Dunkirk

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Dunkirk

• By Cadet Lopez

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The year was 1940. Some 300,000 thousand French
and British troops were squeezed into a
seven-mile wide perimeter around the French port
by advancing Germans.
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Stranded on the beach with their backs to the sea
and their faces towards the Germans, the allied
forces neither had the firepower nor the air
support to win the battle. Finally, the Navy did
not have enough vessels to assure a successful
retreat.
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So a call went out to every vessel in Britain. No
ship was excluded. Some seemed less than
seaworthy. Private vessels, shipping lines,
fishing boats, and pleasure craft were all
drafted into this rescue mission.
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• On May 29 there was an unexpected reprieve, the
  German armor stopped its advance on Dunkirk
  leaving the operation to the slower infantry, and
  the Luftwaffe (Hermann Göring, then in great
  favor with Adolf Hitler, had promised air power
  alone could win the battle).

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• Despite attacks from German fighter and bomber
  planes, the Wehrmacht never launched a full-scale
  attack on the beaches of Dunkirk. Panzer tank
  crews awaited the order from Hitler but it never
  came. In his memoirs, Field Marshall Rundstadt,
  the German commander-in-chief in France during
  the 1940 campaign, called Hitler's failure to
  order a full-scale attack on the troops on
  Dunkirk his first fatal mistake of the war. The
  338,000 soldiers that were evacuated from the
  beaches at Dunkirk would seem to uphold this
  view.

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• The End