Dunkirk was a small port with a small pier; the sea offshore was shallow a good ways off. The Brits and the French were taken off, 2, 3 10 at a time by a fleet of English fishermen and yachtsmen, who brought their boats across the Channel and right up on the beaches, pulling men into their craft from waist deep water and then either back to England or to bigger ships waiting offshore in deeper water....so the next time you're out in a power boat, imagine taking it across 30 miles of open water, right up to a beach under artillery and machine gun fire, with a sky filled with enemy planes, and pulling a half dozen troops aboard..ad then taking them out to a bigger ship or those 30 miles aback; and doing it again and again with a thousand other boaters till you've lifted 350,000 out of harms way.
from William Manchester's "Winston Churchill: The Last Lion":
THE French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.
Behind them lay the sea.
It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone……
. Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate.
King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.”
Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Grade Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw — all of them manned by civilian volunteers:
English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.
Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men.............