The bulk of the British and French armies were huddled on the beach at Dunkirk as German Stuka dive bombers pounded them from the air. (To enhance the terror, the Germans had attached whistles, “trumpets of Jericho,” to the planes and bombs.)[1] The situation was desperate; Winston Churchill quietly agreed with the Admiralty that only ten to twenty percent of the over two hundred thousand British troops would make it out.[2] The captain of a destroyer riding off shore surveyed the scene and said evacuation would be “like attempting to empty a swimming pool with a fountain pen.”[3] Yet in just nine days, 335,000 British and French soldiers made it safely to England. It is commonly called a miracle.
After the First World War, France built a string of heavily-armed bunkers, the Maginot Line, to protect her eastern border, but in 1939, Hitler made an end run around it through Belgium. The United Kingdom sent a large force to block him, but they were ill-equipped and too-poorly trained to withstand the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). Almost overrun, they fell back to the northwest coast of France, where the crossing to England is shortest. The site was Dunkirk, just north of Calais.
Realizing that time was too short for normal military evacuation, a call for help went out for any and all civilian craft. From every harbor, estuary, and river in the land, “from above the locks at Teddington, stretching to within sight of the ‘Dreaming Spires’ of Oxford,”[4] a thousand boats set out for the English Channel.[5] Many were unsuitable for the open ocean, few were designed to retrieve passengers from a sandy beach, yet on they came, braving bombs, magnetic mines, artillery rounds, torpedoes, and machine gun fire.
Under normal circumstances, choppy seas would have made havoc of the rescue, but for days, the weather was “nothing less than perfect for such an operation. Hot, still days with a brazen sun shining through the haze over a placid, almost oily sea.”[6] That was one of the miracles.
There were other unexpected breaks. The German pilots were sometimes grounded by what one Luftwaffe diarist called “clouds so thick you [could] lean on them.”[7] When they did fly, the German dive bombers used deep penetrating bombs rather than the airburst variety, and many simply caused harmless upheavals of sand.[8]
“Another miracle was Adolf Hitler’s order…halting his tanks just as they were closing in for the kill.”[9] Whatever his reason (and there are several guesses), he allowed the Allies to survive, to fight and win another day.
In a radio address to the nation, King George VI called for a day of prayer on May 26, 1940: “Make no mistake, it is no mere territorial conquest that the enemies are seeking. It is the overthrow—complete and final—of this Empire and of everything for which it stands, and after that the conquest of the world.”[10] The people packed the churches. As Winston Churchill would later say in his memoirs, “pent up passion” was evident at Westminster Abbey.
“The rescue electrified the people of Britain, welded them together, gave them a sense of purpose that the war had previously lacked.”[11] It generated the best in civic service. As weary men collapsed in one coastal town, members of the Women’s Voluntary Service quietly removed their boots and socks and washed their torn feet. The mayor later remarked, “I went round and watched them, and I thought how much the men’s feet had bled, but then I looked again and saw that it was not stale brown blood, but fresh red blood that came from the women’s hands.”[12]
It is risky to claim God’s special care for one side in war. It can leave the impression that those who suffer disaster lie outside God’s care. Granting that, it is still difficult to deny that the merciful hand of the Lord was present at Dunkirk. A genocidal madman was loose in Europe, and he had to be stopped. It is most reasonable to think that God preserved a force essential to the task—and that the prayers of people in England were effectual as well as fervent.
[1] Walter Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 8.
[2] David J. Knowles, Escape from Catastrophe: 1940 Dunkirk (Rochester, England: Knowles Publishing, 2000), 39, 74.
[3] Ibid., 96.
[4] Ibid., 40.
[5] Lord, 155. “Here and there were respectable steamers, like the Portsmouth-Isle of Wight car ferry, but mostly they were little ships of every conceivable type—fishing smacks…drifters…excursion boats…glittering white yachts…mud-spattered hoppers…open motor launches…tugs towing ship’s lifeboats…Thames sailing barges with their distinctive brown sails…cabin cruisers, their bright work gleaming…dredges, trawlers, and rust-streaked scows…the Admiral Superintendent’s barge from Portsmouth with its fancy tassels and rope-work.”
[6] Knowles, 77.
[7] Lord, 161.
[8] Knowles, 106.
[9] Ibid., 272.
[10] Ibid., 26-27.
[11] Lord, 274.
[12] Knowles, 131.