Winston Churchill’s island nation faced an existential threat. The poignancy of the challenge was matched only by the defiant British response. The ships of the British Navy were too large to get close enough to the beach where the flower of British manhood waited for help to appear on the horizon.The clock was running and the desperate rescue operation would have failed had not the British people plunged into the breach and retrieved the army using a ragtag flotilla of fishing boats, private yachts, tugboats, and just about anything else that would float. The timely, doughty intervention of the “Little Ships of Dunkirk” as they later came to be known, saved the British forces. Some were fitted out with naval crews but many of the pleasure craft were manned by their owners along with friends, family, and volunteers. It stands as one of history’s great triumphs of a free people in action.
It was hard not to see the parallels this week as Americans pulled together.
Disaster struck and a nation responded. It was not, thank God, a hostile army—it was the awesome, uncontrollable power of a hurricane. But the devastation is just the same. And so is the sacrifice, the heroism, and the love shown by Americans one for another. The hurricane descended on our country without regard to color or creed—black or white, red or blue—just Americans, as Lincoln said, “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh.”
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