The Parallel Lives

Nine months after World War II began, the German Nazi war machine drove French, British, and Belgian troops west across France into a town on the English Channel’s coast, called Dunkirk. By late May of 1940, the German army controlled almost all of France.

     Those 338,000 Allied soldiers were pinned to the coast at Dunkirk. Their backs to the English Channel, they faced certain annihilation should the German army attack a final time.

     Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that, “The whole root and core and brain of the British Army . . . seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity.”

     With this catastrophic situation unfolding, British, Belgian, Dutch, Canadian, Polish, and French navies brought into play a host of warships to ferry stranded soldiers from France to England, a distance of forty-four miles between Dunkirk in France, and Dover in England.

     In addition, the British government requested private owners of small vessels to sail or motor across the English Channel multiple times and assist in the evacuation. 

     “Because of shortages of military personnel, civilian crews manned the ‘little ships at Dunkirk,’” and “The most useful were the motor lifeboats which had good capacity and speed.”

     Code named Operation Dynamo, it proved successful. Between May 27 and June 4, 1940, 338,226 troops crossed the English Channel and landed at Dover.

     On June 4, Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons, and called the Dunkirk evacuation a miracle, yet he warned, “Wars are not won by evacuation.” He also spoke of what he feared most: “We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles.”

     Churchill then spoke of the “originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, and that we may prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem.” 

     Yet, Churchill refused to succumb to despair. Instead, he said that he and England will fight.

     Even though many of Europe’s governments “have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans.

     “We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

     Four years passed. On Tuesday morning, June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies—British, American, and other armies—began Operation Overlord, the Battle of Normandy for the liberation of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.

     Normandy lies south of Dunkirk, some 250 miles distant.

     Led by the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower, D-Day was the largest amphibious invasion in military history. It landed 156,000 troops on Normandy’s beaches the first day. 

     By late August, three months later, a little over 2,000,000 Allied troops were poised to march across Europe toward Berlin to crush “the Gestapo, and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule.”

     Citizens across Europe and America celebrated Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, eleven months after D-Day. Hitler was gone, and men and women whom he had shoehorned into concentration camps burst into tears of joy.

     Shakespeare wrote, “The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on,” meaning that over time a worm will tact in different directions. Power structures too will shift, dependent upon force of will, ideology, resources, skill, and strategy. All worms turn, especially when stepped on.