← Back to the front page

Fabricated Stories About World War II Still Known by Many

Khalid Elhassan November 15, 2019 35 min

Gerd von Rundstedt with Mussolini and Hitler. Bundesarchiv Bild

38. The Dunkirk Myth’s Flaws

Even for a figure as notoriously irrational as Hitler, deliberately letting the British escape would have been too irrational. For somebody who wanted to bring Britain to the peace table, holding hundreds of thousands of British soldiers as POWs in Europe would have been quite a bargaining chip. More so than if those soldiers were back in Britain, armed and defiant.

Moreover, the fatal halt order had not even originated with Hitler. A panzer unit commander who had lost half his armored forces and needed time to regroup requested a halt from Army Group A’s commander, Gerd von Rundstedt. Rundstedt agreed, and passed it up to Hitler, who rubber-stamped the order to halt. After the war, German generals – including Rundstedt himself – pinned the blame on Hitler for ruining the opportunity to win the war in 1940.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.