In the Dark

On Saturday I watched the 2017 film Dunkirk for the first time. I don’t often watch films on TV but I saw this one in the listings and since it got some very positive reviews I thought I’d watch it. Here’s the trailer.

So what did I think?

First, the positives. There is some wonderful cinematography in this movie, and some realistic action sequences that manage to be disturbing without degenerating into a gorefest. It’s also quite interesting that we don’t really see the enemy at all at any point during the film. In summary, I found the first forty minutes or so very gripping, despite (or perhaps because of) the almost complete lack of dialogue.

After that, though, my interest began to wane. The main negative is that I found it hard to engage with any of the characters. In particular, the film did not convey the stress the troops must have been under. The editing was a bit of a mess too. It’s far too repetitive and I found some of the scenes rather contrived.

(I gather some people found the sound in the cinema version rather oppressively loud, but I watched it on telly at home so just turned down the volume…)

Overall, I found Dunkirk worth watching, but I’ve seen it described as one of the greatest war films of all time and it’s not that.

Three historical points.

First, I think there’s a key ingredient missing from this – and some other – tellings of the Dunkirk story, and that is the crucial role of the rearguard that valiantly defended the perimeter of the town and won enough time for evacuation to proceed. The different units of the rearguard (both French and British) depended entirely on the units either side of them to stand. Had the perimeter been broken anywhere, the defence would have failed. The men involved must have thought that they had no chance of making it back to Britain, but they held their ground and by doing so ensured that many thousands did get home. In fact, it was such a well-organized operation that much of the British rearguard was actually evacuated after a controlled retreat to the beach.

A second point is that most of the over 800 small boats that eventually proved crucial in Operation Dynamo were crewed by naval personnel, rather than their owners. The few exceptions were fishing boats, like the one shown in the film. Many of the smaller ships with a shallow draft were used to ferry men from the beach to destroyers rather than taking them all the way back to England.

Incidentally, the trip from Ramsgate – where the little boats were assembled – to Dunkirk is about 50 miles of open water. That’s quite a journey for a pleasure boat or paddle steamer.

Finally, the film reminded me that Winston Churchill’s famous speech in response to the “miracle” of Dunkirk, with its peroration “We shall fight them on the beaches, etc” was given to the House of Commons. It includes this:

We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.

Hansard, 4th June 1940

Churchill made that speech on 4th June 1940. I was born on the same day in the same month, a mere 23 years later.

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