Movie reminds that ‘Wars are not won by evacuations’
My dad used to tell his two sons the reason he wanted no part of the Navy in World War II was, well, the sea. The prospect of being dumped into briny depths was unappealing in the extreme to my old man.
This was despite the fact that, having grown up in Connellsville on the Yough, he was an excellent swimmer.
Better, he felt, to take his chances in the Army, which, after all, operates on dry land.
This was just one of the things that came to mind the other day while watching the movie “Dunkirk,” which has a chance, experts say, of surpassing “Saving Private Ryan” as the highest-grossing World War II film of all time at over $216 million.
The movie, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”, “Interstellar”), tells the story of the epic withdrawal of over 300,000 British and French troops from France in the spring of 1940, under threat of advancing German troops.
This miracle rescue was made possible by the Royal Navy in addition to hundreds and hundreds of private yachts, fishing craft, tugs, indeed, according to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “anything that could be of use along the beaches.”
“Everyone who had a boat … put out for Dunkirk”; government plans “were now aided by the brilliant improvisation of volunteers on an amazing scale.”
In real time, a failure to evacuate the British army from the continent would have sealed the fate of Great Britain. First there would have been the invasion and conquest of the UK followed by the spectacle of Churchill’s government cohorts swinging at the end of Nazi ropes. (Winnie himself would have gone down with guns blazing.)
An invasion by Germany of the British Isles would have had catastrophic consequences for the United States, too. Hitler was sure to see to that. Weak, isolationist America wouldn’t enter the war for another year and a half-plus, bludgeoned into the conflict by the Japanese.
“Dunkirk” is replete with scenes of men scrambling to save their necks from the yawning embrace of the churning sea. There are also scenes of aerial combat, in which British pilots, solitary tigers of the sky, take on equally anonymous German pilots. There is one scene of urban fighting which captures the precarious lot of the infantryman, the randomness of soldierly life or death.
I’ve interviewed enough veterans of World War II to get a sense of the incoherence of large-scale conflict; very often, when talking to veterans, they make little if any sense; first, one thing happens, then another, with no connecting link.
I’ve come to the conclusion that for combatants the war was mostly too big for individual comprehension: shelled from one direction, they were soon under fire from another and then another. Pretty soon it all becomes a blur, so much so that when stories are told to strangers they make perfect sense only to the storytellers themselves; the stranger is frequently left scratching his head in bewilderment.
“Dunkirk” does an admirable job of imparting this jumble, this incoherence.
Movies are rarely the place to go for lessons in history. Hollywood is not Harvard; celluloid is not the printed page; directors are not scholars. Actors pretend, you know, though the good ones can make you believe.
I watched “Jackie” starring Natalie Portman. I believed three-quarters of this tale of the Kennedy assassination and the heartache of Jackie Kennedy. I found it intriguing that the Robert Kennedy character and Jackie are largely at each others’ throats in the movie.
Even more surprising was Bobby’s speech half critical of his brother’s administration. I don’t think so.
Mostly movies “based on real events” are interesting for the atmospherics. If you ever run across the 1940 movie “Abe Lincoln In Illinois” watch it, not for the history, which is mostly bad, but for its visuals of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which are stunning. (Raymond Massey as Lincoln isn’t bad either.)
Someone near and dear to me emailed me about “Dunkirk”: “The movie was about saving 330,000 men with 900 boats yet you saw only about five boats and lines of men on the beach. There was NO BIG PICTURE of what was happening. There was no background as to how or why they were trapped. In fact you never saw a German soldier except for a second in the last scene ….”
All that is true. Yet “Dunkirk” offers lessons that we in 2017 might take to heart. Safely back home in England, a soldier reads an account to another soldier of Churchill’s speech extolling the Dunkirk rescue.
Dunkirk in no way represented a victory, he said. “Wars are not won by evacuations,” he said. Imagine that, a leader who tells the truth.
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Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.