Hand-drawn map of Dunkirk evacuation among war documents published for first time

New book showcases second world war papers, including a sketch of Dunkirk evacuation plans and Churchill’s annotated End of the Beginning speech

From a hasty sketch detailing the plan for one regiment’s escape from Dunkirk, to the handwritten annotations on Winston Churchill’s End of the Beginning speech, a clutch of rarely seen documents from the second world war are being published – many for the first time - by the Imperial War Museum.

The museum’s head of documents Anthony Richards sorted through thousands of papers in the IWM archives to come up with 20 he felt defined the second world war. These include a “diagrammatic layout of embarkation” in which Capt Ken Theobald of the Fifth Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment detailed the plan the British Expeditionary Force would use to help his regiment escape the Dunkirk beaches in 1940.

Continue reading...