Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ A German invasion was expected, and exhibitions of pride and self-congratulation did not sit well with Montgomery. But for the majority, while Britain still had a fighting chance of survival, the returning soldiers were glorious heroes.

      Some civilians baulked at the euphoria too. An old woman watched the shattered troops disembarking at Dover on 3 June. ‘When I was a girl,’ she said, ‘soldiers used to look so smart and would never have gone out without gloves.’ The Mass Observation reporter to whom she spoke noted a flat, unemotional atmosphere in the town. ‘I can only describe it,’ he wrote, ‘as no flags, no flowers and unlike the press reports.’

      However widely felt, the authorities were keen to encourage the sense of emotion and relief – and this was something that Winston Churchill understood instinctively. Oliver Lyttelton, later to be a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, describes great leadership as the ability to dull the rational faculty and substitute enthusiasm for it. In 1940, on a careful evaluation of the odds few would have acted decisively. But despite not being the cleverest of men, Churchill had the ability to inspire the country. He made you feel, says Lyttelton, as though you were a great actor in great events.

      On the evening of 4 June, radio listeners heard a report of the Prime Minister’s speech, given earlier in the day to the House of Commons. The speech did not attempt to ignore reality; Churchill spoke of the German armoured divisions sweeping like a scythe around the British, French and Belgian armies in the north, closely followed by ‘the dull brute mass’ of the German army. He spoke of the losses of men and the overwhelming losses of guns and equipment. He acknowledged that thankfulness at the escape of the army should not blind the country ‘to the fact that what happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster’.

      But Churchill also described ‘a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valour, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity’. If this is what we can manage in defeat, he was suggesting, imagine what we can achieve in victory! He then spoke of his confidence that Britain would be able to defend itself against a German invasion:

      We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …

      Inspiring though these words must have sounded (the front page of the next morning’s Daily Mirror barked ‘WE NEVER SURRENDER’), they hint at a difficult future. Fighting in streets and hills implies guerrilla warfare: the sort of fighting to be engaged in once the Germans had already gained a foothold in Britain. Beyond this, though, Churchill was implying that Britain had strength in reserve. And while this might serve as a reassurance to her own people it was also meant as a message to the United States. We will hold the fort, Churchill was saying, until you come and join us. But please don’t wait too long …

      Joan Seaman, a teenager in London, remembers being scared in the aftermath of Dunkirk. But when she heard these words, the effect was transforming. ‘When people have decried Churchill, I’ve always said, “Yes, but he stopped me being afraid!”’ George Purton, a private in the Royal Army Service Corps, had just struggled back from Dunkirk. He could not share Churchill’s opinion of the evacuation, but he knew ‘a splendid bit of propaganda’ when he heard it.

      The next evening, 5 June, another BBC broadcast boosted the nation. Novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley gave a talk after the news. It was much chummier than Churchill’s, delivered as though knocking back a drink in the saloon bar with friends. In his Yorkshire accent, Priestley mocked the typical Englishness of the Dunkirk evacuation, the miserable blunder having to be retrieved before it was too late. He sneered at the Germans: they might not make many mistakes, but they didn’t achieve epics either. ‘There is nothing about them,’ he said, ‘that ever catches the world’s imagination.’ Warming to his theme that the British are lovable, absurd and quixotic, he spoke of the most ‘English’ aspect of the whole affair: the little pleasure steamers called away from their seaside world of sandcastles and peppermint rock to a horrid world of magnetic mines and machine guns. Some of the steamers had been sunk. But now they were immortal: ‘And our great grandchildren, when they learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back victorious.’

      In Priestley’s talk – and in other reactions to the evacuation – pride can be sensed in perceived British traits: modesty, comradeship, eccentricity, a belief in fairness, a willingness to stand up to bullies, and an effortless superiority. One does not, after all, want to be seen trying too hard. As Kipling once wrote:

      Greater the deed, greater the need

      Lightly to laugh it away,

      Shall be the mark of the English breed

      Until the Judgment Day!

      The emerging story of Dunkirk was being shaped to fit the sense of national self. When, after all, had a plucky little army last hurried towards the French coast, desperate to escape an arrogant and vastly more powerful enemy, only to succeed against the odds and fight its way to freedom? During the Hundred Years War, of course, when the English won the glorious Battle of Agincourt, fought, according to Shakespeare, by the ‘happy few’, the ‘band of brothers’. If a sense of English self had been born at Agincourt, the Dunkirk story needed very little shaping.

      Prevailing public attitudes can be gauged by the reaction to a play that premiered two weeks after the evacuation. Thunder Rock, starring Michael Redgrave, opened at the Neighbourhood Theatre in Kensington. Its author, Robert Ardrey, described it as a play for desperate people – and it was an instant hit. Theatre critic Harold Hobson recalls that it had the same effect on its audience that Churchill’s speech had on his. It proved so popular that it was secretly bankrolled by the Treasury and transferred to the West End – emphasising the blurred line between spontaneous spirit and its imposition by the authorities.

      The plot revolves around a journalist, disillusioned by the modern world, who has retreated to a solitary life on a lighthouse on the American lakes. There he is visited by the ghosts of men and women who drowned on the lake a century earlier as they headed west to escape the problems of their own times. As the journalist and the ghosts speak, the parallels become clear; just as they should have engaged with the problems of their age, so should he now do the same. He resolves to leave the lighthouse and rejoin the wartime struggle. In a closing monologue, he rehearses the issues so relevant to the modern audience:

      We’ve reason to believe that wars will cease one day, but only if we stop them ourselves. Get into it to get out … We’ve got to create a new order out of the chaos of the old … A new order that will eradicate oppression, unemployment, starvation and wars as the old order eradicated plague and pestilences. And that is what we’ve to fight and work for … not fighting for fighting’s sake, but to make a new world of the old.

      Such lofty social ambitions reveal how Dunkirk Spirit was mutating. The initial sense of relief (that defeat was not inevitable) and pride (in an epic last-ditch effort) was combining with political realities to become something more complex and interesting. If Adolf Hitler was a symptom rather than a cause of the problem, then with victory must come a better and fairer world.

      But for all the words spoken and written, perhaps Dunkirk Spirit’s most impressive manifestation was in the realm of British industry. In the immediate aftermath of the evacuation, the need for greater industrial effort was fully acknowledged by workers. This rare convergence of management and workforce, reflecting a shared interest in survival, was perhaps the apex of Dunkirk Spirit. At the SU factory in Birmingham, СКАЧАТЬ