World War: BATTLE OF FLANDERS: Miracle Analyzed

Great Britain replied obliquely last week to increasing pressure for a new expeditionary force. The reply: 36 pages of dispatches by General the Viscount Gort, sent while he was achieving the “Miracle of Dunkirk” in May 1940. There was no trace of the eloquence of the Dunkirk battleground in his reports, only plain speaking with a touch of understatement. > “It was clear from the outset that the ascendancy in equipment which the enemy possessed played a great part in the operations.” Germany concentrated at least ten Panzer divisions against the B.E.F., threw five of them at the British rear defenses, and the British command had no anti-tank guns for this area except those to be got by stripping the units at the front. General Gort’s armored forces were only seven mechanized cavalry regiments with light tanks, a regiment of obsolete armored cars, two battalions of infantry tanks, most of these with only a machine gun each. > The British had only about 130 fighter planes in France. (The French had only 40 bombers for daylight combat.)

> The British lost all their usable airfields on the Continent by May 20—ten days after the battle started.

> Lord Gort emphasized the fact that they began their evacuation before the Belgians capitulated. This is what the Germans said at the time.

Lord Gort’s conclusions: The next B.E.F. must be “equipped on a scale commensurate with the task it is to be called upon to fulfill. The days are past when armies can be hurriedly raised, equipped and placed in the field, for modern war demands the ever-increasing use of complicated material.”