On the 27th of May 1940, a message was sent to Lord Gort, the general commanding the British
Expeditionary Force, trapped by German amour on the beaches around Dunkirk, 'to evacuate
the maximum force possible'.
So began Operation Dynamo, the British Army's greatest disaster, and greatest deliverance.
The retreat from Dunkirk succeeded beyond all expectations.
While the troops struggled to reach the rescue ships, the full weight of the Air Force was
thrown in to attack the German bombers pounding the beaches.
Royal Navy destroyers brought off most of the men.
But hey were backed up by boats of every kind - pleasure craft, river ferries, fishing smacks.
You name it, it was there.
Fortunately the sea was calm, and for six days the fleet, nearly 900 'little ships'
as they were called, sailed back and forward across the channel until they'd saved a total
of three hundred and thirty eight thousand men, a hundred and forty thousand of them
French troops.
It was an astonishing military feat.
The British Expeditionary Force was saved.
Its equipment was lost, left behind in the scramble to get aboard the ships.
But that could be replaced; the men, the core of the future British army, could not.
By the end of the evacuation, six British destroyers had been sunk, and four hundred
and seventy four planes shot down.
Within weeks, the French, under Marshal Petain, sued for peace.
The whole of Northern France and her coastline down to the Pyranees was now under German
occupation.
Of the countries in Europe that stood against the rise of Nazi Germany, Britain was the
last to hold out.
Even though the country was military isolated and alone, Winston Churchill made it plain
in a defiant speech in the House of Commons that the country would fight on.
It was the triumph of Dunkirk that made it possible.
It was to be four years almost to the day before British troops were back on French
soil again.