The Battle of Dunkirk Was Nerve-Wracking—and Bizarre

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By Robert Beckhusen,War Is Boring

It’s hard to grasp the unfolding disaster that was the 1940 Battle of Dunkirk. For nine days, Britain evacuated 200,000 of its soldiers—most of the United Kingdom’s trained troops—along with nearly 140,000 Allied soldiers, from northern France with a fleet of naval vessels and appropriated civilian “little ships” while under near-incessant air attack.

The German army had split the Allied lines, pinning the British Expeditionary Force and the French and Belgian troops to the sea. Without the rescue, Britain would have likely fallen to fascism with the rest of Europe. And until the shell-shocked troops began arriving in British ports, the public was largely unaware of what was happening.

This piece was originally published in 2017.

Lt. Michael Lyne, a Spitfire pilot, was flying air cover for the evacuation when two German Me 109 fighters jumped him, damaging his plane and forcing him to limp back to England.

Wounded and bleeding, Lyne crash-landed on a beach in Kent as onlookers on their Sunday stroll watched, “all enjoying a leisurely promenade under the warm May sun,” Walter Lord wrote in The Miracle of Dunkirk, a military history classic now available as an ebook from Open Road Media.