Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory

by Michael Korda,
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 1, 2017

On May 26, 1940, a few hours after Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave the order to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, Vice Adm. Bertram Ramsay contacted Gen. Lord John Gort, commander of the BEF in France. With the harbor under constant shelling by the Nazis, Ramsay acknowledged that “no one can tell how it may go.” He promised, however, to give the besieged troops “all that the Navy and the Air Force can do.”