How Many Soldiers Were Rescued From Dunkirk? 338,226

The number, and where it comes from

The figure of 338,226 is the standard total of troops landed in England during Operation Dynamo, and the day-by-day landing tables below add up to it exactly. It does not count the men who left before the operation was formally launched: just before 19:00 on 26 May, when Churchill ordered Dynamo to begin, about 28,000 had already gone. Churchill gave a rounder figure while the count was still being finalized. In the House of Commons on 4 June 1940 he said the Navy, "using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, carried over 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and shame."

The number also surprised the people who planned it. In the same speech Churchill admitted: "I thought—and some good judges agreed with me—that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked." Planners had expected to save less than a tenth of what they did. Planning began on 20 May under Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, working from the naval headquarters beneath Dover Castle.

There was also a pause on the German side. Late on 23 May, Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, issued the halt order that stopped his armour short of the pocket, leaving the trapped armies to the Luftwaffe. The pause gave Allied forces time to build defensive works and pull large numbers of troops back toward Dunkirk. The order was rescinded on 26 May, and historians still argue about why it was given.

Day by day: troops landed in England

The count shows how slowly the operation started and how fast it peaked. Most men left through the harbour on every day except 30 May, the one day when the beach total was higher; across the whole operation the harbour accounted for about 71 percent.

Read across the rows and three phases appear. The first two days were the slowest, at 7,669 and 17,804 men, and even then more left from the harbour than from the beaches. Daily totals then rose past 47,000 on 29 May and peaked at 68,014 on 31 May. After 1 June, increasing air attacks stopped evacuation in daylight, and over the last three days totals fell to about 26,000 a day, most of them from the harbour. At the start of the operation, the senior naval officer ashore, Captain William Tennant, ordered men off the beaches because German air attacks had made the harbour docks unusable; when that proved too slow, he sent them to the two long stone and concrete breakwaters, the east and west moles, as well as the beaches.

British, French and everyone else

HISTORY's account puts the split at about 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops. The French share arrived late. The first French soldiers were embarked on 30 May, and another 75,000 French troops were taken off over the nights of 2 to 4 June, by which time most British units had gone. Lord Gort, the British commander, left on 31 May, handing the rearguard to Major-General Harold Alexander, and the last 4,000 men of the British rearguard sailed on the night of 2 to 3 June. French divisions held the shrinking line around the town to the end.

The rest of the total was small but varied. Belgian, Dutch and Polish soldiers had been trapped in the pocket alongside the British and French, and several hundred of the men taken off were unarmed Indian mule handlers of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. Of the French soldiers who reached Britain in June 1940, about 3,000 joined Charles de Gaulle's Free French in Britain. Most of the rest were lodged briefly in camps in south-western England and then shipped back to Brest, Cherbourg and other French ports, though only about half of those repatriated went back into action before France surrendered.

The ships that carried them

The tables of vessels that took part list 861 ships of all sizes, of which 243 were sunk. The backbone was naval: troops boarded from the harbour mole onto 39 British Royal Navy destroyers, four Royal Canadian Navy destroyers, at least three French destroyers and a range of merchant ships. On 27 May, the first full day, one cruiser, eight destroyers and 26 other craft were working.

The famous "little ships" were the hundreds of fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts and lifeboats called in from the south of England. The first of them reached Dunkirk on 28 May. Their main job was ferrying men from the shallow beaches out to bigger ships offshore. Where there was no boat, men improvised: at De Panne and Bray-Dunes, soldiers drove abandoned vehicles into the sea at low tide, weighted them with sandbags and laid wooden planks across them to make jetties.

Getting home was dangerous too. The shortest route, Route Z, was 39 nautical miles but ran close to the French coast within range of German guns; the safer routes ran through minefields or took far longer. The evacuation's casualty summary, citing UK National Archives records, puts deaths on the return voyages to England at about 2,000 troops, and the Royal Navy lost six destroyers in the operation.

Who was not rescued

Not everyone got out. HISTORY estimates about 90,000 Allied troops were left behind when resistance ended on the morning of 4 June and German troops occupied Dunkirk. Many were French soldiers who had covered the final evacuations: about 35,000 men, mostly French, surrendered that day. Earlier, the surrounded French First Army at Lille fought a delaying action against seven German divisions until 31 May, when about 35,000 of them surrendered for lack of food and ammunition.

The equipment stayed behind as well. The losses included 2,472 artillery pieces, about 20,000 motorcycles, nearly 65,000 other vehicles and huge stocks of ammunition, fuel and stores. Over the whole French campaign, up to the armistice on 22 June, the British Expeditionary Force suffered 68,000 casualties, including about 3,500 killed and 13,053 wounded.

Dunkirk was not the last evacuation

If you want the total for everyone brought out of France in 1940, 338,226 is too low. After Dunkirk fell, almost 192,000 more Allied personnel, including 144,000 British, were evacuated through other French ports between 15 and 25 June under the code name Operation Aerial. The 51st (Highland) Infantry Division, cut off further south, did not make it; most of it surrendered on 12 June at Saint-Valery-en-Caux.

Churchill was careful about what the number meant. "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory," he told the Commons. "Wars are not won by evacuations." He also called the events in France and Belgium "a colossal military disaster," while describing the escape as "a miracle of deliverance."

For the Royal Navy's biggest single loss of the following year, see HMS Hood; for the Eastern Front later in 1941, see the Battle of Moscow.