Product Description

Rescuing the British Army from Dunkirk was not just about what happened at sea and off the beaches. This book tells the story of the officers and ordinary British, and French, soldiers who were ordered to hold a series of strong points inland while their comrades were evacuated. They were to fight to the last man. The battle at Dunkirk would have turned out very differently if it were not for men such as Sergeant Major Gus Jennings of the Royal Warwickshire regiment who died smothering a German stick bomb in the church at Esquelbecq in an effort to save his comrades, and Captain Marcus Ervine-Andrews VC who single-handedly held back a German attack on the Dunkirk perimeter thereby allowing the British line to form up behind him. Using new material from British, French, Belgian, German, Russian and Czechoslovakian archives, and interviews with the last surviving witnesses of the Dunkirk campaign, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore can at last tell the true story of how the British Army was really evacuated from Dunkirk and from France in 1940.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #324021 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 720 pages

Tim Gardam, The Times
‘A searing story . . . both meticulous military history and a deeply moving testimony to the extraordinary personal bravery of individual soldiers’

Richard Overy, Telegraph
‘Sebag-Montefiore tells [the story] with gusto, a remarkable attention to detail and an inexhaustible appetite for tracking down the evidence’

Max Hastings, Daily Telegraph
‘A narrative triumph. I have not read a better account’

Customer Reviews

A strong account of individual bravery
I inherited an interest in WW2 from my history teacher father and have read many factual accounts from both the Allied and German perspective over the years. This book stands up well against the more recognised military historians like Holmes, Keegan or Beevor.

After the introducions and background are completed this volume concentrates quite rightly on the tales of each beleagured BEF battalion as they fought a desperate rearguard action back to the French and Belgian coast. Tales of individual heroism and leadership are intermingled with corroborative texts from both British and German archives and extracts that give the bigger picture as events unfolded.

The Dunkirk evacuation ended a huge defeat for the British Army and this book does not seek to hide or diminish that fact. However what it does do is demonstrate the resolute attitude of the Officers and Soldiers on the ground that took huge casualties and made great personal sacrifiuces in order to help ensure that as many men as possible could be extracted to fight another day.

Detailed But Limited
The `miracle' of Dunkirk, as Churchill styled our most famous military disaster, is one surrounded by myths. This book sets out to dispel some of them, but for readers unfamiliar with the story of the fall of France in 1940, it might not be the best place to start, as it does not convey the broad picture very clearly. An entertaining opening of British soldiers visiting French brothels, like children let loose in a sweet shop, is followed later by a detailed account of the `Mechelen incident', when German plans were captured in January 1940. But the implications are less well dealt with, and Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, whose forces performed the decisive German attack through the Ardennes called 'sichelschnitt', or sickle-cut, does not make an appearance until chapter 11.

The use of first-hand accounts conveys the confusion and desperation of the fighting, and the narrative is sometimes intensely personal. There are French and German voices early on, but thereafter it relies on British ones as the book concentrates on the efforts of the soldiers holding the defensive ring while the `little boats' and the Royal Navy set about the work of evacuation. In this it succeeds in creating a vivid impression of what it was like for those desperate men. The book's best sections are those dealing with set pieces, such as the defence of the village of Cassel, the massacres of British prisoners by SS men at Le Paradis and Wormhout, but this is at the expense of the evacuation itself which is covered in much less detail. The book finishes describing the capture of two-thirds of 51st (Highland) Division at St Valery-en-Caux, and the tragic sinking of the Lancastria with over 3,500 lives lost, but it skates quickly over the further evacuations that brought 144,000 British servicemen back from France from points south of the River Somme.

Dunkirk-detailed debate.
To date,the most comprehensive review of the subject from British,French and German sources.Whilst containing sufficient detail at a military unit level for most students the overall handling of the time-line requires some care in following.The notes,bibliography and maps are excellentand accurate.A minor quibble is that where sources differ as to their detail Sebag-Montefiore does not follow up.Nevertheless the best on the history so far.