Discover the heroes who saved 340,000 lives The Battle of Dunkirk has come to represent heroic perseverance in the face of adversity. By May 1940, Hitler's Nazis had pushed the Allies into a corner of France, almost to the sea. They thought the English had no choice but to surrender . . . but they were wrong. "We shall fight on the beaches," said Winston Churchill, the new English prime minister, and fight they did. Surrounded by German ground forces and bombarded by Nazi warplanes, some 340,000 British and French troops were rescued by a makeshift flotilla of military and civilian ships despite incredible odds. Photographs from the archives of TIME and LIFE magazines, combined with compelling text, put the mission in historic context and show how this massive operation unfolded. Discover true heroism in Time-Life World War II: Dunkirk, a remarkable collector's keepsake.