When was the dunkirk disaster

German bombs had hit many of the ships beside the mole that afternoon, and a junior naval officer was so shaken by what he saw there that he panicked, and drove to La Panne, a resort north-east of Dunkirk, to telephone through his warning to England. According to this officer, the mole was unusable, and this effectively prevented ships going there that night.

The true situation was only discovered the following morning, whereupon more ships were sent and the evacuation resumed. The first of the many sinkings that day took place in the early hours of the morning near Kwinte Whistle Buoy, north-east of La Panne, that marked the easternmost point on Route Y, the longest route leading from Dover to Dunkirk. There had been a disaster, the result of an almost unbelievable chain of events.

In the early hours, HMS Wakeful, a destroyer weighed down by its load of evacuated British soldiers, had been torpedoed by a German E-boat, causing the ship to break into pieces. Within 15 seconds both the bow and the stern had plunged headfirst into the water, taking all but one of the rescued soldiers with them, but leaving the two middle sections sticking up in the air with members of the crew clinging to them.

Passing British ships moved in to assist them and those who were already in the sea, their heads bobbing about above the water like corks. Rather than taking pity on the shipwrecked sailors, he ordered his men to fire two torpedoes at them. After the torpedo had hit its target, the watching submariner noted with satisfaction that there was an explosion at the stern of the British warship.

But they did not hang around to shoot up the second ship they had spotted. It is what happened afterwards that transformed a tragedy into a disaster. One of the circling ships was Comfort, a British drifter. When she fell back into the sea, she was temporarily submerged, and Fisher was swept off her deck, back into the sea.

He then watched aghast as HMS Lydd, a minesweeper, whose crew in the darkness had mistaken Comfort for a German vessel, charged towards his erstwhile rescuer. We are all English! Lydd slammed into Comfort, cutting the drifter in half, and killing all who had been on board apart from Fisher and four other survivors. As if that was not bad enough, the Luftwaffe chose 29 May as the day when it made its first determined attempt to disrupt the evacuation.

One of those damaged ships was the destroyer HMS Jaguar. She had taken on board about 1, soldiers, and was steaming away from the harbour when at about 4pm a bomb landed in the sea just a couple of yards away, and exploded.

Another destroyer was on hand to tow Jaguar away, and to take her troops on board, but not before the survivors had seen the terrible injuries inflicted. Stoker Arnold Saunders saw one soldier with a leg blown off, his only hope of surviving being the assistance provided by a comrade, who was attempting to stem the bleeding by putting on a tourniquet. Another image that was remembered by many of the survivors was a man who had had half his head blown off. But it was the burned men on some of the other bombed ships who appear to have suffered most.

One of the worst cases was Bob Bloom, a year-old sickbay attendant on HMS Grenade, which had been tied up at the mole alongside Jaguar while the latter ship was taking soldiers on board. I was thrown up in the air and hit the deckhead. Then I fell back into the blast given off by the bomb. As it hit me, I put my hands up to my face to protect it. It felt as if I had been hit six times on the face with a whip. I was in such pain that I prayed to God to take me. On the first full day, Operation Dynamo was only able to evacuate about 7, men from Dunkirk; around 10, got out the following day May Some to 1, boats, many of them leisure or fishing crafts, eventually aided in the evacuation from Dunkirk.

Some were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were manned by their civilian owners and crew. At the outset, Churchill and the rest of British command expected that the evacuation from Dunkirk could rescue only around 45, men at most. But the success of Operation Dynamo exceeded all expectations. On May 29, more than 47, British troops were rescued; more than 53,, including the first French troops, made it out on May By the time the evacuations ended , some , British and , French troops would manage to get off the beaches at Dunkirk—a total of some , men.

On May 27, after holding off a German company until their ammunition was spent, 99 soldiers from the Royal Norfolk Regiment retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, about 50 miles from Dunkirk. Agreeing to surrender, the trapped regiment started to file out of the farmhouse, waving a white flag tied to a bayonet. They were met by German machine-gun fire. They tried again and the British regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to an open field where they were searched and divested of everything from gas masks to cigarettes.

They were then marched into a pit where machine guns had been placed in fixed positions. They lay among the dead until dark, then, in the middle of a rainstorm, they crawled to a farmhouse, where their wounds were tended. With nowhere else to go, they surrendered again to the Germans, who made them POWs. After the war, a British military tribunal in Hamburg found Captain Knochlein, who gave the fateful order to fire, guilty of a war crime. He was hanged for his offense.

Germany had hoped defeat at Dunkirk would lead Britain to negotiate a speedy exit from the conflict. In the same speech, however, he delivered a stirring statement of the British resolve that would serve the nation well over the next five grueling years of warfare:. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Despite the successful evacuation at Dunkirk, thousands of French troops were left behind and taken prisoner by the advancing Germans. But with Britain and France defeated, American interests lay squarely at home. There was to be no provocation of Hitler, no attempt to engage in a conflict in the Atlantic. Roosevelt looked to secure a naval agreement with Hitler that provided for the demilitarization of the western Atlantic, leaving the American navy to concentrate on the looming danger from Japan in the Pacific.

The offensive gave Japan control over precious oil resources and deprived Britain of the power to protect its route to India. In Berlin, Hitler lost no time. In any event, assembling and mobilizing the army would simply take too long; after the western offensive, many of the motorized units needed an extended period of repair.

The invasion was therefore postponed until the following spring. By early August, German forces reached Moscow. Forced back on the Central Asian republics, the Stalin regime saw no other option but to sue for terms.

The subsequent territorial subtractions made the calamitous concessions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in look like minor losses. Most important, the oil of the Caucasus now fell to Germany. So did the granary of Ukraine. Added to the enormous resources that Germany already controlled and ruthlessly exploited in Western Europe, the Russian acquisitions placed in its hands the economy of the defeated European continent.

Japan also had greatly extended its material resources by virtue of its brutal occupation of much of Southeast Asia. Deprived of assistance from the Allies, Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek felt compelled to accept the harsh terms that the Japanese sought to impose.

By this time—the spring of —the United States had accelerated its rearmament program. Aware that a showdown with the dominant Axis powers could not be indefinitely postponed, Roosevelt nonetheless continued to do everything necessary to avoid confrontation, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. But with their newly won resources, the Germans were making rapid progress toward the making of both atomic weapons and the long-range interballistic missiles that could deliver them.

In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Matsuoka Yosuke—mastermind of the triumphant conquests of and —welcome the state visit of Wang Ching-wei, the leader of the puppet Chinese administration that has been in place for the last four years.

A number of Indian princelings—viceroys installed by Japanese arms in the former heart of the British Empire—are additional guests of honor. In both Southeast Asia and on the European continent, millions of once free people are reduced to slavery, forced to labor for their Japanese and German masters. The degradation of the humiliated Chinese defies description; tens of thousands of Slavs in Europe have been transported in cattle wagons to huge slave labor camps within the Arctic Circle and on the borders of Siberia.

What has happened to the Jews remains unclear. They have completely disappeared from sight, rounded up by the Germans and their collaborators in the occupied territories of Western Europe and shipped off eastward—most likely, it seems, to the northernmost outreaches of the former Soviet Union. No one is sure of their subsequent fate. Terrible rumors circulated by underground resistance movements and intercepted by American intelligence indicate that up to eleven million have been exterminated.

A few remarkable reports suggest that they have been killed in specially designed gas chambers, their bodies incinerated in industrial-style complexes built for that purpose in the region of Minsk, Kowno, Riga, and the woods outside Moscow. But no one credits such stories.

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