We make no apology for reproducing almost the whole of Mr Churchill’s moving statement in the House of Commons on June 4th 1940, when he revealed in full the history, tragic but sublime, of the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force to Dunkirk and its subsequent evacuation in the teeth of enemy opposition
From the moment that the French defences at Sedan and on the Meuse were broken at the end of the second week of May only a rapid retreat to Amiens who had entered Belgium at the appeal of the Belgian King.
However, this strategic fact was not immediately realized.
The French High Command hoped they would be able to close the gap, and the armies of the north were under their orders.
Moreover, a retirement of this kind would have involved almost certainly the destruction of the fine Belgian Army of over 20 divisions and the abandonment of the whole of Belgian.
Therefore , when the force and scope of the German penetration was realized and when the new French and British armies in Belgium to occupy and hold the right hand of the Belgians and to give their own right hand to a newly created French army, which was to have advanced across the Somme in great strength.
However, the German eruption swept like a sharp scythe stroke around the right and rear of the armies of the North.
A force of eight or nine armoured divisions, each of about 400 armoured vehicles of different kinds carefully assorted to be complementary and divisible into self contained units, cut off all communications between us and the main French armies.
It severed our own communications for food and ammunition, which ran first to Amiens and afterwards through Abbeville, and it sheared its way up the coast to Boulogne and Calais, and almost to Dunkirk.
Behind this armoured and mechanized onslaught came a number of German divisions in lorries,and behind them again there plodded, comparatively slowly , the dull brute mass of the ordinary German Army and German people always so ready to trample down in other lands the liberties and comforts they have never known in their own.
I have said that this vest armoured scythe stroke almost reached Dunkirk.
Boulogne and Calais were the centres of desperate fighting.
The Guards defended Boulogne for a while and were then withdrawn by orders from this country.
Glorious Defence of Calais
The Rifle Brigade, the 60th Rifles and the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, with a battalion of British tanks and 1,000 French men in all about 4,000 strong defended Calais to the last.
The British Brigadier was given an hour to surrender. He spurned the offer, and four days of intense street fighting passed before a silence reigned over Calais which marked the end of a memorable resistance.
Only 30 unwounded survivors were brought off by the Navy, and we do not know the fate of their comrades.
Their sacrifice was not, however in vain.
At least two armoured divisions which otherwise would have been turned against the British Expeditionary Force, had to be sent there to overcome them.
They added another page to the glories of the Light Division, and the time gained enabled the Gravelines waterline to be flooded and held by the French troops, and thus it was that the port of Dunkirk was kept open.
When it was found impossible for the armies of the north to re-open their communications through Amiems for the main French armies, only one choice remained. It seemed indeed, forlorn.
The Belgian, British, and French armies were almost surrounded; their sole line of retreat was a single port and its neighbouring beaches.
They were pressed on every side by heavy attacks and far outnumbered in the air.
Another blow, which might have proved fatal, was to fall.
The King of the Belgians had called upon us to come to his aid.
Had not this ruler and his Government severed themselves from the Allies who rescued their country from extinction in the last war, had they not sought refugein what proved a fatal neutrality, the British and the French armies might well at the very outset have saved not only Belgium, but perhaps even Poland.
Yet at the last moment, when Belgium was already invaded, the King of the Belgians called upon us to come to his aid, and even at the last moment we came.
He and his brave and efficient Belgian army, nearly half a million
Strong, guarded our eastern flank, and thus kept open our only line of retreat to the sea.
Suddenly, without any prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his Ministers, and upon his own personal act, he sent a plenipotentiary to the German Command, surrendered his Army, and exposed our flank and means of retreat.
Armies Struggle to Reach Dunkirk
The surrender of the Belgian Army compelled the British at the shortest notice to cover the flank to the sea of more than 30 miles in length, otherwise it would have shared the fate to which King Leopold had condemned the finest army his country had ever formed.
One has only to look at the map to realize that contact was lost inevitably between the British and two out of three corps forming the French Army who were still much farther from the coast than we were , and how it seemed impossible that any large number of Allied troops could reach the coast.
The enemy attacked in great strength on all sides, and their main power, the power of their far more numerous air force was thrown into the battle or concentrated upon Dunkirk and the beaches.
Pressing in on the narrow exit, both from the east and west, the enemy began to fire with cannon along the beaches by which along shipping could approach or depart.
They sowed magnetic mines in the channels and the seas; they sent repeated waves of hostile aircraft, sometimes more then 100 strong in one formation, to cast their bombs upon the single pier that remained and on the sand dunes amid which the troops as they arrived took shelter.
Their U –Boats, one of which was sunk, and their motor launches, took their toll of the vast traffic that now began.
For four or five days an intense struggle raged.
Their armoured divisions or what was left of them, together with great masses of German artillery and infantry, hurled themselves in vain upon the ever narrowing and contracting appendix upon which the French and British armies fought.
Meanwhile the Royal Navy with the willing help of countless merchant seamen and a host of volunteers strained every nerve to embark the British and Allied troops.
Over 220 light warships and more than 650 other vessels were engaged.
They had to operate upon a difficult coast, and often under adverse weather conditions and under an almost ceaseless hail of bombs and increasing concentrations of artillery fire.
Nor were the seas themselves free from mines or torpedoes.
Courage and Devotion of Rescuers
It was in conditions such as these that our men carried on with little or no rest for days and nights , making trip after trip across the dangerous waters.
The numbers they have brought back are the measure of their devotion and courage.
Meanwhile, the R.A.F.Which had already been intervening in the battle so far as its range would allow, now used part of its main Metropolitan fighter strength to strike at the German bombers and at the fighters which in large numbers protected them. This struggle was protracted and fierce.
But now suddenly the scene is clear.
The crash of the thunder has for the moment but only for the moment died away.
The miracle of deliverance, by faultless service by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity, is manifest to us all...
Dramatic Story of the Great Retreat
The enemy was hurried back by the retreating British and French troops.
He was so roughly handled that he did not dare molest the departing armies.
The Air Force decisively defeated the main strength of the German Air Force and inflicted upon them a loss of at least four to one.
The Navy using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, took over 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and shame back to their native land and to the tasks which lie immediately before them.
R.A.F. Win a Decisive Victory
We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.
Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance which should be noted. It was gained by the Air Force.
Many of our soldiers coming back have not seen the Air Force at work.
They only saw the German bombers which escaped their protective attack.
They underrate the achievements of the British Air Force.
This was a great trial of strength between the British and the German air forces. Can you conceive a greater object for the power of Germany in the air than to make evacuation from these beaches impossible and to sink all the ships which were displayed, almost to the number of a thousand, in the waters outside?
Could there have been an objective of greater military importance or of greater significance for the whole purposes of war than this?
They tried hard, and they were beaten back.
They were frustrated in their attack. We got the Army away, and they have paid fourfold for any loss they have inflicted.
Every day formations of German aeroplanes and we know this is a very brave race have turned on several occasions from an attack of one fourth of their number of the Royal Air Force and dispersed in different directions.
Twelve aeroplanes have been hunted by two.
One aeroplane was driven into the water and cast away by the mere charge of a British aeroplane which had no more ammunition.
All our types and all our pilots have been vindicated.
The Hurricane, Spitfire and the new Defiant all had been vindicated as superior to what they have to face.
When we consider how much greater would be our advantages in defending the air above this island against an over seas attack, I must say that I find these facts a sure basis upon which practical and reassuring thoughts may rest….
May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and vision of a few thousand airmen?
There has never been, I suppose in all the history of the world, such an opportunity for youth.
The Knights of the Round Table , the Crusaders ,they all fall back into the prosaic days, not only distant but prosaic, to these young men going forth every morning to guard their native land and all we stand for those men going forward , in their hands the instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it can be said .
Every morn brought forth a noble chance and every chance brought forth a noble deed.
British Losses of Equipment
I Return to the Army.
In the long series of very fierce battles, now on this front and now on that fighting on three fronts at once, battles fought by two or three divisions against an equal or somewhat larger number of the enemy and fought very fiercely on the old ground so many of us knew so well in these battles our losses in men have exceeded 30,000 killed, wounded and missing…
We have lost nearly 1,000 guns, all the transport, and all the armoured vehicles that were with the Army in the north.
This loss will impose a further delay n the expansion of our military strength…
How long it will last depends on the exertions which we make in this island.
An effort the like of which has never been seen in our records is now being made.
Work is proceeding everywhere night and day, Sundays and weekdays.
Capital and labour have cast aside their interests, rights and customs to put them into the common stock.
Already the flow of munitions has leaped forward.
There is no reason why we should not, in a few months overtake the sudden and serious loss that has come upon us without retarding the development of our general programme.
Never the less, our thankfulness at the escape of our Army, and of many men whose loved ones have passed through an agonizing week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.
The French Army has been weakened.
The Belgian Army has been lost. A large part of those fortified lines on which so much faith had been reposed has gone.
Many valuable mining districts and factories have passed into the enemy’s possession.
The whole of the Channel ports are in his hands, with all the strategic consequences that follow from that.
We must expect another blow to be struck almost immediately at us or the French.
We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles.
This has been thought of before, when Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat bottomed boats and his Grand Army, as he was told by someone, there are bitter weeds in England.
There are certainly a good number more of them since the B.E.F. returned.
The whole question of home defence against invasion is, of course, powerfully affected by the fact that we have for the time being in this island incomparably more powerful military forces than we have ever had.
But this will not continue, we shall not be content with a defensive war.
We have our duty to our Allies.
We have to reconstitute and build up the B.E.F once again under its gallant Commander in Chief, Lord Gort.
All this is in train. But in the interval we must put our defences in this island into such a high state of organization that fewest possible numbers will be required to give effective security, and that the largest possible potential of offensive effort may be realized.
On this we are now engaged…..
Chances For and Against Invasion
There has never been a period in all these long centuries in which an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people.
In the days of Napoleon the same wind that would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet.
There was always a chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants.
We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice and the ingenuity of aggression which our enemy displays we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel strategy and every kind of brutal and treacherous manoeuvre.
I think no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching but I hope also with a steady eye.
One must never forget the solid assurance of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised.
I have myself full confidence that if all do their duty and nothing is neglected and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shell prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home , ride out the storms of war, and outlive the menace of tyranny if necessary for years , if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are trying to do.
That is the resolve of the Government, every man of them.
It is the will of Parliament and of the nation.
The British Empire with the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength, even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule.
We Shall Never Surrender
We cannot flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, and we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills.
We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in Gods good time the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.
