Silent shores and steady boats: Ramsgate remembers Operation Dynamo 85 years on

This morning in Ramsgate, the air was still. A hazy sky muted the sun, casting a soft melancholy atmosphere over the sea. It was as though the weather itself understood the weight of the moment. Eighty-five years since Operation Dynamo began, the harbour stirred once more as the little ships, honouring those quiet civilian heroes as boats took to the sea again, marking the anniversary with solemn grace.

As the foghorn blasted out around 5.30am, as I left with a flurry of neighbours making our way to the cliffs. The clifftops lined with people as far as the eye could see. I wanted to distil the moment from the air and flew towards Dumpton, using my drone’s zoom to witness the first boats leaving the harbour over Ramsgate’s Eastcliff and main sands.

The boats moved slowly, silently, a constant stream and a growing fleet on the water. Many boats flanking their route out of the harbour. Gradually the grew smaller and smaller on the horizon, their silhouettes starting to blur with the morning sea fret. Just 2 or 3 nautical miles out, barely a dent in the 50 nautical mile journey, yet each vessel was heavy with the echo of history, of civilians who, back in 1940, sailed into the unknown to rescue stranded soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Operation Dynamo was one of the most remarkable acts of collective courage in wartime. Between 26th May and 4th June 1940, more than 338,000 Allied soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk’s beaches in a hastily organised evacuation. Around 850 vessels took part, from military destroyers to fishing boats and pleasure cruisers. Ramsgate played a vital role, a portal of return and refuge in a time of chaos. It’s staggering to consider how many lives were saved, how many threads of the future were kept from being cut short.

For me, this morning’s memorial carried a deeper reflection. My grandad who grew up in Ramsgate, was a young child during Operation Dynamo. Mum told me how he often recalled standing on a crowded station platform with 100s of other children at Ramsgate train station, waiting to be evacuated to Leek in Staffordshire. He was just 8 or 9 years old. Across the tracks, on the opposite platform, were soldiers, many of them wounded, waiting for transport to the nearest field hospital with space. That image has stayed with me all day. A platform full of children escaping one kind of threat, facing another kind of unknown. And opposite them, young men returning from the front, battered and silent. The image of that moment is deeply sobering.

It’s easy to historicise these events, to wrap them in commemorations and ceremonies. But witnessing the little ships sail again this morning, I felt a crack in time. The rawness was still there, just beneath the surface. The choices people made, the risks they took, the pain they carried home with them.

And yet, as we reflect on the bravery and sacrifice that secured freedoms many of us now take for granted, we must reckon with the brutal truth: this was a war fought against the rise of fascism, against Nazi Germany, against genocide. And yet here we are, 85 years later, witnessing a terrifying resurgence of the same ideologies, the same machinery of dehumanisation, playing out in real time.

We live in an unbearable and unfathomable time.

Genocide is unfolding before our eyes. Famine is being used as a weapon. Entire populations are being punished, starved, erased. Western governments, including our own, are not only standing by but actively enabling it by arming the oppressors. We have the language, the historical understanding, the mechanisms to prevent this – and yet they are not being used. We say never again, and yet here it is. Again.

How can we gather on the shores of remembrance while those in power fuel the very horrors we claim to have learned from? How can we honour the legacy of Operation Dynamo if we do not allow it to wake us up to what is happening now?

Today’s memorial wasn’t just a tribute, it was a mirror. A haunting reflection of how easily we forget. How the conditions for fascism are seeded in silence, in complicity, in the narratives we choose to ignore rather than disrupt, stories we choose not to tell.

The sea remembers. The mist held more than ceremony this morning. It held grief. It held reckoning.
I hope our government was reminded of this too — that history is not a performance, it is a warning. That the freedoms we honour were not gifted, but fought for in blood and bravery. And that to stand by, in the face of atrocity today, is to betray everything we gathered to remember.