At about six in the evening of May 29, 1940, the British passenger ship King Orry steamed into Dunkirk harbour.

Vice-Admiral Ramsay later reported to the Admiralty what she found there: only burning and sinking ships, no sign of anyone on the pier, and no boat moving in the harbour. She came at once under heavy bombing. Half a mile outside the entrance, a dive-bomber had already put her steering gear out of action.

At about the same hour a telephone message reached Dover. It came from the military headquarters at La Panne, passed on through the War Office and the Admiralty, and it said that Dunkirk harbour was blocked by damaged ships and that all evacuation must now be carried out from the beaches.

A little later a corrupt signal arrived from the Senior Naval Officer at Dunkirk: continuous bombing, one destroyer sinking, one transport with troops on board damaged, impossible at present to embark more troops, "though pier undamaged."

Was the harbour blocked or not? That night, nobody at Dover had any way of knowing.

I. A Narrow Way

On the eastern side of the entrance to Dunkirk harbour a long breakwater ran out into the sea. The British naval reports gave it several names: the East Pier, the East Mole, the Eastern Arm. It had been built to keep out the waves, not as a quay for large ships.

At 6:57 p.m. on May 26 the Admiralty ordered Operation Dynamo, the evacuation, to begin.

On the afternoon of the 27th Captain Tennant left Dover in the destroyer Wolfhound with a beach and pier party of 12 officers and 160 ratings. On the way over they were attacked by dive-bombers at half-hour intervals.

At 8:05 that evening, having just reached his post, he sent his first Most Immediate message: the port had been bombed all day and was on fire; embarkation was possible only from the beaches east of the harbour; all ships should be sent there to anchor.

Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, also reported that Dunkirk was bombed with particular severity on the 27th. Burning oil tanks laid a pall of black smoke over the town and docks. The inner harbour was now blocked except to small ships, though the outer mole "could still be used."

At first even Tennant put his hopes in the beaches. But the water there was shallow. Ramsay wrote that the beaches shelved so gently that a pier of barges built out from the sand would have had to be far longer than anything available. On the 28th he asked the Senior Naval Officer whether personnel ships could berth inside the harbour. The only information he had, he wrote, indicated that the East Pier at the harbour entrance was the only suitable berth for such ships to which British troops could have access. The mole that "could still be used" became the only place where large ships could come alongside.

It was also a bottleneck. Early on the 29th Dunkirk asked for all ships to be sent into the harbour. Ramsay refused. One of his reasons was that the harbour was limited by a bottleneck: the narrow gangway along the East Pier to the point of embarkation.

II. The Mole Seen from a Ship

In the destroyer Worcester there was a sailor named Gordon Keith Bonny, mess man for the chief and petty officers. His memoir was later given by his family to the BBC's WW2 People's War archive.

He remembered that the Worcester arrived off Dunkirk at 2:30 a.m. on May 27. He was at X gun. The captain came up to look at the deep red glow of the oil tanks burning ashore. At dawn the ship lay off the East Mole on an ebb tide.

Two Junkers 88s, flying low, straddled them with bombs. No one recognised them as enemy, and not a shot was fired.

Later they went alongside. The harbour, he wrote, was in chaos. Troops began to come aboard; they looked worn out and glad to see the ship. Scores of dogs ran about, terrified of the bombing.

Going alongside did not always mean lying against the mole itself. Bonny remembered that the harbour installations were so badly damaged that they had to make fast to a Channel ferry already against the pier, and another ferry then came alongside them. The soldiers climbed from the mole across one ship and onto the next.

III. Four O'Clock, May 29

At about four in the afternoon of the 29th German aircraft began a heavy attack on the East Mole, mainly by dive-bombing, which went on for more than two hours.

Ramsay's report lists the ships along the mole at that moment, one by one. On the inner side lay the destroyers Grenade and Jaguar, three trawlers ahead of them, three more trawlers ahead of those, then the personnel ship Canterbury, and a French destroyer at the head of the line. On the outer side the transport Fenella lay opposite the two destroyers, and the paddle steamer Crested Eagle opposite the six trawlers. Further inside the harbour were the destroyers Malcolm and Verity.

This, he wrote, presented a very good target.

Canterbury and Jaguar got out of the harbour, both hit and damaged. Canterbury reached Dover at 9:15 that evening, landed 1,950 troops, and was too badly damaged to be used again in the operation. Fenella, lying on the outside of the pier, was hit and sunk. Grenade, on fire and sinking, was abandoned, and a trawler was detailed to tow her clear of the fairway. Verity was straddled by bombs for 35 minutes; when all passage along the pier had stopped, she cast off and went out past the burning Grenade.

Bonny was off the harbour that day too. The Grenade he saw was hit squarely on the stern, broke her moorings and drifted out of control, her ammunition exploding like a huge firecracker. A trawler got her in tow and pulled her clear of the fairway, but she looked a goner. Later she sank.

Then a dozen dive-bombers went for the mole, and two destroyers and several trawlers alongside it were damaged. Crested Eagle took a direct hit. She was full of troops; fire swept her stern, she turned for the beach, and soldiers jumped over the side and waded back ashore.

Ramsay's report says that Crested Eagle was bombed and then beached in a burning condition.

IV. Two Messages

At 7:06 that evening Ramsay signalled his plan for the night: the evacuation of British troops was to continue at maximum speed through the night, and if not enough personnel ships could be kept going to the East Pier, destroyers would be sent there as well.

But at about seven the telephone message saying that the harbour was blocked had come in. A while later came Tennant's broken signal: "though pier undamaged."

The two messages contradicted each other. At 9:28 p.m. Ramsay ordered all ships approaching Dunkirk not to close the harbour but to stay off the beach to the east and collect troops from the shore. Drifters and minesweepers about to be sent into the harbour were diverted to the beaches as well.

At the same time he sent signals to Tennant, and to Hebe and Verity, which were known to be nearby, asking whether personnel ships could still use the Eastern pier. He also told the French naval commander in the north that Dover had lost touch with Tennant, and asked whether transports could still enter the harbour and berth alongside. No reply, he wrote, could be expected until after midnight.

In the event only four trawlers and a yacht entered Dunkirk during the dark hours. German activity fell off sharply; there were only two bombing attacks all night.

Ramsay wrote down his own conclusion: it subsequently transpired that a good opportunity had been missed. Ships to lift some 8,000 to 10,000 troops could probably have been sent to Dunkirk that night at little cost to the work off the beaches.

King Orry stayed alone in the harbour until shortly after midnight on the 29th–30th, when her captain decided to take her out before she too was sunk, freeing the berth and keeping the channel from being blocked. Ramsay said he was right.

At 6:10 the next morning a report came from the destroyer Vanquisher, sent to investigate: the entrance was practicable, though there was an obstruction toward the outer end of the Eastern Arm on the inside. Sailings of personnel ships to Dunkirk were resumed.

In Bonny's memoir, Worcester came off Dunkirk on this trip at 7:30 in the morning. The first thing he wrote down was that the harbour looked blocked with sunken shipping.

V. At the Double

On May 30 there was mist over the sea. Ramsay's report says that there were no air attacks at Dunkirk early in the morning and all was quiet; through the day the mist and a big smoke cloud over the town kept the bombers from attacking in strength.

Tennant made a new rule that day. With many ships at the mole at once offering a massive target, destroyers were to come alongside only one at a time. At about eight in the morning a store ship arrived with provisions but no water. She caused so much congestion on the pier that unloading was abandoned half way, and she was filled with troops instead.

To get more men through the narrow gangway, the troops were urged to quicken their pace. In the end, Ramsay wrote, thousands of them, tired and without food or water for days, broke into the double and kept it up along the whole length of the pier for more than two hours.

That day Sergeant Gordon Pudney, nineteen years old, was waiting on the beach. His son later gave his recollections to the BBC, and they too begin with the mist: May 30 dawned with a heavy mist, and there was little or no sign of the Luftwaffe.

He had heard on the beach how it worked. You gathered a group of forty to sixty men, with an officer and an NCO. The officer reported to the embarkation officer and was given a number. When the number was called, the group could go up onto the mole and head for a ship. Pudney could not swim; he much preferred this to wading out to a little boat rocking in the waves.

The embarkation officer was a brigadier. Pudney stood in at the head of the queue, calling numbers for a captain with a sore throat. He explained later that he made a point of standing close to the brigadier, because you did not hear of many brigadiers being killed in action.

By late afternoon the Germans were close enough to shell the beach. Just as their number was about to be called, a shell burst a few yards away. No one was hurt.

They went out onto the mole. They had been told to bring any small arms back to England. The last two men in the group, from the Pioneer Corps and older than he was, were struggling with a Bren gun and clearly meant to throw it into the sea. Pudney swore at them and took the barrel end to help. A few feet on, the weight eased; he turned round and found they had unclipped the other half and thrown it in. The useless barrel followed it.

The destroyer alongside was HMS Keith. The tide, he wrote, was at just the right height: he could walk straight on board, with no jumping and no climbing down.

VI. The Queue and the Hole

Not everyone met the right tide.

William George Holt, a soldier with an arm wound, spent a night at a casualty clearing station in Dunkirk. His daughter later gave his recollections to the BBC under a title dated June 1.

In the morning, he remembered, the ambulances could not get far because of rubble in the streets, so they got out and helped along those who could not walk. A military policeman told them to make for the mole: "You won't stand a chance on the beaches. They've been shelling and bombing them for a week. There's thousands been waiting on them for days."

The mole was under shellfire too. A hole, he wrote, almost divided the concrete jetty in two. Greatcoats covered the faces of men who had got that far but no farther. A long queue of French and British soldiers stretched the whole length of the mole, "as orderly as a theatre queue."

After three hours in the queue he tumbled onto the deck of the destroyer H34.

Holt called the mole concrete; Ramsay's report speaks only of a narrow gangway. These accounts do not agree on what the mole was made of.

Bonny's entry for midday on Friday, May 31, describes the mole at its cruellest: Junkers 88s had damaged it and killed a great many troops packed densely on it, waiting to be taken off.

VII. The Last Night

After June 1 the evacuation went on only at night.

Early on June 2, while it was still dark, Mike Coyle of the 1/6th East Surreys was ordered onto the mole. His group reached the destroyer Whitshed and had to jump down onto her swaying deck. As each man landed, sailors grabbed him and pushed him out of the way of the man behind.

A sailor told them, he remembered, that this was the last ship out: it was now or never. In fact many more ships would come to the mole. The ship was badly overloaded; later estimates put the number aboard as high as a thousand. The men were ordered to throw rifles, Bren guns, bayonets and ammunition overboard.

At 11:30 p.m. on June 2 Tennant signalled: "B.E.F. evacuated."

But the lifting did not stop. At 12:30 a.m. on June 3 the Rear Admiral, Dover, reported from Dunkirk that four ships were alongside and there were no French troops. At 1:15 he reported again: "Plenty of ships cannot get troops." It was learned later that the flow of French troops had dwindled away shortly after midnight. One ship waited two and a half hours for her load instead of the usual half hour.

On the last night a north-easterly wind tended to blow the personnel ships and destroyers off "the vital East Pier," making berthing difficult.

At 3:18 and 3:40 a.m. on June 4 the destroyers Express and Shikari were the last ships to leave Dunkirk, carrying about a thousand troops and the British pier parties. That day Admiralty Message 1423/4 brought Operation Dynamo to an end.

Epilogue

At the opening of his report Ramsay wrote that some 330,000 troops had reached England from Dunkirk and from the ten miles of beach east of the harbour. The figures in his appendix for the different kinds of ships add up to 338,682, with a note that the list is incomplete because a number of vessels did not record their totals.

On May 26 the German army chief of staff, Halder, wrote in his journal that Hitler had at last agreed to move the left wing within artillery range of Dunkirk, to cut off from the landside "the continuous flow of transport (evacuations and arrivals)." On June 4 he noted the report from the front: Dunkirk taken, "French are gone." That afternoon he added that two French divisional commanders had been captured at Dunkirk, together with, it was claimed, 40,000 men.

Ramsay recorded that when the French naval commander in the north agreed to end the operation, he observed that all the ammunition at Dunkirk had been expended and that those left behind were few, mainly non-combatant troops.

Lord Gort wrote that at one time the port seemed likely to go out of use at any moment, but that troops "were in fact embarked there till the end, in numbers which far exceeded expectations."

In Ramsay's report, the telephone message of the night of May 29 that the harbour was blocked takes up a single paragraph. Nowhere does the report say who made the call.

Sources and Editorial Boundaries

1. Royal Navy official report: Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsay, "The Evacuation of the Allied Armies from Dunkirk and Neighbouring Beaches" (submitted to the Admiralty 18 June 1940), Supplement to the London Gazette, no. 38017 (17 July 1947), pp. 3295–3318, read column by column in the scan: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/38017/supplement/3295 . Used: para. 2 (some 330,000 troops, with the Admiralty footnote); para. 4 (Tennant and a party of 12 officers and 160 ratings leaving Dover in Wolfhound at 1345, attacked by dive-bombers at half-hour intervals); para. 8 (Tennant's signal of 2005 on 27 May); para. 17 (28 May: the East Pier as the only suitable berth to which British troops could have access); para. 21 (barge piers impracticable); para. 23 (29 May: "a bottleneck, formed by the narrow gangway along the East Pier to the point of embarkation"); para. 30 (the attack on the "East Mole Pier" from about 1600 on 29 May, the berthing of each ship, Canterbury at Dover at 2115 with 1,950 troops, Fenella sunk, Grenade abandoned, Verity straddled for 35 minutes, King Orry arriving about 1800 and leaving after midnight); para. 31 (the 1906 plan); para. 32 (the telephone message via La Panne, the War Office and the Admiralty, and the corrupt signal "though pier undamaged"); para. 33 (the 2128 order); para. 34 ("a good opportunity had been missed ... some 8,000 to 10,000 troops"); the Vanquisher report at 0610 on 30 May; paras. 42–44 (30 May: one destroyer alongside at a time, the store ship without water, troops who "broke into the double and kept it up the whole length of the pier for more than two hours", mist and smoke); para. 64 (Keith sunk off Bray and La Panne on 1 June); para. 84 ("B.E.F. evacuated", 2330 on 2 June); para. 85 (reports at 0030 and 0115 on 3 June); para. 89 (wind "tending to blow Personnel Vessels and Destroyers off the vital East Pier"); paras. 90–91 (Express and Shikari leaving at 0318 and 0340; Admiral Nord's observation; Admiralty Message 1423/4); the appendix note on Crested Eagle ("bombed and then beached in a burning condition"); and the appendix table totalling 338,682 (marked incomplete; night-only evacuation after 1 June). The report calls the same structure the East Pier, the East Mole Pier and the Eastern Arm; times are given as in the report, without time zones, and are not converted.

2. BEF official report: General the Viscount Gort's despatch, Supplement to the London Gazette, no. 35305 (17 October 1941), from p. 5901, sections on the evacuation read in the scan: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/35305/supplement/5901 . Used: p. 5926, the heavy bombing of 27 May and "Though the outer mole could still be used the inner harbour was now blocked except to small ships"; and "troops were in fact embarked there till the end, in numbers which far exceeded expectations."

3. A sailor's memoir: Gordon Keith Bonny (mess man, HMS Worcester), memoir contributed by Christine Bonny to the BBC WW2 People's War archive on 28 November 2003, A2089361: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/61/a2089361.shtml . Used: arrival at 0230 on 27 May, lying off the East Mole on an ebb tide, the Junkers 88s, troops and dogs; berthing outside a Channel ferry; Grenade hit astern, breaking her moorings, towed by a trawler, later sinking; Crested Eagle hit and making for the beach; "The harbour looks blocked with sunken shipping" at 0730 the next morning; and, at midday on Friday (31 May), "Junkers 88 have damaged the mole and killed a lot of troops." The memoir is undated and several of its days have to be inferred from the events it records; they were checked against Ramsay. The two accounts differ on how Grenade left her berth (towed clear, says Ramsay; broke her moorings and drifted before being towed, says Bonny); both are given.

4. Soldiers' recollections (all from the BBC WW2 People's War archive, contributed by family members, not written in 1940; copyright rests with the contributors, so they are summarised and quoted only briefly): (a) Gordon Pudney, extract contributed by his son Neil Pudney on 11 February 2004, A2288289: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/89/a2288289.shtml . Used: the mist of 30 May; groups of forty to sixty given numbers; the brigadier as embarkation officer; the shell burst; the two Pioneer Corps men and the Bren gun; HMS Keith; the tide. The text gives his age (19) and rank (sergeant) but not his unit, which is not stated here. (b) William George Holt, contributed by his daughter Brenda Barks on 8 February 2004, A2276606, titled "1 June 1940: Dunkirk": https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/06/a2276606.shtml . Used: the casualty clearing station; the military policeman; "A hole almost divided the concrete jetty in two"; "as orderly as a theatre queue"; three hours to board H34. Which destroyer H34 was is not stated and is not supplied here (to be verified). The date follows the contributor's title (to be verified). (c) Mike Coyle (1/6th East Surreys), contributed by ActionBristol on 26 August 2005, A5337173: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/73/a5337173.shtml . Used: the mole in the dark on the morning of 2 June, the jump onto Whitshed's deck, "this was the last ship out", throwing weapons overboard, "as high as one thousand." No time of day is given beyond "morning." These recollections were written down or passed on decades later. They are used for what each person saw; dates, ship names and numbers were checked against Ramsay, and where Ramsay offers no check the text says that the memoirist is the source.

5. German side: Franz Halder, The Halder War Journal (U.S. Army typescript translation, 1947, Internet Archive scan): https://archive.org/details/HalderWarJournal . Used: 26 May 1940, Hitler's permission to move the left wing within artillery range of Dunkirk "to cut off, from the landside, the continuous flow of transport (evacuations and arrivals)"; 4 June, 1200, "Dunkirk taken. Coast has been reached, French are gone," and 1500, two French divisional commanders (25th and 68th) captured with a claimed "40,000 men." Only the English translation was read, not the German original.

6. Disagreements and open points. The structure of the mole: Holt says concrete, Ramsay speaks only of a gangway; no engineering drawing or port record was read, so this is left open (to be verified). The source of the telephone message of 29 May: the report says only that it came via La Panne, the War Office and the Admiralty; who made it and on what basis is not recorded and is not supplied here. Ramsay's 8,000 to 10,000 is his own later estimate, not a count. The total evacuated is about 330,000 in the report's text and 338,682 in the incomplete appendix; both are given. The 40,000 prisoners is a front-line claim recorded by Halder and is given as such.

7. Map: Dunkirk, Dover, De Panne (La Panne) and Bray-Dunes, with coordinates from Wikidata (used for coordinates only). The mole itself, the obstruction reported by Vanquisher, the casualty clearing station and the La Panne headquarters have no exact location and are listed as unresolved.

8. Rights and editing. The London Gazette is an official British publication; the Halder translation is a 1947 U.S. government translation; the BBC archive recollections remain the contributors' copyright and are summarised with brief quotation only. No dialogue, weather or thoughts have been invented; everything said by a person in the text comes from the sources above.