The German Blitzkrieg brought the Battle of France to so swift and devastating a conclusion that the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and other troops had no choice but to retreat to Dunkirk on the English Channel French coast near the Belgian border. German general Gerd von Rundstedt expressed to Adolf Hitler his reservations about the extremely aggressive tactics of Blitzkrieg advocate and armor commander Heinz Guderian, who was determined to push virtually the entire BEF into the English Channel. Rundstedt believed that Guderian's tanks could not do this alone and advised calling a halt to their advance until more conventional infantry divisions could catch up. Hitler agreed, Guderian's advance was halted, and a narrow window of opportunity was thereby opened for British and French troops to be evacuated from Dunkirk.

The evacuation, which has been called miraculous, was a mammoth effort (appropriately code named Operation Dynamo) between May 26 and June 4, 1940. The British Admiralty cobbled together a fleet of 693 ships, including 39 destroyers, 36 minesweepers, 77 civilian trawlers, 26 civilian yachts, and a motley assortment of other small craft, which fetched from Dunkirk 338,226 soldiers, including 140,000 French troops. The Allies were forced, however, to abandon a huge cache of heavy equipment. (Even before Operation Dynamo began, some 28,000 nonessential British personnel had been evacuated via Dunkirk.)

Although Operation Dynamo was extremely successful, it was accompanied by much confusion and friction between the British and the French. Indeed, initially, the French were not allowed to embark on the evacuation ships, and only after virtually all the British troops had been evacuated were large numbers of French troops taken off en masse. On the last two nights of the operation, 53,000 French soldiers embarked. Nor was the evacuation as heroic, stoic, and orderly as it is often portrayed to have been. Officers sometimes used small arms to control panicky troops in the evacuation lines, and the sailors managing the small boats that transferred troops from shore to waiting vessels not infrequently used their oars to beat off those threatening to overload and swamp their tiny craft. It is true, however, that the greatest disorder occurred early in the operation, as the rear echelon troops were being evacuated. The front line troops, who were the last to leave, tended to be far more disciplined, calm, and orderly. . .

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