FYI: (Scroll Down for discussion of the movie Dunkirk.)
Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" is lighting up the box office, with star turns by Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh. One set of characters remains largely offstage, however: the Germans, who appear almost entirely in the form of faceless bullets, torpedoes, and bombs.
Yet without the initial German decision to hold back from launching an armored assault on the beachhead, the Second World War might have taken a very different course. The battered British and French troops would have been hard-pressed to turn back any such attack. In its absence, though, more than 330,000 allied soldiers were pulled off the beaches -- nearly ten times the number that the British initially hoped to evacuate. Via email, I asked Robert M. Citino, the author of "The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to the Third Reich" and "The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943," among others, and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National World War II Museum, to shed some light on the Wehrmacht's behavior.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-24/why-the-germans-blew-it-at-dunkirk
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Regards,
Ted