Was Dunkirk A Moral Victory Or Military Disaster?

Was Dunkirk a moral victory or a military disaster? Firstly, let’s set the scene for this event. Neville Chamberlain had declared war on the Nazis eight months ago and currently there was a stalemate between both sides called the “Phoney War.” On May 10, the Germans launched a blitzkrieg attack on the Netherlands and Belgium. By May 15, they had already broken through the French defenses and started to head straight for the English Channel. A week later, German forces had the British Expeditionary Force and other allied troops surrounded at the port of Dunkirk in France. The troops at Dunkirk looked doomed, but surprisingly the German troops were given a halt order, giving the British troops a bit of breathing space. The halt order had given
However, the civilian appeal to join the cause was a success and they brought home 180 troops in three days. When Operation Dynamo ended 338,226 soldiers had escaped from Dunkirk. Soldiers were hailed as heroes when they got home. The soldiers at Dunkirk had endured hellish conditions. They were starving, exhausted, and had endured fierce bombardments of bullets and bombs. The sight of boats coming to shore was probably a sight they had been yearning to see for days. “'I've got to survive, I must survive to fight on in this war,” is what James Bradley,a soldier who escaped at Dunkirk, was muttering himself when he saw Dunkirk in a blazing mass of flames. James Bradley had been trained to a machine gunner in WWII.”We were told that we'll have to stand and fight to the last here. But then we were told, a second time, 'We've got to get out of here, we've got to save the regiment - or what's left of the regiment.” This account of one soldier’s time at Dunkirk is only example of the conditions, and I can’t even imagine the types of conditions the other soldiers went
Was it really a military disaster? Dunkirk was a success, morally. British soldiers(B.E.F)and any allied soldiers were stuck at Dunkirk. The amount of soldiers that did end up escaping exceeded the estimate that Winston Churchill believed would escape. Poor planning and strategizing had left the British Expeditionary Force and allied soldiers in a desperate situation, they were able to get out of it. The soldiers were hailed as heroes when they returned, but not all the soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk. What happened to the soldiers left behind? Germans captured 40,000 French soldiers and 40,000 British soldiers who were left behind at Dunkirk. The story of the forgotten soldiers are often overlooked but until the the end of the war in 1945, forgotten soldiers were largely mistreated at the war camps. The POWs were denied food and medical treatments and were forced to drink ditch water and were given repulsive food. The question can be debated, whether Dunkirk was a success or a fail. I believe Dunkirk can be considered a success. The British soldiers were in a sticky situation and fighting back wouldn’t be effective at that moment. If you’re looking at it from another perspective, you could say it was a military fail, but I believe the first priority is always keeping people