Operation Dynamo (May/June 1940)  

It was late spring of 1940 when Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Operation Dynamo and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, France.  That decision and the weather cooperated to rescue over a third of a million mostly British troops from the battlefields of 1940 France.

Believing that those Allied troops were contained in a pocket on the French beaches, Hitler let his victorious German Armies recover after six weeks of  “blitzkrieg” mechanized warfare that saw WWI strategy along with the French Maginot Line nullified.
Seven days of unusually calm seas in the English Channel produced what was called “The Miracle at Dunkirk”. Using the protection of the Royal Navy and  Royal Air Force, brave remnants of the French Army fought a rear guard holding action. Then, a flotilla of hundreds of private “little ships” evacuated the Expeditionary Force about a mile from the beaches to waiting warships. Finally, these warships ferried 338,000 troops the few dozen miles to the safety of the Britain Isles.
Britain gradually redeployed these troops now rearmed with US Lend Lease equipment to the other front lines of North Africa and India. Just four years later, many of these same Dunkirk troops returned to liberate France on D-Day (June 6, 1944).

Dunkirk became an early example of the dozens of strategic blunders by an Adolf Hitler who was militarily incompetent and delusional with power. .

Mark Lindberg

Mtn. View, CA