Dunkirk - A Great Deliverance or Great Disaster

“Dunkirk was a great deliverance and a great disaster” - (AJP Taylor)

Is there sufficient evidence in sources A to F to support this interpretation? Use the sources and knowledge from your studies to explain your answer

AJP Taylor gave this quote from his book “English history” which was published in 1965. It says that Dunkirk was a great deliverance; this entails how the troops were saved and successfully delivered form the advancement of the German Army. However the disaster is referring undeniably to the more disguised details of Dunkirk, such as the great military defeat, the thousands of pieces of equipment and the 1.2 million prisoners taken by the Germans. The sources have a wide range of media, Source A being a painting and therefore less reliable due to it being just an artist’s impression of events. Sources B and C are pictures from the battle which means they will show a more accurate picture, although they only show a single instance in time. Source D is an extract of a speech by the minister for war, Source E is an article from The Daily Express, and therefore it is likely to contain some gathered information about the event. Source F is an extract from a book by AJP Taylor encompassing the quote making up the title which is useful for seeing the context in which the quote was made. Some sources are certainly more valuable than others, for their informative nature and lack of bias, for example source F is written by a historian more than twenty years after the event allowing for a large amount of research to be gathered and compiled for such a work, However source D has a huge amount of bias and difficult vocabulary therefore limiting its usefulness at supporting the claim by Taylor. Another factor at determining...

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... which would increase morale of both the troops and the population. He also uses a metaphor and emotive language to slightly exaggerate the forces victory but it makes the evacuation sound such as an extreme success with the language emphasising the men’s ability to hold their morale; which was shown in source C where the men were firing upon enemy aircraft. He also focuses on the men’s lives rather than the major losses of equipment, which although gets a mention it is encompassed mid-sentence since it is not seen as much of a failure as the men’s lives being saved is a success, this is important as it is the major deliverance that Taylor was mentioning in his quote. He also claims that the forces refused to accept defeat, however this claim is entirely contrived since the evacuation was a final resort after defeat to the German forces in Europe

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