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years to come, the phrase "Dunkirk Spirit," would be a rallying cry showing that the British people can overcome adversity.
The British were extremely lucky that they were able to pull such a maneuver off. The Germans had them trapped along a five kilometer strip of beach, and could have fairly easily decimated the remainder of the British army. Instead, Hitler ordered his Generals to halt and let the British escape and then continue South as soon as possible, to take Paris, which was his main objective at the time. If the British were taken out of the war totally, the Americans probably would never have joined the war, leaving the Wehrmacht to only do battle with the Russians. Nobody really knows why Hitler did this, many suggest that he still hoped for the British to sue for peace and join his Thousand Year Reich, others think it was just a case of bad judgment given the fact that German High Command was in a fit of celebration for the huge success behind the fall of France. This is one of the questions that will be debated for the rest of history.

Bibliography

Churchill, Winston. 1940. We Shall Fight on the Beaches. Speech presented before the House of Commons, London, England.

Dupuy, Trevor N., Curt Johnson and David L. Bongard. 1992. The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Hitler, Adolf. 1927. Mein Kampf. Eher Nachf, G.M.B.H.: Verlag Frz.

Jackson, Julian. 2003. The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940. New York: Oxford University Press.

Macksey, Kenneth. 1996. Why the Germans Lose at War. New York: Barnes & Noble Publishing.

Shirer, William L. 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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