Coincidence, noun The atheist’s explanation for a miracle
The 2010 film The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth, tells the story of Prince Albert, who became King George VI when he took over the throne of England in 1936. His brother Edward VIII had abdicated in order to marry the twice divorced American Wallis Simpson. George VI assumed the throne with great trepidation, as he had a pronounced stutter. Kings often have to give speeches, a prospect that horrified the reluctant monarch.
Yet George VI was also a man of deep Christian faith and a strong sense of duty. He immediately went to work on his impediment, ably coached by an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue. As a result, he was able to deliver an inspiring speech, re-enacted in the above-mentioned film, on September 3, 1939, when Britain went to war against Germany.
There was another, even more important speech delivered by George VI on May 24, 1940, when Britain faced its greatest crisis of the war. Nearly a quarter of a million British soldiers, the great bulk of the British army, was trapped in France, on the verge of annihilation by the fast advancing German army, spearheaded by Irwin Rommel’s Seventh Panzer Division. For the British, the alternatives were simple. Save the army or lose the war.
“Let no one be mistaken,” King George told his people. “It is no mere territorial conquest that our enemies are seeking. It is the overthrow, complete and final, of this empire…and after that the conquest of the world….At this fateful hour we turn, as our fathers before us have turned in all times of trial, to God most high. Here in the old country I have asked that Sunday next be reserved as a day of national prayer. Let us with one heart and soul humbly, but confidently commit our cause to God and ask His aid, that we may valiantly defend the right, as it is given to us to see it….With God’s help we shall not fail.”
The British people did indeed pack their churches two days later. The lines outside Westminster Abbey, which snaked endlessly down the nearby streets, told the tale for the entire nation.
“I thought,” said Winston Churchill, “and some good judges agreed with me, that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked. The whole root and core and brain of the British army… seemed about to perish upon the field, or to be led into ignominious and starving captivity. All therefore seemed about to be lost.”
On May 27, the German high command, buoyed with confidence, announced that “The British army is encircled and our troops are proceeding to its annihilation.”
But three unlikely “coincidences” took place, the first of which had already occurred. On May 23, for some inexplicable reason, Hitler ordered his generals to halt their advance on the British Army.
“We were utterly speechless,” wrote General Heinz Guderian, who commanded the German First Panzer Division. “But since were not informed of the reasons for this order, it was difficult to argue against it.” The attack was not resumed until May 25.
The second was a heavy storm that broke out over Flanders (northern Belgium) on May 28th, that kept much of the German Luftwaffe grounded while the British Expeditionary force retreated to Dunkirk. The British formations at that time were still eight to ten miles from the port. The time gained by Hitler’s strange order and by the grounding of the Luftwaffe enabled the British and more than one half of the French First Army to get to the beach. A rear guard of two French divisions under General Molinié was then set up to keep the Germans at bay while the others escaped.
Finally, though torrential rains reigned over Flanders, a great calm descended upon the English Channel. In the words of one British soldier who was there, it was “as smooth as a millpond.” Was this a variation on another miracle that took place some 3,500 years before?
And the hail struck all that was in the field through all the land of Egypt, both man and beast; the hail also struck every plant of the field and shattered every tree of the field. Only in the land of Goshen, where the sons of Israel were, there was no hail. Exodus 9:25-26
The British people did more than pray. A call went out for everyone who had boats of any kind to sail to the rescue from England. In response, commercial ferries, sailboats, paddle steamers, fishing boats, small pleasure craft, everything that could float went out upon “the millpond” to save as many British soldiers as possible.
Flying over the “armada” was the legless British fighter ace Doulas Bader. “The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping. One felt one could walk across without getting one’s feet wet, or that’s what it looked like from the air.”
“Operation Dynamo,” as the evacuation was called, began slowly, with only 7,669 soldiers rescued on May 27. On May 30, 53,823 were brought to safety. It was on that day that General Halder, chief of the German General Staff made this entry in his diary. “Bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe, and now we must stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy getting away to England right under our noses.”
By the time “Operation Dynamo” was complete on June 4, a grand total of 338,226 British and French soldiers had been brought safely back to England.
“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory,” said Winston Churchill. “Wars are not won by evacuations.”
Nevertheless, with the salvation of the army, the resolve of the British people stiffened. Churchill’s war cabinet, which had been evenly split between the surrender faction led by Lord Edward Halifax and those who wanted to continue the fight, now closed ranks. There would be no surrender to Nazi Germany.
Though World War Two was not won at Dunkirk, it almost certainly would have been lost had the British army perished. The deliverance of the army, helped by three miracles, kept England in the war and sowed the seeds of ultimate victory.
America’s National Day of Prayer: May 2
