World Battlefronts: Strange Truce

Two French Red Cross workers cycled along the causeway that leads across the marshes outside Dunkirk. They passed safely through the German lines, pedaled through no man’s land to the British lines. There they delivered a message from the German garrison commander. He wanted a truce to permit evacuation of Dunkirk’s 20,000 civilians before the final battle, in which the city was certain to be destroyed.

The British and Canadian commanders balanced the civilians’ lives against the loss of time in capturing Dunkirk and putting it to Allied use as a supply port. The civilians’ lives weighed heavier in the scale.

Back to Dunkirk went the Red Cross messengers, followed by a British officer who haggled over truce terms with an officer deputed by the German commander.

At last the bargain—one of the strangest of the war—was struck: firing would cease at 6 p.m. Tuesday. The Germans would have twelve hours to de-mine the road. The civilians would have 36 hours to quit the town. Then the Germans would have twelve hours more to blow up bridges and relay their mines. After that the battle would be resumed.

Protocol in No Man’s Land. The most minuscule points of military protocol were scrupulously observed. Major Jack Monteith, a wiry, six-foot Scot, supervised the later detailed negotiations in no man’s land when unforeseen points arose.

The evacuation procession included petits bourgeois in well-worn but well-tailored suits; artisans and laborers in ragged, patched work clothes; automobiles out of gas, loaded with entire families and drawn by horses; an ice-cream vendor’s velocipede, with a baby squalling in the ice-cream compartment; people with dogs, cats, cattle, goats and parrots.

In 24 hours, 12,800 passed the lines; in 36 hours, more than 17,000. But there were more thousands to go; a four-hour extension was granted. A score of German soldiers who had no stomach for the last-ditch stand Hitler had ordered tried to slip through, dressed in civilian clothes, but they were stopped.

At 10 a.m. Friday, the hour when the 15,000 Germans were supposed to have re-mined roads in preparation for the renewed assault, Allied warplanes swooped down upon Dunkirk’s docks and defenses, the guns spoke. At Dunkirk the war was on again.