The 88-millimeter shell came without warning. Marshall, only twenty-three years old, was riding in a jeep when the driver, Torlacius, took a wrong turn on the way back to brigade headquarters. They drove straight into a German gun position, machine guns opening up from all sides. Marshall never stood a chance.
Torlacius threw himself into a ditch and crawled back to the Cameron lines, but the warning was clear: the defenders of Dunkirk were not going to give up easily. This was not the Dunkirk of 1940, the famous evacuation that saved over 338,000 Allied soldiers from the beaches. No, this was the other siege, the one that lasted from mid-September 1944 until May 1945, long after everyone thought the war in France was over. In May 1940, German troops had swept through France and the Low Countries with terrifying speed.
Instead of fighting to the death, the Allies chose to evacuate, pulling hundreds of thousands of men off the beaches using everything from warships to fishing boats and pleasure yachts. It was a miracle, but it also meant that Dunkirk was never fully captured. The Germans held it, and four years later, as the Allies broke out of Normandy and raced toward Paris, they found that Dunkirk was still a thorn in their side. The Allied breakout from Normandy in the summer of 1944 was spectacular.
By mid-August, more than 150,000 Allied soldiers had landed on the French Riviera between Marseille and Nice. Polish, Free French, Dutch, British, American, and Canadian troops all fought together, pushing the Germans back relentlessly. But as they advanced, they realized they needed ports to supply their armies. The artificial harbors built at Normandy were useful but limited.
The Allies needed deep-water ports, and Dunkirk was one of them. Adolf Hitler understood this too. In December 1944, he ordered that all major ports along the Atlantic and Channel coast be defended as fortress cities. The Allies were not to use these ports for supply, and they were to be forced to waste time and manpower trying to take them.
Le Havre, Boulogne, and Calais eventually fell, but Dunkirk proved far more stubborn. Instead of launching a direct assault, the Allies chose a different strategy. They decided to isolate the city and starve it into surrender. The task fell mainly to the First Canadian Army.
In September 1944, Canadian brigades advanced toward Dunkirk, not to capture it directly, but to seal off every road and rail line leading in and out. The idea was simple: cut the Germans off, and eventually they would have to give up. But the Germans had other plans. The area around Dunkirk was low-lying, and the Germans deliberately flooded large sections of it, turning the fields into impassable marshland.
Soldiers could only move along the raised roads, which were perfect targets for German artillery. Every movement was visible, every advance a gamble. At Koksijde, troops had to march along a long, straight road for kilometers without any cover, while German guns fired on them continuously. The Canadians and their allies suffered heavily.
The Germans were well-entrenched and determined. They knew that as long as they held Dunkirk, they were tying down Allied forces that could have been used elsewhere. And they were still receiving supplies. Between the 20th of April and the 2nd of May 1945, just days before the end of the war, German submarines called Seehunds were still sneaking into the port.
Normally armed with torpedoes, these small submarines were instead fitted with containers of food. Despite the blockade, the garrison was still being fed. The German garrison inside Dunkirk included more than 10,000 soldiers. Among the Allied troops surrounding them was a unit that had formed in Britain in 1943, made up of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had fled their occupied homeland.
They fought alongside the Canadians, British, Poles, and French, all of them knowing that their countries were counting on them. As the months dragged on, the siege became a war of attrition. The Germans launched counterattacks, sometimes gaining ground and holding their positions. Even as Berlin was on the verge of collapse in April 1945, the German forces at Dunkirk were still actively fighting and advancing.
It seemed absurd, but the defenders were not ready to give up. The end finally came in May 1945. On May 8th, Nazi Germany officially surrendered. But at Dunkirk, the fighting did not stop immediately.
The next day, May 9th, the garrison finally capitulated. In the village of Wormhoudt, a German officer named Frisius signed the surrender to General Liška. After eight months of siege, the fortress of Dunkirk had fallen. The Germans had held out for months in a port that, by the end, no longer had any strategic value.
Their casualties are unclear, but when they finally surrendered, they were taken as prisoners of war. The Allies had won, but the cost had been high, and the siege had proven just how determined the German defenders could be. For the soldiers on both sides, the siege of Dunkirk was a brutal, exhausting ordeal that lasted long after the rest of France had been liberated. It was a battle that no one talks about much, overshadowed by the dramatic evacuation of 1940.
But for those who were there, it was a fight that never seemed to end. The war ended, but the memory of that long, muddy, bloody siege stayed with them forever. And now, when you hear about Dunkirk, you know there is more than one story to tell.
