DUNKIRK

Hello my lovelies

Well, Papa went off to see Dunkirk, along with Andrew from church, Bob Birks, Andrew Kuchel and some other men.  He said it was a very good film, showing what it must have been like for over 400,000 men to be trapped on a beach.  Four  hundred thousand!  That's twice the population of Canberra.

Here is what happened.

It was May 1940 and the enemy was so rapidly advancing and encircling the allied troops that a decision was made to evacuate the forces from France.  However, the only port from which to evacuate was Dunkirk and that was already being seriously threatened by the enemy.

Mr Churchill, the Prime Minister later said that "...the whole root and core and brain of the British army...seemed about to perish upon the field, or to be led into ignominious and starving captivity...)

It was a dreadful situation.  However, the Queen's father George V1 requested that Sunday 26 May should be observed as a National Day of Prayer.  In a sirring radio broadcast, he called the people of Britain and the Empire to commit their cause to God.  Together with members of the Cabinet, the King attended Westminster Abbey, whilst millions of his subjects in all parts of the Commonwealth and Empire flocked to the churches to join in prayer.

Very soon, three miracles happened.

The first miracle was that for some reason - which has never been fully explained, Hitler overruled his generals and halted the advance of his armoured columns at the very point when they could have proceeded to the British army's annihilation.  They were only 10 miles away!

Winston Churchill later wrote that he felt this was because Hitler believed "...that his air superiority would be sufficient to prevent a large-scale evacuation by sea."

The second miracle occurred when a storm of unprecedented fury broke over northern Belgium on Tuesday, 28 May.  This storm grounded the German aeroplanes and enabled the British army, now eight to twelve miles from Dunkirk, to move up on foot to the coast in the darkness of the storm and the violence of the rain, with scarcely any interruption from aircraft above.

The third miracle - despite the storm in northern Belgium, a great calm such as has rarely been experienced, settled over the English Channel during the days which followed, and its waters became as still as a mill pond.  This extraordinary calm enabled a vast armada of little ships, big ships, warships, privately owned motor-cruisers from British rivers and estuaries - in fact, almost anything that would float, to ply back and forth in a desperate bid to rescue as many of the men as possible.

Here are a couple of photographs of boats heading towards the English Channel.

Photograph of troops waiting to be rescued.

And here are a couple of photographs taken in Greenwich in May this year to remember the great rescue.

Love Nanxxx