The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

rain – but no wind. The Channel remained flat as a board. The weather gods
were smiling on the British.
Nearly 18,000 men were evacuated that day – almost 12,000 from the
east mole, and nearly 6,000 from the beaches. Yet most of these had been
lifted from the Dunkirk end, and now more and more men were pouring on
to the beaches further along, particularly near Bray Dunes. Bill Tennant
heard that there were now around 5,000 milling around the dunes and
beaches there, so sent two of his officers and fifteen men to see what they
could organize. They were staggered to discover not 5,000 but some 25,000
men already there, most exhausted, thirsty, hungry and leaderless. And
there were nothing like enough boats offshore. ‘I must stress the need for
boats and motor launches at Bray,’ they signalled. ‘Much provisions for
troops also needed.’
That same evening, Ramsay, from the Dynamo Room at Dover, asked
that every available shallow-draft power boat should be sent to the beaches
as soon as possible. Despite the embargo on the news of the evacuation, the
Admiralty responded by combing the entire coast from Portsmouth to
Norfolk for motor boats, lighters and barges, and, of course, their crews.
And these were now heading to Dunkirk too.
HMS Icarus had now reached Dunkirk too, having reached Dover in the
early hours and then steamed off with four other destroyers, including her
sister ships Ivanhoe and Intrepid. They arrived at the mole at around 5.30
a.m. just as a personnel vessel filled with water and waiting outside the
harbour for a berth hit a magnetic mine. ‘She just erupted into a thousand
pieces,’ says Andrew Begg, who saw her go. The Mona Queen sank in
about two minutes. Earlier, the destroyer HMS Wakeful had also sunk, hit
by a torpedo on her return to Dover; more than 600 troops on board were
drowned.
Only two hours after drawing alongside the mole, Icarus sailed away
again with some 950 men on board, reaching Dover at around 11.30 a.m.
Quickly unloading, she then turned round and sped back, this time heading
not for the mole but for the beaches at Bray Dunes, where the shortage of
shallow-draft boats was still causing major difficulties. ‘It was chaos,’ says
Andrew Begg, ‘because there was no way of getting large numbers of men
out to the ship.’ Icarus dropped two whalers and a motor boat. ‘We couldn’t
anchor and daren’t anchor because of the constant aerial activity,’ says