What is the significance of the miracle of dunkirk

Hitler gave the tanks the go-ahead again on May 26, but by that time the Allies had gained crucial time to put their preparations in place. On the evening of May 26, the British began the evacuation from Dunkirk, using the codename Operation Dynamo. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay directed the efforts, leading a team working out of a room deep inside the Dover cliffs that had once contained a generator known as a dynamo giving the operation its name.

On the first full day, Operation Dynamo was only able to evacuate about 7, men from Dunkirk; around 10, got out the following day May Some to 1, boats, many of them leisure or fishing crafts, eventually aided in the evacuation from Dunkirk.

Some were requisitioned by the Navy and crewed by naval personnel, while others were manned by their civilian owners and crew. At the outset, Churchill and the rest of British command expected that the evacuation from Dunkirk could rescue only around 45, men at most.

But the success of Operation Dynamo exceeded all expectations. On May 29, more than 47, British troops were rescued; more than 53,, including the first French troops, made it out on May By the time the evacuations ended , some , British and , French troops would manage to get off the beaches at Dunkirk—a total of some , men.

On May 27, after holding off a German company until their ammunition was spent, 99 soldiers from the Royal Norfolk Regiment retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, about 50 miles from Dunkirk. Agreeing to surrender, the trapped regiment started to file out of the farmhouse, waving a white flag tied to a bayonet. They were met by German machine-gun fire. They tried again and the British regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to an open field where they were searched and divested of everything from gas masks to cigarettes.

They were then marched into a pit where machine guns had been placed in fixed positions. They lay among the dead until dark, then, in the middle of a rainstorm, they crawled to a farmhouse, where their wounds were tended. With nowhere else to go, they surrendered again to the Germans, who made them POWs. After the war, a British military tribunal in Hamburg found Captain Knochlein, who gave the fateful order to fire, guilty of a war crime.

He was hanged for his offense. Germany had hoped defeat at Dunkirk would lead Britain to negotiate a speedy exit from the conflict. The evacuation of Dunkirk, code-named Operation Dynamo , which began eighty years ago this week, has gripped the imagination of the West ever since the Royal Navy accomplished the seemingly-improbable feat of withdrawing nearly , soldiers from France during a ten-day period from May 26 to June 4, Indeed, the bravery of the crews who manned these ships is undeniable.

The undertaking was hazardous by any measure; of the small craft employed in Operation Dynamo, nearly 30 percent ended up on the bottom of the Channel. But the focus on the little ships overlooks the larger reasons for the success of the Dunkirk evacuation. The Royal Air Force prevented this outcome by committing precious Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons to protect the skies over the Channel.

Although the Luftwaffe sank ships including nine destroyers, the evacuation was able to continue until the Royal Navy had withdrawn all but the 40,man French rear guard. The vast majority of troops embarked not on little ships but on destroyers and other large vessels from an intact mole, or pier. Commander James Campbell Clouston , a Canadian officer in the Royal Navy who masterfully organized the pier operations, would lose his life when a Stuka dive bomber sank the boat in which he was sailing on the final night of the evacuation.

As he put it, the "whole root and core and brain of the British Army" was on the brink of being eliminated. If that had happened, Britain would probably have become the next domino to fall in Europe, and Hitler might have ultimately triumphed. Yet somehow the country managed to mount the most audacious rescue operation of all time, resulting in what Churchill memorably described as a "miracle of deliverance".

Dunkirk has become iconic because of its fleet of ships, sent across the bombed and battered waters to save the stranded Allies.

What made this armada so incredible was the fact it was made up of so many tiny civilian boats. They were needed to get through the shallow waters to where the soldiers were, and that meant the military had to gather together pretty much any kind of vessel they could get their hands on, from private yachts to fishing boats to paddle steamers.

Some fishermen even manned their own boats, bravely plunging into the thick of battle. One of the legendary "little ships of Dunkirk" was the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer which made no fewer than seven trips during the evacuation and saved a staggering 7, men. The plucky ship, dubbed the "Heroine of Dunkirk", was a fighter as well as a rescue vessel, even managing to shoot down German planes.

Years later, it would be transformed into a nightclub. Another famous Dunkirk boat was the pleasure steamer Marchioness. It made it through WW2, only to hit the headlines in when it tragically sunk in the Thames while hosting a party, with the loss of 51 lives. As if the sheer logistics of the Dunkirk evacuation weren't difficult enough, we have to remember that this immense operation took place under constant German bombardment.