The Dunkirk evacuation begins, a flotilla rescues a trapped army
On this day · 26 May 1940
With the British army pinned against the Channel, a hastily assembled fleet of warships and little ships began lifting men off the beaches.
On 26 May 1940, with German forces driving the British Expeditionary Force and French troops back toward the sea, Britain launched Operation Dynamo to evacuate them from the port and beaches of Dunkirk.
The shallow shoreline could not take large ships, so the Royal Navy pressed roughly 700 “little ships” — fishing boats, pleasure craft, lifeboats — into ferrying men out to the destroyers waiting offshore. Soldiers queued for hours in the water under air attack.
When the operation ended on 4 June, more than 338,000 British and French soldiers had been carried to England — far beyond the few tens of thousands originally thought possible.
What looked like certain catastrophe became, in nine days, the “Miracle of Dunkirk.”
The army was saved, though most of its heavy equipment was abandoned on the French coast.
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