Word: dunkirks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...meaning of Dunkirk hits home when Mr. Miniver pilots his speedboat slowly down the Thames estuary with the flotilla of amateur navigators who set out to rescue their beaten Expeditionary Force. The Nazi mentality becomes viciously and pathetically real when Mrs. Miniver disarms a wounded German flyer in her kitchen, then slaps his face for talking Aryan nonsense. World War II is reduced to the compass of an Anderson shelter when the Minivers and their well-scrubbed youngsters ride out an air raid in their own backyard. It is anybody's backyard, anywhere...
...Poland and the Lowlands, Germany proved that the side with command of the air can operate successfully on the surface. Britain proved it again in the retreat from Dunkirk. In the Battle of Britain, Germany came close to proving Mitchell down to the last paragraph, but failed because she went at the job with too little vision (and too few airplanes) and because Britain took command...
Companion example of this shuttle system is Walter Graebner, who has headed the London Bureau since 1939-all through the days of Dunkirk and the dark months of the Battle of Britain...
...involving no more than 500,000 men. A bridgehead diversion, provided Britain can hold control of the air, might be enough to compel a major Nazi effort to head it off. Once established, the bridgehead could be used by more massive forces. Even if there were defeat-even another Dunkirk-the effort might or might not be worth while. But the U.S. Army does not think in terms of defeat. With overwhelming air power on the Allied side, it thinks the second front will work...
Butcher and Bolt. It was Winston Churchill who gave Britain's Commandos their name.- After Dunkirk, when these special units were first formed, Churchill remembered his Boer War days and the Boer Commandos: irregular, ill-trained, but well-equipped bands of 300 to 400 Boers, with less regard for the niceties of war than for ambushing and killing British soldiers...