Dunkirk: From Disaster to Deliverance - Testimonies of the Last Survivors

by Sinclair McKay

When Churchill made one of the most inspiring speeches of the 20th century - 'we will fight them on the beaches' some thought that it was his way of preparing the public for the fall of France. Others heard it as a direct appeal to the Americans. The Prime Minister was speaking in the Commons in June 4 1940, giving thanks for the miracle of deliverance, the harrowing and breathless evacuation of over 338,000 troops - British and French and Belgian - from the beaches and harbour at Dunkirk in the teeth of nightmarish German onslaught. Churchill was determined it shouldnt be labelled a victory. He was already too late. Hours later, broadcaster JB Priestley was to call it an absurd English epic. The last of the boatloads had returned to Dover in the small hours of June 4th. And the mythologizing had already begun from euphoric American journalists to the thousands of women who lined up on railway platforms, crowding round exhausted soldiers as if they were movie stars. But was Churchill privately convinced that the Germans were about to successfully invade England?Those days of Dunkirk, and the spirit, and the image of the indefatigable little ships, are still invoked now whenever the nation finds itself in any kind of crisis. But there is a wider story too that involves a very large number of civilians - from nurses to racing enthusiasts, trades union leaders to dance hall managers, novelists to seaside cafe owners.And even wider yet, a story that starts in September 1939: of young civilian men being trained for a war that was already 25 years out of date; and the increasing suspense and occasional surrealism - of the Phoney War. The absurd epic of Dunkirk told here through fresh interviews with veterans, plus unseen letters and archival material is the story of how an old-fashioned island was brutally forced into the modernity of World War Two."

Genres: History, World War II, War, Nonfiction

ebook

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Sinclair McKay writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph and The Secret Listeners and has written books about James Bond and Hammer horror for Aurum. His next book, about the wartime “Y” Service during World War II, is due to be published by Aurum in 2012. He lives in London.
-Source

Reviews

[Kenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating - 3.5.

[Andy Lind · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was very good. My only hope was that I would hear more from the survivors perspectives than the author's. Other than that, it is a wonderful read.

[David Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed every page of Sinclair McKay's Dunkirk: From Disaster to Deliverance. Unfortunately, those pages were often not cohesive and left me less enthused about the book as a whole. McKay presents the events leading up to the events at Dunkirk through the eyes of its survivors, and his anecdotal approach succeeds to a certain extent. I found that each individual story, as played out over a page or two, offered an interesting and enjoyable snapshot of the events leading up to and during the Dunkirk evacuations, from the time England entered the War. Those anecdotes do not, however, offer a particularly scholarly examination of Dunkirk itself, and I found myself wanting more of a macro-level framework of the political and military framework for the personal experiences of the survivors that McKay relates. While this book has some merit, it will be of greater interest to the casual reader.