Dunkirk: Zuydcoote & Bray Dunes
DUNKIRK: ZUYDCOOTE
AND BRAY DUNES
May 5
Today would be the cornerstone of the entire trip. The guide we had chosen was Emmanuel Clermont, a native of the area who works for both Dunkerque Tourisme and Tours by Local. [5 stars!!!] According to websites we researched, he was experienced and knowledgeable; and we had found already that he had been responsive to our queries and gone "above and beyond" in helping us plan and schedule the trip. He drove a comfortable company minivan and picked us up at our hotel punctually at 9:30.
Our first stop, one that had been planned for months to be at low tide, would be at nearby (about 5 miles east) Zuydcoote and Bray Dunes to see the what remains of the HMS Crested Eagle, a paddle steamer passenger ship which was hit during Operation Dynamo by German bombers while trying to evacuate the ~600 men aboard her (and whose bell, you may recall from the photo in yesterday's entry, is displayed at the 1940 Operation Dynamo Museum). With the ship on fire, the captain ordered her beached so survivors could escape back to the beaches, which about 300 did. The fate of the other 300 is dramatically memorialized by the skeletal ruins which are visible at low tide.
Emmanuel had advised us to bring beach shoes we didn't mind getting muddy, and we sloshed out to see what was left of the ship after 86 at the bottom of the Channel. (We learned from the jump that Emmanuel knew that of which he spoke!)
In May 1940 the German army had attacked France from 2 directions, with Army Group B (Plan Yellow) moving in from the east through the Netherlands then Belgium [note: the Belgian border with France is ~12 miles from Dunkirk] and Army Group A (Plan Red) attacking from the south and swinging northeast. Both converged along the northern French coast from Abbeville and Boulogne to the west and De Panne to the east ... with Dunkirk the bullseye. The French and Allies had pillboxes and machine gun nests to defend the Channel, which like cowbirds the Germans captured and moved into. In addition, they built some of their own along the coast. Here are a couple of those remaining, one with the obligatory graffiti, presumably from history-averse local kids ...
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| Pillbox at Zuydcoote |
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| Pillbox at Leffrinckoucke |
Note:The movie Dunkirk and others before, as well as a number of books (I recommend an oldie, The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord), focus on the Little Ships' role in the evacuation of Dunkirk. It's certainly the most intriguing part of the story, but in the end it is estimated that somewhere between 15,000 - 35,000 soldiers actually returned to England via the Little Ships. Their role in extricating soldiers from the shallow waters on the beaches and ferrying them to the larger ships who had to anchor offshore, however, was invaluable. Approximately 100,000 soldiers were transported by Little Ships from the beaches to larger Naval vessels.
For all types of ships, a big part of the story that's sometimes lost is the difficulty in making it to Dunkirk, then picking up soldiers, and returning. The Germans weren't just sitting on their hands. They had the aforementioned machine gun nests and artillery, but their first line of defense was the fearsome trio of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers, mines, of the harbour and beaches, and the Kriegsmarine (U-boats, E-boats, S-boats, and small warships). The Allies tried 3 separate routes (creatively known as X, Y, and Z) to enable them to reach Dunkirk. The following map shows those routes and the obstacles facing each:
The superiority of the vaunted Royal British Navy along with ships from France and the other Allies, along with RAF fighters/bombers and the weather, allowed enough Navy and Little Ships to cross so that an unexpectedly large number of BEF and French (and a few other Allies) were evacuated back to England. Collective and individual heroism, fierce support from the RAF, favorable (for the Allies) cloudy weather, and Providential favor were all vital.
Following our visit to the sunken ship and the surrounding area, we made a brief refueling stop at a cafe in Zuydcoote.
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| Old hospital on beach at Zuydcoote with bullet holes pocking the facade |
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| Downtown Zuydcoote (school kids heading to see shipwrecks on beach) |
Afterwards Emmanuel suggested a stop at a WWI military cemetery there. The magnitude and importance of WWI to France, England, and neighboring countries had finally begun to sink in for us. To Americans (or at least the 3 of us) WWI is almost as ignored or forgotten as the Spanish-American War, probably because the U.S. was only involved in the fighting for a year and lost over 116,000 men. The carnage and slaughter in France, the Low Countries, England, and Germany, however, lasted 4 years and cost an estimated 20 million lives, half military and half civilian. Their WWI cemeteries are full. Since there was obviously fighting near Zuydcoote and Bray Dunes during WWII as there had been in WWI, some of those interred are WWII soldiers.
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| WWII French KIA's |
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| WWI French KIA's |
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| WWI French Algerian and Moroccan deceased marked by unique Muslim headstones |
As with every military cemetery I have visited from Vicksburg and Gettysburg to Arlington to American, Canadian, and German cemeteries in Normandy, there is a mystical stillness that has left me with a sense of awe and sadness. Although Zuydcoote is a small town (population 1,600), its large "City of the Dead" (about 2,500) has a disproportionate impact for a village of its size.
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