The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
DOVER CASTLE
THE NERVE CENTRE OF OPERATION DYNAMO
This spot – high on the ramparts of Dover Castle – was once a front-row seat on history. Rowena Willard-Wright gestures at the harbour far below, the blue haze of the Dover Strait and the coastline of France beyond, and paints a picture: “A sea of ships – but that was the case for the whole of the South Coast. Very busy, very smoky, but the sea was like a mill pond. Calm as you like – what came to be known as ‘Dunkirk weather’.”
Rowena is a senior curator at English Heritage, which owns Dover Castle. In May and June 1940, the castle played a largely unsung role in the event that came to epitomise the British wartime spirit: the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French coast at and around the port of Dunkirk.
The fleet of civilian vessels – pleasure craft, lifeboats, fishing smacks, ferries – may monopolise the story, but the evacuation was far less spontaneous and improvised than many realise. Operation Dynamo was masterminded from Dover Castle, by the man whose statue we are standing next to.
Telescope in his left hand, the bronze likeness of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay scans forever the horizons he commanded between 1939 and 1945. The former nerve centre of the operation lies in the chalk deep beneath our feet: “Right in the middle of the white cliffs of Dover, which were like cheese, in tunnelling terms,” says Rowena, who leads me down a ramp into a complex of half a dozen tunnels sunk during the Napoleonic era and re-equipped for use in the Second World War.
Inside a former communications room, once filled with telephone exchanges, a white table acts as a screen on which the shifting story of May 1940 is projected in maps and newsreels. By May 25, some 400,000 British and Allied troops were trapped by German forces in a diminishing pocket around Dunkirk. On the evening of the following day, ensconced in the tunnels, Ramsay received orders to trigger the operation to bring them home. He had had less than a week to prepare.
As we progress through the dimly lit brick passageways, the story unfolds by means of original footage, interwoven with computerised animation and, at one point, a ghostly hologram of defeated troops. The most dramatic exhibit is the main ops room, with dangling head sets and its original plotting table – of the kind that featured so memorably in war films.
“It’s a strange mixture between the simplicity of writing stuff on a blackboard and the enormous technological breakthrough of radar,” says Rowena.
On May 29, as the first of the “little ships” prepared to sail for France on calm seas, Ramsay wrote to his wife of the sheer exhaustion of the staff in the tunnels: “Officers and men cannot continue at this pace, but all are doing their best.”
In the end, the rescue was a miracle in the midst of a defeat. At Dover harbour, according to Rowena, a WRNS officer who worked in the tunnels noted that the returning troops, far from being overjoyed to be home, “walked like automatons”.
Soon, however “what looked like defeat would pass into the language as a refusal to be defeated”. And Dunkirk was re-cast as “the event that shaped our world,” to use the publicity slogan for Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film. But it started and finished deep underground where, in Ramsay’s words, “days and nights are all one”. Dover Castle (englishheritage.org.uk) is open daily, 10am-6pm. Admission (including access to the wartime tunnels): adults £19.40, 5-15s £11.60.