“I was by now dulled by hours of explosions so that the imminence of death aroused no great feeling of fear. “I heard the Stuka coming down in a vertical dive right on top of me,” Elliman reported. But eventually the planes switched their focus to the beaches. For a time some of us huddled under the hull of a wrecked steamer, but as nothing happened for some time I called in all my men, and formed them up in a queue again for fear we should lose our place.” You felt so completely exposed on the beach. While these attacks were in progress, the Stukas were diving, zooming, screeching and wheeling over our heads like a flock of huge infernal seagulls. The alarm this caused on 29 May, the worst day of the evacuation in terms of British shipping sunk by the Luftwaffe, was recorded by gunner Lieutenant Elliman, who reached Malo-les-Bains beach, north-east of the main Dunkirk jetty, known as the “mole”, that afternoon: “The destroyers pumped shells into the air, and disappeared behind 80ft high walls of spray thrown up by near misses. But cinemagoers queueing up to see Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, when it opens on 21 July, particularly those too young to have parents who lived through the war, may well not appreciate how close the exodus came to ending in ignominious disaster.įor many soldiers waiting to be rescued from the Dunkirk beaches, the first indication that their evacuation was not a foregone conclusion came when they saw that the ships that had been sent to whisk them away were being attacked by German planes.
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