The basic facts of how the BEF came to be cut off in northern France was explained by the Guardian’s Evelyn Montague on 29 May 1940. Two days later, he was watching the rescued troops arriving back on British soil:
The miracle of the BEF’s return: Stories of the ordeal on Dunkirk beach
by EA Montague
1 June 1940
In the grey chill of dawn today in a south-eastern port, war correspondents watched with incredulous joy the happening of a miracle.
By every canon of military science the BEF has been doomed for the last four or five days. Completely out-numbered, out-gunned, out-planed, all but surrounded, it had seemed certain to be cut off from its last channel of escape. Yet for several hours this morning we saw ship after ship come into harbour and discharge thousands of British soldiers safe and sound on British soil. As the sun was turning the grey clouds to burnished copper, the first destroyer of the day slid swiftly into the harbour, its silhouette bristling with the heads of the men packed shoulder to shoulder on its decks.
One watched them with a pride that became almost pain. They had passed through nights and days of hunger, weariness and fear, but nearly every man still had his rifle and a clip of ammunition; nearly all had brought their full kit with them - and what an agony its weight must have been. They were still soldiers and still in good heart. They were of all units and ranks. Some were in the position of the gunners whose battery had been shelled out of existence near Oudenarde, because our overworked fighter planes had had no time to deal with the German reconnaissance planes.
Their battery commander had told them to do the best they could for themselves, and they had walked 30 miles to Dunkirk. It is a stretch of level sand backed by dunes. The sea in front of it is shallow for some way out, so that ships cannot come close in. Many of the men have spent up to four days on this beach, hiding in hollows scratched in the sand, from the German planes which have scourged them with bomb and machine-gun.
Every now and then, among the men who climb the gangplank into England, one sees stretcher-bearers carrying a still form, its face bloodless and remote. Yet [others] survive in their thousands and are able to joke and sing.
In no time the ship is ready to return to Dunkirk. But before it is ready, another has drawn up alongside. British ships and French and Dutch, warships, drifters, trawlers, yachts, barges, they bring their loads across the hostile Channel and then go back undaunted into the inferno.
All the selfless courage of two nations is being thrown into the resistance at Dunkirk, and it looks as if it will not be spent in vain.
This is an edited extract. Read the full article.
Accounts of the difficult task of evacuation, the role of the RAF, and the homecoming were published on 31 May 1940.
By 3 June 1940, most of the troops had been evacuated, with just a few thousand left in France.
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