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White Wing
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There could be no better evidence of White Wing's participation in Operation Dynamo. A.D. Divine DSM, whose book Dunkirk was published by Faber in 1945, recounts how he sailed for Dunkirk in White Wing with Rear- Admiral Taylor on Sunday, 2nd June at 8.45 pm. "The Admiral proposed to supervise the lifting of the pocket of men from Malo-les-Bains in person and also to take charge of other small boat movements through the night. White Wing was capable of approximately 12 knots but, owing to trouble with her starboard engine, did not make this speed all the way across".
"Having the Admiral on board, we were not actually working the beaches, but were in control of operations. We moved about as necessary and after we had spent some time putting small boats in touch with their towing boats, the 5.9 battery off Nieuport began to drop shells on us. It seemed pure spite. The nearest salvo was about twenty yards astern, which was close enough. We stayed there until everybody else had been sent back and then went pottering about looking for stragglers."
David Divine then tells how, as dawn was breaking, he saw a troop-ship alongside the Mole receive a salvo of shells in her boilers and blow up just as she was picking up some of the 1000 French troops waiting to board her. "It was quite the most tragic thing I have seen in my life." he writes.
Nick Blewitt found White Wing quite by chance in August 1994, when he went to Aberdovey in North Wales to buy an engine for another boat he was restoring. In the mid 60s the boat was sold by Jamie Nesbit Evans, a well loved local man who had sailed her in the locality for some thirty years. Nick fell in love with the boat and to his wife's consternation bought her. Then he heard rumours that she was a Dunkirk Little Ship. Jamie Evans confirmed the story before he died and David Divine's book in the local library provided the details.
In fact, White Wing's teak-on-oak construction had survived the years of neglect very well and Nick and Alison soon had her sailing again
Source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11 & 19
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