"Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster"

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“Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster”

 AJP Taylor

Is there evidence in sources A-F to support this interpretation?

Sources and own knowledge

-This statement is a very vague statement and as a result, it is a statement that can be easily justified using Sources A to F. In this response I will examine what each source is telling us, and whether it agrees, disagrees or is neutral to the statement, “Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster”.

The Dunkirk evacuation, codenamed Operation Dynamo by the British, was the large evacuation of Allied soldiers from May 26 to June 4, 1940, during the Battle of Dunkirk. The plan was created by British Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay and was accepted by Winston Churchill.

In the 9 days, more than three hundred thousand (338,226) soldiers — 218,226 British and 120,000 French — were rescued from Dunkirk, France and the surrounding beaches by a hastily assembled fleet of about seven hundred boats. These craft included a mixture of merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and RNLI lifeboats, whose civilian crews were called into service for the emergency. These small craft ferried troops from the beaches to larger ships waiting offshore.

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-Source A shows both sides of Taylor’s statement, that Dunkirk was both a great deliverance and a great disaster. It shows that ships did escape with soldiers aboard and this was a great deliverance for Britain in the view that many soldiers were successfully evacuated from Dunkirk. This source also shows the disastrous side of

Dunkirk. It shows that the German military and Luftwaffe sank many boats that were taking a number of the Allied soldiers back to Britain. From my own knowledge I know that the events shown in the painting did happen for instance I know ...

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