In celebrating the 75th anniversary of Dunkirk, Britain has conveniently forgotten that it was God's intervention that saved the day...
In recent days the nation has been celebrating the 75th Anniversary of 'Operation Dynamo', the evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk between 27 May and 4 June 1940. The emphasis has been, once again, on the "Dunkirk Spirit" – on the sacrifices and heroism, the grit and determination of the British people, on the collaboration between the Navy, the RAF, and (especially) the "little ships". Services have been held in places such as Dover and Ramsgate, Dunkirk and Westminster Abbey, with media reports on these continuing the same emphases. National pride has been on parade again.
Selective National Memory
Conspicuous by their absence have been any substantial element of thanksgiving to Almighty God and any recognition of the role of prayer and the miraculous. This is the result of the secularisation of British society – a process almost unthinkable to most who lived and died in those dark days. In some cases it results from ignorance; in others, the result of wilful attacks upon the testimony of the participants at the time.
In the Dunkirk exhibition in Dover Castle there is no mention of the spiritual dimension of those times. On its website, the word 'miracle' is only used to credit the director of the operation: "Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay pulled off a miracle".1 Furthermore, the BBC website includes an article entitled Spinning Dunkirk,2 in which the 'miracle' is attributed to clever manipulation of the media by the politicians, creating a "myth" that the British have preferred to believe. Other authors have also scorned the miracle.
Conspicuous by their absence this memorial year have been any substantial elements of thanksgiving to God, or recognition of the role of prayer."
Call to Prayer
What do the eyewitness accounts have to say? Did you know, for example, that the main operation was preceded by a National Day of Prayer? In a broadcast on 24 May 1940 to the nation and the Empire, King George VI called his people to a day of repentance and prayer on Sunday 26 May.
John Richardson, in Dunkirk Revisited, writes:
It says much about the times, and about Dunkirk, that it had then taken centre stage in the nation's life. Every church and synagogue had been packed. Petticoat Lane's market closed for the only time in its history so that traders could attend church. On the forecourt of Southampton's Guildhall, an overflow of 2,000 had assembled to hear relayed the united service within.3 [emphasis added]
British Pathe's film commentary refers to "the mighty congregation" at the service in Westminster Abbey, at which King George VI, Winston Churchill, members of the Cabinet and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands participated. The photograph here shows the queue for prayer outside the Abbey. The Daily Sketch, reporting the following day, said "Nothing like it has ever been seen before".
Answered Prayer: Halted Forces
So what followed? Contemporary accounts refer to three or four aspects of the miraculous. First, the Panzer forces were unexpectedly halted for two days on 24 May, enabling the Allies to re-group. Even now, historians puzzle over why this happened; not even the German generals could agree the reason for the call to halt the German armoured divisions.
This clearly preceded the National Day of Prayer – was it a case of "Before they call I will answer" (Isa 65:24)? Perhaps God was blessing the king's very decision to call for prayer, itself a step of faith preceded by several days of debate, commitment and preparation. It is also important to realise that prayer was already well underway. Consider this excerpt from Norman Grubb's 'Rees Howells – Intercessor':
When the war broke out the prayer meetings at Wales Bible College became a daily event...Every week and often for days at a time there were whole days of prayer. It seems that God would lay one or another aspect of the war on the heart of Rees Howells or one of the others praying, and the whole community would intercede...4
Dunkirk was bathed in unprecedented levels of prayer all around the country, and then the miraculous happened."
Bad Weather over Flanders
The second miracle of Dunkirk was that within 48 hours of the National Day of Prayer, a great storm broke over Flanders, giving cover to the Allied troops, softening the marshlands which lay before the German armoured divisions and grounding the Luftwaffe for all but 2½ days of the operation. General Halder, head of the German Army General Staff, wrote in his diary on 30 May:
The pocket would have been closed at the coast if only our armour had not been held back. The bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe, and we must now stand and watch countless thousands of the enemy get away to England right under our noses.5
Calm Conditions for the 'Little Ships'
The third miracle was strangely calm conditions in the Channel during much of Operation Dynamo.
German author Hans Frank states that over the 9 days of the operation "the sea was leaden and calm, unusual for the Channel."6 Even the rather cynical comedian Spike Milligan was later to write "...the Channel was like a piece of polished steel. I'd never seen the sea so calm. One would say it was miraculous."7
The Daily Telegraph wrote on 8 July, 1940:
Those who are accustomed to the Channel testify to the strangeness of this calm; they are deeply impressed by the phenomenon of nature by which it became possible for tiny craft to go back and forth in safety.
This was particularly helpful in evacuating over 98,000 soldiers from the beach zones, as opposed to from the harbour area.
Large-Scale Rescue
By the end of Operation Dynamo on 4 June, a total of over 338,000 troops had been rescued (almost 140,000 of which were French, Belgian, Dutch and Polish). This contrasted greatly with the Admiralty's best estimate in planning – 45,000 over a two-day period.
In the House of Commons on 4 June, Churchill confessed that he had only hoped for 20,000-30,000 successful evacuations: "I feared it would be my hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history."8 The graph to the left shows the unexpectedly miraculous scale of the rescue.
On the same day, the BBC reported: "The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, has described the "miracle of deliverance" from Dunkirk and warned of an impending invasion."
Notable Reactions
Looking back on Operation Dynamo, Vice-Admiral Ramsay wrote to his wife: "The relief is stupendous. The results are beyond belief."9 General Pownall, Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, noted in his diary at the time: "The evacuation from Dunkirk was surely a miracle."10 Admiral Sir William James, who later led the evacuation of remaining Normandy and Brittany ports, was later to exclaim, "Thank God for that miracle at Dunkirk".11
C.B. Mortlock wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 8 June 1940:
...the prayers of the nation were answered...the God of hosts himself had supported the valiant men of the British Expeditionary Force...One thing can be certain about tomorrow's thanksgiving in our churches, from none will the thanks ascend with greater sincerity or deeper fervour than from the officers and men who have seen the hand of God, powerful to save, delivering them from the hands of a mighty foe, who, humanly speaking, had them utterly at his mercy.
When services of national thanksgiving were held in all churches on the following Sunday, it was with great feeling that many a choir and congregation sang the words of Psalm 124, for they were seen to apply to that situation through which the nation had just passed:
If the Lord had not been on our side- let Israel say -if the Lord had not been on our side when people attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away.
Praise be to the Lord, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the fowler's snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
No other passage of Scripture could have more aptly described the nation's experience on that day.
In the aftermath of Dunkirk, the nation was awestruck at God's deliverance. Surely 75 years on, it is time to recognise afresh the hand of God in our history, and give him all due worship."
Remembering Today
Surely, it's time for us to recognise anew the hand of God in our history, and to give him all due praise and thanks.
It's time, too, for those of us who are Christians to repent of any national pride and complacency and to intercede on the nation's behalf – that the Almighty will have mercy and by the power of his Holy Spirit bring conviction and conversion once more to this disturbingly secular land.
References
1 English Heritage: Operation Dynamo
2 Spinning Dunkirk. BBC News, 17 February 2011.
3 Dunkirk Revisited, 2008, p139.
4 Chapter 34: Intercession for Dunkirk.
5 Shirer, W L, 1959. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, p883.
6 2007, Seaforth Publishing.
7 Games, A, 2003. The Essential Spike Milligan, p.198.
8 We Shall Fight on the Beaches, Speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
9 Barnett, C, 2000. Engage the Enemy More Closely. Penguin Books, p161.
10 Lord, W, 2012. The miracle of Dunkirk. Open Road Media.
11 Ibid.
