Don’t Underestimate the Men in Skirts
/The Other Dunkirk
51st Highland Division Last Stand Battle of St Valery
THIS week marks the anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuations – hailed as
the miraculous rescue of troops during World War Two. If you saw Christopher Nolan’s 2017 movie Dunkirk you didn’t see the whole story. The Dunkirk evacuations, which began on 27 May, were spun into tales of an incredible victory; 338,000 Allied soldiers were snatched to safety. Meanwhile, a further 220,000 Allied troops were rescued by British ships from Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire, bringing the total of Allied troops evacuated to 558,000. Dunkirk was a huge achievement and it had to be portrayed as a victory and as a success to boost the morale of the British people and capture the nation’s imagination. That was the good news.
What politicians were not going to start telling was the bad news. While eight times more men had been saved than thought possible, what you didn’t see was the story of the thousands of French soldiers left standing on the beach to be captured by the German forces or the British 51st Highland Division ordered to join the battered French forces and stop the German’s advance when the operation ended on June 4.
Over the next week, the French and the Highlanders continued to fight against
impossible odds at the Battle of St Valery. In the end, around 10,000 men being captured by the Germans led by General Erwin Rommel.
Follow my links to get the entire story. They tell it much better than I can.
One of the French soldiers at the Battle of St Valery was Dr. Edmond Caillard. Dr. Caillard plays an important role in my book The Duty of Memory
“Les hommes en jupons de femmes.”
