By mid-September 1944, Dunkirk was surrounded. The Canadians had sealed off every road leading into the city, but they did not storm it. Instead, they chose to wait, to isolate the ten thousand German soldiers trapped inside and let them wither. Their commander, Vice Admiral Friedrich Frisius, had no intention of making that easy.
The same stretch of coastline that had witnessed the miracle evacuation of 1940 was now the stage for a very different kind of siege. The Germans had flooded the low-lying land around the city, turning open fields into impassable marshland. Any movement had to be made along raised roads, raised embankments that were nothing more than kill zones. It was the perfect defence.
The Allies had other priorities. Antwerp was the prize, and the Scheldt estuary had to be secured to open that great port. Dunkirk would have to wait. So, instead of a decisive assault, the task fell to the First Canadian Army to simply hold the ring.
They advanced on the outskirts, fighting through villages like Loon-Plage, Mardick, and Spycker. The fighting was brutal and confusing. At Loon-Plage, the Canadians initially pushed forward, only to be forced back after days of fighting without proper food or water. At Coppenaxfort, they had to advance for kilometres along a single exposed straight road.
German artillery zeroed in on them from the start. Armoured vehicles were knocked out, and infantry units were pinned down in the open. Every attack was dangerous, every attempt to gain ground costly. Captain Bruce Valentine Marshall, a twenty-three-year-old intelligence officer, took a wrong turn in his jeep one evening while heading back to headquarters with his orderly.
They drove straight into a German 88-millimetre gun position guarded by machine guns. Marshall was killed instantly. His orderly dove into a ditch and crawled the entire way back to the British lines. The incident was a grim warning: the defenders of Dunkirk were not going to fold.
They were determined, well-armed, and strong enough to offer a real fight. Despite the stubborn resistance, the Allies achieved their objective by mid-September. Dunkirk was completely cut off. Rather than risk the casualties of a direct assault on a flooded fortress, the decision was made to leave it contained.
The siege lines were handed over to a new force: the Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade Group under General Alois Liška. These were Czech and Slovak soldiers who had fled their occupied homeland and had trained in Britain since 1943. Now, they were given the unglamorous, grinding task of holding the siege. Months passed.
The winter of 1944 into 1945 dragged on, with the Czechoslovaks manning the flooded perimeter and the Germans hunkered down in the city. The garrison, against all odds, refused to collapse. They were even being supplied from the air and, in the final days of the war, by sea. Between 28 April and 2 May 1945, just a week before the German surrender, the Kriegsmarine sent small Seehund midget submarines towards the city.
Normally armed with torpedoes, these tiny vessels were instead packed with containers of food. They delivered supplies to the starving garrison and even carried mail back out. The men nicknamed them “butter torpedoes. ”
But the most astonishing moment came earlier, in early April 1945.
While the rest of Germany was crumbling under the weight of the Soviet advance and the Allied push across the Rhine, Admiral Frisius decided to go on the offensive. On 5 April, he launched Operation Blücher, a full-scale sortie against the Allied lines surrounding his city. The attack was so unexpected that it threw the British forces into chaos. They believed a major German breakout was underway.
Bridges were blown up, not just around Dunkirk, but dozens of kilometres away, as panicked commanders feared the German army was suddenly pouring out of the fortress. The sortie achieved its initial objectives. German troops gained ground and held it for a time. It was a surreal, almost absurd moment: while Berlin was on the verge of capture and the city of Hamburg was surrendering without a fight, an isolated garrison of ten thousand men on the coast of France was still advancing, still fighting, and still holding its ground.
But the outcome was inevitable. On 8 May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally. The war in Europe was over. Yet, in Dunkirk, the garrison held on one more day.
On 9 May, Frisius finally signed the surrender. The ceremony took place in the village of Wormhout, a short distance from the city. Eight months of siege ended with the German admiral handing his sword to General Liška. The cost for the besiegers had been significant.
The Czechoslovak brigade suffered 167 dead, 461 wounded, and 40 missing. The German garrison, which had held out in a port that had long since lost any strategic value, was taken into captivity. The scale of their losses remains unclear. In the end, the Siege of Dunkirk was a battle of attrition and stubbornness, a forgotten footnote in the final months of the war.
A city that had once symbolized the desperate escape of an army was, four years later, the site of a last stand that served no purpose but to delay the inevitable. It stands as a quiet testament to the strangeness of those final days, when the guns only fell silent when the war itself was already over.
