Dunkirk 2021

August 27, 2021

The Taliban have ridden into town with terrorists, who Thursday killed 10 Marines, two soldiers,  a Navy corpsman, and dozens of Afghans. We’re blasting the country’s foreign policy leadership of the past 20 years. Biden, Obama, and Bush have been condemned as dupes of their generals and diplomats.

In 1975 the end in Saigon was the same as the end is now in Kabul: Americans and their local-national allies, thousands of them, fighting and dying to get out. The world was very different then, that war was very different.

The men who died Thursday and their brothers—Marines, soldiers, medics, civilians, came to Kabul to conduct an evacuation, but really they came for combat. No other word works. They are the newest heroes of Dunkirk. Who remembers?

From May 26 through June 4, 1940, when German divisions had trapped British and French troops against the English Channel near the port city of Dunkirk, the British Royal Navy and hundreds of private ships and boats evacuated roughly 215,000 British and 123,000 French troops in Operation Dynamo. Some 68,000 were rescued on May 31 alone, roughly 64,000 on June 1. About 75,000 French troops came out between June 2and June 4.

The dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London called the evacuation the “miracle at Dunkirk.” Books were written about it, movies were made, the last one in 2017.

The British people welcomed the troops home. Then they learned that some 68,000 British troops were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the six-week-long Battle of France. The British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, left behind 2,400 artillery pieces, 20,000 motorcycles, and 65,000 other vehicles in France, as well as hundreds of thousands of tons of stores, ammunition, and fuel. Six British destroyers and three French destroyers were sunk along with hundreds of small craft.

At that point Americans weren’t in the fight, but they heard—the world heard—about Dunkirk. But few knew that two British divisions returned to France to reconstitute the BEF, along with French troops who had been evacuated. Then the Brits’ high command bowed to the reality on the ground and withdrew the force by June 14, the same day the Germans entered Paris. The Germans took 35,000 French soldiers prisoner.

Ten days earlier, on June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill set the tone for England’s warfighting heart with his immortal “we shall fight on the beaches” speech to Parliament. The Royal Air Force then engaged the German Luftwaffe in an all-air battle that lasted from July to November, followed by the Blitz on England’s cities that killed more than 40,000 civilians through May 1941. Churchill had given the approaching fight for survival its name in his June 18 speech: “The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” He ended with “… if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘this was their finest hour.’”

The U.S. fought with its Western allies for the survival of democracy, of freedom, against forces of pure evil. For the war the West lined up with one outlier, the USSR, which months earlier had been in bed with the Nazis and when combat ended in August 1945 assumed Germany’s role in threatening the existence of the free world.

What’s different today? Nearly everything, starting with the world’s political alignments and the technology of war. More than that: the flawed judgment of U.S. political and military leaders over these last 20 years—the 9/11 anniversary is two weeks away—are the menu for nonstop agonizing. The menu is, more or less: the U.S. can’t impose democracy where it’s not wanted; we didn’t learn from the British or Soviet failures in Afghanistan; we should have killed bin Laden and got out; we should have known the Afghan army wouldn’t fight.

Instead, we now know it was an ugly, bloody, tragic failure from the start. The most experienced four-star Army and Marine Corps generals and their diplomatic colleagues kept sending those sunnyside-up briefings to the White House and Congress. In the end they were wrong, not just wrong, but monumentally wrong. Were they incompetent or just gullible, hearing from their subordinates what they wanted to hear? Who knows?

Who really understood the truth about Afghanistan? No one we knew, no one we trusted.

In France in spring 1940, the BEF and the French and Belgian armies were routed by the Germans. Like our generals in Afghanistan, the British commanders didn’t understand their enemy, who used tanks and bombers to outmaneuver them. The Brits could only throw their ships, trawlers, ferries, and small craft into rescuing every soldier they could squeeze aboard in two weeks, under constant air attack.

At home, the British cheered and supported their men as they came off the boats, not knowing what lay ahead. Those rescued soldiers weren’t safe for long, eventually they returned to combat, in North Africa, in Italy, again in France. Churchill knew, and he hammered home the truth: that the Germans were massing their bombers for a year-long assault on fortress England. The Brits stood up and supported their wartime leaders.

Right now the U.S.-led Kabul evacuation may get 150,000 out—a strong maybe—over three weeks, while facing suicide bombers and ragtag guerrilla-terror teams.  

Here in the U.S. we see some admirable folks welcoming the refugees, others turning their backs. The political recriminations will continue. The President will make a campaign promise, no more Afghanistan deployments. Maybe, maybe not. But Afghanistan will be remembered, in all its sadness.