About 3 weeks after Churchill becomes PM, the French and British armies get surrounded by the Germans on the beach of Dunkirk. The 2 armies had been fighting for a good 9 months, with the Germans slowly but surely pushing the French and British armies back. However a good portion of those surrounded escaped. Any civilian in Britain that had a boat was sent to the beach of Dunkirk to help evacuate the soldiers. About 6000 soldiers died during the evacuation, but 338000 got out. A pretty significant reason the British were able to evacuate the armies was due to Herman Gorring of the German Luftwaffe. He had convinced Hitler to let his Luftwaffe try to eliminate them, rather than Hitler's plan of attacking from the ground. Even though the evacuation had been very successful, Churchill made sure the British knew nothing was over yet by saying "War's not won by evacuation". After the evacuation of Dunkirk, Hitler set about making his plans to invade Britain.
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