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This is the story of the dark days of 1940, when defeat overtook the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders and the ghost of a great army came home from France. It is the story of a lost campaign, as untried young men armed with little more than rifles took on the might of Hitler's panzer divisions while the Allied armies crumbled on all sides. It is the story of French soldiers too, whose heroism and sacrifice made the deliverance of Dunkirk possible. It was the greatest disaster in British military history: the Second World War was all but lost. Yet from the rout rose that legendary spirit that somehow found triumph in defeat, success in the extraordinary evacuation of so many men from beneath the German guns. Robert Jackson's closely detailed account of three weeks of battle, and the nine days it took an armada of ships to evacuate 198,000 troops, recalls with startling clarity how unprepared were the British for war in 1940. Book jacket.
* * * Special 75th Anniversary Edition * * * Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man tells the story of the rescue in May 1940 of British soldiers fleeing capture and defeat by the Nazis at Dunkirk. Dunkirk was not just about what happened at sea and on the beaches. The evacuation would never have succeeded had it not been for the tenacity of the British soldiers who stayed behind to ensure they got away. Men like Sergeant Major Gus Jennings who died smothering a German stick bomb in the church at Esquelbecq in an effort to save his comrades, and Captain Marcus Ervine-Andrews VC who single-handedly held back a German attack on the Dunkirk perimeter thereby allowing the British...
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the British force in Europe from 1939_1940 during the Second World War. Commanded by General Lord Gort, the BEF constituted one-tenth of the defending Allied force.??The British Expeditionary Force was started in 1938 in readiness for a perceived threat of war after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and the claims on the Sudetenland, which led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. After the French and British had promised to defend Poland, the German invasion of that country began and war was declared on 3 September 1939.??The BEF was sent to France in September 1939 and deployed mainly along the BelgianFrench border during the so-called Phoney War leading up to May 1940. The BEF did not commence hostilities until the invasion of France on 10 May 1940. After the commencement of battle, they were driven back through Belgium and north-western France, forcing their eventual evacuation from several ports along the French northern coastline in Operations Dynamo, Ariel and Cycle. The most notable evacuation was from the Dunkirk region and from this the phrase Dunkirk Spirit was coined.
Overwhelmed by the German Blitzkreig, the British Expeditionary Force faced annihilation. Miraculously, and thanks to decisive generalship, over 300,000 troops got back to our island fortress to fight another day. There was much more to the Dunkirk story than evacuating the beaches in the little ships and boats.
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the fighting and evacuations written by soldiers on both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "The Navy, using nearly 1,100 ships of all kinds, carried over 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and shame [...] We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won byevacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance [...] we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills [...] until [...] the New World, with all i...
During the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940, German forces successfully cut off several units of British, French and Canadian troops from supporting forces and supplies. Nearly 350,000 Allied troops were left stranded on the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, in France, amounting to what Winston Churchill called "the whole root, core, and brain of the British Army." Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, in what was named Operation Dynamo, a total of 338,226 soldiers were rescued by hastily assembled boats to British destroyers and other large ships or directly back to England. This book fills a gap in Osprey's coverage of World War II (1939-1945), as no Campaign titles have yet covered the Dunkirk evacuation, and, unlike previous treatments of the subject, provides a description and assessment of the operation from an operation perspective. Author Doug Dildy relates the various overlapping and interconnected struggles--land forces vs. land forces, air forces vs. air forces, air forces vs. naval forces, all in a race against time--and their operational impacts on one another in one coherent, coordinated volume.
THE TRUE STORY OF THE 41,000 BRITISH SOLDIERS WHO WERE LEFT BEHIND AFTER THE EVACUATION OF DUNKIRK, MAY 1940 'Meticulously researched, very well written and deeply moving' Andrew Roberts 'Few readers will be unmoved by Sean Longden's account' Dominic Sandbrook At 2am on the morning of the 3rd of June 1940, General Harold Alexander searched along the quayside, holding onto his megaphone and called "Is anyone there? Is anyone there?" before turning his boat back towards England. Tradition tells us that the dramatic events of the evacuation of Dunkirk, in which 300,000 BEF servicemen escaped the Nazis, was a victory gained from the jaws of defeat. For the first time, rather than telling the tal...
This is the Naval Staff History of "Operation Dynamo", originally published internally in 1949. British ships evacuated nearly 100,000 men of the BEF from the beaches, and over 200,000 from harbours. Other nations' vessels carried more than 30,000.
It is September 1939. Shortly after war is declared, Anthony Rhodes is sent to France, serving with the British Army. His days are filled with the minutiae and mundanities of Army life friendships, billeting, administration as the months of the Phoney War quickly pass and the conflict seems a distant prospect. It is only in the spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear; the men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk, where they face a desperate and terrifying wait for evacuation.
The dramatic story of how a quarter million men were evacuated from the coast of France—and how the British Expeditionary Force fought on. This book, part of the Retreat and Rearguard series, covers the actions of the BEF during the retreat from the Dyle Line to the evacuation points of Dunkirk, Boulogne, Calais, Saint-Valery-en-Caux, and finally the Cherbourg Peninsula. Some of the engagements are relatively well known (Cassell, the Arras counter-attack, and the notorious Le Paradis SS massacre), but the author has unearthed many less known engagements from the long and painful withdrawal. While the main Dunkirk evacuation from the port and beaches was over by early June, elements of the BEF fought on until June 21. In relating those often heroic actions, this book catches the atmosphere of desperate defiance that typified this never-to-be-forgotten period.