They were already too late, because there was still a gap ten miles wide through which the French and the British were streaming at full speed. In the west, however, the Germans were still moving along the coast and Leutnant Heinrich-Robert Hinze, in his curiously impassive, mandarin manner, was preparing himself for more shooting. Long before Calais had fallen, the outposts had been called in, the office equipment loaded into trucks, blankets rolled and the cookhouse piled into the mess wagon, with the contents of the first-aid post and the medical stores, and the battery was on its way towards Dunkirk. The presence of men like Hinze was confusing the position for the planners at Dover. Because of the shellfire and the increasing attacks of the Luftwaffe, ships were being forced to turn back and the signals that were dropping one after another on to the staff communications officer’s desk made it brutally clear that the short route to Dunkirk could not be used during daylight. ‘There are two other possible routes,’ the staff navigation officer was saying.
