With the increase in news about Nolan's next film "Dunkirk" I got thinking about the place of Dynamo in the British national consciousness and the narrative of WW2.
The "little boats" obviously are a major part of the story and many town quays and docks in the southern UK have plaques commemorating how many boats left to help and some of the vessels themselves still taking part in remembrance events, so my question is this:
Do we know how useful the informal help of non-military vessels was during the evacuation?
If so, how useful were they at actually helping in the evacuation or was their benefit (if any) more of a psychological/political one in the building of the "Dunkirk Spirit" narrative?
It really depends on how you define the 'Little Ships'. If you take the loosest possible definition, i.e. every non-naval/military ship involved, then they were hugely useful. If you focus down to just the small boats, ignoring the larger passenger vessels, then their role becomes rather less defined. On the 30th of May, the RN's estimate of troops transported by the various types of ship had the RN's destroyers carrying 17,000 people, large Merchant Navy transports and hospital ships evacuating 9500, and the remaining ships (including RN drifters, minesweepers and trawlers, as well as the smaller civilian craft) carrying a total of 15,000 men. However, it should be noted that this followed an attempt to cut down on the numbers of destroyers involved in the evacuation.
The majority of the troops evacuated from Dunkirk boarded ships at Dunkirk harbour, rather than being evacuated over the beaches. Nearly 340,000 troops were evacuated from the Dunkirk pocket, with just under 100,000 coming over the beaches. A large part of this is down to the sizes of the ships directly evacuating troops. At Dunkirk harbour, the largest ships could come alongside the moles, and be loaded directly, allowing more troops to be packed aboard. However, as Dunkirk harbour came under artillery fire and air attack, smaller craft, including those which came over informally, became more useful, ferrying troops out to ships outside the harbour. The majority of ships travelling from Dunkirk Harbour were destroyers, naval transports and large civilian ships.
On the beaches, the troops typically boarded the smaller boats, the lifeboats and pleasure craft, which shuttled them out to the larger ships which had to wait offshore. This was a slower process than loading troops directly, and typically the receiving ships took fewer men aboard. The typical 'Little Ship' would only make a single trip to Dunkirk, due to damage sustained by the heavy fire. In addition a large portion of the inshore work was done by motor launches and small craft carried by the RN ships offshore.Despite this, the ~100,000 troops who came off the beaches would likely have passed through one of the 'Little Ships'. Some craft were singled out for their efficacy in this work. The lifeboats of the RNLI were cited as some of the most useful small craft available, equalling the RN's own landing craft. The London Fire Brigade fireboat Massey Shaw was named as one of the most effective civilian ships, with her volunteer crew making four trips to the beaches and back.
One of the most important informal contributions came from 40 Dutch coasters, called Skoots in the official narrative. While these craft were too big to beach easily, they were greatly useful for ferrying troops between the beaches and ships lying offshore. They would also occasionally return to the UK, either when there weren't enough ships to transfer to, when they needed replenishment, or when evacuation over the beaches ceased temporarily. Some of these ships evacuated more than 1000 men, making them a substantial part of the evacuation over the beaches.
Sources:
The War in France and Flanders, Major L. F. Ellis, HMSO, 1954
The Evacuation of the Allied Armies from Dunkirk and Neighbouring Beaches, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, 1940, published in the Supplement to the London Gazette, 17th July 1947
The popular view of the evacuation from Dunkirk is one of the RN and the "little ships" rescuing the BEF from the beaches. Although the RN were heavily involved, the bulk of the vessels used in the evacuation were conventional merchant vessels of all types, cargo ships, ferries and fishing vessels of all types were involved. The larger ships used the docks and then the moles at Dunkirk, then when these were destroyed by bombing, ships' boats collected the men from the open beaches north of the town, and ferried them to the larger vessels. The "little ships" were then collected to help in this process of ferrying the men to the larger ships. They were, of course, very important in the morale boosting story post evacuation. The annoying thing (obviously I'm biased) I've found about every single screen/film portrayal of Dunkirk is the ignoring of the role of the civilians in the Merchant Navy in the evacuation! I hope that this new version won't be the same.