Dunkirk by Julie Summers

I went to see Dunkirk earlier this week. Not the town but the film of the same title written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It is a remarkable piece of art but is it a good film? And is it historically accurate? And does that in fact matter? I went with a completely open mind and was determined to leave my historian's hat firmly at the door. Trouble is, I went with an American friend and his English-born wife who had no idea about the history behind the evacuation at Dunkirk as the USA did not enter the war for another eighteen months.

So I gave them a very brief outline: as the Germans stormed across the Netherlands, Belgium and then parts of France hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their equipment were trapped in a small area of land around the French seaport of Dunkerque known of course by its British name Dunkirk. It is just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the Belgium border and in May 1940 was teaming with troops from the British Expeditionary Force and the French, Belgian and Polish armies. Between 26 May and 4 June 338,226 soldiers were rescued from the harbour and beaches by a hastily assembled fleet that comprised over 800 boats, some of them trawlers, pleasure craft and barges. There was even a paddle steamer, HMS Daffodil, that had ferried evacuee children from Dagenham to Lowestoft in September 1939. Of those men rescued, over 120,000 were French. And the Little Boats, as they became known, came not only from across the Channel but further up the western coast of mainland Europe. Some forty Dutch vessels with naval crews rescued around 26,000 men.

Colour photograph of troops making their way to a pleasure boat at Dunkirk, May 1940

The evacuation of Dunkirk, known as Operation Dynamo, was deemed a miracle. For those caught up in the flight from the Germans it was a terrifying and humiliating ordeal. My grandfather, then Major Philip Toosey in the Territorial Army (4th West Lancs) was picked up on the night of 2 June 1940 in the last contingent of British troops to be rescued. The following evening he had dinner with his wife in Manchester. He wrote after the war: 'This, I think, was one of the most vivid contrasts of the whole war – the night before standing up to my neck in the sea at Dunkirk with not a great hope of ever getting home and the next night having a very good dinner in the Midland Hotel.' He had been picked up along with the remains of his regiment by a Thames barge which was holed below the waterline and constantly in need of baling out. The barge eventually drew alongside a larger vessel and the men were able to scramble up the nets on the side and to safety. As the last man clambered up the ladder on the side of the minesweeper the barge gurgled and sank.

Major Philip Toosey (seated far left) with the officers of the 4th West Lancs, 1939

In fact, of the 861 Allied ships that were involved in the Dunkirk evacuation, 243 sunk but not all by enemy action. Some sank, like the Thames barge that rescued my grandfather, too old and ill-adapted to the sea. Others were attacked from the air and by mines. It is estimated that the cost in human terms was some 3,500 British killed or drowned at sea or on the beaches with a further 1,000 lives lost as a result of air raids on Dunkirk. About 40,000 British troops did not make it back across the channel. They were taken prisoner by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in POW camps. It was by any measure an extraordinary episode in the early years of the war and one which captured the imagination of the British public back home. The spirit of Dunkirk became a by-word for resilience and bravery, only to be eclipsed a few months later by the Blitz spirit as Britain itself came under air attack.

Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton based on a real life hero, Commander James Campbell Clouston

Back to the film. It is impressive on so many levels. The score is fantastic. Hans Zimmer uses Edward Elgar's Nimrod to such powerful effect that when the audience see the Little Ships for the first time it is hard to hold back the tears. The conceit of the film merges three time frames: a week for the soldiers; a day for a captain of a pleasure craft and an hour for a Spitfire pilot. That too works well. The cast is outstanding, the photography magnificent, the scenes of drowning and death powerful. Yet something, for me, is missing. It is not the history. It is the humanity. This, after all, was a massive human triumph and tragedy in equal measure. For individual men it was a matter of life or death but somehow, I do not now how, that is missing from this epic film. And without the human story history films, however impressive, are just a visual spectacle.

Small boats in the English Channel by Janie Hampton

Refugees in small boats are much in the news, with governments determined to stop them coming, send them back, or keep them incarcerated in camps. In the summer of 1940, there were refugees in small boats in the English Channel. This is the story of one such refugee family.

Amsterdam, early 20th Century

The Kleins were a hard-working, bourgeois, Jewish family with a comfortable home in Amsterdam. When on 10 May, 1940, the German army invaded Holland, Simon and Maria Klein knew they had to leave everything behind.

Simon had already been a refugee twice. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in about 1900, his parents sent him to Leipzig to escape conscription, and a few years later his relations told him to go to Holland. ‘The land of the free,’ they said. He found work in a firm of tailors’ accessories and married the owner’s niece, Maria. As the representative of “Double-weave underwear” Simon took Maria to Germany but after a few years they returned to The Netherlands with their two small children. ‘In Amsterdam nobody took any notice what religion you were,’ remembered their daughter Josephine. ‘Whether you were Jewish or gentile didn’t make any difference.’

In the late 1930s cousins from Germany stayed with the Kleins en route for America, travelling on through Belgium and France. But by May 1940, that route was blocked.

German soldiers in Amsterdam, May 1940. 

Josephine, 13, and her brother Eli, 15, were asleep on the night of 14 May 1940, when their mother told them to dress quickly and grab their gas masks. With their uncle Ralph, the Klein family took a taxi twenty miles west to the fishing town of Ijmuiden. In the dark harbour, crowds of people were trying to get away from the advancing German army. Mr Klein had struck a deal with a man who owned a small rowing boat, and then given extra money for water and food. The Kleins climbed on board, as more people swarmed down the steps and jumped in.

It was soon full but even so, there were more desperate people. ‘Take me…’ ‘For mercy’s sake, take my son!’ ‘Let my wife come with you!’

German invasion 1940, from The Second
World  War, W. Churchill, 1948.

As Mr Klein pushed off, tears were streaming down his face. The boat was about 15 foot long, and there was only just room to sit down. None of the dozen people on board were sailors, so Eli and another boy, both Boy Scouts, took the oars. As they rowed into the dark water they could see the flashes of guns behind the town of Ijmuiden. Mr Klein’s plan was to row out to sea, where they would be picked up by a passing ship.

Day came, and night again, and another day, with a rising wind at night and waves that crashed against the boat. They had been tricked and they had only one orange between them and a small tank of water, which they drank from a thimble. There were no passing ships.

On the third morning Josephine noticed the water rising in the boat, and quickly used her gas-mask box to bail out the sea water. The next day they sighted land. They believed they had rowed the hundred miles to the east coast of England. But they had simply drifted down the coast of Holland, towards another invaded port, possibly The Hague. Starving and parched with thirst, the Kleins and their passengers turned out towards the open sea again, and kept bailing.

Dunkirk in 1940

 As a Girl Guide, Josephine had learned to read the stars and she worked out North . But no-one had the energy to row, as they drifted in the English Channel. She tried to get the others to sing Guide songs but everyone was too thirsty. The days were hot for May, and the nights were pitch-dark. Twice they saw aeroplanes. One open plane dipped towards them and the pilot pointed with his arm towards England. They couldn’t lie down and sea water sloshed in the bottom of the boat. An  elderly couple sat up straight as if on a bus, and never spoke a word.

More than week after they left Holland, a British destroyer sighted the tiny boat. By then they were semi-conscious, and their feet were swollen from the sea water.  The British sailors carried them on board and they were taken to a hospital in Maidstone. The hospitals in Kent were all on stand-by for the imminent evacuation from Dunkirk: fully staffed but still empty.

The Kleins were soon recovering from ‘trench foot’ and when the evacuation  from Dunkirk began, they were sent to a refugee hostel in Chelsea filled with Belgian fishing families and run by English lady aristocrats.

Other refugees from The Netherlands in London, May 1940. Princess Juliana of the Netherlands pushing her daughter Princess Irene, with her heir Princess Beatrix beside her. Her friend Elizabeth Van Swinderen points out London barrage balloons.

The Kleins wanted to go to America, but they couldn’t get passports, so they settled in Chester. They were welcomed by neighbours with fresh vegetables, school uniforms and support. Josephine made friends through the local Girl Guides and then the Sea Rangers. European Girl Guides arriving in Britain were called not ‘Refugee Guides’, but ‘Golondrinas’, or ‘Swallows’.

Josephine Klein wrote Our Need for Others 

and Its Roots in Infancy, 1987,  and 

Doubts & Certainties in  the Practice 

of Psychotherapy, 1995. . 

After she left school, Josephine read French and Sociology at the University of London, became a social worker and then a psychotherapist and co-founder of the Refugee Therapy Centre in London. Eli joined the British army, and then went into business, married happily and had three children.

When refugees arrived in Britain in small boats 75 years ago, they were welcomed. Nobody described the men who sold the boats as ‘people traffickers’, nor the refugees as ‘illegal immigrants’. They too were escaping war and persecution, just as people from Syria and Mali are today. The 20^th Century refugees contributed to Britain, and helped make it the country it now is.

www.janiehampton.co.uk   @janieoxford