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Triumph of His Majesty’s Bathtub Navy

Stories of war—whether modern or historical—are not usually of much interest to me. I don’t like to dwell on tragedy, and war is always tragic, for every side, regardless of the motivations or outcome. Occasionally, however, in the midst of tragedy is a story of hope that is worth retelling. I told such a story here back in 2005, back when the Battle of Dunkirk (which has always been well known in Britain and France), was little known in North America. Then Christopher Nolan had to go and make an Oscar-winning movie about it. So the story is much better known now in outside Europe, but no less interesting, unique, or inspiring.

The year was 1940, and World War II was raging. Hitler’s army had overtaken Belgium and advanced into France. Britain sent over 300,000 troops to assist the French army, but in spite of those sizable numbers, the German force was winning, due to their superior armaments, training, and organization. By late May, German troops had the bulk of the allied forces surrounded, trapped in Dunkirk (Dunkerque in French), in the northernmost corner of France across the English Channel from Dover. To the east was occupied Belgium; to the south and west, the advancing German army; to the north, the sea.

Operation Dynamo

Britain had already suffered severe casualties in France, and they knew this battle could not be won. Retreat was the only option, but all escape routes had been blocked. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, headquartered in the reinforced tunnels beneath Dover Castle, was put in charge of evacuating the troops. The rescue plan was code-named Operation Dynamo.

Unfortunately, there were several major problems. Time was quickly running out for the cornered British troops. Ramsay believed he had a week at most to rescue the soldiers, who were packed onto the beaches and being shelled mercilessly. An exodus by sea was the only possibility, but German planes had sunk so many ships in Dunkirk harbor that it was nearly impossible to navigate, and U-boats posed a constant threat. Farther to the west, where the beaches were, the water was so shallow that British destroyers and transport ships could not get any closer than about a mile (1.6km). As if that weren’t enough, Britain had far too few vessels available to transport the hundreds of thousands of soldiers trapped on the beach, even under the best conditions.

Ramsay was deliberate and methodical in his preparations. He arranged transportation, food, and medical care for the troops that would soon be arriving in Dover. He sought out every available ship, and established a complex and efficient communications network. Logistics in place, Operation Dynamo was put into motion on May 26. But after the first day, the outlook was grim. Fewer than 8,000 troops had been rescued, and the most optimistic estimate was that a total of 45,000 might escape before Germany overtook the beaches—at the rate the operation was progressing, it would take 40 days to rescue all the remaining troops. Ramsay faced the possibility that the core of the British army would be wiped out. At that time, conventional wisdom held that Britain would inevitably be invaded as soon as France fell, and with so much of its army gone, Britain’s defenses would be in ruins.

The Bathtub Navy Saves the Day

In desperation, Ramsay put out a public call for help: everyone with a boat—any kind of boat—was asked to help rescue the troops. The response was instantaneous and overwhelming. A makeshift flotilla of 850 “Little Ships”—yachts, lifeboats, fishing boats, and anything else that could float—rushed to the scene. Most of the boats were manned by British sailors, but in many cases the civilian owners themselves risked gunfire and mines to make the 22-mile (35km) crossing. When possible, the small craft were used just to ferry troops to the larger vessels offshore, but thousands of troops used them for transport all the way back to England. By the morning of May 29, officials estimated that 2,000 troops per hour were being evacuated. Nine days after Operation Dynamo began, a total of 338,226 people—including about 95,000 French troops—had been rescued.

Churchill called it a “miracle of deliverance,” and the “Dunkirk spirit” quickly became the stuff of legend. In retrospect, the eventual allied victory might well have been thwarted had Britain lost hundreds of thousands of troops at Dunkirk. Nevertheless, the massive rescue could hardly be considered a victory. There was more to the story than the heartwarming tale of heroism.

The Other Side of the Story

For one thing, the escape was not as clean as the media made it sound. While swarms of small boats were shuttling soldiers off the beach, more than four hundred Luftwaffe fighters attacked, dropping bombs and inflicting heavy casualties. Soldiers returning to England described the beaches as littered with dead bodies. In all, tens of thousands of people lost their lives at Dunkirk.

In addition, the highly publicized rescue obscured the fact that thousands of British troops were still trapped elsewhere in France. Two weeks later, the British ship Lancastria was returning from a rescue mission when it was sunk off the coast of Brittany. Half of the 6,000 passengers lost their lives, but nothing was mentioned in the press about the incident for weeks, lest it dampen the spirits that had been uplifted by the Dunkirk miracle.

Meanwhile, France felt deeply betrayed. The British troops had ostensibly come to their rescue, but then fled the German army. Without any hope left from across the Channel, France surrendered to Hitler within three weeks. Notwithstanding the many French soldiers rescued at Dunkirk, many in France resented what they regarded as British cowardice. It wasn’t until 1944 that Britain redeemed itself, when British and American forces collaborated in the D-Day operation, leading to France’s liberation.

Dunkirk Redux

In June of 2000, on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Dunkirk, Britain commemorated the event with a massive celebration. A large number of small boats reenacted the Channel crossing to Dunkirk. Although there weren’t nearly as many boats as there had been in 1940, some of the original craft had been restored specifically so that they could make the journey again. While British television crews lined the Dunkirk shore to relay the landings to exuberant crowds back home, the French media—as might be expected—gave little coverage to the event.

About 800 British and French veterans who had been rescued at Dunkirk attended a massive parade past the town hall. Prince Charles gave a speech at the Dunkirk Memorial in both English and French, praising the courage of all those who had helped in the miraculous rescue. The remaining members of the Dunkirk veterans’ associations—many in their 80s and 90s—chose that occasion to officially disband their organizations.

Politics and media spin aside, the story of the Battle of Dunkirk inspires me for one simple reason: it shows ordinary people lifting the veil of war—the impersonal propaganda of numbers—and seeing each other as human beings. Fisherman didn’t row across the English channel to transport “troops”; they risked their lives to rescue people with names and faces. That the public could, however briefly, set aside their habit of detached reliance on the machinery of government and take personal responsibility for other lives—especially in a time of war—is to me an immensely hopeful sign. It’s a step toward understanding that the soldiers wearing different uniforms are human beings too.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 16, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on January 21, 2005.

Image credit: Frank Capra (film) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Peru’s mysterious geoglyphs

There are certain sites in the world that inspire intense curiosity about their origins, like the Stonehenge formation or the statues on Easter Island. These ancient human-made structures cause us to wonder what was in the minds of those who created them, what purpose did they serve? Another intriguing example of this type of site is the Nazca Lines of Peru, an extensive set of patterns drawn into the Nazca Desert over 1,500 years ago.

Making a Good Impression

The Nazca Lines are a series of negative geoglyphs—patterns drawn on the ground by adding (positive) or removing (negative) stones or soil. Other examples of geoglyphs include labyrinths, burial mounds known as intaglios, and so-called “hill figures”—shapes cut into hillsides to reveal the chalk beneath, most often found in England (such as the Uffington White Horse).

The term “Nazca Lines” refers collectively to hundreds of large designs drawn on the surface of the Nazca Desert. They’re thought to have been created between 200 BCE and 600 CE by the Nazca, a culture known for its distinctive pottery and intricate textiles. This desert, an arid plateau located between the Andes and the coast of Peru, has a very particular topography and climate that allowed for both the construction and the preservation of the figures.

Instead of a sandy surface, the Nazca Desert floor is covered in a layer of pebbles made red through oxidation. Various designs, ranging from straight lines and geometric forms to intricate figures of animals, insects, and humans, were created by removing these pebbles, exposing the lighter-color soil beneath. The lack of wind and rain in the area meant that these figures were not disturbed since their creation thousands of years ago until they were rediscovered in the modern era.

Eyes in the Sky

A curious trait of the Nazca Lines is that they are difficult to identify from the ground; given their tremendous scale, they are much more recognizable from above. Thus it was not until the 1920s, when airplanes began flying over the area, that they were seen in their full aspect. This peculiarity led scientists and amateurs alike to ponder both the how and the why of these formations: How did the Nazca people create these large-scale designs without seeing them from above, and why would they have created them this way in the first place?

An early attempt to answer these questions came from Paul Kosok, an American archeologist, and his one-time assistant, Maria Reiche. Kosok, and Reiche after him, believed that the lines were a type of astronomical calendar, showing the alignment of different planets and stars as they rose above the horizon.

Reiche, who took over the study and mapping of the lines after Kosok left the project in 1948, eventually became its premiere advocate and guardian. Born in Germany and educated in mathematics, geography, and languages, Maria Reiche first went to Peru in 1932 to work for the German consul in Cuzco as a nanny and teacher for his children. She began working with Kosok in 1940, and spent the rest of her life preserving and studying the lines, until her death in 1998.

Although the astronomical calendar theory has raised doubts—including the observation that the multitude of lines and their varying orientations could be found to correspond with almost any trajectory and the fact that astronomical alignments have changed with time—Reiche made a huge contribution to the study of the lines. Her advocacy brought heightened attention to their existence, and resulted in their designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.

Alien Flight Forms

Reiche believed that the Nazca had created the lines using grids, making smaller versions of the drawings and then transposing them onto a larger design. She even found markings she believed showed this initial process near some of the figures. Although the use of this method cannot be confirmed, there is evidence that the Nazca used some form of surveying technique in their production of the designs. Wooden pegs, dated to the time of the Nazca, have been found near the ends of long lines, implying they were used as markers of some kind.

The Nazca were very able weavers, and this ability could have translated into general pattern-making facility as well. Also, there is a similarity between figures they used on their pottery and some of the geoglyph forms. This seems to indicate their aptitude and predisposition to be the creators of the figures.

Nevertheless, some have publicly doubted the Nazca’s ability to create such works, given their earthbound perspective. Chief among these doubters is the Swiss author and UFO theorist, Erich von Däniken (of Mystery Park fame), who claimed in his 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods, that the Nazca Lines were in fact landing strips for alien spacecraft.

Another attempt to explain how the Nazca could have created the lines, when they are only fully visible from the air, was made by Jim Woodman in the late 1970s. He believed that the Nazca could have constructed basic hot air balloons, using materials available to them, in order to survey their designs from above. To prove this point, Woodman and balloonist Julian Nott set out to create a prototype of such a balloon and to attempt flight. They created a balloon out of cotton fabric, inflated it using only the heat from a wood fire, and attached a reed basket to it as their gondola. They did manage to get airborne, but this success does not prove that the Nazca did so too.

In response to this kind of speculation, Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky set out to reproduce one of the Nazca figures (a 440-foot-long [about 130m] condor) without recourse to aerial observation. With the help of friends and family, and using a method of measuring points on a smaller version of the design to corresponding points on the larger design, in a matter of days he succeeded in producing a close likeness of the Nazca condor, sketched out in white lime on a Kentucky field.

Walk the Lines

While most scholars now believe the lines were created by the Nazca, most likely without aid from above, the question of their purpose remains unanswered. What was the motivation for this huge undertaking?

Given their size and their complete visibility from the air, the lines may have served some religious purpose, made for the benefit of celestial beings. The recent discovery of the ancient town of Cahuachi, located near the lines, lends credence to this theory. Archeologists studying the site believe that the town was a pilgrimage center to which people would come before visiting the lines.

Although there is no record of how the lines might have served in religious ritual, some now believe that ancient pilgrims might have walked along the lines as a show of devotion to a particular sacred entity, much as labyrinths were used in medieval cathedrals in Europe, and to a certain extent today.

Some people believe that the lines correlate with underground water sources, a key piece of knowledge in such an arid environment; the religious ritual might even have pertained to ensuring adequate water supplies in this drought-prone area.

Keep Off the Beaten Track

Whatever their purpose, for the first time in their long history, the Nazca Lines are now threatened with serious defacement. Although prohibited, there has been extensive foot and vehicular traffic over the lines in recent years, particularly by looters stealing artifacts from the ancient tombs in the area. Also contributing to the problem is increased tourist activity and the nearby Pan-American Highway.

After the environmentalist group Greenpeace staged a protest near one of the formations in 2014, damaging it in the process, Peru received a grant from the United States to better study and preserve the Nazca lines. As part of that initiative, new drone and mapping technology revealed the presence of 50 previously unknown geoglyphs, thought to be the work of an earlier civilization than the one which created the already-known formations.

This is an encouraging development, and brings hope that the situation can be turned around and the Nazca lines can be protected. It would be truly unfortunate for these fascinating structures to be lost after resisting destruction for so many centuries.

After all, they are not only a part of the rich cultural heritage of the area—which also includes the remains of the great Inca empire—but they offer a unique chance to put oneself into the minds of those who lived so long ago. This is what makes the Nazca Lines so fascinating for modern folk: their inscrutable mystery, which has lasted over the course of centuries.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 5, 2006.

Image credit: Paul Williams [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons