in the dunkirk evacuation who was to blame? the navy or the army?

Question

at the time who did people in Britain blame? the navy or the army? xxx

Answer 1

I can't say who the British people blames. Without the evacuation, about 250,000 British and French soldiers would have been taken prisoner and basically left Britian without an army.
Why the Germans let them escape has always puzzled me. Hitler would have been in a fantastic bargaining position if he had been holding 250,000 British prisoners of war. And Chamberlain would probably have caved to Hitler's demands. The navy and civilians owning boats & ships responded and evacuated the army. A tremendous effort by the populus and military.
Victory has a thousand authors and defeat has one. Meaning that everyone wants credit for winning and no one wants credit for failure.
For Dunkirk, lots of blame could be spread around. But don't forget the French. The entire French army, fighting in their country collapsed in just six weeks of fighting the Germans.
This failure to defend greatly contributed to Dunkirk.

Answer 2

Operation Dynamo (or Dunkirk Evacuation or just "Dunkirk") was the name given to the World War II mass evacuation of Allied soldiers from May 26 to June 4, 1940, during the Battle of Dunkirk. British Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay planned the operation and briefed Winston Churchill in the Dynamo Room (a room in the naval headquarters below Dover Castle which contained the dynamo that provided the electricity), giving the operation its name (Holmes 2001:267).

In nine days, more than three hundred thousand (338,226) French (120,000) and British (218,226) soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk, France and the surrounding beaches by a hastily assembled fleet of about seven hundred boats. These craft included the famous "Little Ships of Dunkirk", a mixture of merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and RNLI lifeboats, whose civilian crews were called into service for the emergency. These small craft ferried troops from the beaches to larger ships waiting offshore. Though the "Miracle of the Little Ships" is a major folk memory in Britain (and a great morale booster of the time), over 80% of the evacuated troops actually embarked from the harbour's protective mole onto the 42 destroyers and other large ships.
Before the operation was completed, the prognosis had been gloomy, with Winston Churchill warning the House of Commons to expect "hard and heavy tidings". Subsequently, Churchill referred to the outcome as a "miracle" and exhortations to the "Dunkirk spirit" — of triumphing in the face of adversity — are still (occasionally) heard in Britain today. The British press presented the evacuation as a "Disaster Turned To Triumph" so successfully that Churchill had to remind the country, in a speech to the House of Commons on 4 June, that "we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

Answer 3

Blame??? The recriminations were mainly between the French and British. The so-called miracle of Dunkirk was the escape of the majority of the BEF by the flotilla of British ships.

The French were wanting the BEF to punch southward and help defend Paris. What they all did not consider was that the Allied Generals were outwitted. They lost the Battle of France because of their outdated tactics rooted in the static trench warfare of WWI. The use of tanks in 'penny packets' in support of infantry were no match for massed armour of the German panzers. Their poorly conceived plan to defend the Low Land Countries doomed them from the onset. The Maginot Line did not reach the coast in order to not offend the Low Land countries proved their downfall. IF their was to be any blame, blame the allied generals.

Answer 4

Follow the links

Answer 5

The National government screwed up. Gave no support when needed most and the French were not the most vigourous in that battle. Both were overwhelmed by the superior German war machine.

Answer 6

" THE French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.
Behind them lay the sea.
It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone. If the Germans crossed the Channel and established uncontested beachheads, all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops. Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.” Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Grade Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw — all of them manned by civilian volunteers: English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.

Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven. It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.
England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become. Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people — a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die” — who could if necessary be Just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

In London there was such a man."

from William Manchester:" Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion"

Answer 7

Nether, it was the Allied Command !!
Had too many irons in the fire---had gambled big on certain things that didn't prove correct ---and were too full of themselves at the time to make proper "think-tank" operations that would have given them proper info or at least proper overview to avoid the catastrophe !!

Answer 8

army. definately

Answer 9

both i hope