Dunkirk evacuation

The Dunkirk evacuation, also called Operation Dynamo, was the rescue of Allied troops trapped on the northern coast of France in the early summer of 1940. After the German breakthrough through the Ardennes, the British Expeditionary Force and large French forces were pushed back to the port of Dunkirk and surrounded. Over about nine days, warships and hundreds of small civilian boats, many of them crewed by volunteers, took more than three hundred thousand soldiers across the Channel to Britain. Much of the army's heavy equipment was left behind, and France fell soon afterwards. Winston Churchill called the evacuation a miracle of deliverance, but warned that wars are not won by evacuations. It became a symbol of British resilience.

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