Word: dunkirks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...DUNKIRK (311 pp.)-A. D. Divine-Dutton...
...will ever know the full story of Dunkirk-"the greatest evacuation in the history of war." Many ships went to the bottom carrying eyewitnesses, logs and records with them. Many rescuers lost "all count of times and days," and after bringing home their load of men, collapsed in sleep and never recaptured a clear remembrance of their work. But British Naval Analyst A. D. Divine (who skippered the yawl Little Ann in the great evacuation) has tried to collect every available account, and to place each one in its proper place within the great, overall story. He has succeeded...
...Author Divine, 19 forces were evacuated (including the famed rescue of General Sir John Moore's army from Corunna). At two points on Gallipoli, the evacuations were executed so admirably that the entire force of 83,000 soldiers was brought off with only half a dozen casualties. But Dunkirk was not the result of expert planning. It was a last-minute improvisation, stamped by "complete and utter absence of red tape." It depended chiefly on the horse sense of hundreds of independent skippers...
...which has not had a princess of its own to smile at for some time now, Britain's Elizabeth was (as they say in French) a mad success. Four thousand people jammed the epically dirty Gare du Nord when the London-Paris night ferry train puffed in. A Dunkirk railway worker had hung a sign on the locomotive: "Zezette" (French for Lizzie...
Later, when Sykes inquired how this could have come about, he was told that the resistance had been organized by the parish priest. He went to the priest. The priest told him that in the early months of the war he had been with a French unit evacuated from Dunkirk. At a small English seaside hotel, under continual bombing, he had been astonished at the behavior of the two women hotelkeepers, who kept up their life as if it were a holiday season in peace. "I recognized in a flash," said the French priest, "we must be formidable...