The Salvation at Dunkirk
Dunkirk. By A. D. Divine. (Faber and Faber. 15s.) AT the time, the evacuation of the B.E.F from the beaches of Dunkirk seemed a miracle. Now, more than five years after the event, it is possible to see that the operation was in a double sense in keeping with our past naval and military tradition. It was nothing new for a British army to find salvation as the sea coast—at Bremen and Corunna and elsewhere—and it was nothing new for the Crown in an " emergency " to summon to its aid- all the available SeaMC/V and shipping of the realm. In 1940 the difference lay in the scale of the operation and in the perils that attended its execution ; never before had so many men to be rescued in such dangerous circumstances. Dunkirk was one of our most gloribus defeats, a defeat that could be rightly hailed as a victory, and Mr. Divine has now told its story as fully as it is ever likely to be known. His account is based on the collection of logs made by Mr. J. D. Casswell, K.C., and a great part of it consists of the plain narratives written by the men who made the miracle possible. Their stories are woven skilfully into a long and detailed history of what the Navy called " Operation Dynamo," a history which no one interested in our maritime heritage will find too long. A carping critic might complain that there was too much similarity between the extracts from log-books, but he would be wrong, for these seeming repetitions help to build up a picture of an operation which was simply the sum total of thousands of heroic trips from the English coast to the Dunkirk beaches and back. A worthy record of Dunkirk could only have been constructed in the way Mr. Divine has chosen.
The quality of the book and of the men it describes can best be judged by a few examples chosen at random from its pages. There is the understatement of Captain Holkam of the Mona's Queen: " everything was uneventful until we reached to within about half a mile off Dunkirk, when the ship was mined and sank within two minutes, the survivors being rescued by the destroyer Vanquisher." There is Lieutenant Davies, of the paddle-minesweeper Oriole, who deliberately beached his ship so that she might be used as a pier, and who two days later formally reported his action, citing the appropriate paragraph in King's Regulations. There is the barge Royalty, which was attacked by German planes when its crew were setting their topsail after its tug had slipped the tow. There was the navigator of the destroyer Malcolm, who marched through the streets of Dunkirk playing the bagpipes in order to collect soldiers when the flow along the Mole had temporarily stopped. One could go on quoting good yarns. This is a book not only to be read through, but to be sampled again and again.
Mr. Divine is no mere panegyrist. His picture includes the warts, but the warts were remarkably few and insignificant. He disposes of the legend that the evacuation was carried out in halcyon weather—it is surprising how many legends about weather there are in British naval history—and he judiciously distributes the credit due to the various types of ship that took part (although I looked in vain for anything about his own motor-boat, apart from the reference to his decoration in the appendix listing the honours awarded). Above all, he pays tribute to the staff work and to Admiral Ramsay, who had the overall responsibility for the evacuation and who four years later, as Supreme Naval Commander, was to gain his most fitting reward, the ferrying back of the Allied troops to France.
S. H. F. JOHNSTON.
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