On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, the last major battle of the global conflagration known as World War II began on the island of Okinawa, some 400 miles south of mainland Japan.

Although buoyed by the retreat, Winston Churchill also countered with a dose of reality that hard fighting was still ahead, saying “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory … Wars are not won by evacuations.” Those 48 hours were vital in the Allied effort to rescue the soldiers cornered on the European continent. The greatest aid in the ally’s escape strangely came from Adolf Hitler himself, who, likely fearing an Allied counterattack, halted Nazi armored forces bearing down on Dunkirk for two days. The maneuver became known as the “Miracle at Dunkirk,” and it proved a powerful rallying cry for the dark days ahead. A massive effort of both military and civilian vessels successfully ferried 338,000 British Expeditionary Force members across the channel to Britain. With the expeditious collapse of French resistance against German forces during the Battle of France, British troops found themselves trapped in Dunkirk, a town in Northern France.

Sometimes a victory can be a well-executed retreat, and that’s exactly what happened during the Battle of Dunkirk in late May 1940. Not every victory means you won a battle.

Major us tank battles wwii