The real 'Dunkirk'

Just seen Christopher Nolan’s film, Dunkirk. An impressive and gripping account of the evacuation of nearly 200,000 British troops from the beaches in 1940. 140,000 French and Belgian troops were also rescued.

Churchill, though, recognised that the campaign overall had been a ‘colossal military disaster’, with the British Expeditionary Force losing almost all its equipment as well as 66,000 men killed, wounded or captured.

One of the fascinating questions the film does not tackle is why Hitler made his rampaging army call a halt when the enemy appeared to be at his mercy. Was he concerned that in some parts of his force, half the tanks were now out of action?  

Had he been shaken by a British counter-attack near Arras or did he believe that surely at some point, the French – supposedly Europe’s greatest military power – must have a serious counter-attack in them?   Or was he convinced by Göring’s boast that the Luftwaffe could destroy the Allied forces on Dunkirk’s exposed beaches without any help from the army?

Whatever the reason, the result was ‘Dunkirk’.

For the full story see Britain’s 20 Worst Military Disasters. See also my post of 24 January 2012.

The Brexit riddle

What is the difference between Boris Johnson and Winston Churchill? Churchill was prepared to sacrifice his career to save his country. Johnson is prepared to sacrifice his country to save his career.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 20 - the Fall of Singapore

For Winston Churchill, it was ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.   Before World War Two, Britain had spent the then vast sum of £60m turning the island of Singapore into a supposedly impregnable fortress at the end of the Malayan peninsula – at that time also a British colony.

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese landed at the northern end of the peninsula, and though they were heavily outnumbered, they fought their way down it remorselessly, until by the end of January 1942, they had conquered the whole peninsula without the British scoring a single significant victory.

Now the defenders blew up the causeway that linked Singapore to the mainland, but on February 8, the Japanese launched an invasion.   Just as they had in Malaya, they outfought and outmanoeuvred the defending forces, using their air supremacy to deadly effect.

Just a week later, 85,000 British and British Empire forces surrendered to the 35,000 Japanese invaders.    The Japanese had lost only 3,500 men in the conquest of Malaya and Singapore – then the greatest city in south-east Asia.

D-Day - civilian casualties

I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s impressive tome, D-Day. Beevor puts the number of French civilians killed in the months leading up to the 1944 Allied landings in Normandy at 15,000.

The Allies’ trump card was their air supremacy, but Churchill had mooted the idea of setting a ceiling of 10,000 for the number of French civilian casualties during the campaign. After that bombing would have to cease. The suggestion was rejected.

About 3,000 French people were killed in the first 24 hours of the operation, double the number of US service personnel who died. Among the places that suffered particularly heavy casualties during the invasion were Saint-Lo where about 300 died, and Caen, where the death toll was over 800.

The Germans, meanwhile, continued their systematic murder of French civilians. On June 8, 1944 they hanged 98 citizens of Tulle from the town’s trees. Two days later, in the most notorious massacre of all, they descended on Oradour-sur-Glane, shooting all the men, then herding the women and children into the church, which they set on fire. A total of 642 died, and the Nazis had got the wrong village. They were supposed to be taking revenge for an attack by the Resistance at Oradour-sur-Vayres, 15 miles away. Altogether, nearly 20,000 French civilians perished during the campaign.