This plan was put into effect on May 22, and the first convoy of seven ships reached Dunkirk three days later. In the Channel they had come under the fire of several German coastal batteries situated to the east of Calais, and had returned the fire vigorously. Now, in the port, they were subjected to continuous air raids. The electric wires to the piers had already been knocked out by enemy bombs, and consequently no mechanical unloading facilities were available. Discharging the cargoes by hand was a slow and tedious job, all of the time under enemy bombardment. Some munitions trains were blown up almost as soon as they were formed. A good part of the remaining cargoes was set afire as soon as it reached the shore. Four freighters were sunk.
Manifestly it was impossible to continue under these conditions. Accordingly the French Admiralty sent the supply ships thereafter to Dover, where the cargoes were to be transshipped on a multitude of small fishing boats for the final run to Dunkirk. To provide the numerous fishing boats necessary for the operation, groups of French sailors, under junior officers, were sent to all the French Channel and even Atlantic coast ports, with orders to requisition everything that floated—including the Belgian trawlers which had fled from their home country at the coming of the German invasion.
If the crews of the requisitioned ships volunteered, they were reinforced by two or three naval ratings armed with automatic rifles, or sometimes only with carbines or revolvers. If they did not volunteer, they were replaced promptly by naval personnel. In this way more than 200 small vessels displacing between 10 and 150 tons were sent on their way, but it would take them several days to reach Dover, and meanwhile the situation had changed radically. As for the cargo ships similarly requisitioned, 25 out of the 30 got as far as the Downs; of these 25, only 13 arrived at Dunkirk—and only 8 returned from there, the other 5 having been sunk.
At Dunkirk, however, the landing of supplies had become a matter of purely secondary interest. The land front facing the Germans had become disorganized; no counteroffensive could succeed in consolidating it. The few munitions and rations which the ships succeeded in landing, often at cost of heavy casualties, found no takers to deliver them to the troops. The latter surged constantly toward the sea in ever thickening masses. The problem of evacuation would soon take precedence over that of supplies. During the last days of the battle the only supplies landed from the incoming vessels were some loaves of bread thrown quickly over onto the docks; the supplies loaded aboard at Dover remained in the holds, while the decks were jammed with troops seizing every means of escape from the closing trap.
At the beginning of the Dunkirk tragedy, the French Admiralty, motivated by a deep attachment to the soil of France, urged that the port be reinforced rather than evacuated. It declared, on May 19, that without air support any attempt to reembark the troops would be “doomed to disaster.”
The British viewed the matter in a more realistic light. They did not have the same feeling toward the Dunkirk soil that the French did. What came first with the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force was to insure the safety of the only army the United Kingdom had. With less illusions than the French, he was little inclined toward the launching of a counteroffensive without the means to sustain it. In fact it is now known that on the same day, May 19, General Lord Gort advised his Government that it would be prudent to contemplate the evacuation of the whole British Expeditionary Force to England.
The British Admiralty, like their French allies at Maintenon, replied that such an operation would be both hazardous and impractical—a unity of viewpoint that was flattering, since the two organizations had not conferred on the subject. But from then on, urgent natural interests dictated diverging courses of action. The French planned to give their best efforts to revictualling Dunkirk; the British moved quickly toward the evacuation of their Army without even informing their ally of their decision. Although a meeting of the Franco-British War Council was held on May 22 at Vincennes, headquarters of General Weygand, Mr. Churchill did not breathe a word of the British intentions during the conference.
It was not until May 25 that the French Government and French High Command received real intelligence of the matter. On that day a liaison officer, Major Joseph Fauvelle, came to Paris from the Armies of the North. He did not hesitate to deliver his message in plain language, and the Prime Minister, deeply impressed, that evening for the first time used the word “armistice.” For Fauvelle had described the military situation as tragic, and had added that from information he had personally gathered, the British Expeditionary Force was preparing to disengage and to reembark for England.
Up to that moment the French had had no thought except to continue fighting to hold Dunkirk—“to save, above all, the honor of the flag,” as was repeated in one of General Weygand’s telegrams that day. But although Admiral Abrial had momentarily checked the Germans on the Aa River, he did not conceal from the Admiralty his opinion that the situation was extremely critical. The Admiralty, reading his telegrams, received the impression that at any moment everything could break wide open—particularly if, as Fauvelle had just indicated, the British were thinking more of evacuating than of holding. It was necessary to prepare for the worst.
It was under these conditions that Captain Auphan, Deputy Chief of Staff of the French Admiralty, was sent to Dover on May 27 to make an on-the-spot estimate of the situation. He arranged for a meeting there with Vice Admiral Odend’hal, Chief of the French Naval Mission to the British Admiralty at London, and with Rear Admiral Marcel Leclerc, Chief of Staff to Admiral Abrial. Naturally he was to confer also with the British naval authorities.
While awaiting the arrival of Leclerc, who had left Dunkirk in a fast motor boat, Odend’hal and Auphan exchanged information at the Allied Officers Mess. Both were considerably astonished at the large number of British naval officers in battle dress who were present.
Living at London and mingling in British naval circles, Admiral Odend’hal knew many of these officers, at least by sight. All these officers, he learned, had been assigned by their various branches to the task of manning the hundreds of small craft which had been requisitioned at Dover and other English ports several days before. In khaki, and carrying gas masks over their shoulders, they were at work on the plans for evacuation, which had already been in preparation since the day before.
It was thus—that is to say, by chance—that the French High Command learned of a decision already made of vital importance to the battle then raging, and, in fact, to the future of the whole alliance. When Weygand and Darlan learned of it, through Auphan’s report, they had some rather sharp words to say about the British—not because of the decision itself, which time was to prove was highly correct, but because it had been made unilaterally, and because the evacuation thus made would disorganize the entire defense. When, two or three weeks later, the question of a separate Franco-German armistice arose, it was the opinion of the majority of French leaders that after such a breach of trust and disregard for the spirit of teamwork, France was not required to make a greater sacrifice for the common cause than England had.
At Dover Captain Auphan met Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay and Admiral Sir James Somerville, who briefed him on “Operation Dynamo”—the evacuation of Dunkirk—which was already in progress under their direction. Auphan agreed with them upon a plan whereby the French could join the operation without delay. This plan was approved by the French Admiralty the day after Auphan’s return.
Now the requisitioning of the small vessels in the Channel and Brittany ports proved an enormous advantage. Orders were sent out to the requisitioning officers to expedite the program to the maximum. Even so, the British, who had had much more time than the French to set up their program, began complaining that the French vessels were not arriving quickly enough.
On May 28 Rear Admiral Marcel Landriau was designated to command all the small French naval vessels assigned to the operation, which would be called the Pas-de-Calais Flotilla. This short-lived naval force consisted of two super-destroyers, seven fleet-destroyers, six 600-ton torpedo boats, four sloops, some twenty patrol vessels, submarine chasers, or fast motor boats, and a host of miscellaneous small craft—approximately 200. Landriau hoisted his flag on the antiaircraft sloop Savorgnan de Brazza,