![]() That same day, Dill received a telegram from the British Military representative to the Allied Military Committee. Catalogue ref: WO 106/1613ĭespite Gort’s lack of diplomacy or care towards the French, Dill knew that Britain had to do its best by its ally. ![]() Telegram from Commander-in-Chief, BEF, Lord Gort to C.I.G.S., Field Marshal Sir John Dill: Evacuation of the French. Gort reminded Dill that the safety of the BEF was his primary consideration: ‘every Frenchman embarked is at cost of one Englishman’ ( WO 106/1613). When Gort first learned of the arrangements for the French at his headquarters at La Panne on 29 May, he immediately telegraphed the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, to ask for clarification on whether French troops were to be evacuated alongside British troops in equal numbers. Now, the Royal Navy would have to shoulder the responsibility for evacuating the French, as well as the BEF, from Dunkirk 1.ĭespite British willingness to help their French allies, the most undiplomatic figure of the Anglo-French military and naval coalition was none other than the commander of the BEF, Field Marshal Lord Gort, whose scathing remarks and dismissiveness of the French martial ability throughout the Battle of France possibly helped drive a wedge between the Allies. The reason few French warships were available at Dunkirk was because of an agreement between Royal Navy and French Navy commanders concerning theatres of responsibility this arrangement had, thus, resulted in much of the French fleet being stationed in the Mediterranean. They had already gathered a force of hundreds of French trawlers as part of the resupply effort, which would now be used for evacuating troops, but they lacked warships of their own. Faced with this new situation, for which they were quite unprepared, the French were forced to revise their plans. ![]() It was not until 27 May, the day after Dynamo had commenced, that the French realised that the BEF was being withdrawn from Dunkirk. Secondly, the French army and navy had intended the opposite of an evacuation Admiral François Darlan, the Chief of Staff of the French Navy, supposed that the Dunkirk beachhead could be sustained in order to become a continuous threat to the German flank. Firstly, the British were intent on evacuating from Dunkirk from the beginning, and since both the French and the BEF had conducted their own separate retreats and were manning their own sections of the Dunkirk perimeter, the Admiralty simply assumed that the British would evacuate BEF troops in Royal Navy ships, while French soldiers would be evacuated in French ships. The origins of this dispute, perhaps, stem from a difference in terms of how both Allies viewed the Dunkirk Salient from the start. French and British escapees from Dunkirk debarking at a British port during the Evacuation, June 1940. In fact, documentary evidence provided in WO 106/1613 suggests that British military and naval chiefs overseeing the evacuation were resolutely committed to saving French 1 st Army soldiers who were stranded at Dunkirk, alongside the men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). By far the most destructive of all the myths to emerge from the story of the Dunkirk evacuation is that the British abandoned their French allies at Dunkirk, both literally and metaphorically.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |