How long did the dunkirk evacuation last

He described how his medical orderly had his right cheek blown away. Two other men were killed. After the bombing ended, a different kind of torture had to be endured. Elliman and his men, along with thousands of other British soldiers, abandoned their original plan to get on a boat off the beach at Malo-les-Bains, and joined the queue leading to the mole. Only the wounded were got away that night.

As the hours went by, the spirits of all must have been sinking. Mine certainly were. Sleep was impossible. It was just waiting, waiting, waiting. The shortage of destroyers at the mole during the night of May was the result of a mistake. German bombs had hit many of the ships beside the mole that afternoon, and a junior naval officer was so shaken by what he saw there that he panicked, and drove to La Panne, a resort north-east of Dunkirk, to telephone through his warning to England.

According to this officer, the mole was unusable, and this effectively prevented ships going there that night. The true situation was only discovered the following morning, whereupon more ships were sent and the evacuation resumed. The 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.

A year-old from Essex, Waite was captured on May He was moved from place to place and kept prisoner on a farm in Poland and forced to work the fields with Nazi guards watching. In the frigid winter of —45, on a forced march of nearly a thousand miles from Poland to just outside of Berlin, Waite almost died. He finally was rescued in April by Allied forces as the war was drawing to a close. But in , we had the additional challenges of one of the coldest winters on record that January, of having suffered years of misery, fear, exhaustion and starvation and of watching fellow men die and helping to bury them by the roadside.

Those are things you never forget. British soldier Peter Wagstaff recalled similar treatment. Some were killed. But you took it because it was part of life. You accepted it. This was happening all the time. You are fighting to keep alive. Meanwhile, the French military was in tatters and seemed poised for defeat. From the day of the German invasion on May 10 through the evacuation of Dunkirk, France had lost 24 infantry divisions, including six of seven motorized divisions.

Instead of four armored divisions equipped with tanks each, the country now had three, each equipped with Allied assistance had disappeared. The British had withdrawn all but two divisions south of Dunkirk, and the Belgian Army had surrendered. The French were further hampered by a lack of strategic clarity. Premier Paul Reynaud favored a Dunkirk-like evacuation to North Africa, where the army could be protected by the French Fleet and the Royal Navy while it reconstituted itself, gathered additional forces from the French colonial empire and took delivery on a fleet of planes from the U.

Commander Weygand, however, opposed such a move and vowed to remain on French soil to defend his homeland. General Alan Brooke returned to France to command the few remaining British units and judged the situation untenable.

At Amiens, 90 miles northwest of Paris, the German 10th Panzer Division lost two thirds of its tanks in just three days. The 7th Panzer Division, led by Erwin Rommel, finally broke through in the west and charged 20 miles south of the Somme to cut off one British division, which retreated and later evacuated. As the days proceeded, Rommel simply directed his Panzers around the remaining Hedgehogs, and the French were unable to mount an effective counterattack.

Paris fell on June On June 17, Rommel covered miles westward and on June 19 he captured Cherbourg. The French government, which had been in a state of crisis for weeks, signed an armistice on June The brutal Chinese government assault on the protesters shocked the West and brought denunciations and sanctions from the United States.

In May At approximately a. Ford was working as the chief engineer for the main plant of the Edison Illuminating Company The fort was built to defend his forces from French soldiers enraged by the murder of Ensign Joseph When the fortress city of Verdun, France, came under siege by the Germans in February , the French pleaded with the other Live TV.

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