Dunkirk holds a semi-sacred place in Britain’s collective conscience. It has spawned conflicting experiences and attitudes. It inspires strong emotions, not only among veterans but in those born years afterwards, with only a folk memory of the event and a politically convenient interpretation. How then does a modern filmmaker approach it?
Chris Nolan, one of the most respected directors currently working, has written and directed a feature film set during the evacuation. It was a story with which he was already familiar. ‘I think every English schoolboy knows it,’ he says. ‘It’s in your bones, but I thought it was time to go back to the original source.’
Reappraising the Dunkirk story, Chris built up questions about what had really happened. ‘I was assuming, as modern, cynical people do, that when I looked into it, what I would find would be disappointing. That the mythology of Dunkirk Spirit would fall away and there would be a more banal centre.’ But as he unpeeled the layers, he found something unexpected: ‘I realised that the simplifications actually expose a truth, because the bigger truth, the wood for the trees, is that an absolutely extraordinary thing happened at Dunkirk. I realised how utterly heroic the event was.’
Heroic – but not straightforward. ‘When you dive into the real life of the story, what it would really have been like to be there, you find that it’s an incredibly complicated event. The sheer numbers of people involved – it was like a city on the beach. And in any city, there is cowardice, there is selfishness, there is greed, and there are instances of heroism.’ And the fact that heroism occurred alongside negative behaviours, that it flourished in spite of base human nature, makes it all the more affecting and powerful. ‘That,’ says Chris, ‘is what true heroism is.’ Yet for all the individual acts, he sees the Dunkirk evacuation as a communal effort by ordinary people acting for the greater good. This, he says, makes the heroism greater than the sum of its parts. And it is ultimately his reason for making the film.
Another attraction is the sheer universality of the story. ‘Everybody can understand the greatness of it – it’s primal, it’s biblical. It’s the Israelites driven down to the sea by the Egyptians.’ This offers an ideal background for what he calls ‘present-tense characters’, anonymous individuals without unwieldy back stories. ‘The idea is,’ he says, ‘that they can be anonymous and neutral, and the audience can encounter them, and become wrapped up in their present-tense difficulties and challenges.’
Chris sees himself as proxy for the audience while making the film. ‘What I’m feeling and how I choose to record what I’m feeling – the way in which I’m acquiring the shots – fires my imagination about how to put the film together.’ If he has a visceral reaction, he feels he’s on the right track. ‘I’m sitting in the cinema watching it as I shoot it,’ he says. And for him, to tell the story well it has to be shot from the point of view of the participants – on land, in the air, and at sea. Which means that on the little ships, almost all of the shots he eventually used are from the deck, while on the aircraft, cameras are carefully mounted in places where the audience can see what the pilot sees. ‘You want things to feel real, and you want them to be experienced. Pure cinema, to me, is always a subjective experience.’
The enemy barely makes an appearance in the film. German soldiers appear only very briefly, and even then the audience barely sees their faces. But this, as Nolan points out, reflects the reality of the situation, the subjective experience of the men on the beach. ‘When you look at first-hand accounts, close contact with the enemy was extremely sporadic for most British soldiers. I wanted to put the audience in the boots of a young inexperienced soldier thrown into this situation, and from the accounts, they did not stare into the eyes of Germans. I wanted to be true to that and embrace the timeless nature of the story. The reason the story has sustained generations of interpretation and will continue to do so, is because it’s not about the Germans and the British, it’s not about the specifics of the conflict. It’s about survival. I wanted to make it as a survival story.’
In fact, the actual enemies of most of the British soldiers (at least those not defending the Dunkirk perimeter) were aeroplanes, artillery guns, submarines, mines and gunboats. And a battle against an unseen enemy that can’t be fought, touched, or often even seen, creates an unusual war film. In fact, in Chris’s eyes, it is not a war film at all. ‘It’s more of a horror than a war film. It’s about psychological horror, about unseen threats. The guys on the beaches had very little understanding of what was happening and what would happen – and I want the audience to be in the same position.’
Another enemy was time. ‘It is the ultimate race against time,’ he says. ‘But set against that, you have the length of time of the event, comprising boredom, stasis, things not happening. They’re stuck and this is where the tension comes from, where the adrenalin comes from. Making a film about people standing in line on a bridge to nowhere, time becomes everything.’
Chris Nolan may want his audience to feel as baffled and uninformed as the young men queuing under fire for a place on a boat home, but as the author of a history book on the same subject, I do not. I want to paint a vivid picture of the event, offering readers rather more clarity than two soldiers offered Pilot Officer Al Deere of 54 Squadron after he had crash-landed on the beaches on 28 May:
‘Where are you going?’ asked Deere.
‘You tell us,’ said one of the soldiers.
‘You’re evacuating, aren’t you?’
‘We don’t know.’
Before examining what happened, though, I want to place the event in its historical context, and so it is important to find out more about the lives of young people in the years leading up to the war. What, we will ask next, did it mean to be young in an age of uncertainty? Where did Dunkirk come from?
Two
The story of Dunkirk amounts to more than a frenzied month of soldiers and sailors, tanks and beaches, ambitious politicians and quivering generals. It is more, even, than an intense drama of personal and national survival. It is the story of the men and women involved, their backgrounds, and the experiences that formed them. It is a story of the approaches used by different nations to overcome the misery of the 1930s, and how these led to the evacuation of an army as another strained to destroy it. And it is a story of the rising importance of youth, politically, economically and militarily.
We begin the story in Britain. We will move to Germany, and finish in the United States. We will observe similarities and the contrasts. And we will wonder who we might have been, and how we would have coped.
The United Kingdom
Nineteen-year-old Thomas Myers was evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches on 31 May 1940. Recalling the event, years later, the Durham Light Infantryman remembers behaving like an ostrich, trying to bury his head (and other parts) in the sand, as bombs, bullets and shells flew down. He managed to stay calm, unlike the unlucky few whom he saw panicking and running about aimlessly.
But despite his coolness under fire, Thomas was not an experienced soldier. Five years earlier, aged fourteen, he had left school in County Durham on a Friday afternoon and walked up the pit road to meet the manager of the Dean and Chapter Colliery. At three o’clock on the following Monday morning he started work as a coal miner.
Thomas’s father and his two older brothers were miners. ‘In this area you were bred for the mines,’ he says. Asked whether he was happy doing it, he says, ‘You were born to it. You were a miner. You go in the mine. There’s nothing else.’
Thomas started work just as his father had before him. He was given no training; he was simply told to collect a pit pony and go