Eighty years on. 4th June 1940

Historical

Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Dunkirk, ended. Overnight the Royal Navy embarked over 26,000 French troops, mostly from Dunkirk harbour.  In total, 338,226 men have been evacuated including about 112,000 French troops.  The Germans captured 30,000 – 40,000 French troops when Dunkirk surrendered.  British materiel losses included 2000 field guns, 60,000 vehicles and 676,000 tons of ammunition, fuel and supplies.

The evacuation of Narvik began.  Overnight British destroyers and Norwegian fishing boats started shuttling Allied troops to six troop transports hidden in various inlets on the Ototfjord.

Admiral Wilhelm Marschall led the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the cruiser Admiral Hipper and the destroyers Karl Galster, Hans Lody, Erich Steinbrinck and Hermann Schoemann from Kiel to attack Allied warships and supply vessels off Norway.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave one of his finest and best-known speeches in the House of Commons, reviewing the conduct of the war in France and Belgium: “The German eruption swept like a sharp scythe around the right and rear of the Armies of the North….. cut off all communications between us and the main French Armies”.

On the evacuation of Dunkirk he said: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations”,

and the prospect of invasion of the Britain “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  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.”

Game day 278.  Italy

Italy collected seven industrial resources, 5 from the homeland and two from the African colonies.

One day before Mussolini’s historical plan, the army marched across the border into France with 6 armoured and six infantry divisions, meeting no opposition.

Credits:   Historical information:  http://www.worldwar2daybyday.blogspot.com, Wikipedia, Chronicle of the Second World War (JL International Publications, 1994).  Background image to game maps: Hasbro Ltd.