On this episode, AccuWeather Founder & Executive Chair Dr. Joel N. Myers and AccuWeather Network Chief Meteorologist Bernie Rayno discuss one of WWII's most defining moments: The Dunkirk Evacuation and how weather played a pivotal role in the fate of thousands of Allied soldiers.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Welcome to Invisible Iceberg, I'm Bernie Raynaud.
00:05On today's show, we examine one of World War II's most defining moments,
00:09the Dunkirk evacuation, and how weather played a pivotal role
00:13in the fate of thousands of Allied soldiers.
00:16Plus, we take a look at how history would have been altered
00:19if Mother Nature didn't provide a strategic advantage,
00:24and find out how other weather events impacted operations on the battlefield
00:29during the years-long war.
00:31It all starts now on Invisible Iceberg.
00:40May 1940.
00:43German forces surround 400,000 Allied soldiers near Dunkirk in northern France.
00:50Exhausted, the Germans decided to pause their attack,
00:53underestimating the British evacuation capabilities.
00:56Typically, Macy's air were choppy and stormy,
01:01but a rare stretch of favorable weather played a critical role in the Allies' escape.
01:07Did this lucky break give them just enough time to plan their retreat?
01:11It's just one of the fascinating stories in the book,
01:14Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History.
01:17Joining us right now is Accu with the founder and executive chairman
01:21and author of the book, Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History,
01:25Dr. Joel Myers.
01:27Dr. Joel, thanks for joining us today.
01:28My pleasure as always.
01:29Let's start from the beginning.
01:32What events led to World War II?
01:35We have to go back, really, to World War I.
01:39And the winners of World War I, particularly France and Britain and the United States to
01:47some degree, imposed very harsh reparations on Germany.
01:53They had to pay for the whole cost of the war.
01:57And it wasn't clear-cut like World War II.
02:00Germany was saddled with enormous debt.
02:02So what happened is the value of the currency, the German Deutsche Mark, became worth less and less.
02:08And finally, you know, the stories about it took a wheelbarrow full of money to go buy a loaf of bread.
02:14And so people who had saved and worked and toiled their entire lives and saved money and money in the back became worthless.
02:23And that's what great debt and inflation does.
02:26And still there was no excuse for bringing Hitler to power.
02:31And he took over and became a dictator.
02:34And so that set the stage for World War II.
02:38He was very aggressive.
02:39He wanted to bring back the proud German legacy.
02:46And he was determined to conquer all of Europe and be the major global power.
02:54And it all grew out of what happened in World War I.
02:57All right, let's get into the war.
02:59Where did Germany advance in the early part of World War II?
03:02Well, of course, Germany built up its military, was very efficient.
03:06And Hitler couldn't be trusted.
03:12And he would say one thing and sign agreements.
03:15And then he would do what he wanted.
03:18And so Germany was quite successful militarily because the rest of Europe wasn't prepared.
03:25And they kept, even France was easily overrun.
03:30And so many of the countries around Germany fell rather quickly.
03:34The evacuation of Dunkirk we're going to talk about literally saved the British and the Allied army and helped the United States ultimately.
03:44Or the war might have gone on for another year or two or three.
03:47Dunkirk is in northern France.
03:51And it's right across the channel from Dover.
03:54It's about 40 miles of open sea between the two.
03:58And you're right, the remains of the Allied forces were pushed up basically to the beach on Dunkirk.
04:08And the German tanks were coming.
04:11And they could have continued and wiped them out.
04:14But they stopped.
04:15And people wondered, well, why did Hitler stop?
04:17Well, they were exhausted, I guess.
04:19They stopped for a couple of days to regroup.
04:21And they didn't think the Allied troops could escape anyway because the Germans had control of the skies.
04:29And so it was just a matter of time between that and the tanks that they would wipe out.
04:35Approaching a half a million troops, about 400,000 troops in Dunkirk, all concentrated in a particular area.
04:44And then the miracle evacuation occurred.
04:48And weather, like it did for D-Day, laid a huge role.
04:53Huge role.
04:53Huge role.
04:54Well, first of all, what is it normally like in May?
04:57And how did the actual weather differ from this in May of 1940?
05:03Well, the weather conditions can either be somewhat stormy, rough seas, you know, with storms moving through still.
05:12Or you have calmness if there's a high pressure area over, but with sunshine.
05:19And it alternates between those two.
05:22But in this case, it was neither.
05:25You had a high, but you had very low clouds under just a 300-foot ceiling.
05:32In other words, the cloud base was 300 feet.
05:36So the German planes couldn't bomb from the air.
05:43Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister, asked for all people in Britain that had any kind of a boat, a fishing boat, a ferry, even paddle boats,
05:55to get across the channel, the English channel, to rescue these troops.
06:03And most of them were rescued.
06:05And finally, when the last of them got out, now some of them were killed and some ships were sunk.
06:10And there were, and the 400,000, there were 10,000 or so that were killed.
06:15But most of them escaped in these thousands of boats that were owned by the public.
06:22And they escaped to Britain.
06:24And that was one of the key events of the war.
06:28And if not for the favorable weather, most of them might have been eliminated and killed or captured by the Germans.
06:36What are the odds that that weather would be as perfect as it was?
06:42It probably was definitely under 20%, maybe under 10% likelihood that there would be enough of the special weather.
06:49It maybe was even smaller than that, favorable to the Allies.
06:53But there's no question that all those troops escaping, not only did it, and importantly, not only did it save all these troops,
07:04but the morale, the impact on the morale of the British people.
07:11Remember, this is a year and a half before America entered the war.
07:15This is around June 1st, end of May, of 1940.
07:21America didn't enter the war until Pearl Harbor, which was December 7th, 1941, 18 months later.
07:28This certainly was, it allowed Britain to survive until America entered the war.
07:35Fascinating work, Dr. Joel.
07:38Stick around because you'll be joining us again in just a few minutes.
07:42Here with more insight on the Dunkirk evacuation is Dr. Sam Edwards,
07:46historian and associate professor at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.
07:53Thanks for joining us here today.
07:56It's a pleasure.
07:57All right, let's talk about Dunkirk and why Dunkirk was a problem for the British in May of 1940.
08:07There are real worries that maybe the British Army is going to be cut off.
08:10It's already separated by the end of May from the Belgian forces to the north.
08:14Then it becomes separated from the French forces.
08:16There's a real fear that if the British forces aren't evacuated from Dunkirk at the end of May,
08:21early June of 1940, that maybe they're at risk of being cut off.
08:24Maybe they're at risk of being captured and all that that might entail in terms of the ongoing British war effort.
08:30And what actions did Winston Churchill take soon after becoming British prime minister?
08:36So Winston Churchill becomes prime minister on 10th of May, 1940.
08:40He's also a keen military thinker. He's something of a strategist himself, and he has a real kind of interest in keeping an eye on operations.
08:48He's going to be very closely involved and interested in what becomes Operation Dynamo.
08:52And what was the idea, strategy and planning behind Operation Dynamo?
08:57Hopefully, in two days, 45,000 Allied troops will be got off the beaches.
09:02As it becomes, though, it's a 10-day operation, and for various reasons, it's a successful one.
09:08Those connected to the weather, those connected to decisions made by the Germans,
09:11and those also connected to what the Royal Navy does, and also what the famous little ships do,
09:16with 800 or so descending on northern France to try to draw off those Allied troops.
09:21So what starts as hopefully two days and hopefully 45,000 troops becomes 10 days and something in the region of 338,000 Allied troops.
09:31And oftentimes a retreat is not necessarily critical to the success of winning a war,
09:37but that was the case with the evacuation of Dunkirk, was it not?
09:43Yeah, Churchill's so good at sort of summing this up.
09:47He refers to it as the miracle of Dunkirk, but he's also quite keen to make clear that wars aren't one with evacuations.
09:54And so he's, on one hand, he rightly celebrates the success of the operation, the role of the little ships,
09:59the fact that those hundreds of thousands of troops are brought back to Britain,
10:03but he's also quite careful of managing expectations.
10:06And how should Dunkirk be remembered today?
10:09It's interesting. In Britain, Dunkirk is often now remembered as a marker of what's called the People's War,
10:17the idea that ultimately World War II is won by the concerted combined efforts of the entirety of the national society.
10:24Dr. Sam Edwards, historian and associate professor at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.
10:31Thank you again for joining us today.
10:33Coming up, from tropical storms to extreme cold,
10:37we uncover how Mother Nature impacted other military operations during World War II.
10:43But next, what if the Dunkirk evacuation had failed?
10:48We discuss the possible impacts if the weather wasn't on their side when we come back.
10:53Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg. I'm Bernie Raynaud.
11:06Joining me again is Ackie with the founder and executive chairman and author of the book,
11:10Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joel Myers.
11:14You know, when you think of World War II in Europe,
11:16I think the event that most people have most significant, believe that has a more significant impact was D-Day.
11:25But the evacuation of Dunkirk was one of the more important events here.
11:32And what would have been the immediate impact if the evacuation would have failed?
11:37Well, what's interesting is both of those, in both those cases, the weather played a critical role.
11:42And without the help of the weather, basically, it would have been a much longer war before the Allies would have won.
11:51Now, in the case of Dunkirk, evacuating almost 400,000 troops from Dunkirk to Great Britain,
12:01saving those troops, if that hadn't happened,
12:05and those troops had been captured or killed by the Germans,
12:08Britain would have had no military left.
12:11They would have had agreed to a truce with, or just surrendered to Germany.
12:21Remember, it was the British Empire, so Germany then would have taken over a lot of the colonies.
12:25Germany would have controlled almost all of Africa, as well as the Mediterranean.
12:29They would have been the world power.
12:32The United States would have been isolated.
12:34Of course, the big four that fought the war, the United States, Britain, China, and Russia.
12:40But China was not as big a power than a lot of people, so Russia was key, and Britain was key.
12:48France played a role, but France was occupied by Germany.
12:53There were just some people who had, you know, Charles de Gaulle was in exile and so on, so they weren't a factor.
12:59So it was crucial, as far as the balance of power, not only in terms of these 400,000 troops and saving the British military so they didn't have to surrender,
13:11but to the morale of the British people, which then had to hold out and deal with all the bombing that was to come and survive,
13:22but the morale, the impact on the morale, and it's captured in, after the last of the troops got saved,
13:31a couple days later, and the relatively new Prime Minister had only been in office, Winston Churchill, for a month, less than a month,
13:39made the famous speech to the House of Commons.
13:41We shall go on to the end.
13:44We shall fight in France.
13:46We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
13:49We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
13:54We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
13:58We shall fight on the beaches.
14:00We shall fight on the landing grounds.
14:02We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
14:05We shall fight in the hills.
14:07We shall never surrender.
14:09That inspired the nation and changed the whole future path of the war, of World War II, in Europe.
14:18And so this evacuation was more than the physical saving of the British military, but an inspiration.
14:28Of course, attitude is so important in so many things, particularly in war.
14:32This was an important turning point.
14:34Is it safe to say, or was it a turning point of the war?
14:39For the Allies?
14:40Obviously, the United States wasn't involved in the war yet, but it was certainly a turning point.
14:47Can we call it that?
14:48Well, it was a major turning point.
14:51Obviously, the landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 was another one.
14:59I mean, there were so many key battles.
15:01But it was a major turning point in the war for sure.
15:04And if those troops were wiped out, Germany would have been much more powerful, really in control of the economy without any concerns.
15:16The United States may not have ever entered the war.
15:19You know, Japan wouldn't have bombed Pearl Harbor.
15:23All kinds of things might have turned out differently.
15:26It was a key turning point.
15:27Well, that was my next question about the United States.
15:31What would have, I mean, it's all guesswork at this point.
15:35Well, what would have meant for the United States if all of those troops would have been captured?
15:40Well, we don't know how it would have unfolded.
15:42I mean, we also had Germany was an evil nation because Hitler was an evil dictator and what he'd done with killing the Jews and others and all the things we've read about and found out afterwards.
15:58So it's quite likely the United States would have entered the war anyway, but it would have been very different and it might have gone on for a much longer time.
16:05Obviously, our other ally was Russia and that was also key, Hitler's defeat in Russia because of the cold and the Russian army also allowed the United States to be successful ultimately and the allies together beating Germany.
16:26The other question I would have is Winston Churchill really seemed to capture the spirit and the resolve and the fight of the British people.
16:37What would have happened if he wasn't the prime minister?
16:39Well, he was a great orator.
16:41He was disliked by a lot of people.
16:44They were always trying to get him out.
16:46You know, he had in the beginning, there's a great film about that.
16:49You know, he even had riffs with the king of England who was not happy that he was the prime minister.
16:55It's because Chamberlain was such a failure that he became prime minister and, you know, apparently he started drinking alcohol in the morning and drank all day.
17:07How he consumed it all still stood up, I don't know, but clearly he was the right person for the time.
17:13Yeah, it's just amazing that the weather certainly changed the course of history or at least had a major role in changing the course of World War II.
17:24So, no question, if the weather had been more normal, those troops would have been captured or killed and it would have been a very different story.
17:35I want to thank ACCUA, the founder and executive chairman, and author of the book, Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shaped History, Dr. Joe Myers, for telling us this fascinating story today.
17:46My pleasure as always, Bernie. Enjoyed it.
17:48Up next, we explore how weather events played a critical role on the battlefield during World War II.
17:55Welcome back to Invisible Iceberg, I'm Bernie Raynaud.
18:06World War II was marked not only by significant military battles and strategic operations, but also by impactful weather events.
18:15Bitter cold affected two major operations.
18:20In the winter of 1939 and 1940, Finland experienced extreme cold with temperatures dropping to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
18:29These conditions severely impacted the Soviet invasion, causing significant casualties from frostbite and cold-related illnesses.
18:37Now, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, one of the coldest winters on record hit.
18:46With temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and lower, the unprepared German troops faced equipment failures and numerous frostbite cases.
18:55Now, in the Pacific, tropical weather played a significant role.
19:00In October of 1944, Typhoon Cobra struck the U.S. 3rd Fleet in the Philippine Sea, sinking three destroyers and causing nearly 800 fatalities.
19:10The following year, Typhoon Connie again hit the U.S. Navy's 3rd Fleet in the Western Pacific, killing seven sailors and wrecking a 100 aircraft.
19:21In August of 1945, Category 3 Typhoon Helen smashed the bow of the USS Wasp.
19:27The Great Hanoi flood of 1945 in Vietnam caused severe flooding, complicating Japanese occupation and contributing to widespread famine, leading to thousands of deaths.
19:39That's our show for today.
19:41For more information and get your copy of the book, Invisible Iceberg, When Climate and Weather Shapes History by Dr. Joel Myers, go to invisibleiceberg.com.
19:52If you have any questions or comments, send us an email at questions at accuweather.com.
19:57We look forward to seeing you next time.
19:58We'll see you next time.