Rico's rants: Dunkirk? That's a bit much

19 April 2010

Dunkirk? That's a bit much

John Burns has an article in The New York Times about the latest efforts to solve the travel problems in Europe:

Few moments in modern British history are more iconic than the evacuation of the British expeditionary force of nearly 340,000 troops in the spring of 1940 from the beaches of Dunkirk, 22 miles across the Channel from the white chalk cliffs that overlook this ancient port town. At the time, Winston Churchill called it “a miracle of deliverance”. Beneath azure blue skies on Sunday, an intrepid band of Englishmen tried to stage a scaled-down rerun of the 'little ships', hundreds of private craft that joined the Royal Navy in the improbable 1940 rescue, saving hundreds of thousands of British, French and Canadian soldiers to fight on against Nazi Germany.
This time the effort centered on a group of men in a flotilla of inflatable speedboats, who set out from Dover to ferry some of their stranded compatriots home from the rail and ferry chaos created by the cloud of volcanic ash that has shut down much of Europe’s air traffic.
British newspapers have calculated that the shutdown has stranded up to a million British travelers, counting those whose outbound flights have been canceled and those abroad trying to get home. But, after hours of fruitless negotiation, the organizers of the modern evacuation venture were defeated by an adversary that prevailed where Hitler’s battalions and dive bombers failed: the opposing force on this occasion was a small regiment of unimpressed French harbor and immigration officials, who met the Englishmen and their thirty-foot boats in the harbor at Calais with a resolute Non!
After hours of appeals through diplomatic channels for an easing of the French veto, the organizers in Dover abandoned the effort, canceling any further cross-Channel shuttle, by inflatable boat, at least. Before the French halted it, however, the evacuation effort, nicknamed “the Spirit of Dunkirk”, had repatriated about twenty travelers, the first to board the boats in Calais. The bid to bring people home in the boats came as the air shutdown showed signs of becoming an issue in Britain’s 6 May general election.
As the opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats called for the Labour government to do more to counteract the effects of the shutdown, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ leader— who has surged in the polls since the country’s first-ever televised debate among the party leaders— called the shutdown a “catastrophe”. Mr. Clegg said his three young sons, due back in school in London on Monday, were among those stranded abroad with their maternal grandparents in Spain.
After an emergency meeting at 10 Downing Street, members of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet outlined possible measures to deal with the crisis, including chartering cruise ships to repatriate Britons stranded abroad. The Royal Navy has been asked to look at the possibility of deploying ships as emergency passenger ferries, and the Conservatives suggested that propeller-driven aircraft, thought to be less susceptible to engine damage from volcanic ash, should be drafted into service to get the airlines flying again.
Dan Snow, a television personality and naval historian who led the effort to evacuate Britons stranded in Calais, said it was not clear what French laws the effort had transgressed, apart from a suggestion by French officials that it lacked the permits necessary for any boat plying for hire. The organizers in Dover said they had charged no fares, but suggested to those making the journey that they could contribute to Help for Heroes, a British charity for those wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Snow, who is preparing a BBC television documentary on the 1940 evacuation that will run on the 70th anniversary of the evacuation’s completion in early June, said the French officials appeared to have trouble identifying with the spirit of the venture. “What happened in 1940 was a triumph of improvisation,” he said. “But improvisation is incompatible with modern bureaucracy.” He shrugged. “All we wanted was to help some people get home,” he said. And, he added, to lighten the mood in Britain as it struggles to cope with an air shutdown that will enter its fifth straight day on Monday, with no sign of ending: “We thought we could have some fun, and we did. All the people who participated in this had a great time.”
The undertaking won enthusiastic endorsement from the small group that made it back to Dover aboard the boats. Marcel Sigel, an Australian interior designer working in London, said the journey across the Channel, at high speed in perfect conditions, had been an adventure after a long overland journey to Calais from Milan, where he had been when the air shutdown was declared. “We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves,” he said.
At best, the operation Mr. Snow led could never have made more than a minimal impact on the chaos that the air shutdown has caused. For days, ferry terminals on both sides of the Channel, as well as Eurostar trains that run through the Channel tunnel, have faced large backups of passengers without tickets. The tangle has been made worse by the fact that the air shutdown coincided with the last days of the Easter break for British schools, one of the busiest times of the year for airlines operating between Britain and European vacation destinations.
But, as much as British news coverage of the shutdown has focused on the disruption, and on economic costs that some experts have estimated at $1 billion and more, there were signs that some Britons are reveling in the situation. People living near Heathrow Airport on the western outskirts of London, one of the busiest in Europe, have celebrated the absence of jet engine noise and the smell of aviation fuel from the 2,000 flights that normally use Heathrow every day. Loraine Martin, 63, an office administrator who lives under the airport’s flight path, told Reuters that the stillness took her back to the 1950s, when Heathrow was still a relatively peaceful airfield and jet engines had yet to take to the skies on commercial aircraft. “It’s gloriously peaceful,” she said. “I could hear the birds singing, even through the double-glazed windows.” She added, “Normally, I can’t talk on the telephone when the planes are coming in, but now I can have long conversations.”