How did I not know about Boatlift? (trigger warning: 9/11 post)

[neadods]

How did I not know for 13 years about the 9/11 boatlift? (Youtube link)

I knew about the people walking out over the bridges; a fandom friend's mother got out that way. I knew about the firefighters and doctors and EMTs walking in over the bridges because that was the only way in and they Had. To. Help

Comments

[themis1]

It's amazing how people step up when the need is there.

(The comparison with Dunkirk isn't really fair, though, since those rescuees were surrounded by the German army.)

[neadods]

True. Of the many advantages the 9/11 boatmen had (better technology, faster communications) most important was nobody was shooting at or shelling them!

[themis1]

Actually for reasons nobody's ever managed to figure, Hitler didn't outright attack the people waiting for the boats at Dunkirk - but it was still the middle of a war zone with the possibility of that happening. Some interesting facts here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/02_february/03/dunkirk_facts_figures.shtml

This shouldn't take away from the actions of the New York boatmen - they were still going in to something where they didn't necessarily know what was happening, just that they were needed - but the two events were quite different. Equally awful, but quite different.

[neadods]

A very interesting link, thank you!

The parallels between Boatlift and Dunkirk aren't really coming from the underlying situation, though. They're coming from the fact that every civilian with a boat rushed to help in both cases and that is not a common thing.

[ext_195770]

Also, last time I looked, the East and Hudson rivers weren't 21 miles wide at their narrowest point and didn't have minefields.

[neadods]

I'll confess to not being that up on the details of Dunkirk beyond the celebration that civilians in their hundreds rushed to help. But I do know that their conditions, especially rushing into a hot war zone, were much, much different.

(Irrelevantly, I was incredibly pissed that the Jubilee footage here showed maybe 3 seconds of the Dunkirk boats as they sailed. They deserved much, much more respect.)

[ext_195770]

One in ten of the Dunkirk "little ships" ships were sunk by enemy action and the Navy also lost 6 destroyers and 24 smaller naval vessels.

The Isle of Man Steam Packet company lost three vessels on the same day (in terms of distance, the Isle of Man to Dunkirk is probably roughly equivalent to Chesapeake Bay to Manhattan.

Which may have been one of the reasons the exercise took nine days rather than nine hours.

ETA I've just checked. It's forty nautical miles between Dover or Ramsgate (two of the ports involved in the exercise) and Dunkerque. That means (given that the official minimum size of vessel was 30 feet though the smallest vessel taking place was 15 feet long) that given normal cruising speeds of boats of that size and tides etc the time taken to do a crossing one way would be between four and ten hours. That's excluding the time taken to load up the boat from men standing chest deep in water and leaving out the disembarkation time.