Dunkirk

Some of those little boats took a long time getting back, Nellie. DMIL told me that her best friend had given up on her husband having survived Dunkirk when he suddenly walked through the door. I can't remember how long she said he'd taken, and she couldn't tell me why, but he'd walked from the South coast all the way home to Yorkshire.

Another view. This review from a Marie Claire critic hasn't been well received. She adopts a strange viewpoint imo, although I am critical of some aspects of the film.

I don't agree with her by the way. For the life of me I cannot see how any telling of the Dunkirk story could ignore what the men (yes, mostly men) went through in surviving.

www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a28515/dunkirk-movie-review/

The evacuation of Dunkirk was from 26th May - 4th June 1940

' We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of victory. Wars are not won by evacuations'

Winston S Churchill speech to the House Of Commons, 4th June 1940.

Just tried to get the Channel 4 programme on catchup and it's not available.
Disappointing. May try again later.

It was a clever move to get Harry Styles in the film in that a lot of young people will watch it purely for that. He was, actually, very good.

When Nolan chose him for the part, he had no idea who he was.

I'd assume he went into music via drama school [?]. Must have a good agent!

Ok 1940 - I'm pre-occupied with May 1941 and the Battle of Crete, Niggley.

Back to 1940 and this film, I read the Marie Claire review Day6. I know the film isn't for everyone and this review isn't the only one I've read that criticises the shortage of women, lack of the French point of view, lack of BEM and particularly the absence of the commonwealth/Indian troops involved in the evacuation.
I'm all for inclusivity and for recognising the role people other than white men played in our history but I find that level of criticism of this particular film less than impressive. I suspect showing few BEM soldiers and the women being portrayed mainly in nursing roles, or occasionally on one of the little boats is a fair representation of what happened.
I thought Harry Styles was good, much better than I'd expected.

A map of World War 2 day by day for anyone interested.

www.independent.co.uk/indy100/article/world-war-two-progress-video-britain-nazis-second-global-conflict-churchill-poland-7872696

Fair enough Iam. How can you portray women in a situation where there were none except in a very minor way? The troops consisted of the British Expeditionary Force Canadians, Belgians and French, so no ethnic imperial troops were involved, so why portray them as being there when they weren't?!!! If your going down the road of make believe why not add the Americans and have done with it!!!

"The knee-jerk response from most Brits and historians is to scoff and say that’s because they weren’t there. It makes no military sense to ship soldiers from India to France. There’s no popular memory of colonial troops there. Even the Ministry of Defence in London initially rejected suggestions that Indian troops were there.

But they were. Four companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC), plus headquarters and support detachments. Perhaps 1,000 men.

And their service has literally been whitewashed out of history.

When the British army went to France at the beginning of the war, it was a totally mechanized force, which was revolutionary for its time. But as soon as they got into the field, they realized they were having a problem moving supplies and equipment over rough ground. So, the call went out to the empire for animal transport companies.

The empire at the time included India and what's now Pakistan, and a force was assembled — labeled K6 — to provide the vital role of mule and horse transport.

These men were not frontline soldiers, but they were all long-service professionals in what was an all-volunteer force. They were trained to fight, and in the chaos of the Battle of France in May and June of 1940, they did fight, took casualties and some of the men were decorated for bravery."

Iam, I remember reading about a Belgian woman who married a British soldier, and had to be dressed as a man to be evacuated with her husband.

It's in a book called Women in the Second World War by Collette Drifte.

I was going to write about the Indian troops and the mules etc Jen. What I found mist surprising about that was they were landed at Marseille.

The Vichy Govt were in the S/SW of France - 500 miles from Dunkirk. Eventually they did join the rest of France and many were captured etc.

If you are driving through France an interesting place to visit is Oradour sur Glan. It is to the West of Limoges. That was an atrocity which happened because of the viciousness of one commanding officer when he and his troops were retreating at the very end of the war. The small town was left as it was found - except of course that all the dead were buried - and the town rebuilt next to it. That is a very sobering place. We could not bring ourselves to walk around the beautifully kept cemetery.

Thank you for the Marie Claire link Day6. It makes me feel better about missing seein it. We went on impulse yesterday for the afternoon showing - and the cinema was full! It's the first time that's happened, it's usually half empty, especially in school holidays when the place is full of bored kids. May watch it when it comes out on video.

We visited Oradour sur Glan some years ago, and it is truly heartbreaking, an appalling war crime. Everything has been left as it was after the massacre as a memorial, and you could feel the atmosphere of terror that the people had been subjected to.
The museum is interesting, but the whole experience is pretty upsetting. It is worth visiting but be prepared to feel a bit shaken.

JenD, yes I read about the Indian troops and the mules. I agree with what others have said about the role of women - they would in 1940 have been nurses or maybe trawler owners, as is depicted in the film. I don't appreciate women being air brushed out of history but in this film, I felt the portrayal was historically accurate. It would have been good to include something about black and other ethnic minority troops from the French and British colonies but as has been said, at Dunkirk they were a relatively small proportion of the over 350,000 troops being evacuated. The French troops included North Africans from the French colonies. The stories of the colonial troops would make a wonderful film in its own right. I don't feel though, that we should airbrush out the huge efforts of male white British (often working class) troops in order to meet the great diversity issues of our current age. Does that sound supremacist, it isn't meant to.

Not at all supremacist. It's what happened.
My dad went into the army before the war as he was white working class poor, very thin, weighing hardly anything.
He was the eldest of eight or nine children, and he did that to get fed.

What annoys me [and I don't mean to sound flippant by saying it] about criticism of films like this which are, after all, artistic interpretations of events and not documentaries, is that one could say there were lots of homing pigeons used during the war but there was no portrayal of them in this particular film. In every film lines have to be drawn at what can be shown or not shown, because if you make too many statements or show too many things it detracts from the overall impression being given. A screenwriter once said that, when making a film of a book he had to eliminate everything that wasn't necessary to the telling of the story, which meant leaving out 90% of what was written and several character.

Tegan - the reference to the missing homing pigeons made me smile so thanks.
JenD - my mum and her brother both were found to be underweight when they joined the armed forces. My uncle was put on a body building diet of some kind to increase his weight. Both were told they'd have been taller if their diet during childhood had been better. Of course, both left school at 14 to work in the cotton mills. My mother was determined we would have a better, healthier diet with no cow heel stew under any circumstances.
When we see original film of soldiers during both WW's what's striking is how much thinner they are than most people now.

Iam, my dad did grow.
He was 6'1" when he enlisted when he was 19, and 6' 2.5" when he came home after Burma.
He weighed 144 pounds, with a maximum chest of 32" on enlistment. 32" no matter how hard he puffed out his chest!