Naval Staff History No. 41, the official historical study of the evacuation from Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo, 26 May–4 June 1940, dated 1949.
Source: The National Archives, Kew, ADM 234/360. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
1 matching pages. OCR may contain transcription errors.
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THE EVACUATION FROM DUNKIRK |
Unformatted machine-generated OCR for document page 128.
THE EVACUATION FROM DUNKIRK CHAP. X clearly marked as hospital ships. Neither of the two ever reached Dunkirk. were despatched from Dover, the Worthing at 1255 and the Paris at 1648, both we should scrupulously observe the Two hospital carriers part en clair asking for hospital ships to be Geneva sent across Convention. and stating that for our At 1433 the A/S trawler Grimsby Town, on patrol on Route X, reported that had bombed a hospital ship. This was Worthing. Visibility was good. 12 aircraft bearing 90° South Foreland 27 the miles (between V and W buoys) Nine bombs were dropped and the the Calcutta ship was sent machine the gunned, she was slightly damaged by near misses and corvette Mallard to stand by her. The Worthing returned to harbour. near W buoy, when two aircraft attacked her, near misses putting out of action The Paris, after running into thick fog, was in clear visibility at about 1900, her engines and extinguishing all lights. About an hour later the ship was attacked again by 3 aircraft, and received further damage. She was abandoned by all but the Captain and some of the officers, who were shortly afterwards taken off by a fast motor boat which also rescued men from some of the Paris's lifeboats that had been wrecked by bombing. Three tugs, the Sun XV, Sun IV and Lady Brassey attempted to tow the ship; but at 0400 on 3rd June, after a further air attack, the Paris sank 1 mile east of W. buoy. Evacuation figures, 2nd June A total of 26,256 men were landed in England on 2nd June, 19,561 from Dunkirk harbour and 6,695 from the beaches. Of these totals, French ships working only from the harbour carried 1634, and Belgian trawlers carried 313. The accumulated total of men evacuated to this date was 285,305. 104