Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance by David Boyle

Author:David Boyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-05-21T21:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 28 May

This was the day the nightmare really became real. In the early hours of the morning, Ramsay’s most modern ferry, Queen of the Channel, had been bombed by a single German plane, which took her to the bottom, though most of her crew and the 900 troops aboard were rescued by the stores ship Dorrien Rose.

Even more significant was the Belgian ceasefire negotiated by King Leopold, aware that his troops could no longer hold out. The Belgian government disagreed and went into exile in London, leaving Leopold behind. Gort’s right hand man, Alan Brooke, destined for a critical role in the war effort, was moved from organising the rearguard to filling the gap with the British Second Corps. Even so, the Belgian surrender left seven French divisions cut off in Lille, effectively behind enemy lines.

The newspaper columnist William Hickey said that he had overheard a conversation about Leopold in an expensive restaurant that day. “I’m terribly shocked about it,” said one man. “He was at Eton!”

Aware of the whole new danger to the BEF, Churchill wrote a memo to his ministers:

“In these dark days, the prime minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the government, as well as important officials, would maintain high morale in their circles; not minimising the gravity of events but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination.”

*

Churchill went to the House of Commons where he warned them to “prepare for hard and heavy tidings”. It was a terrifying phrase for those who knew that the vast bulk of the British army was now facing imminent capture or annihilation.

Churchill’s own battle was also reaching a moment of crisis. For days now, he had been tiptoeing around the looming disagreement with his rival for the position of Prime Minister, his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Halifax was, with increasing exasperation, proposing a different way forward: that they should put out feelers to the Italian government to see what terms Germany might accept to end the war. Halifax was representing the views, not just of the Foreign Office, but of intelligent and informed opinion who believed, and with some reason, that Britain could not fight on without an army.

Churchill had wrong-footed Halifax so far, without opposing him directly, but he knew the moment would have to come – and he was still not secure enough in his position to survive a high-level resignation or two from the former appeasers. Today, he had decided to call in reinforcements. The day before he had suggested that, the issue before them was so momentous that it made sense to include the Liberal Party leader in their discussions – knowing that Archibald Sinclair was not just a friend and former comrade-in-arms from the Western Front, but a long-standing anti-appeaser.

But his masterstroke was to hold the 5pm war cabinet in his room in Parliament, instead of in Downing Street. The

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