Most people hear “Dunkirk” and think of 1940, the miracle evacuation, the little boats crossing the Channel to save over three hundred thousand stranded Allied soldiers from the beaches. But four years later, Dunkirk became the stage for something else entirely. A siege that lasted eight months, where the roles were reversed. This time, it was the Germans trapped inside the city, surrounded by Allied forces, stubbornly refusing to give up until the very end of the war.
By the autumn of 1944, the Allies had broken out of Normandy. After nearly two months of brutal fighting in the hedgerows, they finally smashed through the German lines. The German army in the West, already bleeding from the catastrophic losses on the Eastern Front, began to collapse. Allied tanks raced across France, liberating village after village, driving the remnants of the German army back toward their own borders.
Hitler issued a clear and brutal order. Every major port along the French coast was to become a “fortress city,” defended to the last man. The Allies needed those ports desperately. Their supply lines stretched all the way back to the beaches of Normandy, and every day they wasted trying to capture a heavily defended harbor was a day the Germans could use to regroup.
Most of those fortresses fell. Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, all eventually captured or surrendered. But Dunkirk was different. The German garrison there refused to break.
By early December 1944, Dunkirk was completely surrounded. British and Canadian troops had sealed off every road, every path, every escape route. But instead of storming the city, the Allies made a decision that would define the next several months. They left it alone.
Why? Because they had bigger priorities. Antwerp, the largest port in Europe, had been captured, but it was useless unless the Germans were cleared from the Scheldt Estuary. Every soldier, every tank, every shell needed for the push into Germany was being funneled toward that objective.
Dunkirk could wait. Let the Germans sit there, cut off and starving. They would surrender eventually. Inside the perimeter, more than ten thousand German soldiers waited.
Their commander was Vice-Admiral Friedrich Frisius, a naval officer thrown into a land command role. His forces were a mixed bag. Elements of the 226th Infantry Division, naval personnel, gunners manning heavy coastal artillery. But they had one huge advantage.
The terrain itself. The land around Dunkirk is flat, low-lying, and crisscrossed with canals and drainage ditches. The Germans opened the sluice gates and deliberately flooded vast areas of the surrounding countryside. Within hours, fields turned into shallow lakes.
The only dry ground was the raised roads, long, straight ribbons of concrete that cut through the water like causeways. Any soldier advancing along them was completely exposed. There was no cover, no place to hide, nowhere to run. One well-placed machine gun could hold a road for hours.
The Canadians learned this the hard way. In September 1944, as they moved to seal the ring around Dunkirk, they found themselves fighting through this nightmare terrain. At Loon Plage, they pushed forward, only to be driven back under heavy fire. Soldiers went days without food or water.
At Koksijde, a long straight road stretched for kilometers with nothing but open, flooded fields on either side. Men advanced without cover under continuous German artillery fire. Armored vehicles were knocked out. Infantry were pinned down.
Progress was measured in meters. One British officer, Captain Bruce Valentine Marshall, and his orderly, Private L. Torlacius, found out just how alert the defenders still were. They took a wrong turn in their jeep while driving back to headquarters in the dark, and drove straight into a German position armed with an 88-mm gun and machine guns.
Marshall was killed instantly. Torlacius dove into a ditch and crawled back to friendly lines. The message was clear. The Germans inside Dunkirk were not a beaten force.
They were organized, well-armed, and ready to fight. Eventually, the Allies completed the encirclement. Dunkirk was cut off completely. But the Germans didn’t surrender.
They just waited. From October 1944 onward, the siege settled into a long, grinding stalemate. The task of containing the fortress fell to a unit that had been waiting for this moment for years. The Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade Group, under General Alois Liška.
These were Czech and Slovak soldiers who had fled their homeland after the Nazi occupation, rebuilt their units in Britain, and were now finally getting the chance to fight back on the continent. It was their longest and most significant operation of the war. Day after day, month after month, they manned the lines around Dunkirk. Dug in, wet, cold, under constant artillery fire.
The Germans fired on anything that moved within range. It was a war of patrols, snipers, and shelling. Neither side was able to break the other, and neither side seemed willing to try. But the Germans had made a plan.
In early April 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing and the Red Army fighting street by street in Berlin, Adolf Hitler was dead within weeks, Vice-Admiral Frisius had other plans. He waited until the Allied lines had thinned out, then launched a surprise attack. Operation Blücher. On April 5, 1945, the German garrison threw everything it had at the surrounding Allied forces.
The attack was so unexpected, so aggressive, that British units dozens of kilometers away blew up bridges, panicking, convinced that a full German breakthrough was underway. The Germans gained ground, seized positions, and held them. It was a strange and surreal moment. While the rest of Germany was collapsing into chaos, while Berlin was being pounded to rubble, here on the coast of France, German soldiers were advancing.
They were still fighting, still on the offensive, months after any hope of victory had vanished. But it was futile. The war was over, whether they admitted it or not. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally.
The next day, May 9, 1945, the garrison of Dunkirk finally capitulated. In the village of Wormhoudt, Vice-Admiral Frisius formally surrendered to General Liška. After eight months of siege, it was over. The Czechoslovak troops who had invested so much of their strength in the siege had lost 167 dead, 461 wounded, and 40 missing.
The German garrison marched into prisoner-of-war camps. And in the end, the entire ordeal had served no purpose. Dunkirk had been strategically irrelevant for months. No supplies flowed through it, no reinforcements could reach it, and no Germans escaped through it.
It held on simply because a commander refused to surrender, because soldiers followed orders to the last, because a fortress city was ordered to fight. The Siege of Dunkirk, and the strange final German offensive of Operation Blücher, remain forgotten battles of the Second World War.
