Ramsgate - 3-4 June 1940. The evacuation ended at 3.40am on the 4th June. 338,226 men had been rescued with the last 26,175 French troops on the night of 3-4 June. Doris mentioned parts of this episode in her journal which gave us a small insight to what ordinary people did on the home front. Her final record of 4th June - I must remember to post the dozens of letters soldiers have passed to me to post on their behalf. We have been told the emergency is now over, but I wonder if it has just begun? Sam will drive mum and the girls home in the morning. The call went out and ordinary people just did what had to be done, without complaining, making personal sacrifices, working tirelessly for people they didnt know and just because they were asked to help. These were just regular people - Doris a newsagent, My Gran a farmers wife, Elsie a sailors wife and Cathy was a butchers wife. There was Mrs May a town landlady of a lodgings house, the Mayor Mr ABC Kempe and many hundreds of others who helped, from Firemen - nurses, Priests - railwaymen. All played their part. Quietly with modesty and with a sense of duty. Such actions were of course common in the other towns during the evacuation. With 383 troops on board HMS Shikari was the last ship to leave Dunkirk. At 10.30am on the 4th June the small ships were dispersed, their work done. The Dunkirk Evacuation officially ended at 2.23pm “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.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 not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, 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 in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight 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, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.” Winston Churchill - June 1940 Later in 1942 my grandmother would lose one of her two sons at the Battle of El Alamein and the other would be wounded. At this same time they had German POWs working on their farm at Ash near Sandwich. When my mother told one of the German POWs her brother had been killed, the next day he gave her a beautiful wooden cross hed carved and asked her to give it to my grandmother. She accepted the gift and treasured it for the rest of her life. It went with her to her grave in Ramsgate Cemetery.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 20:37:36 +0000
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