SPECIAL JOURNEY IN WAKE OF DUNKIRK HEROES

ON a mission of remembrance rather than rescue, the little ships sailed again, 85 years after Dunkirk.

- BY LUCY THORNTON

The flotilla of 66 little ships set out across the Channel, in the long-faded wake of the ordinary people who made the same journey between May 26 and June 4, 1940.

Operation Dynamo - later named the “miracle of Dunkirk” by Winston Churchill - turned a crushing military defeat into an act of bravery and collective spirit that would sustain the nation through the rest of the Second World War.

The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships organises the recreation every five years.