Some people had the view that the events at Dunkirk in 1940 deserve to be remembered as triumph for - page 1
Keywords: dunkirk, evacuation,
By Phemolarpa on 13/12/2011
Level: GCSE Key Stage 4 (Years 10-11)
Page Number: 1 of 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
'Dunkirk' was the evacuation of the troops trapped on Dunkirk, which was called a "miracle" by Winston Churchill whilst speaking in front of the British public. As the German army swept through Western Europe in the spring of 1940, using Blitzkrieg tactics, both the French and British army could not stop the fast approaching enemy. For the people in Western Europe, World War two was about to start for real and the "Phoney War" were soon to be over
The advancing German Army trapped the British and French armies on the beaches around a town called Dunkirk. This has been proven by source B10 which has been written by John Harris who is an historian writing about Dunkirk in a book about great military battles “The Storms of War” written in 1988. The source states clearly with the encapsulated words that the naval officer sent to evacuate just 5000 men returned with a swollen amount of 20000 in prior to that, there was still a queue of a thousand waiting to be evacuated( it didn’t state if the evacuation was successful).In this situation it was a success. Moreover, some men trying to climb on the boats made it more depressing as they were numb with shock and were suffering from hunger and insomnia. They even still had more difficulties like having cold water. In addition most of the men were already tired. The men were even trying to get away from the Germans which implies the Germans were still going to come back to them in England as they were fleeing. They even abandoned dozens of horses on the sands which made it look more of disaster. Some people will still come up with this statistics of the volume of evacuees which the success wasn’t stated. Some people will call it a disaster because of the reaction of the people and also the forces during the evacuation s well as the war ammunitions and horses left behind.
Many people since that time have taken that view that Dunkirk was a miracle. An example of these set of people is Ben Walsh who is an history teacher and author. He wrote a GCSE history textbook called Essential Modern War History in 2003. Writing under the importance of Dunkirk, he stated that: 340,000 men, 71 heavy guns and 595 vehicles were rescued. That was contradicted by Josh Brooman’s who is also an author of a
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