[TonyInOhio]

Don’t forget: IIRC, about 40,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner at Dunkirk. They went into captivity — fighting the hopeless fight — so the greater war could be won

Your point is well made, but those were mostly French soldiers - virtually all of the BEF in the Dunkirk enclave were evacuated, though hundreds died from bombing and strafing of their ships enroute to England.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Not to be a pedant, but:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7750005/Dunkirk-the-soldiers-left-behind.html

From the article:

But history has tended to overlook the fate of the British soldiers who never made it back across the Channel: 40,000 of them were marched off by the Nazis to captivity. To boost national morale, the British press wrote about the soldiers who escaped rather than those who were left behind, but the latter suffered a miserable fate.

My point, factual and otherwise, stands. There was a hell of a fight at Dunkirk, and Churchill also said "Wars are not won by evacuations". This war, which is as vital to our national survival in its own way as Dunkirk was in 1940, will not be won by ideological evacuation.