The Dunkirk movie is primarily a reaction to the old patriotic propaganda movies of the past. The hero always wins, and if there is sacrifice, it’s always noble, and always worth it.
Before we dismiss them, it may be fair to note these movies–and the Allied press coverage of World War II–were quite successful in conveying the inevitability of victory. Once, in a graduate class I took on World War II, the professor said he would not devote time to Patton’s 3rd Army advance across France in ’44 because the Allied victory was inevitable; our superiorities in manufacturing and manpower made, to him, the campaign boring. Many historians didn’t realize how easily we could have lost as late as ‘44. The most important thing a cause can have is the enduring assumption of victory.
A close study of Dunkirk is unpleasant, which explains its history of avoidance in cinema. When the war in France in 1940 is mentioned, the assumption is the British and French fought nobly against an overwhelming Nazi juggernaut. The truth is that when the French surrendered in 1940, they had more men and tanks than the Germans. An examination of the debacle leading up to Dunkirk was not what the Allied public needed in 1940. We faced a brilliant German general staff who based their tactics on lessons learned from H.B. Liddell Hart, an Englishman ignored in his own country.
If the Dunkirk movie has a genre, it’s historical horror. The movie depicts what it’s like to die standing on a beach under the Stuka dive-bombers, or trapped in an underwater compartment of a troopship or to be submerged in cold water under a burning oil slick with the choice; drown or burn. The film shows breaking men who would do anything to save themselves. We see what was then called shell shock and now PTSD. The film doesn’t emphasize that most of these men didn’t break.
◊♦◊
The great outpouring of fishing boats brought the Army out of Dunkirk to fight again. It wasn’t accident, or certainly not humanity, that the German general staff didn’t unleash their Panzers against Dunkirk. Blitzkrieg works by terror, by disrupting supply and communication. Men without fuel, ammunition, and food are on a timeline of how long they can continue. Blitzkrieg is never frontal assault. The beachhead at Dunkirk would have been frontal assault and the German army would have ground down elite divisions it couldn’t afford to lose in a head-on fight.
Moments of honor occur in the film. Every boat on the English coast, no matter how tiny, crossed the channel; the film’s one high moment of hope, if it didn’t last long. The Stuka dive-bombers and German bombers descended upon the helpless boats, killing them with German efficiency. But the boats kept coming. Sometimes the English showed heroism in this movie, but always the pointless, hopeless heroism, which changed nothing in the great sweep of events.
The movie could be described as anti-war. Who, though, were the filmmakers trying to convince not to fight? The British Empire went to every length to avoid war. The powerful Bloomsbury group in Parliament, led by the dashing and beautiful Lady Astor, was decidedly anti-war. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s great theme was “Peace in our time.” The British had felt the ravages of war. To avoid war they stood by in ’36 and watched a then-weak Hitler march into the Rhineland. Czechoslovakia, Austria, fell and the British and French did nothing. When Germany rolled into Poland on September 1st, 1939, Hitler gambled the British and French wouldn’t hit him in the west on September 2nd. His impregnable western wall was hollow propaganda. Had they attacked, with the Soviet Union pouring into Poland from the east, the Germans would have collapsed. The American people in 1940 were firmly isolationist with no desire for further European adventurism.
|
No one in the English-speaking world, the audience for this film, in the position to affect policy, wants to see the world go to war.
|
Maybe the filmmakers wanted to convince a modern audience of the horrors of war. When Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “What’s the use of having a military if we don’t intend to use it?”—General Colin Powell recounted nearly choking on her words. No one in the English-speaking world, the audience for this film, in the position to affect policy, wants to see the world go to war. The argument is how to achieve peace. Some believe peace can be achieved by pure intentions and unilateral disarmament. Others believe vulnerability is the true catalyst to violence. Neither group requires a vision of young men dying to teach them the undesirability of armed conflict.
The film ends with one of Sir Winston Churchill’s most stirring oratories on the radio in the background. “. . . We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” If a viewer didn’t already know these words, they would have gone unrecognized almost, as radio static against a backdrop of beaten, exhausted and under nourished men returning home; as if the evacuation was more for the sake of humanity than continued struggle. A viewer might not recognize that a British soldier could simply wait for the Germans and surrender and expect to live. In 1940, the average British soldier expected his surrender to be fully honored by the rules of war. Only later, did they learn this wasn’t universally the case. By attempting the channel crossing, he risked his life and a horrifying death at sea. The men who survived Dunkirk formed the core of later British efforts in North Africa, Sicily, and France. Without the British Army’s hook to the north in ’45, Denmark would have become a communist satellite.
◊♦◊
Winston Churchill’s bust was removed from the White House in the Obama years. A symbol of old empire, of Colonialism, the divide between the classes, racism even, some said. It’s no use saying Sir Winston Churchill was the epitome of the gentle, temperate man likely to lead the world into equality. The cruelties of the old empire are legend; yet it became a springboard toward dreams that weren’t dared in 1940, in a way Nazism, Soviet hegemony, and the Imperial Japanese could never have been. A gentler man, a softer man, could not have held the world in our darkest hours against these forces. Before the war, he was despised by both parties, and he was sacked immediately afterwards. Soft men don’t like him or that voice, eloquent enough to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, that brought hope to the free world. In my darkest hours, I hear him. “You can always take one with you,” the words he planned to put over the airwaves had Germany managed to make a beachhead in England.
To be anti-war may be the noblest of human sentiments, but for these great human aims to survive, to mean more to humanity than having the sad appellation of being right at the wrong time, they have always needed a man like Sir Winston Churchill to see to the survival of those who would utter them. It nearly cost the free world everything when the British called upon him years later it should. We can never afford to make that mistake again.
I grew up around World War II veterans, but I never knew a veteran of Dunkirk, although I did know a Scot farmer who told me how, long years after the war, while the farmers managed enough to eat, the cities were still hungry up into the 50s. The British Empire paid a price to keep the hope of freedom alive.
I didn’t enjoy the movie. It made me physically ill, and I cried through the whole showing. It offered nothing I needed to see. Those men who gave so much deserve to be honored for their strength and resiliency, and not to be remembered for those very few who broke.
Producing a film for political and social needs is legitimate. It’s just as legitimate to call such a production for what it is. History, politics, is far too important to be handled with mere truth; nobody’s ever done it unless the truth lay conveniently on the side we want to promote, and I’m not making a foolish plea for the various factions to resort to truth now, but Dunkirk was a long time ago. Only a few of the men who knew its horrors still live. The politics in this case are yesterday’s issues. The old empire’s day is done, and it will not come back. It was our enemy’s finest hour. If we must recall those horrible days is it too much to ask to remember what those men gave and honor them for risking everything to remain free to fight on another day?
__
Photo credit: IMDb