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|My wife, Jackie, and I lived in California for 9½ years, from June 21, 2011 to December 22, 2020. Among my friends at the Valley Evangelical Free Church in Hemet, California, were Chris, and his wife, Joan.
Chris and I were in the church men’s group that met at 6:00 am every Thursday morning.
As it turns out, Chris’ father and my father were both soldiers during the Second World War. My dad was a soldier in the U.S. Army 3rd Division, and later a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Chris’ dad was a soldier in the Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment, a line infantry regiment of the British Army, known to everyone in Britain as the Green Howards.
The regiment known as the Green Howards was formed in 1688. Its men have served with distinction in every conflict of the British Empire wherever in the world for nearly 340 years. Today, the regiment is amalgamated with other British regiments to form the Yorkshire Regiment.
The men of the Green Howards have earned 16 Victoria Crosses, since the award was introduced on January 29, 1856 by Queen Victoria to honor acts of valor during the Crimean War.
The VC is awarded for “valour in the presence of the enemy.” The British are rather understated about their highest and most honored military decoration awarded to soldiers of the British armed forces.
Chris’ dad was a soldier in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that was sent across the English Channel to France in 1939 to help defend Belgium, the Netherlands, and France from Nazi Germany in the first months of the Second World War.
On August 23, 1939, nine days before the beginning of the Second World War, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret agreement to carve up eastern Europe and divide it between them.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the west. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. By October 6, 1939, Poland was defeated.
In the meantime, on September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany, imposed an economic blockade, and the British Expeditionary Force was sent across the English Channel to help defend Belgium and France from Germany.
During the eight months from September 1939 to May 1940, except for a few raids and skirmishes, hardly any fighting happened on the Western Front. Very few military land operations were carried out at all.
The German High Command observed that the French, British, Belgian, and Dutch allies were placing themselves in position to defend against a German attack that would come from the north, through Belgium, as in the First World War.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
The Allied forces, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, and France, dug trenches in front of the German forces, and for eight months, they watched each other in what was called the Phoney War by the British, and the Sitzkrieg by the Germans.
Suddenly, on May 10, 1940, Germany attacked.
Three German panzer corps drove through the heavily wooded “impassable” Ardennes region of dense forests, rolling hills, and rugged terrain and headed northwest — behind the French, British, Belgian, and Dutch armies — trapping them against the English Channel.
By May 21, 1940, German forces had trapped the British, the remains of the Belgian forces, and three French field armies along the northern coast of France.
The British commander decided that evacuation across the English Channel was the best course of action, and Allied forces began a withdrawal to Dunkirk, the closest good port on the Channel.
On May 23, Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, issued an order to halt the German advance outside Dunkirk. Adolf Hitler approved the order the next day, and the German High Command sent confirmation to the front.
You can’t make this stuff up.
This order to halt, to stop the attack, to fail to close the trap and capture the entire British, French, and Belgian forces in Dunkirk, can only be seen as the miraculous hand of God, Himself.
Attacking the trapped British, French, and Belgian armies was left to Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, until the order was rescinded three days later on May 26.
This three day halt gave Allied forces just enough time to construct defensive works and pull back large numbers of troops to fight the Battle of Dunkirk.
From May 28 to May 31, the remaining 40,000 men of the French First Army defended the city of Lille. During those four days, other French forces fought to delay seven German divisions, including three armored divisions, keeping them away, and preventing them from attacking the defenders of Dunkirk.
On the first day of the evacuation of Dunkirk, only 7,669 Allied soldiers were rescued, but by the end of the eighth day, 338,226 had been rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 vessels.
Allied soldiers were able to embark from the harbor’s protective breakwater onto 39 British Royal Navy destroyers, four Royal Canadian Navy destroyers, at least three French Navy destroyers, as well as many volunteer merchant ships and civilian small craft.
Other Allied soldiers, including Chris’ dad and his fellow soldiers of the Green Howards had to wade out from the beaches, waiting for hours in shoulder-deep water.
In the midst of this disastrous evacuation under intense bombing by the Luftwaffe, a British commander, under fire in Dunkirk, sends a three-word radio signal to the home country.
These are the three words of the signal transmitted by that British officer trapped in Dunkirk in May 1940 —
“But if not.”
That British commander, facing death in Dunkirk, is telling the British people, the folks back home, of the resolve of the men of the British Expeditionary Force to fight on and not surrender.
Even though British soldiers seemingly are in a hopeless situaton and facing annihilation in Dunkirk, they will not surrender to the Nazi forces surrounding them — even if they are not rescued.
The message is a clear declaration of bold, unyielding courage, firmly fixed within the shared biblical knowledge of the British people.
This three-word radio signal is a direct reference to Daniel 3:17-18, describing the actions of three Hebrew young men, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, had renamed them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to assimilate them into the Babylonian court and distance them from God.
When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are ordered to bow down to an image of the Babylonian king, or face death in a fiery furnace, they declare their faith in God’s power to deliver them from the fiery furnace, saying,
“. . . our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” (KJV, ESV)
When the British people hear of this three-word radio signal, they immediately understand its meaning. The biblical reference resonates deeply within the spirit of the British people.
The message ignites a surge of determination that energizes British national morale and inspires the mobilization of over 700 civilian small boats — the famed “Little Ships of Dunkirk.”
Ordinary people of Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales — grandparents, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, just plain ordinary citizens — get underway in small boats and head out across the English Channel to rescue their boys stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk.
Without hesitation, they join the British Royal Navy in Operation Dynamo to rescue their boys and accomplish the “Miracle of Dunkirk.”
Over the next eight days, this little flotilla of hundreds of fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, lifeboats, and merchant marine boats, arrive in the water off Dunkirk. They rescue British, French, Belgian, and Dutch soldiers, and carry them to the larger ships, farther out to sea, in what becomes known as the “Little Ships of Dunkirk.”
Against all odds, the operation successfully rescues approximately 338,226 Allied soldiers who are evacuated in the eight days between May 26 and June 4, 1940.
The British Expeditionary Force loses 68,000 soldiers, and abandons nearly all of its tanks, vehicles, and equipment in the campaign in France that ends with the evacuation from Dunkirk.
On June 4, 1940, British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, gives his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons.
Churchill vows, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Churchill calls the campaign in France and the evacuation of Dunkirk “a colossal military disaster,” saying “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army” was stranded at Dunkirk and was about to perish or be captured.
In his speech, Churchill honors the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force as a “miracle of deliverance.” He reminds the British people that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”
To the people of Britain, the rescue from Dunkirk is a story of faith, courage, and unity in crisis.
It is a moment to acknowledge the true grit and spiritual strength of the British people, who are suddenly, standing quite alone, in a desperate fight for life against Nazi Germany.
Two weeks after the evacuation of Dunkirk, on June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill gives his “Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons. Churchill warns that with the fall of France, the “whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.”
Churchill emphasizes that the survival of the British Empire, and even of Christian civilization, depends on Britain’s resistance, concluding with these resounding words:
“If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
For the British people, this brief moment in their history is just another deep breath before the leap — a short respite of three months before the beginning of the “Blitz” — the brutal bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe over Britain.
In his “Finest Hour” speech, Winston Churchill stated it clearly, “The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin.”
The Battle of Britain will last for eight months, from September 7, 1940 to May 16, 1941.
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