Dunkirk Spirit Recalled

Seventy years on from the infamous Dunkirk evacuation, surviving veterans of the expeditionary force's rout are to be reunited.

As the organisation, English Heritage begins a programme of events and activities to celebrate the dramatic rescue operation an official reconstruction of the Channel crossing is being organised for later this month - to be watched by the men themselves.

Described by Prime Minister Winston Churchill as "a miracle of deliverance", the recovery of hundreds of thousands of stranded British and French soldiers from Dunkirk during World War II was no ordinary military operation.

Greeted in Dover by soldiers from the Irish Guards second battalion, (pictured here) who were the weary and often horribly wounded soldiers' first contact onshore, they were fed and transported homeward while the many critically ill soldiers were urgently ferried on to waiting medical care.

It was co-ordinated from a cramped labyrinth of secret tunnels deep below Dover Castle, where Vice Admiral Bertram Home Ramsay and his naval staff oversaw the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force trapped at Dunkirk, under fierce attack by the German armed forces.

On 26th May 1940 and over the next nine days, the destroyers, corvettes and minesweepers of the Royal Navy, together with a host of requisitioned merchant vessels and pleasure ships, lifted some 338,000 stranded soldiers from the harbour of Dunkirk.

They were helped by a host of tiny craft - fishing boats, cabin cruisers and the like - the 'little ships' that had sailed from England to help in the rescue.

This operation, code-named 'Dynamo', was to prove a vital event in the War, triggering a response of public sympathy for the rescued battle-weary troops and a national resolve to pull together in the face of the enemy and the famous British 'Dunkirk Spirit' was born.

After the 'miracle', Britain then stood alone against the might of Hitler's forces, with daily expectation of invasion across the English Channel.

However, the mighty Luftwaffe had first to take control of the skies and so began the epic Battle of Britain, with the RAF finally seeing off the threat of German forces ever stepping onto English soil.

Hitler switched to a bombing campaign of London and other cities while soon also turning his attention to the invasion of his former ally, Russia.

The United Kingdom lived to fight another day - D-Day - on the 6th June 1944 - almost exactly four years later, when the USA joined the other allied forces massed across the entire country for the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.

(BMcC/GK)