Tag: BEF

British Newsreel - 1940 - Dunkirk

Dunkirk: Remembering the British Army Rear-Guard! (25.2.2024)

This is a section of a 1940 British Newsreel lamenting the crushing defeat we British – as a nation – suffered at Dunkirk at the hands of the rampant Nazi Germans! Not only did a flotilla of around 800 civilian boats volunteer to sail (unarmed) from the UK to Dunkirk to get as many of the 400,000 stranded British and French soldiers off the beaches – but a very professional British Army Rear-Guard was ordered to hold to the last round and fight to the last man! If not for their sacrifice, the small boats (and the ships of the Royal Navy) could not have succeeded in their task of saving the bulk of the British Army so that the UK could live to fight another day!

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Tom Wintringham – How an Oxford Communist Founded the Home Guard

Tom Wintringham returned to the UK after the Spanish Civil War and worked as a journalist. He used his experience of fighting fascism in Spain to call for the establishment of a ‘Home Guard’ in the UK made-up of ordinary people defending the area within which they lived from the threat of armed invasion. He wrote a number of progressive books on modern warfare which emphasized guerrilla fighting but were also critical of the class-based system of the UK military. This Communistic thinking immediately made him unpopular with the rightwing Winston Churchill and the middle class officer corps.

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