Word: dunkirks
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Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins...
...British were already thinking about evacuating France, and Dunkirk, about 50 miles away, was the only port that remained open to them. They hoped to rescue perhaps 45,000 men in the two days they estimated they might have left. But Guderian's tanks did not move, and more British troops kept pouring into Dunkirk. While the Royal Navy sent 165 ships, many of which could not enter the shallow harbor, London issued an emergency call for everything that could float -- yachts, fishing boats, excursion steamers, fire-fighting boats, some 850 vessels in all. The first 25,000 men reached...
...that time the Luftwaffe was bombing and strafing the beach, and Dunkirk was in flames. R.A.F. fighter planes raced across the Channel to defend the departing soldiers, who often had to stand in water up to their necks while machine-gun bullets spattered around them. A paddle-wheel steamer, Fenella, took aboard 600 soldiers, then was hit by a bomb. Most of the survivors were evacuated onto another paddle steamer, Crested Eagle, but a dive bomber set it afire, and most of the men aboard perished. A hospital ship marked with large red crosses rode at anchor off the beach...
Caught unawares by South Yemen's rapidly spreading civil war, the British and Soviet governments were participating in a joint rescue operation that in a modest way resembled the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk during World War II. As savage fighting between Marxist factions spread throughout the desert country, about 5,000 foreigners were transported from Aden, at the southern approach to the Red Sea, to the former French colony of Djibouti, 150 miles away...
...France fell, the general fled to Britain and, with less than $500 in his treasury, proclaimed himself leader of the Free French forces. Most of his countrymen-including 90% of the 2,000 French soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk-ignored him, remaining loyal to the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Cook summarizes De Gaulle's monumental presumption: "A marshal of France and head of government had ordered French soldiers to lay down their arms before the enemy. A brigadier general virtually unknown outside military circles was refusing to obey, and compounding this disobedience...