The Allied colonel was twenty-three years old when he drove his jeep straight into the German line. His name was Captain Bruce Valentine Marshall, and he had taken a wrong turn in the dark while heading back to his brigade headquarters. Somewhere between the flooded fields and the raised roads, he stumbled into an 88 mm gun position. Machine guns opened up.
Marshall had no time to react. He was killed instantly. His batman, Private Torlacius, threw himself into a ditch and crawled back through the mud to the Canadian lines. He lived.
Marshall did not. That was the kind of war being waged around Dunkirk in the autumn of 1944. Most people know the name Dunkirk from May 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were trapped on the beaches and miraculously evacuated by fleets of fishing boats and pleasure yachts. That operation saved the British Army and became legend.
But fewer people know that there was a second siege of Dunkirk, starting in September 1944 and lasting until May 1945. Only this time, roles were reversed. This time it was the Germans locked inside. This is a story about Germany’s last offensive operation in France, and about a fortress that refused to fall until the war itself was over.
By late summer 1944, the Allies had seized the initiative. After nearly two months of brutal fighting in Normandy, they finally broke out through Operation Cobra at the end of July. The German Army in the West, already shattered and depleted, began a desperate retreat across France. Hundreds of thousands of Allied troops poured out of the bridgehead, liberating town after town.
Paris was liberated. The Germans could not hold a coherent front anymore. The Allies were also landing on the south coast of France in Operation Dragoon, pushing the Germans north through Provence. Together, these campaigns crushed German control over France in a matter of weeks.
But as the front line swept east, one thing was left behind: the ports along the Atlantic and Channel coasts. Chunks of German garrisons remained isolated, surrounded by Allied armies, but refusing to surrender. Commander Hitler had issued a clear order: defend every major port as a fortress city. The reason was simple.
Ports were valuable. If the Allies captured them intact, they could supply their armies much easier. So the Germans would hold them, forcing the Allies to waste ships, men, time, and resources to capture or contain them. Most of these fortresses eventually fell.
Le Havre fell. Boulogne fell. Calais fell. But one port held out until the very end.
And that was Dunkirk. By early December 1944, British and Canadian troops had completely surrounded the city. But they did not launch a full frontal assault. Instead, they decided to seal it off and starve it into surrender.
This was partly because of the flood. The land around Dunkirk was low-lying, so the Germans opened the sluices and deliberately flooded huge areas. What had once been fields, pastures, and farmland became shallow lakes and impassable marshland. The only ways to move were the raised roads, straight and narrow, with no cover anywhere.
Any soldier advancing along those roads was fully visible to German gun crews and artillery observers. Any attack would be a slaughter. The Allies therefore chose containment. They would besiege the city instead of destroying it.
They also had a bigger priority: the port of Antwerp. Antwerp was the largest and most strategically important port in the region, but it sat deep inland, behind the Scheldt Estuary. Until that estuary was cleared of German guns, no supply ships could reach Antwerp. Everything else needed to wait.
So Dunkirk was contained and left to wither. The task of sealing off the city was carried out mainly by troops of the First Canadian Army. Through September 1944, they fought inch by inch through flooded countryside to cut every road and track leading into Dunkirk. Battles flared around small villages with strange names:Loon Plage, Mardyck, Spycker, Bergues.
Every advance happened along those exposed raised roads, under German artillery fire that never seemed to stop. At Loon Plage, Canadian troops pushed forward and gained ground, only to be forced back again. Many soldiers spent days without food or water because supply columns could not move up safely. At Koksijde, men had to advance for kilometers along a single straight road, no cover, no room for maneuver, with German guns firing at them the whole way.
Armored vehicles were knocked out. Infantry units were pinned down. Progress was measured in blood and meters. Yet by mid-September, the objective was achieved: Dunkirk was completely cut off from the outside world.
The Germans inside were trapped. But they were far from defeated. By October, the siege had settled into a strange stalemate. The city was surrounded, but the man in command inside was determined not to surrender.
His name was Vice-Admiral Friedrich Frisius, an experienced naval officer who now found himself in charge of ground defense. He commanded more than ten thousand men, including elements of the 226th Infantry Division, naval personnel, and coastal artillery units. And he still had plenty of fighting spirit left in him. Inside the city, German soldiers settled into a routine of watch duty, patrols, small unit raids, and endless artillery exchanges.
Outside, the Allies had no interest in storming the place. They built defensive lines of their own, kept pressure on the perimeter, and waited. As months passed, the siege became almost routine. Both sides learned to survive day by day.
But the men tasked with keeping Dunkirk contained were not British or Canadian by the end. The siege was handed over to the Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade Group, under command of General Alois Liška. This unit consisted of Czech and Slovak soldiers, men who had fled their homeland after it was occupied by the Germans, who had fought their way through Britain, who had volunteered to return to the continent and take part in the liberation of Europe. Now, at the end of 1944, they sat in the flooded flatlands around Dunkirk, facing an enemy they hated more than most, while frost and fog settled over the ditches and the minefields.
These men spent months in the siege lines. They dug trenches, stood watch through freezing nights, exchanged fire with German snipers, and waited for the war to end. The Germans inside the city were suffering too. Food was running low.
Morale was dropping. Yet still they held on. Some supplies did get through. Between the 20th of April and the 2nd of May 1945, with the end of the war days away, German small submarines, Seehunds, slipped out of the besieged port.
Normally these little submarines carried torpedoes, but now their torpedo tubes were fitted with containers full of food and other essentials. These supply runs carried enough to keep the garrison going just a little longer. The crews also took mail out with them when they left. They even had landed sick and wounded personnel.
They became known to the Germans as butter torpedoes, because of the supplies they carried instead of their usual armament. Even in those final days, Dunkirk was functioning as a fortress, receiving supplies by sea under the noses of the besieging Allies. It was a bizarre symbol of German stubbornness, but it wasn’t the full story either. In early April 1945, with the war clearly lost and Berlin itself days away from falling, Frisius did something astonishing.
He launched an offensive. On the 5th of April, German troops poured out of Dunkirk in a coordinated attack against the Allied lines surrounding them. They called it Operation Blücher. The assault was so unexpected that British units dozens of kilometers away blew up bridges, fearing the Germans had broken out and were heading toward them.
German infantry initially gained ground, capturing positions and holding them. Soldiers who had spent months under siege, short on food, short on hope, suddenly attacking outward and advancing. It was a surreal moment in the history of the war:while the German capital was collapsing under the weight of Soviet armies, German troops in a flooded corner of France were still attacking, still gaining ground, still showing teeth. It did not change the outcome of the war.
It could not. But it said something about the determination of those men, and about the man commanding them. Even when the war was over in all practical terms, Frisius refused to simply wait to be starved into submission. He went out fighting instead.
The end came soon enough. On May 8th, 1945, Nazi Germany officially surrendered. One day later, on May 9th, 1945, after nearly eight months of siege, Dunkirk finally capitulated. In the village of Wormhoudt, General Frisius signed the surrender agreement to General Liška, commander of the Czechoslovak forces who had held the siege lines for months.
Eight months of besieging a city that no longer had any strategic value to anyone. Eight months of holding on, waiting, watching, dying. The Czechoslovaks suffered 167 dead, 461 wounded, and 40 missing during those months. The Germans who walked out of Dunkirk after itch surrendered were taken as prisoners of war.
Their casualties were never clearly counted. It was over. And then, almost immediately, the story was forgotten. Dunkirk 1940 is remembered as the miracle.
Dunkirk 1944-45, though, all but vanished from history. The Germans held onto a soggy, flooded, strategically worthless port for eight entire months after it was surrounded, launched one final desperate sortie weeks before Hitler killed himself, and forced the Allies to invest tens of thousands of men in containing them. And when the war ended, they surrendered quietly to a Czechoslovak general in a small village, and everyone moved on. That was it.
That was the forgotten siege of Dunkirk. And that was the last offensive military operation conducted by Germany on French soil during World War II. Not a grand armored thrust. Not a desperate counterattack across open plains.
It was an attack out of a flooded fortress town, by starving defenders, in the final weeks of the war, with nothing left to gain and nothing left to lose. And after eight months of resistance, it ended not with a dramatic final battle, but with a signature on a piece of paper in a village called Wormhoudt. The siege was over. The war was over.
And the men who had been trapped inside that city, and the men who had sat outside it for months, all marched off onto history’s pages, where most of them would barely get a footnote. The 1944-45 Siege of Dunkirk,and Operation Blücher, remain two of the most overlooked battles of the Second World War. Yet they were fought all the way to the end, with real men, real courage, real stubbornness, and real death. Not by famous generals or elite divisions, but by ordinary soldiers, many of them far from home, who refused to stop fighting until the war itself told them to stop.
Dunkirk survived a second siege, and it remained a German-held fortress until Germany itself no longer existed. That is the miracle they don’t tell you about. That is the forgotten siege.
And that is the story of Germany’s final offensive operation in France.
