ostend -
which he didn't realise had been in enemy hands for days.
But when he got to the road behind the beach,
Deere found a stream of soldiers headed in the opposite direction,
towards Dunkirk.
Deere joined them,
travelling along roads choked with abandoned vehicles.
Papers in Britain had reported
troops were "retreating, according to plan",
so he was stunned by this reality.
A few hours later, he made it to Dunkirk.
When Deere emerged here on the beach in Dunkirk,
he was met by the most astonishing sight -
lines of British soldiers, as far as the eye could see,
stretching across the beach down onto the water's edge.
But they were waiting patiently.
There was order in this chaos.
And Deere was proud to see that even after suffering terrible defeat,
the British Army could still keep its discipline.
Al Deere headed to the mole and persuaded a Navy officer in charge
it was essential for him to jump the queue so he could get back
and continue the fight in the air.
Deere still had to wait for a ship to arrive, which he did,
but he experienced the terror of a Luftwaffe bombing,
because, at 3pm, the protective cover of the clouds began to clear
and the bombers returned.
He described what happened.
"There was a mad scramble for cover.
"I sheltered behind the rock causeway,
"but most troops dived into the water,
"re-emerging at neck level to fire their rifles
"in desperate defiance at the bombers."
Deere eventually boarded a destroyer,
narrowly escaped being blown out of the water,
but made it back to England.
He now fully appreciated the importance of the job
he and other pilots were doing.
He got back to his airfield that evening
just 16 hours after crashing.
In the months ahead, Deere would fight heroically
in the Battle of Britain.
In Dunkirk, the relentless bombing of the mole continued.
Ships lined up here along the side of the mole were sitting targets
for German bombers.
Troops cowered as they watched ships being hit by German bombs.
A British destroyer and a ferry slowly sank.
Luckily, the troops were able to get off,
most of them having to jump into the water
and swim back to the mole.
600 of the traumatised soldiers
eventually set sail on the paddle steamer Crested Eagle,
but then disaster struck.
Just off here at Bray-Dunes,
about six miles east of Dunkirk,
the Crested Eagle came under relentless fire
from German dive-bombers.
Now, she was hit by four bombs
and was on fire from bow to stern.
About 200 soldiers jumped overboard,
where they were gunned down by German machine guns
from the planes above.
But the paddles were still turning.
And in a desperate attempt to save the survivors on board,
the captain ran the ship aground,
where it can still be seen at low tide today.
300 of the men who'd just boarded Crested Eagle were now dead.
12 other large ships
and three destroyers
were also sunk that day.
Despite these terrible losses,
the evacuation on 29th May
went better than anyone could have hoped.
Over 47,000 troops
had been taken from Dunkirk that day -
around 14,000 from the beaches,
and 33,000 from the mole -
more in one day than Churchill believed
could be evacuated in total.
But now the Germans were just outside Dunkirk,
held back by a thin line of exhausted troops -
the last line of defence.
Here on the beaches, and in Dunkirk,
100,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force
were still waiting to be evacuated,
and it felt almost certain
that soon they would be in the hands of the enemy.
Next time...
The British suffer the most catastrophic day of the evacuation.
The scenes that were playing out on the beaches around Dunkirk
were truly chaotic, like something out of Armageddon.
The plight of the men and the beaches grows ever more desperate.
Any man that would retreat past a mile marker that he pointed at
would be shot.
Only acts of extraordinary bravery can save them now.
Over two weeks in 1940,
a military miracle unfolded here in Dunkirk -
the evacuation of 300,000 troops,
cut off and trapped by a rampaging German army.
But, it was very nearly a disaster that knocked Britain out of the war
and handed victory in Europe to the Nazis.
I'm JJ Chalmers, a former Royal Marine,
and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
Over three programmes, I'll be charting those momentous 14 days,
day by day, hour by hour.
In France, I'll be retracing the steps of those heroic men
who made the evacuation possible.
Artillery slammed off the bunker.
Using my own experiences, I'll relive some
of the horrors they faced.
Nothing prepares you for a moment of extreme trauma like that.
The real story of Dunkirk goes far beyond the familiar tales
of beaches and little ships.
I'm Raksha Dave, and I'm finding out just how the rescue mission
was planned and executed,
revealing how tenacity and ingenuity overcame overwhelming odds.
23 people on this tiny boat.
This time, the British step up their desperate fight
to prevent Dunkirk being overrun.
We don't have enough men,
so if it means you've got to stay in your position
or I'm going to shoot you,
then that's what it takes.
The biggest naval evacuation in history faces disaster.
This just must have been the most terrifying place
to have been on Earth that day.
While an armada of ships of all shapes and sizes
set sail on a heroic rescue mission.
These are the 14 days that saved Britain.
30th May, 1940.
Tens of thousands of exhausted soldiers were waiting
on the beaches of Dunkirk for rescue ships to take them home.
Operation Dynamo, the ambitious plan to evacuate the British Army
from France, had begun three days earlier.
53,000 troops had already boarded ships from the East Mole in Dunkirk.
It's the half mile long breakwater
that's just jutting out into the sea behind me.
It had never been designed as a jetty,
but with the harbour at Dunkirk badly damaged by the Luftwaffe bombing,
there was little choice.
But, 20,000 troops had also been rescued from this ten mile long
stretch of beach just east of the town.
But, around 100,000 troops were still surrounded
as the German forces closed in at an alarming rate.
Luckily, that morning there was bad weather.
Low hanging clouds over these beaches protected them
from Luftwaffe bombers.
But the evacuation was still going too slowly.
There just weren't enough suitable ships.
At this rate, it would take another nine days
to get all the men back to Britain.
It was time they didn't have.
General Gort, commander of the British forces,
reckoned he had just two days at most
before the Germans overran Dunkirk.
The most important thing to remember about Dunkirk,
it's a game of time.
You have to
get the maximum number of soldiers off the beaches
before the Germans arrive.
Hundreds of thousands of British and French troops were now trapped
inside a pocket around Dunkirk.
28 miles long, but only five miles deep.
And, with the Germans rapidly approaching,
the British knew they were running out of options.
French soldiers were defending the western end
of the pocket's perimeter.
The British were manning the rest of it, and would attempt to hold
back the Germans using a narrow drainage canal as a barrier.
I'm just outside Dunkirk.
The town is about five miles that way.
Now, this once marshy flat land
is covered in a spider web of canals and ditches.
Believe it or not, it actually reminds me a lot of Afghanistan.
The area where I was fighting, there's the fertile land
that sits either side of the Helmand River.
You'd only farm that area because it was covered in
man-made irrigation ditches and canals.
We couldn't just go where we wanted because these obstacles
got in the way, and it channelled you into vulnerable points
like water crossings and bridges.
That was the same for the Germans.
They had ripped through France and Belgium,
but now, particularly because the British had blown
the bridges over the canals,
it meant that these obstacles were all the more difficult to cross.
Dunkirk is perfect ground for our needs.
What have you got around Dunkirk?
You've got marshland and you've got canals.
These are difficult things for tanks to get through and across.
We just need time to evacuate our men.
And that's what this terrain, this boggy land, is going to buy us.
Among the soldiers ordered to defend this stretch of canal
was Lieutenant Jimmy Langley and his platoon of 37 men.
Langley was 24.
He dropped out of Cambridge four years earlier
to join the famous Coldstream Guards.
He was tireless, exceptionally resourceful,
and loved by his troops.
They'd been attempting to hold back the Germans for over a week,
but now Langley was preparing for his most critical battle yet.
Langley and his platoon set up in a farmhouse just a bit further
down this bank.
They knew that the Germans would approach across the fields
on the opposite side of the canal.
The men spent the morning fortifying the farm,
and dug trenches in the neighbouring fields.
As they worked, they watched the last British stragglers
pass over a nearby bridge, trying to get to the beaches of Dunkirk.
The retreating soldiers were ordered to abandon their equipment
at the canal because Dunkirk was already choked
with thousands of vehicles.
This left rich pickings for Langley's men,
who came away with a haul of weapons, food and cigarettes.
The farm fortified, all they could do was wait.
Langley felt that they were as prepared
as they could be for the inevitable siege they would face
when the Germans arrived.
But General Gort knew Langley and the other men on the perimeter
were desperately outnumbered.
It was only a matter of time before they'd be overwhelmed.
The evacuation from the beaches had to be accelerated.
Up to this point, most of the ships available for the evacuation
had been too large to get into the shore
to load troops directly.
To solve this difficult problem,
the Royal Navy had come up with an unlikely plan.
They'd been requisitioning hundreds of little ships -
everything from pleasure cruisers to fishing boats.
Some of those little ships survive today,
and many are gathered here on the River Thames for the annual
Dunkirk Veterans Cruise.
I've been lucky enough to be invited aboard
one of these historic ships - Janthea -
by the family who now own her.
So, who originally owned Janthea and how did she get requisitioned
to go to Dunkirk?
Well, Janthea was built for a gentleman called Austin Reed,
and Austin never took commission of her
because she was commandeered by the Navy.
The story goes that when he heard the boat was going to Dunkirk,
he came down and put barrels of beer on for the troops.
Who was actually crewing these boats?
There's this kind of general assumption, isn't there, that
people think that people just went out there -
the people that owned the boats, to go and rescue these soldiers?
Yeah, that's not quite true.
Toughs and other boat yards were told to collect boats together,
and they were taken to Sheerness
or Dover,
and then naval crews were put on board.
So they were predominantly sailed and crewed by the Navy?
Yes, the majority. There are one or two of the little ships
that we know the owners took.
Some of them didn't even know where they were going.
You know, on the trawlers and the tugs, that sort of thing,
they were just crew and they didn't actually know
what they were going to do - they just went.
In the early hours, an armada of these little ships
bravely set out for Dunkirk on their perilous rescue mission.
Many wouldn't return.
By midday on 30th May, 1940,
large numbers of little ships were arriving
at the beaches near Dunkirk.
The scenes that were playing out on the beaches around Dunkirk
were like something out of Armageddon.
You've got to imagine the sight facing those on the little ships
when they arrive.
You've got hundreds of thousands of men
stretching almost as far as the eye can see.
You've got, kind of, equipment, you've got fires burning,
and then you've just got the natural hazards of the water itself,
of the sea.
After navigating those hazardous inshore waters,
the little ships faced their next danger.
Getting stuck.
The gentle slope of the beach means that the water stays very shallow
a long way out,
plus the tide ebbs and flows very quickly,
meaning that there was a real risk of small ships being stranded
as the tide moved, and they were beached until the next high tide.
Your little boat can be swamped in the swell.
You can have a load of desperate men trying to come towards your boat.
That may risk it as well.
There are even accounts of naval personnel
having to draw their weapons,
even fire warning shots, to prevent these, you know,
understandably desperate, scared men from swamping the boats
that are lifting them off.
Getting the men onto the little ships was proving dangerous
and slow, but then a military police officer
came up with an ingenious idea.
Lieutenant Harold Dibbens had grown up around boats
on the Isle of Wight.
He'd been overseeing the embarkation at De Panne Beach at the eastern end
of the pocket still in Allied hands.
Gibbons headed into the dunes,
where he found a group of military engineers.
He suggested that together they try and build a makeshift jetty,
using the hundreds of abandoned lorries that littered the seafront.
It was a long shot, but if it worked,
it could transform the evacuation.
The engineers had only just arrived in the dunes
after an exhausting march.
Normally 250 strong, they were down to just 30 men,
but they agreed to help.
The engineers drove the trucks into the shallows at low tide,
and then built a walkway on top using scavenged floorboards.
By mid-afternoon, this is what they'd built.
Now, small boats could come alongside this improvised jetty -
soldiers and other troops could make their way
along these boards into the deeper waters,
where they could step off into boats without fear of capsizing.
And I'm stood exactly where it was built.
I mean, you can see here the hotel,
the Kursaal, which stands to this day,
so many of the buildings around it were damaged.
The area was completely strewn with old vehicles and munitions.
And look, even over here, you can see the iconic
towers on that building.
The jetty was so successful,
troops up and down the beach started building others.
Possibly they'd had the same idea at the same time as Dibbens,
but ten were built that day.
This ingenious solution
allowed the little ships to be hugely effective.
But, as the little ships continued to rescue soldiers
from De Panne Beach, a very different scene was unfolding
that evening at a luxury beachfront villa
that used to stand just up there.
The villa was a residence of General Gort,
commander of the British Army.
It was chosen
because it had a direct dial international phone line.
This was the only line back to England
in the entire Dunkirk pocket.
For 11 days, Gort had been
desperately attempting to save his army.
Here in De Panne, they were on the most easterly edge
of the pocket. With the front line only a few miles away,
it meant they were, in fact, in range of the German artillery.
The threat to Gort was growing every day.
So, the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
decided he should be evacuated.
The order wasn't well received.
He got his nickname, Tiger Gort, because he's so courageous.
After all, this is a man who's won a Victoria cross.
There is no higher decoration.
He's a brave, loyal man,
and he will die with his last man, given the choice.
But of course, Churchill's like, "Uh-uh. That is a PR disaster.
"What, they're going to get our top military head,
"and go back with it to Germany? No, mate. You get on that boat."
Churchill told Gort it would be "a needless triumph
"to the enemy to capture you."
So, Gort reluctantly agreed to leave.
That evening, he hosted a final dinner at the villa.
It was a rather extraordinary dinner party.
Senior officers sat down to a three-course meal,
including champagne and fruit salad,
as artillery shells fell around them,
and exhausted soldiers clambered into little boats
just outside their window.
They could have raised a toast that night because had it
been the most successful day of the evacuation so far.
Thanks to the little ships,
and the bad weather holding off the Luftwaffe bombers,
almost 30,000 troops were evacuated from the beaches,
whilst over 24,000 were taken from the Mole,
the breakwater being used as a jetty.
In total, 53,823 evacuated
in just this one day - a near miraculous achievement.
And in the early hours of the following morning,
there was another miracle of salvation for the British.
The hundreds of German tanks that were descending on Dunkirk
were ordered to withdraw
because Hitler didn't want to risk his precious tanks in the final,
difficult assault on the town.
This is not tank terrain,
and we've made sure that is especially the case.
We've opened the sluice gates.
We've flooded what were originally marshlands, wetlands anyway.
What doesn't like marsh?
A big, heavy Panzer,
and a Hitler only has so many Panzer tanks.
I mean, you know, he doesn't have an infinite supply.
It meant that one of the greatest threats to the thin line of soldiers
holding the perimeter, like Lieutenant Langley
and his platoon in the farmhouse behind me,
would have been removed, which was just as well
because they didn't actually have any weapons
that could have destroyed German tanks.
But, the British and French troops were still overwhelmingly
outnumbered by the German infantry.
Although, with the German tanks gone,
they might just be able to hold out a little longer.
But, would it be long enough?
A desperate situation at Dunkirk wasn't helped by the
rapidly deteriorating relationship
between Britain and her French allies.
Anglo-French relations are very rocky, to say the least,
because the French genuinely feel that the British are deserting them.
There were certainly examples of the French trying to get on board
ships to take them back to England,
and priority being given to the British.
So, when Churchill hears that it's almost exclusively
the British Army that's being saved,
he's like, "We've got to turn this around."
That morning, Churchill flew to Paris for a meeting
with the French Prime Minister, Reynaud.
He had to admit that, of the 165,000 men evacuated so far,
only 15,000 were French.
Churchill is aware of the situation,
and don't forget, he's also a pragmatist.
He is a politician. He knows he has to cut a deal.
So what he did, in a very Churchillian manner,
he mimes arm in arm,
he said, "Bras dessus, bras dessous!"
In other words, from now on, they'll be going arm in arm,
and large numbers of French were taken from that point.
But you know, the bitterness felt by the French
remained for years and years and years.
RAKSHA: While these negotiations played out,
hundreds of little ships were again arriving at Dunkirk.
But the sea was far rougher today,
and German artillery was bombarding the beaches.
Sailing into this maelstrom on her second mission
was Janthea, who had already been damaged on her first.
On the way to the beaches,
she was machine gunned by aircraft,
and on the way out, a Stuka landed a bomb
about 30 metres away from the stern.
And it loosened all the planks in the back end.
When she got back to Ramsgate,
they filled the bilges with pitch to stop it leaking...
As you do! As you do.
She went back on the 31st.
All we know is that she brought 50 Frenchmen,
I don't know how, out to a trawler.
And then she brought 23 Frenchmen back to Ramsgate.
23 people on this tiny boat.
Amazing.
It's pretty incredible story.
I mean, she was completely battered and almost blown to smithereens,
but still managed to go back out there. Yeah, absolutely.
How many soldiers do you think she managed to save?
We just don't know.
Unfortunately, the crew didn't log it,
as not many of them did, you know?
Nobody made notes.
People didn't think the world was going to last much longer. No!
What do you think about the people who took these little boats over
and rescued all of those soldiers?
We're very proud of the ships and what they did.
I always said that the Dunkirk spirit
is sort of the attitude - just get on and do it.
And that's what the Dunkirk spirit is all about,
and that's what the people at the time must have been thinking.
But not all the boats at Dunkirk were as lucky as Janthea.
De Panne, at the eastern end
of the ten miles of beach held by the British,
was increasingly coming under intense artillery bombardment
from the Germans, who were now amassing at Nieuport.
This is... Just must have been the most terrifying place
to have been on Earth that day
because, you know, it is constant bombardment.
The little ships that had bravely fought through the heavy surf
to the beach now started to be hit by German shells.
Dozens of boats were sunk,
and others forced back.
The British soldiers making their way through De Panne
towards the beach had to run through a nightmare of
fire, shrapnel and falling glass.
When soldiers arrived at the beach,
they found no boats waiting for them.
So many little ships had been destroyed by German artillery
that the decision was made that the evacuation of De Panne beach
would be abandoned.
The 6,000 already exhausted troops
were ordered to begin marching the five miles up the coast
to the beaches outside Dunkirk.
They get there, this wonderful promised land
from which they're going to retreat back home to England,
but in fact, you know, the vessels aren't waiting for them.
The relentless German bombardment meant the already small pocket
of coastline available to the British was shrinking even further.
On May 31st, almost 23,000 British and French troops were evacuated
from the beaches - 7,000 fewer than the previous day.
But, because low cloud held off the Luftwaffe,
an amazing 45,000 were taken from the Mole by large ships.
This was the most evacuated on any day from Dunkirk -
68,014.
And, amongst those troops was their leader, General Gort,
who travelled to the beach under the cover of darkness.
Like his soldiers before him, he made his way
onto one of the hastily built lorry piers.
But, in the darkness and confusion on the beach,
Gort became separated from his staff
and somehow managed to end up on the wrong pier.
While his staff boarded the Royal Navy flagship HMS Keith as planned,
Gort ended up being taken to a minesweeper called HMS Hebe.
It was a mistake that would soon threaten his life.
Because the Navy was about to suffer a day of carnage.
General Gort, the recently relieved commander of the BEF,
was on board the minesweeper HMS Hebe just off Dunkirk.
He shouldn't have been there.
Gort had become separated from his staff,
who were correctly on the destroyer, HMS Keith.
Both ships were picking up hundreds of soldiers,
who were being ferried out from the beaches.
For two days, German bombers had been kept away by rain
and low cloud that blanketed the beaches.
But, in the early hours of the morning,
the clouds began to clear and the weather started to improve.
Suddenly, the rescue ships offshore began to realise just how vulnerable
they were going to be from attack from the air.
To find out what happened,
I've come to meet naval historian Richard Holdsworth
on board the World War II destroyer, HMS Cavalier.
Hello, Richard. Hi, Raksha.
Gort has finally been evacuated.
Was he rescued on a ship like this?
He should have been on a destroyer like this.
He should have been on board HMS Keith,
the flagship of the offshore fleet.
Armed destroyers like HMS Keith were fast, manoeuvrable
and the safest option to keep the famous general safe.
But, during the night, he ended up on the wrong pier and ended up
on the minesweeper Hebe, which set off to sail,
and he must have thought he was safe.
But the air attacks then started as the cloud cover disappeared
and daylight dawned.
What happens to the minesweeper? Does it come under attack?
Literally, the whole of that fleet spent the morning
being attacked by swarms of Stuka dive-bombers.
And Hebe was no exception.
Gort himself came to the bridge to join the captain,
and is known to have stood there completely undisturbed
by the carnage going on around him.
Setting that example for which he was most famous.
Was Gort in real danger?
He was in as much danger as everybody offshore that morning.
It's one of the realities of life on a warship.
The senior commander is in as much danger as the most junior member
of the crew.
He was in the thick of the action.
But, during a lull in the Luftwaffe attacks,
the crew managed to transfer Gort to HMS Keith.
She was then quickly sped to Britain on a high speed
motor torpedo boat, and only just in time.
Shortly after Gore gets away from Keith,
Keith itself comes under very, very violent attack from dive-bombers.
So she's racing full ahead.
High speed turns.
She then takes a direct hit...
..and has sunk by about 9:40.
Ships like these have a crew of 200, 225.
Most destroyers were taking between 800 or 900 soldiers off at a time,
and they were crowded on the upper deck
because they didn't want to put people below
in case the ship was hit and sank and they'd be trapped below decks.
It must have been like hell on Earth.
A further four destroyers, one minesweeper,
and at least three passenger ferries were lost that day.
You know, we're talking about thousands and thousands of men,
who thought they were safe, and then discovered that they weren't.
Inevitably, hundreds of people lost their lives,
really within sight of shore.
It's heartbreaking, really, isn't it?
To think that you're almost there, that you're being rescued,
you're within arm's reach of those white cliffs of Dover.
But actually, you're not safe at all.
The troops defending the canal on the Dunkirk perimeter
had enjoyed two days of relative peace.
But, at 11am, the Germans launched a massive attack.
Their aim was to overrun Dunkirk that day.
Lieutenant Jimmy Langley was among the troops who had to stop them.
Langley and his platoon of Coldstream Guards
were keeping watch from the farmhouse
that they had carefully fortified.
They'd knocked tiles out from the roof and machine guns poked out.
A low mist hung over the fields.
As it burnt off, Langley spotted 100 Germans
making their way across the fields on the opposite side of the canal.
He ordered his machine gunners to open fire.
All of them were killed.
The Germans fired an incendiary shell into the roof.
Langley and his men managed to tumble down the stairs
moments before it exploded.
But then they went straight back up and started firing again.
An officer from the unit next to them made it to the farmhouse
and told them that they could hold out no longer
and that they were going to retreat.
His men were exhausted and the Germans were massing
for a huge assault.
But Langley's commanding officer told them that they must
hold the line and that any man that would retreat
past a mile marker that he pointed at would be shot.
We don't have enough men,
so if it means, you know, you've got to stay in your position
or I'm going to shoot you, then that's what it takes.
A short while later,
Langley spotted the officer and two of his men
near the mile marker.
Suddenly, they started to run towards Dunkirk.
Langley and his commanding officer both fired.
And they saw the officer fall.
The two other men ran back to their positions.
No-one else attempted to retreat, but shortly after,
while Langley was manning a machine gun in the roof,
he felt a huge wave of heat and dust as he was knocked from his feet.
An artillery shell had come through the roof.
He wrote in his memoirs that,
"there was a long silence and I heard a small voice
"saying, "I've been hit",
"which I suddenly realised was mine."
Funnily enough, I had similar thoughts when I was hit.
I knew what the risks were.
I knew where the statistics lay.
But you just don't think it's going to happen to you.
And, when one of your platoon is badly wounded,
it can have a devastating impact on everyone else.
When you see someone you know, get injured, get hurt.
It's not just a body, a piece of meat.
It's someone you know, it's someone you respect.
It's someone you love.
Being able to put that to one side and carry on with your job
is difficult because, obviously, you might even just think
if that can happen to him, it can happen to me.
And if you think like that, you just can't do your job.
You just can't fight.
You must put it to one side.
Pretty wild when I look back at it, but...that's the job.
Langley's arm was severely wounded.
After patching him up, his men loaded him onto an ambulance,
which headed to the beaches.
They then returned to the fight.
Seven miles away,
William Tennant, the Navy officer overseeing the evacuation,
was on the Mole.
Five days earlier, he'd volunteered to come to Dunkirk from Britain,
and he and his men had brought significant order to the chaos.
Tennant set up his communications base
in a concrete bunker at the foot of the Mole.
It gave him some protection from the artillery
that was falling on the Mole itself,
and from the German aircraft that had continued its onslaught
now that the weather had cleared.
The shells and bombs blew holes in the Mole's walkway,
which had to be patched with planks and doors.
Ships loading at the Mole and waiting offshore suffered terribly.
In total that day, 31 were sunk,
and 11 others were badly damaged.
It was the blackest day of the evacuation for Tennant.
The losses were so great that he agreed that the next day
there would be no daylight evacuation.
The British and French troops gathered on the beaches
would have to wait until the cover of darkness to board any ships.
While it was hard enough for the able bodied at Dunkirk,
things were even worse for the injured.
This included Lieutenant Jimmy Langley.
When Langley arrived here on the beach in his ambulance,
he was stretchered out to lifeboats waiting in the sea.
But, when he told the crew he was unable to stand,
he was turned away because he would take up the same space as four men.
Sadly, this was the case for many severely wounded soldiers
all along the beach.
Many injured men were taken to a requisitioned mansion in Dunkirk,
known as Chapeau Rouge,
which had been turned into a medical clearing station.
There were over 300 wounded soldiers here,
many of them too injured to be evacuated.
When Langley arrived here in the afternoon,
the doctors and the orderlies drew lots to decide
which of the medical team would stay behind with the injured.
They knew that that meant that they would be captured,
or worse, because there was a rumour swirling that the Germans
were taking no prisoners.
It must have been terrifying.
The doctors and nurses operated on injured soldiers by candlelight,
with shells bursting in these gardens.
Very different to my own experience in Afghanistan.
When I was injured, I was evacuated to a hospital within one hour.
I was back in the UK from the other side of the world within 48 hours.
Now, I've been involved in triaging guys in the past,
but it was minor injuries -
deciding who goes first,
but not the idea of having to decide who goes at all.
Guys here that were so badly wounded that they couldn't make it home
and would have to be left to the fate of the Germans.
And the medical team that stayed with them.
I mean, that is unbelievable bravery.
While Langley was taken to Chapeau Rouge,
his men have been valiantly defending the farmhouse
on the canal.
But that night, along with all 4,000 British soldiers
holding the perimeter, they were ordered to surreptitiously withdraw.
While they headed to the Mole, French troops took over the defence.
So many ships were now involved in the evacuation
that, despite the terrible losses,
on June 1st, nearly 64,500 soldiers were evacuated.
Only 4,000 fewer than the previous day.
More than half of those evacuated were French.
The 4,000 men who'd just withdrawn from the perimeter
were almost the last British soldiers still in Dunkirk.
But, when they arrived at the Mole,
they found no ships waiting to take them home.
Following the terrible losses the previous day,
Tennant had ordered the last ship to leave before dawn.
The men, including the troops of the Coldstream Guards,
who had held the line against overwhelming odds,
were told they would have to wait an entire day
until the ships returned that evening.
They trudged off back to the dunes, hoping that the thin line of French
troops who were defending them could hold out for another day.
But, with the Germans now only four miles away,
that hope was fading fast.
By June 2nd, over 200,000 British soldiers
had been evacuated from Dunkirk.
About 7,000 remained -
mostly the troops who'd put up the final line of defence.
They'd taken shelter in the dunes and were waiting for nightfall
when they hoped the rescue boats would return.
The area was being constantly pounded
by German artillery and bombers.
William Tennant and his Royal Navy team also remained,
and the 300 injured soldiers at Chapeau Rouge.
Medics had found three lorries
to transport some wounded to the Mole.
When they arrived, Tennant sent a message from his bunker
at the foot of the Mole, saying,
"Wounded situation acute. Hospital ship should enter during the day.
"Geneva Convention will be honourably observed.
"Enemy will refrain from attack."
Two hospital ships were sent from England at 1:30pm.
But, despite the red crosses, both were attacked by the Luftwaffe.
SS Worthing had nine bombs dropped near her,
and was forced to return home damaged.
Then, at 7:15pm, SS Paris was sunk off Dunkirk.
No hospital ships made it through to Dunkirk that day.
The wounded here at Chapeau Rouge,
including Langley of the Coldstream Guards, would be left behind.
They suspected that their fate at the hands of the Germans
would not be good.
As night fell, a last flotilla of ships
began to arrive at the Mole.
The remaining British were waiting here for them,
along with thousands of French.
They included the survivors of Langley's platoon.
Within only a couple of hours, they had all been boarded.
Tennant spent most of his sailors home as well.
Only Tennant and a few of his team remained.
Except for them, the Mole was deserted.
The French troops had stopped arriving,
many of them were still holding the perimeter,
and the commanding officers had not told them to evacuate.
At 11pm, Tennant sent his final message home -
"Operation complete. Returning to Dover."
Tennant stepped onto a fast motor torpedo boat,
with his staff, and returned to England.
On June 2nd,
another 26,256 men
were evacuated from Dunkirk.
All British troops, apart from the severely wounded,
had now been rescued.
This extraordinary achievement made Dunkirk a byword
for British grit and determination against all odds.
But, it wasn't the end of the story.
Many French soldiers remained in Dunkirk.
The ships bravely returned the following evening
and picked up over 45,000.
At 3am, a motor torpedo boat made a final check of the harbour.
It was the last British ship to leave Dunkirk.
Knowing no more ships were coming,
the French surrendered later that morning,
and the Germans entered the town.
Soon, they were marching up the driveway of Chapeau Rouge.
When they arrived here at Chapeau Rouge,
Langley was lying here on a stretcher on the drive.
He'd been carried out to greet the Germans
for they feared all the wounded would be murdered.
Shortly after, the first German arrived.
He was exhausted, covered in dust,
and he slumped down next to Langley.
The battle of Dunkirk had been just as hard for them.
Langley pointed up at the Red Cross that was flying above the house,
and the German leader nodded.
He gave Langley a drink of water from his own bottle.
It was an act of kindness and solidarity.
Both sides had faced horrors in the last two weeks.
German doctors had to amputate Langley's arm,
but, five months later, he escaped into Vichy France.
In 1941, he was repatriated back to Britain,
where he joined MI6.
The events of Dunkirk left both the Germans and the British
depleted and exhausted.
They suffered similar numbers of casualties.
In total, 3,500 British soldiers lost their lives,
and 13,053 were wounded.
It wasn't just comrades left on the beaches of Dunkirk.
Tens of thousands of trucks and motorbikes.
Thousands of tonnes of ammunition,
hundreds of thousands of tonnes of supplies,
machine guns, rifles -
vast amounts of equipment was left behind.
Nazi propaganda was all over Dunkirk.
There were pictures full of soldiers that had had to abandon
all of their equipment,
and them getting excited about how just one unit alone
had had to discard 200 guns.
But, an astonishing 338,226 British
and French soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk.
You can replace tanks, you can replace guns,
you can't replace men quite so quickly and quite so easily.
The troops arriving back in Britain
weren't sure what kind of reception awaited them.
As the troops came home,
they were expecting to be treated
as the sort of remnants of a shattered army.
I've talked to a lot of veterans, and that's the impression I've had,
that we were embarrassed about what happened to us
and we were astonished to find we were being treated as heroes.
We were being bought drinks in pubs, we were being slapped on the back,
we were being thrown sandwiches as we came home on the trains.
We were heroes.
We got our boys back onto British soil.
It is the makings of a great story,
and stories carry the morale of a nation.
The mood in the country goes up because we're still fighting.
Through tenacity, acts of individual bravery and sacrifice,
the British had managed to overcome the formidable odds they faced.
It would be too much to claim that victory had been snatched
from the jaws of defeat on the beaches of Dunkirk.
But it meant that the badly battered and bloodied British Army
could limp home, lick their wounds,
and prepare to fight another day.
Four years later, the men rescued at Dunkirk
were the core of the British Army that landed in Normandy
in the decisive assault that would ultimately defeat the Nazis.
If the Dunkirk evacuation hadn't taken place,
huge numbers of people just simply wouldn't be here today.
We'd be living in a different world.
In the dark days of 1940,
Dunkirk gave the British people a glimmer of hope.
It demonstrated that, with fortitude and ingenuity,
we could withstand the Nazi onslaught.
It gave Britain the courage and resolve, as Churchill said,
to "ride out the storm of war", and "never surrender".
Those 14 days in the spring of 1940 saved Britain.