Whom do we credit?

I'm going to spend a bit more time on movies that I saw a while ago, though I am not going to spend as much time on any of them as I did on Walter Mitty. To be fair, that was two movies and a short story.

Let's start with Dunkirk, a 2017 film by Christopher Nolan celebrating the Dunkirk evacuation, where more than 338,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated from the beaches and harbor there.

(I did write a little about Dunkirk in reference to something else last year: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-commandeered-past.html) 

Because of the harbor size, large ships could not get close; a lot of the evacuation was done by smaller boats, including many civilian vessels.

The movie does a good job of covering a lot of the historical factors while still being cinematic.

I think it's mostly true.

The overall theme of it is common people rising to the occasion with limited means and saving the day. That is something that happened.

A petty argument you could make is that some of the boats were taken without the owners' knowledge or consent; it was not all a volunteer force. There were still many civilian volunteers, even under direct navy command. It's hard to imagine a successful evacuation without them, based on the time constraints and the number of troops needing rescue.

Something else that I don't remember the movie treating (except for Tom Holland's pilot character) is that for every seven men rescued, one became a German prisoner of war. Some of those did not make it back. That's a lot of people, but all of them captured or killed would be worse. 

Remember, war is Hell.

None of that is actually why I kept it in my notes. It was an article that I read back then, about how it was part of changing attitudes about the war.

Apparently a lot of Brits were against engagement in WWII. Maybe they thought if Germany left them alone, it didn't matter what else happened, but it's hard to find praise for Neville Chamberlain nowadays.

Of course, Germany did not leave England alone, which I am sure was a factor. Apparently a lot of the changing attitudes came from Churchill's speeches where he lauded the patience and heroism of ordinary Brits, telling them how good they were and how important their patient support was.

The Wikipedia article mentions an ideological division between liberal and conservative, but that was more a matter of focusing on the ordinary people rallying and "the people's war" versus focusing on the military might.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation 

Eventually the ordinary people version won, possibly because it's a better story, but there are lots of good stories without storytellers promoting them. So that, and "Keep calm and carry on," ... a lot of the credit for that seems to belong to Churchill. 

That may have been the best thing that could happen under the circumstances for people getting through the Blitz and rising to the occasion. Good.

My concern with it is then that if we remember ourselves better than we were, will that cause other problems? 

Because remembering ourselves as better than we were happens a lot on this side of the pond.