Showing posts with label Dunkirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dunkirk. Show all posts

Thursday 27 May 2010

Dunkirk 70 Years On.






There are so many anniversaries commemorating events from the second world war these days. Each one with less veterans of the event with each passing year. Usually they commemorate victory, Dunkirk celebrates defeat! Hitler's army had smashed its way through France with one man noted that he drove over the Somme  battlefield in one day while his forefathers had spent four years there. (The 'Battle of the Somme' in 1916 lasted from July 1st until late November.) British and French forces, armed with inferior weaponry, were forced into withdrawal. Eventually they gathered on the beach at Dunkirk and disaster loomed. 


Meanwhile Goering had persuaded the Fuhrer that his Luftwaffe would destroy the trapped armies on the beach. Hitler ordered his Panzers to stop and gave the tired Brits an opportunity. With the nation only too aware of the Nazi danger a call went out for boats to help, they came in their the hundreds! Crossing the Channel they picked up men from the beach and took them to the destroyers and larger ships waiting to return them to Blighty. The cost was tremendous! Many ships were destroyed by strafing and bombing, a great many volunteer sailors suffered alongside the men they were attempting to rescue. 


Back home it was announced like a victory! Over three hundred thousand British and French were rescued from captivity and while they themselves came home ashamed at their retreat they were greeted as hero's who had escaped the enemy. In his postscript programme which was broadcast right after the news on the BBC that evening J.B. Priestley spoke of the little boats in such terms that the 'myth' of the action sunk deep into the British conscientiousness. Here was a nation now fully aware of the danger and power of the Nazi force and yet they had rescued their men from under the nose of the enemy and now were becoming bound together in their desire to stand up and oppose the foe. This was the nation that had defeated a German army twenty years ago and they were determined to do the same again. A retreat it certainly was, fear of the enemy  invading filled the land certainly, but the desire to stand and fight grew in the British people. All because of a few small boats that crossed the Channel.