Seventy years ago this week, the German invasion of France came to an unexpected halt in the outskirts of the French channel port of Dunkerque (Dunkirk), allowing the evacuation of 338,000 British and French troops trapped there: the "miracle of Dunkirk." Winston Churchill tried to contain the exuberance by remarking, "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory; wars are not won by evacuations." But the "spirit of Dunkirk," however fanciful and sentimental it may seem, lived on long enough, and was real enough, to inspire the RAF to turn back the Luftwaffe in September, during the Battle of Britain. For France it was a different story. During the first weeks of the Blitzkrieg the French Army lost nearly 100,000 men holding off the German advance, but the bulk of the French were in Belgium, erroneously deployed there in expectation of a reprise of 1914. Instead, they got the Blitzkrieg. More on the 70th anniversary of these colossal, tragic events in the days and weeks to come.
