The Battle of Dunkirk

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The Battle of Dunkirk

In my opinion the battle of Dunkirk can be seen as both a deliverance

and disaster. It can be seen as a deliverance by the fact that the

British and French survived which is a great feat on it's own, because

seeing what predicament the British and French were in, it was likely

they were going to lose. They turned the tables and 338,000 men were

saved. On the other hand, it can be seen as a disaster because out of

the 338,000 men saved 139,997 were French, so for British morale that

wasn't very good. Also even Churchill said, "Wars are not won by

evacuation". Some would say that Britain still lived to fight another

day that is also an important point. I will try to come to a

conclusion based on my own knowledge and some sources.

I would like to start by giving some of the reasons why this battle

can be seen as a great deliverance because the British survived to

fight another day, and the population back home was led to believe it

was a great delivery. They had to spread this sort of propaganda to

keep up British morale. We find out from source I that almost all of

the B.E.F was saved. We get some more statistics on how many men were

saved, from source K. On the first five days of the evacuation, about

106,000 men were saved. So seeing this evidence it does suggest that

Dunkirk was a great deliverance. The only problem I would have with

this is that the British government failed to mention that 139,997 of

the evacuees were FRENCH (source I). Plus you can't really even trust

the figures given because the British government drew them up, so they

most likely exaggerated them to show off to the public and keep

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the1-mile jetty that helped so many men escape. Also all of them

failed to mention that 1/3rd of the men saved were French.

To conclude, some people would say that it was a great deliverance

because the British lived to fight another day, but as Churchill said,

"wars are not won by evacuation", also the Americans thought the

British would lose, they were proven wrong. Some people say if the

British hadn't evacuated the war would have been lost there and then.

On the other hand it can be seen as a disaster because only 2/3rd of

the men saved were British. There were 68,000 casualties, and a lot of

weaponry was lost. In my opinion it was a bit of both, deliverance and

disaster. There isn't sufficient evidence to rule anything out. I

would say that Dunkirk was a lesson learnt by the British and a hard

one at that.

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