Monday, December 04, 2006

Iraq is our "Dunkirk."

From Micheal Barone's townhall article talks about how Churchill's Dunkrik is like Bush's Iraq.

While George W. Bush's many critics and detractors portray him as facing the same dilemma as Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, Bush himself seems determined to proceed the way Harry Truman did in Korea -- or, as some might put it, as Winston Churchill did after Dunkirk.

{snip}
But Bush seems unpersuaded. "There's one thing I'm not going to do," he said at last week's NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."

In this, Bush has the support of others. Defense Secretary-designate Robert Gates opposes a quick pullout. So does the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Command's Gen. John Abizaid.


Bush is sticking to his principles and will stay to fight for victory in Iraq. Good for him. He is leading us to fight the fight. I always said it was like "Churchill's Dunkirk," when the allies retreated from France when it became invaded by the Germans.

Dunkirk, and the evacuation associated with the troops trapped on Dunkirk, was called a "miracle" by Winston Churchill. As the Wehrmacht swept through western Europe in the spring of 1940, using Blitzkrieg, both the French and British armies could not stop the onslaught. For the people in western Europe, World War Two was about to start for real. The "Phoney War" was now over.

The advancing German Army trapped the British and French armies on the beaches around Dunkirk. 330,000 men were trapped here and they were a sitting target for the Germans. Admiral Ramsey, based in Dover, formulated Operation Dynamo to get off of the beaches as many men as was possible. The British troops, led by Lord John Gort, were professional soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force; trained men that we could not afford to lose. From May 26th 1940, small ships transferred soldiers to larger ones which then brought them back to a port in southern Britain.

The beach at Dunkirk was on a shallow slope so no large boat could get near to the actual beaches where the men were. Therefore, smaller boats were needed to take on board men who would then be transferred to a larger boat based further off shore. 800 of these legendary "little ships" were used. It is thought that the smallest boat to make the journey across the Channel was the Tamzine - an 18 feet open topped fishing boat now on display at the Imperial War Museum, London.


Churchill never gave up. Either will Bush. WE will fight the fight and win. That I am sure of. (No matter what the MSM or Dems say!)

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