The book explores the broader implications of Dunkirk on the war and its role in shaping subsequent events. With vivid storytelling and attention to detail, Sebag-Montefiore delves into the military strategies, individual acts of heroism, and the intense challenges faced during this critical operation. For The Miracle of Dunkirk, Lord interviewed hundreds of survivors and people who were involved in the evacuation. What the historian, Walter Lord refers to in his classic study, THE MIRACLE OF DUNKIRK is a series of crises that allowed many components of British society to take part in the rescue of these men.

Operation Dynamo involved the coordinated effort of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force (RAF), and a flotilla of civilian boats. This memoir of the effort would have been more interesting to those who lived through that era than it was to me, unfortunately. Walter Lord wrote the definitive Titanic book, A Night to Remember, and wrote another heart-in-your-mouth thriller here. The book is not new, I believe it was originally released in the 80's, but it has become more popular due to the film version of Dunkirk.Superbly written and drawn from richly original sources, Dünkirchen 1940 throws new light on what the British tend to regard as an heroic humiliation but for the Germans was a victorious sideshow. pages, including appendices covering evacuation statistics, bibliography, British units and ships engaged, eyewitness list, 27 b/w photos, e/paper maps. The sheer quantities is mind blowing and from reading this book you could argue that the men and women doing this side of the war are just as important as those having to do the fighting. Read this book either before or after seeing the movie and you will see how different the reality of this retreat was from what was portrayed on screen. On the second day they find a German convoy of captured Allied vehicles and tag themselves onto the end.

Robert Kershaw's accurate and gritty account provides a fresh coherency to the German action in Belgium and France in the spring of 1940. The tide is too low for them to take on men from the mole (or pier) itself so Lightoller ties up to a destroyer that is taking on men from the mole and the men cross the destroyer to his ship. After eight months of Phoney War, however, Hitler suddenly attacked Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg. With his outstanding record as a fighting soldier and armoured tactician, it was no surprise to anyone that he was to be hugely successful.

It was also inspiring when the hundreds of local boats arrived to carry soldiers across the channel. Many of the survivors were still living when Lord wrote the book and his interviews with hundreds of them provide the reader with the "real" story based on their memories, even though some may have been a bit faulty. But Gamelin had miscalculated: the main German army was farther south, through the “impenetrable” Ardennes Forest, which the French hadn’t even bothered to cover. It saw the evacuation of over 330,000 troops to Britain as Nazi German forces closed in, however 68,000 men were captured or killed during the operation.