by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode of the PBS NOVA series called “Great Escape at Dunkirk,” obviously
timed to coincide with the release of two, count ’em, two dramatic films about the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, Dunkirk and Darkest Hour (and both
were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Darkest
Hour also won Gary Oldman a Best Actor
nomination for playing Winston Churchill). Like a lot of NOVA’s World War II specials, it tries to “contemporize”
the story by showing modern archaeologists digging for relics of the operation,
including a Spitfire plane that flew fighter support over Dunkirk but then
crashed in England, killing its pilot, when he lost control in a cloudy sky.
But the real “meat” of the show was the authentic footage of the Dunkirk battle
itself and the interviews with the now-elderly survivors — though NOVA’s director, John Hayes Fisher, put so little faith in
his audience’s ability to understand their sometimes thick accents that they
were subtitled even though they were obviously speaking English. (Some previous
PBS shows on World War II have featured interviews with survivors who fought on
the Axis side, and either subtitled or voice-overed them, but this one didn’t.)
“Great Escape at Dunkirk” vividly dramatized just how shaky both the military
and political situations in Britain in 1940 were; Winston Churchill had just been appointed Prime Minister by the British
Parliament, but Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was
still in the Cabinet and with each new reversal in the military situation he
was advising Churchill to contact the German government and sue for peace.
Churchill, of course, said nothing doing; he avoided a public confrontation
with Halifax for fear it would bring down his government and end his Prime
Ministership just a month or so after it started.
Churchill ordered the British
army to stand and fight at Dunkirk as long as possible — the Chamberlain
government had sent a British Expeditionary Force of 400,000 men to fight
alongside a French army estimated at 2.5 million — and they had expected the
German advance into France to move through Belgium because they thought the
actual border between Germany and southern France to be impenetrable to tanks.
They were wrong; the Germans, using the weapons that as of 1940 had worked to
provide them Blitzkrieg successes
against every other country they’d invaded — Stuka dive-bombers and Panzer tank
corps — feinted an attack through
Belgium but really mounted their main drive at the border with France, got
through the supposedly “impenetrable” terrain and made swift work of the French
army. It got to the point where the British and French forces were pushed out
of all the rest of France to that tiny beachhead at Dunkirk, and the Germans
not only had more effective land forces, they also controlled the air, so the
Allies who attempted to mount a resistance were out in the open manning
artillery weapons and were therefore sitting ducks for the Stukas.
Inexplicably, the Nazi advance halted for several days just before what appeared
to be the final push, apparently because the German commanders were worried
about the length of their supply lines and the possibility that they might run
out of ammunition and food, and this gave the British time to coordinate the
fabled evacuation that turned a military rout into a strategic retreat. (Later
in the war Adolf Hitler’s refusal to allow the German forces to stage strategic retreats — “Where the
German soldier stands, there he stays!” Hitler said, to the horror of his
generals — helped turn military defeats into total routs and sped Germany’s
defeat in the overall war.) By all conventional standards, Dunkirk was a defeat
— and a humiliating one — for the British forces, who even as they were being
evacuated over the English Channel were still vulnerable to German sea mines
and air attacks (one of the most interesting segments of this show indicates
how the British figured out how to defend their ships against the Germans’
magnetic mines, which could blow up a ship that sailed nearby without actually
having to hit it; the British developed a way to turn their entire ships into
giant magnets with reverse polarity to the German mines, so the ships repelled
instead of attracting the mines).
One of
the modern-day excavations was of a British ship with over 600 people aboard
which sank from a German mine — the one person who escaped was a servicemember
who’d been standing on the top deck smoking a cigarette; everyone else died
because the ship’s captain had ordered them all to stay below decks to weight
down the ship so it would sail lower in the water, and so when the mine blew up
the ship they had absolutely no hope of getting out alive. The show also noted
that the workhorse fighter of the Royal Air Force at the start of the war, the
Hawker Hurricane, was built with the old-fashioned airframe of wood covered
with “doped” fabric, while the Supermarine Spitfire, which was introduced
during the Dunkirk battle, was all-metal and especially lightweight because,
instead of constructing a fuselage that could support itself as all previous
aircraft designers had done, the Spitfire’s creator, R. J. Mitchell, built
structural support into the wings as well — creating the fastest and, even more
importantly, most maneuverable fighter plane to that time. (Being a buff of the
film Spitfire, a.k.a. The
First of the Few — Leslie Howard’s last
project, in which he directed as well as starring as Mitchell in a marvelous
and moving biopic in which Howard the director got a far more incisive
performance out of Howard the actor than most of his previous directors had — I
got rankled when Fisher and his narrator, Eric Meyers, attributed the design to
“Supermarine.” “He had a name! It was Mitchell!” I yelled at the TV.) The show pointed out that a
lot of the British soldiers were bitter because they were under attack by
Stukas, supported by Messerschmidt ME-109 fighters (whose swept-back wings made
it easier than it had been in previous planes for pilots to see what they were
shooting at), while they saw no signs of the RAF — the RAF was actually in
action, but back attacking the advancing German columns in southeastern France,
though they were outnumbered and the German pilots also had more experience.
The overall message of the show was that Dunkirk was a military defeat which
Churchill and his propagandists were able to turn into a political victory,
giving the British people enough confidence that they could come back from
defeat and not only continue to fight but actually win the war — though
Churchill, as he acknowledged in his memoirs of World War II, was well aware
that the only salvation for
Britain was to get the U.S. into the war on his side. He even mentions the
long-standing correspondence he had with President Franklin Roosevelt, which
both men signed as “Former Naval Person” because in World War I Churchill had
been First Lord of the Admiralty and Roosevelt the Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, in which Churchill pleaded for U.S. involvement and Roosevelt said he
agreed that the U.S. should fight
against Germany in World War II but he had enormous political difficulties in
getting the U.S. people and the U.S. Congress on his side. (Ironically, the
British determination to fight on in World War II in hopes of attracting
support from the U.S. was not that different from what the U.S. had done in the
American Revolution — keeping the struggle going until the nascent United
States could attract the support of Britain’s rival superpower in the late
1700’s, France.)
