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Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins on us."
% The British were already thinking about evacuating France, and Dunkirk, about 50 miles away, was the only port that remained open to them. They hoped to rescue perhaps 45,000 men in the two days they estimated they might have left. But Guderian's tanks did not move, and more British troops kept pouring into Dunkirk. While the Royal Navy sent 165 ships, many of which could not enter the shallow harbor, London issued an emergency call for everything that could float -- yachts, fishing boats, excursion steamers, fire-fighting boats, some 850 vessels in all. The first 25,000 men reached England by May 28, and then the bizarre rescue fleet hurried back for more.
By that time the Luftwaffe was bombing and strafing the beach, and Dunkirk was in flames. R.A.F. fighter planes raced across the Channel to defend the departing soldiers, who often had to stand in water up to their necks while machine-gun bullets spattered around them. A paddle-wheel steamer, Fenella, took aboard 600 soldiers, then was hit by a bomb. Most of the survivors were evacuated onto another paddle steamer, Crested Eagle, but a dive bomber set it afire, and most of the men aboard perished. A hospital ship marked with large red crosses rode at anchor off the beach all one day until a bomb went down its funnel and scattered bodies all over the harbor.
For nine days, often under heavy fire, the ships steamed to and fro as the great evacuation continued. By June 4, when it ended, some 200,000 British troops had been rescued, along with about 140,000 Allied forces, mostly French. British losses: 40,000 left behind, dead or taken prisoner. To many of the French, the evacuation was a British betrayal, a flight, the abandonment of an ally. To the British, it was a miracle and the only route to national survival.
With 60 remaining divisions, the French tried to form a new defensive line along the Somme, but after having lost about 40 divisions plus almost all British forces, they were seriously outnumbered, as well as outgunned and outgeneraled. The Germans had not only their panzer units but also 130 infantry divisions. On June 7 the French commander Maxime Weygand told the government, "The battle of the Somme is lost," and advised it to ask for an armistice. Premier Reynaud declared, "We shall fight in front of Paris," but the government itself fled to Tours and then Bordeaux.
Left behind was an undefended Paris facing the almost unthinkable prospect of Nazi occupation. The Parisians responded with wild flight. With cars, ( bicycles, baby carriages, nearly 2 million of them (some 65% of the city's population) choked the roads to the south. "I fly over the black road of interminable treacle that never stops running," author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote of watching refugees from his plane. "Where are they going? They don't know. They are marching toward a ghost terminus which already is no longer an oasis."