A New Spirit
From the opening of the war to the evacuation at Dunkirk, the British Army suffered one traumatic setback after another. It became a soldier’s battle at every point as the “fog of war” descended over the vast battlefield. Coordination was difficult, reliable information scarce, and rumors were rampant. The junior officers, sergeants, and individual soldiers saved the army from disintegration by taking the initiative to keep their units together in the confusion of retreat. It was not pretty, but it worked. Instead of the greatest military disaster in British history, the army’s successful retreat and miraculous escape from Dunkirk became a source of national inspiration and hope. As one historian noted:
Dunkirk had started something. The spirit of Britain was roused, a vast flame of self-sacrifice and endeavour which swept the country and kept it going through the next dark eighteen months. In this campaign there had been no differentiation by rank. Everybody, from the commanding general downwards, had faced the same conditions, the same dangers and the same hardships. All the privileges of peacetime had disappeared and there grew from it not only inter-service co-operation but also that tremendous comradeship that carried the forces through Alamein and Normandy.26
Across the Atlantic, sensing this new spirit of defiance in the people and government of Great Britain, The New York Times proclaimed:
So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. In that harbour… at the end of a lost battle, the rags and blemishes that had hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, in shining splendour, she faced the enemy, this shining thing in the souls of free men which Hitler cannot command… It is the future. It is victory.27
But I call to God, and the Lord saves me. Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice. He ransoms me unharmed from the battle waged against me.
—Psalm 55:16–18