Pillar of Fire: Dunkirk, 1940

London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Very Good/Very Good. 1990. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0283996978 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. 256 pages : Photographs, map, notes, bibliography, index. In the space of three and a half weeks during May and early June 1940, the armed forces of Nazi Germany came breathtakingly close to winning the new European war only ten months after it had begun. The British Expeditionary Force and its French and Belgian allies were cut off in the north and driven back to the very sands of the Channel and the ruins of Dunkirk, the lone port still in its hands. The BEF - and Britain - faced catastrophe. How that catastrophe was averted, through a combination of enemy blunders and British resourcefulness, is told here by Ronald Atkin, in an account that exposes the myth of the `miracle of Dunkirk'. The true story of those chaotic and desperate weeks is dramatically chronicled through the diaries, memoirs and personal reminiscences of hundreds of the men who lived through them - from COs to foot soldiers and generals to privates. The Imperial War Museum has been building up these archives of contemporary recollections over the last fifty years and Ronald Atkin is the first person to make use of their new research in such depth and set it in context of the military operations. Fifty years on, at last the full story can be told of the first major turning point in a war which, until then, had gone in only one direction - Germany's. .