"Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster" (AJP Taylor) - Is there sufficient evidence in Sources A to G to support this interpretation? Use the sources and knowledge from your studies to explain your answer.
Target: Main target – evaluation of sources for their sufficiency, drawing conclusions from evidence (AO 6.2 and 6.3 and 6.1)
“Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster.” (AJP Taylor). Is there sufficient evidence in Sources A to G to support this interpretation? Use the sources and knowledge from your studies to explain your answer.
From knowledge, sources A to G, and from other sources, I know that Dunkirk could be seen as both a disaster and deliverance. I am going to go through the facts and sources and then decide whether or not there is enough evidence to support AJP Taylor’s quote.
Source A, is a contemporary painting of troops being rescued from the beaches, by Charles Cundall, from which we can see German bomber planes bombing the British troops. This shows Dunkirk to be a disaster. We can also see that as German planes are bombing, there are several small boats in the water, at the beach trying to rescue the British troops. However, we can also see that there are a few navy ships also rescuing British troops. This proves to be a deliverance, as in fact, from my knowledge I know that the British Government had expected to rescue up to 50,000 men, but 340,000 men were actually rescued. I also know from my own knowledge that in order to rescue this amount of men, huge military equipment had to be abandoned, which again refers to the Battle at Dunkirk to be a disaster. So, from this one photograph, I have evidence of Dunkirk being both a deliverance and a disaster. However, this source is biased and as the British Government must have censored it, as they would have only wanted the British people to see what they wanted them to see. This was that “everything was perfect” and that the British troops were all safe and that the Germans would not defeat Britain. In Source A, this image of “everything being perfect” is portrayed, as overall, there is an image of a British Victory being exposed. This is the point where I can comment on the insufficiency of this source, because it only shows you what the British Government wanted you to see.
