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

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      Two

       Quite Like Us

      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 and find an older boy. Thomas’s job, it turned out, was to collect tubs of coal, recently filled at the coalface, attach them to the pony by harness, and pull them several hundred yards to a spot where they were mechanically hauled to the surface. He would then collect empty tubs and drive them back to be filled. This cycle would repeat itself over his seven-and-a-half-hour shift.

      Thomas remembers his first night in the mine: ‘Timber supports were holding the roof which was trying to come down, cracks would show, and I was frightened to death. The noises! When I was on my own! It was very frightening for a boy of fourteen to go in the mine under those conditions.’

      A short while later, Thomas’s fears about safety were confirmed when a boy was killed doing the very same job. The boy had been asked by a hewer to carry a drill in his empty tub. As his pony galloped along, the tub slid off the road and the drill shot up in the air, driving itself through the boy’s body. Thomas was horrified when he heard the news. ‘I’m going there no more,’ he told his brother that evening. ‘You’re going back again tomorrow!’ he was told. ‘You’ve got to get over this!’ Shortly afterwards, when yet another boy was killed, Thomas was the first person there. ‘What a scene!’ he says. ‘There wasn’t a body. He had been pulled to bits.’

      In the year that Thomas started work, an average of four miners were killed every day in Britain. Coal mining was the nation’s most dangerous peacetime occupation. And even when a miner had worked his way up to hewer, the work was no safer. Hewers had to work in tiny seams, sometimes as narrow as twelve inches wide, lying on their sides, hacking at coal with an elbow tucked inside a knee. ‘You get the coals out the bloody best you can,’ a Durham miner told BBC interviewer Joan Littlewood in 1938. ‘If you hear the ceiling coming down, you have to get out of the way. But the only way to be really safe is to let the flaming coal stay there …’

      Life was difficult as well as dangerous. Miners returned, caked in coal and sweat, to small homes without bathrooms. Most washed in little tubs in the kitchen. The author W. F. Lestrange spent some time in a house, like Thomas’s, lived in by a family that included three miners. The woman of the house, he wrote, ‘spent most of her time fighting vainly against coal-dust-smeared walls and furniture and floors in the intervals of boiling water for the three successive bath-times’.

      Life was no easier across the Irish Sea. Politically, Northern Ireland was (and still is) a part of the United Kingdom; geographically, it is a part of Ireland. Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast in 1937. ‘People used to earn their pay or they didn’t get it,’ he says, ‘and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it.’ Harry worked out in the open, in all weathers, drinking tea from a can, with a half-hour break to eat, play dice or pray. And his future was dependent on the goodwill of the foreman. ‘He used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job,’ Harry says. ‘If the foreman didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out … and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’

      Yet as odd as it may sound, Harry Murray was a fortunate man. The Northern Ireland government was intended, in the words of its first Prime Minister, to be ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. And as a Protestant, Harry was guaranteed access to basic housing and a lowly paid job in industry. An Ulster Catholic had no such security. Harland and Wolff had not employed Catholics since the early twentieth century, and they no longer bothered applying for shipyard jobs. These had become the natural preserve of Protestants, passed from father to son, from uncle to nephew.

      So although Ulster Protestants received lower wages than their English counterparts, and often lived in houses without mains water and gas lighting, they could be considered – in relative terms – privileged. It was, after all, better to be second than third class.

      Even in London, the beating heart of the British Empire, ordinary life was hard. In 1939, the average Londoner lived to the age of sixty-two, compared with eighty-two today. Two per cent of Londoners attended university in 1939; today, the figure is 43 per cent. In 1934 Sister Patricia O’Sullivan arrived in east London, where she lived among the families of sailors. One of her chief memories is of the importance of pawn shops to local people. When a man went to sea, he would not be needing his suit for a while, so he would take it to the pawn shop. On his return, he would redeem it, and pawn items brought back from distant parts of the world. Sister Patricia would often furnish poor homes with the things sailors СКАЧАТЬ