GERMAN FAILURE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 201, 3 June 1940, Page 6

GERMAN FAILURE

MAIN OBJECT NOT ATTAINED. BRITISH NOT SURROUNDED. SPIRIT OF MEN WINS THROUGH. (United Press Association-Copyright) (Received This Day, 1.30 p.m.) LONDON, June 2. The Secretary of State for War (Mr Anthony Eden), broadcasting to the world, said: “Germany has made a great strategic gain—the loss to us in equipollent and material has been heavy. But there is npw another side to this picture. The hulk of the British Expeditionary Force has been saved, and, quite apart from what the French have done for their own forces, we have been able to bring tens of thousands of our French allies off with ns at Dunkirk. Nor is the effort ended. Four days ago not one of us would have dared to hope that the isolated Allied armies would have fought their way through the bottle-neck to the coast. It is the spirit of the British Expeditionary Force that has won through. Those men have marched 100 miles. They have fought countless actions with the enemy that hemmed them in and pressed upon them from three sides. The German High Command proudly announced that they were surrounded. They have fought their way out. “Thanks to the magnificent, untiring co-operation of the Allied navies and air forces, we have been able to embark more than four-fifths of that British Expeditionary Force which the Germans claimed to have surrounded. The Germans, despite the huge losses which we know them to have suffered, have failed in their main object—to surround and annihilate the Allied armies in the north. The British Expeditionary Force still exists, not as a handful of fugitives, but as a body of seasoned veterans.”—British Official Wireless.