Like Dunkirk, these evacuation were not without issues, as on 17 June during the evacuation from St Nazaire, German bombers sank the liner Lancastria which was being used to transport troops home. Unfortunately, it is not known how many were on board at the time, however it is estimated that 6, lost their lives, making this the worst disaster in British maritime history.
In order to keep morale high, Churchill kept the disaster a secret for five weeks. Jump to Navigation. It felt as if I had been hit six times on the face with a whip.
I was in such pain that I prayed to God to take me. But someone picked me up, and pushed me outside, and I ended up on the upper deck. I said something to him, but then I noticed his ribs were sticking out through his chest.
He was dead. I looked at my hands. The skin was hanging off both of them as if I was trying to pull gloves off. My face was stinging like mad. My lips were swelling up all the time. I did not realise this at the time, but my nose had all but disappeared. Only the septum was left. Bloom somehow jumped into the water over the side of the ship, and climbed up on to the mole. From there he staggered on to Crested Eagle, a paddle steamer moored to the other side of the mole.
Shortly afterwards, having also taken on board wounded men from Fenella, another personnel vessel beside the mole, that had been hit, Crested Eagle got under way, only to be hit by four of the bombs dropped by yet another wave of bombers. Before he could be burned again by the fires ignited by the bombing, he jumped into the sea for the second time that day.
Crested Eagle was beached near Bray Dunes, the beach to the north-east of Malo-les-Bains, where she became one of the landmarks for small ships striving to find the beach, but in the meantime those in the water had to swim for their lives. They hung on to it and kicked with their legs, while I sat on it holding the ring. Bloom was eventually rescued by another ship, which took him to Ramsgate.
Not that he knew much about the journey. Mercifully, while he was lying in the wardroom, somebody slipped a morphine capsule under his tongue, whereupon he lost consciousness. He was already in England when he woke up.
He had been laid out with other wounded men in a marquee. 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 It had taken the Germans just 18 days after Dunkirk to capture France. Britain now stood alone against the Nazis and many wondered whether it would be the next to concede.
Some members of the British government, beginning to regret the rise of the uncompromising Churchill, considered what sort of an agreement might be reached with the German leader. Hitler tentatively planned for a British invasion, code-named Operation Sea Lion, but he knew that such an incursion would be risky, difficult and very costly, and so he waited for a British peace offer. Churchill was having none of it. He quickly replaced the equipment lost in France.
He began currying a relationship with U. President Franklin Roosevelt, who signaled his intention to assist the British in any way he could. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. The assault failed to produce the desired results, with the British capital escaping serious harm. Instead, 20 German planes were damaged and another 60 shot down. The Strait of Dover, where the distance between England and France is just 21 miles across the English Channel, is located to the southwest.
Because of its seaside location near the borders of three European powers, Dunkirk known as Dunkerque in French and the surrounding area have been the site of centuries of commerce and travel, as well as numerous bloody battles. In the face of such a coordinated strategy, superior air power and highly mobile ground forces supported by panzer tanks, all three countries would succumb quickly: The Germans occupied Luxembourg on May 10, the Netherlands on May 14 and Belgium by the end of the month.
Soon after the blitzkrieg began, German forces invaded France—not along the Maginot Line , which the Allies had expected, but through the Ardennes Forest, moving steadily along the Somme Valley toward the English Channel. As they advanced, German forces cut off all communication and transport between the northern and southern branches of Allied forces, pushing several hundred thousand Allied troops in the north into an increasingly small sliver of the French coast.
By May 19, General John Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force BEF had begun to weigh the possibility of evacuating his entire force by sea in order to save them from certain annihilation by the approaching Nazi troops. Meanwhile, in London, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had resigned under pressure on May 13, making way for a new wartime coalition government headed by Winston Churchill. At first, British command opposed evacuation, and French forces wanted to hold out as well.
In planning this risky operation, the Allies got a helping hand from a surprising source: Adolf Hitler , who on May 24 gave the order to halt the advance of German panzer divisions bearing down on Dunkirk. Hitler gave the tanks the go-ahead again on May 26, but by that time the Allies had gained crucial time to put their preparations in place.
On the evening of May 26, the British began the evacuation from Dunkirk, using the codename Operation Dynamo. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay directed the efforts, leading a team working out of a room deep inside the Dover cliffs that had once contained a generator known as a dynamo giving the operation its name. On the first full day, Operation Dynamo was only able to evacuate about 7, men from Dunkirk; around 10, got out the following day May Some to 1, boats, many of them leisure or fishing crafts, eventually aided in the evacuation from Dunkirk.
Some were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were manned by their civilian owners and crew.
0コメント