DUNKIRK 93
and three French armies were forced to retreat to France’s Atlantic coast. By 20
May these troops found themselves cut off and threatened with annihilation on
the beaches at Dunkirk, whereupon Winston Churchill’s Cabinet hatched “Oper-
ation Dynamo”: the evacuation of the BEF back to England by sea. The massive
undertaking began a week later, on 27 May, and continued until 4 June. Over that
nine- day period 861 Allied vessels—of which 693 were British, mostly requisi-
tioned private boats— rescued 338,226 Allied troops (198,000 British and 140,000
French, Polish, and Belgian soldiers). Though it was a major turning point of the
Second World War because it enabled Britain to fight on, the Dunkirk evacuation
was hardly an unqualified success. As Churchill put it, “Wars are not won by evac-
uations.” The British had to abandon all their vehicles and heavy guns and equip-
ment: enough to outfit eight to ten divisions. They also lost 84 Royal Air Force
(RAF) planes and 240 naval vessels (including six destroyers) during the Dunkirk
evacuation. Nor did every one make it out. A rearguard force of 5,000 British and
35,000 French troops had to be left behind, were subsequently captured, and were
consigned to slave labor in Germany for the duration of the war— a grim after-
math not widely reported. A moral victory in an other wise disastrous phase of the
war for the Allies, the so- called “Miracle of Dunkirk” received its first cinematic
dramatization in almost 50 years with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017). Nolan
first conceived of such a film in 1995, when he and his then- girlfriend (now wife)
Allied troops ner vously await evacuation in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017).
(Warner Bros./Photofest)