Dunkirk
Page 32
(© Warner Brothers)
The film’s three Spitfires in formation.
(© Warner Brothers)
British destroyers sailing home to England with an RAF escort.
(© Popperfoto/Getty Images)
In the film, a Spitfire is chased by a Messerschmitt 109 as they pass a representation of HMS Keith.
(© Warner Brothers)
Troops in long hopeful queues waiting for little ships to carry them to larger ships offshore.
(© Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical via Getty Images)
A scene from the film: troops queuing for the little ships as casualties are taken away.
(© Warner Brothers)
Director Christopher Nolan with Fionn Whitehead, playing Tommy.
(© Warner Brothers)
Allied troops hoping for deliverance.
(© Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)
The mole, intended as a breakwater to prevent sand blocking the harbour, was substantially rebuilt for the film. Here, soldiers stand on part of the surviving mole.
(© Warner Brothers)
Troops walking along the mole. The wooden walkway, with its high rail, is clearly visible as are the crisscross piles beneath.
(© Popperfoto/Getty Images)
A photograph taken by Sub-Lieutenant John Crosby [see Chapter Eight] on board Clyde paddle steamer Oriole. It is likely that these soldiers, some up to their necks in water, were standing on one of the submerged lorry piers built by the Royal Engineers.
(© Time Life Pictures/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
A lorry pier as recreated by production designer Nathan Crowley and his team. ‘It was an enormous learning curve,’ says Nathan. These piers were originally built, in May and June 1940, by men such as George Wagner and Norman Prior by driving lorries down to the shoreline, filling them with sandbags, shooting their tyres out, and laying planks across their roofs.
(© Warner Brothers)
Some of the Little Ships, each weighed down with evacuated soldiers.
(© Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images)
In the film, the soldiers load up on one of the surviving Little Ships, the New Britannic, recreating the rescue seventy-six years later.
(© Warner Brothers)
The mole as it looks today at low tide. Only a few of the original crisscross piles are still visible.
(© Joshua Levine)
Captain William Tennant, later Admiral Sir William Tennant. Arriving on 27 May to coordinate the evacuation as Senior Naval Officer Dunkirk, he encountered a chaotic scene. Later that night, he sent a ship alongside the mole as an experiment. It was a successful experiment: the vast majority of soldiers rescued over the next seven and a half days would be lifted from the mole.
(© Popperfoto/Getty Images)
George Wagner photographed at home in Lichfield in November 2016. George was a Royal Engineer, a keen dancer and a beach motorcyclist who helped to build one of the lorry piers. ‘We wanted to survive as a country,’ he says. ‘It was about comradeship and everyone together helping.’
(© Joshua Levine)
The author stands beside one of Crested Eagle’s guns on the beach near Bray Dunes.
(© Paul Reed)
About the Author
JOSHUA LEVINE is the author of several works of popular military history, including Forgotten Voices of the Somme, Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, and The Secret History of the Blitz. On a Wing and a Prayer, his history of the pilots of the First World War, has been turned into a major British television documentary. He lives in London.
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Also by Joshua Levine
Beauty and Atrocity
Forgotten Voices of the Blitz
Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk
Forgotten Voices of the Somme
Operation Fortitude
The Secret History of the Blitz
Copyright
Excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1937), reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell; (Victor Gollancz 1937, Martin Secker & Warburg 1959, Penguin Books 1962, 1989, Penguin Classics 2001). Copyright © 1937 by Eric Blair. This edition copyright © the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1986; and Copyright © 1958 and renewed 1986 by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
DUNKIRK. Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Levine. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-274030-4
EPub Edition JUNE 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-274031-1
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* George VI and Chamberlain were such close friends that the King had given Chamberlain a key to Buckingham Palace Gardens, providing the Prime Minister with a short-cut between his Belgravia home and Westminster.
* This story is Thompson’s own account from Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill (1953).
* The expression ‘Fifth Column’ was probably coined during the Spanish Civil War by General Mola. As the Nationalists besieged Madrid with four columns of troops, Mola claimed that a ‘fifth column’ existed within the city, made up of Nationalist supporters waiting to rise when the time came.
* The regiment’s predecessor had once worn purple uniforms. Purple had been the favourite colour of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Hence ‘the Pompadours’.
* Of the 175 Lysander army co-operation aircraft deployed in France and Belgium, 118 were lost. This episode perhaps explains why.
* See Chapter Three.
* It was the RNF’s unfortunate Daimler Dingos who met the Panzers instead. More than half of 12 platoon’s scout cars were destroyed in the action.
* A scapegoat was probably also desirable to deter the French from accusing the British of betrayal – since the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk had already begun without the knowledge of the French.
* In the film, shoulder titles worn by the character Alex show him to be a member of this battalion.
* Much of the bad feeling between France and Britain over the last seventy-seven years can be traced to this act of supposed betrayal. While this is understandable, two points need to be added. First, retreat and evacuation were the only sensible courses of action in the circumstances. By keeping alive his impractical plan to attack southwards, Weygand was endangering both his and the British forces. Second, British ships were to evacuate h
uge numbers of French troops alongside British troops. The exodus from Dunkirk was a desperate effort to keep the war alive, not a sly British bid to cut and run.
* But not for long. Langley escaped from hospital a month later and made his way to Marseille in the Vichy ‘free zone’, where he worked for an escape network. Arriving back in England in 1941, he joined MI6, working to facilitate escape lines on the continent.
* A regular (or irregular) occurrence that often caused problems; remember Edward Watson in Calais.
* Not only does the film show differing experiences, it also shows the same action experienced differently from multiple viewpoints.
* Adjacent to the present-day (and extremely atmospheric) Dunkirk 1940 Museum.
* The two ships were Mona’s Queen and Grive.
* At least until the railing was broken down in places to ease boarding.
* Clouston would be dead within a few days, drowned after his RAF boat was attacked by Stukas.
* The link had been put in place, months earlier, thanks to the efforts of Ramsay’s flag lieutenant. The Admiralty had tried to resist it on financial grounds.
* Philip Brown was on board Sabre when a shell fired from the shore struck – but failed to explode. ‘It was a very lucky escape from certain death,’ he writes.
* Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, chose his nom de plume as a tribute to the sailors’ cries. ‘Twain’ is an archaic form of ‘two’.
* Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service.
* The villa has recently been demolished.
* Quite possibly Crested Eagle.
* He unfortunately no longer has it.
* George Wagner and Norman Prior both helped to build the piers at different sectors along the beach.
* According to Montgomery, the idea to appoint Alexander as Gort’s successor had been his idea. Gort had originally planned to appoint the less able Lieutenant General Barker, commander of I Corps.
* Howell also spotted a lone rowing boat, containing a sailor and eight or ten soldiers. It was hoping to reach England seventy miles away – but was heading in completely the wrong direction, so Howell flew low over it several times in the right direction, trying to communicate the bearing it should follow. On landing he reported its position, hoping that the men would be picked up.
* A few were crewed by civilians who signed a T124 form, entitling them to £3, and making them Royal Navy volunteers for a month.
* In the First World War, ‘poilu’, an adjective meaning ‘hairy’, came to mean ‘a French soldier’.
* Clem Miniver is the husband of Mrs Miniver, the title character in a 1942 film about a suburban British housewife. Clem takes his own motorboat across to Dunkirk.
* See Chapter Seven.
* Churchill’s promise to defend the perimeter as the French evacuated was clearly not a factor in Alexander and Tennant’s thinking.
* Entertainments National Service Association, an organisation providing live entertainment to the armed forces.
* His personal assistant, Hugh Ironside, remembers the ‘gruesome’ sherry parties Dowding used to throw with his sister. ‘Stuffy would have one sherry,’ he says, ‘and he used to play his ancient tunes on his ancient gramophone and after a time I used to find it most difficult to get anyone to come.’
* See Chapter Six.
* See Chapter Four.
* An expression in use since 1918.
* This, of course, was why the mole was pressed into service for embarkations, on the night of 27–28 May, by Captain William Tennant.
* Potter does not mention his feelings on the subject – but it must have been galling, after such an ordeal, to discover that the boat was heading for Dunkirk, and not for the safety of England.
* In the same letter, Sergeant Oates apologises for ‘not getting anything for Martin’s birthday but all the people were refugees & shops were shut also there were no post offices working’.
* After the evacuation, Machin was sent straight to a training camp where the officers in charge – none of whom had been in France – accused the men, many of whom were near-starving and without uniforms, of being untidy and dirty. Machin was – and still is – furious.
* The film’s historical advisor (also the author of this book) remembers phoning associate producer Andy Thompson to ask why the Messerschmitts had yellow noses. Now he knows.