Dunkirk - a review

A couple of years ago on a TDY to some faraway land [I think it was Hawaii], a friend and I watched a movie about Dunkirk that was made in 1958.  As with the movie that I saw last night, the movie was simply titled Dunkirk.  It was a very good, very effective portrayal of the chaos, desperation, and uncharacteristic [for the British] improvisation that was Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force [BEF] from Northern Europe in 1940.  The story’s focus is split in two – the first is one the homefront.  The British government kept the British public in the dark on the progress [or lack thereof] of the British war effort.  There was also a sense of complacency in Britain about the war, because they had been at war for eight months [the so-called “Phoney War’] where nothing really happened in Europe.  When the government starts to “requisition” private watercraft for an operation the on which the government won’t comment, that feeling of complacency starts to change.   During this part of the film. you get the figurative “big picture” about how and why things are going to Hell in a hurry. 

The second focus is on a squad of British troops lead by Cpl. Tubby Binns as they try everything they know to outwit and evade the Germans as they make their way through enemy-held territory to rejoin the BEF in northern France.  You had the sense the Germans were breathing down their necks at every opportunity.  This culminated in a very ballsy move by Binns and his troops to move right through a German camp, using the noise from a German air raid to cover their movements to avoid detection by the Germans they were trying to evade.  By the movie’s end, Binns and his troops make it back to Britain, and the split on the homefront between those who know there’s a real a war and those who think the war is a fake has disappeared.

About eighteen months ago I heard there was going to be a new movie about Dunkirk, and that it was going to be filmed in IMAX format.  Given the nature of the 1958 movie, one that I thought would be hard to top, and the technology available to tell the story again, I had very high expectations.  I had similar expectations for Pearl Harbor sixteen years ago.  Those expectations were dashed when that movie turned out to be a chick flick, and when Alec Baldwin was cast to play Jimmy Doolittle. Luckily, the new movie Dunkirk is no chick flick.

The story of the movie has a promising beginning.  British Tommies are fighting their way through the streets of Dunkirk when they are bombarded with German propaganda leaflets.  The leaflets are very simple and very effective.  They depict the disposition of German forces against the British – a sea of red in northern France, Belgium and Holland [the Germans] and a small pocket of white on the English Channel coast around the small town of Dunkirk [the British, labeled “you”].  We see the Tommies evading German sniper fire to just barely make it to the safety of the French lines, and then make it to the beach, where we see British troops patiently queueing up to wait their turn to get off the beach.   But what is missing is context, the “how did we get in this mess” part.  There is no sense that the German Wermacht is handing the Allies their collective ass in a rout.  The only sense of menace one gets is from the Luftwaffe.  The “oh shit” factor comes from the Stukas.  The movie easily captures the essence of that terror weapon from that time.  Sitting in the theater, you feel like those screaming Stukas are coming for you.

Scale.  The thing that was missing from this movie was “scale”.  Kenneth Branaugh’s character rightly stated there were almost 400,000 men stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk.  But when you look at the shots of the beach, there’s lots of open sand.  Two weeks ago, I saw more people at Pensacola Beach to watch the Blue Angels perform than what I saw in the movie last night.  In the 1958 movie, the soldiers are packed into and around Dunkirk like proverbial sardines.  To provide a more recent example, Atonement captured more feel of how cramped, chaotic, grim and desperate Dunkirk was in a single, five-minute take than the new Dunkirk movie did in almost two hours. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QijbOCvunfU

Dunkirk Scene from Atonement

This movie was filmed in IMAX.  The pictures are bigger, the resolution of the pictures is crisper, and the sound is better.  You can literally hear the bullets whizzing around you as the Tommies are trying to avoid being killed by the unseen Germans.  You get the sense the British are in trouble, but not that they are desperate.  The aerial sequences are outstanding.  You’re in the cockpits with the RAF as they try to keep the Luftwaffe away from the beaches.  When the bullets from the German aircraft hit the Spitfires, you can almost feel it.  There were only a handful of British aircraft portrayed in the movie, giving one the sense of a very few against the entire Luftwaffe.  Perhaps that was the intent, because from the vantage point of the ground pounders, “where was the Air Force?”  That question was asked in this movie, and it was asked in the 1958 movie.  Most of the air-to-air fighting was done away from the beaches. 

To imagine the scale of Operation Dynamo, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were trapped in a very small pocket of land about the size of Hong Kong waiting to either be rescued by the British or captured by the Germans.   Almost 700 ships of all kinds [some were just pleasure boats, not ships] were needed to evacuate such an enormous mass of humanity.  That wasn’t really depicted in the new movie.  When the “cavalry” finally does appear and Kenneth Branaugh says he can see “home”, it’s underwhelming.

Claustrophobia.  The claustrophobia you sense in the new movie is more on a micro level rather than a macro level.  It comes on the ships once the troops were evacuated.  One gets the sense that the thing that will kill the evacuees would be drowning below decks on the ships that get attacked by the Luftwaffe and the U-Boats.  You’re in the cockpit of one RAF pilot who had to ditch his Spitfire.  The water is rushing in but the pilot can’t get out because his canopy is jammed.  But fear not – without giving away too much of the plot, this guy lives.

There are two enemies in this movie – the Germans and the English Channel.  The Channel is ever-present, but one never really gets the sense that the Germans are closing in, tightening the noose around the BEF with each passing hour.  In the 1958 movie, you saw Germans.  You saw their faces, your heard their voices, you felt the approach of their tanks outside of Dunkirk.  The new movie doesn’t have that.  You don’t see any Germans at all until the last frames of the movie.

Shell shock – Cillian Murphy is a British private who is rescued [by one of the civilian boats requisitioned by the Royal Navy] from the remnants of a sunken ship.  Not only has he been chased out of France by the Germans, he nearly died after a U-Boat sank the ship that got him out of France.  He’s seen a lot of bad stuff, he’s been “in the shit”, and he’s seen enough. He doesn’t make any bones about wanting to go home.  But when he found out the boat he was on is going in the opposite direction, he freaks, with some unfortunate consequences.  When he asks the boat captain why he, a civilian, is doing such a thing to deliberately go into harm’s way, the boat captain has the best line in the movie - “Men my age dictate this war, why should we not fight it?”

Conclusion.  The new version of Dunkirk proves to me that “newer” doesn’t always mean “better.”  This movie has been hailed by some critics as a “masterpiece.”  The bar for such a distinction must be pretty low these days.  I’ve seen masterpieces, and Dunkirk [2017] is not one of them.  It isn’t crap either.  For me it is a case of missed opportunities and heightened expectations.  While Dunkirk is not a masterpiece, it isn’t crap either.  It is a good movie that could have been great.  Save your money and wait for pay per view.

Tom's Uncle Frank

[Originally posted in Tony's Rants, Jan 20, 2008]

We were sitting in our cubicle talking about Bill’s latest trip for work. He went to Hawaii and he was telling us about going to the USS Arizona Memorial. He mentioned that he didn’t see any Imburgios or any Rutherfords on the wall, but he did see a few Howards there. This got Tom to tell us a story about his Uncle Frank. He allowed me to share this story with anyone who cares to read about it. Hopefully I can write it as well as he told it. This is an amazing story…

During the late 1930s, Uncle Frank was a bit of a troublemaker in Brooklyn, so much so that his mother wanted to get him out of the house. This being during the Great Depression and the era of FDR’s New Deal, Uncle Frank’s mom decided to enlist him in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He shipped out to Idaho so he could spend his youth cutting down trees to build national parks. Uncle Frank soon grew tired of the outdoor life, so he hitch-hiked all the way back to Brooklyn. This was long before the advent of interstate highways, so to hitch-hike from Idaho to Brooklyn was quite a feat. Uncle Frank showed up back at his house but his mom wasn’t too thrilled to see him, so she took Uncle Frank to the nearest Army recruiter and enlisted her under-age son. This is where the story starts to get interesting…

After basic training, Uncle Frank soon found himself stationed at the Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. His unit, and others like his also stationed at Schofield Barracks, rotated regularly to the Philippines. Uncle Frank spent a bit of time in the PI. Now, Uncle Frank was pretty good with dice. He got into a crap game and ended up winning over $3,000. This is $3,000 in 1941 money, so you might say Uncle Frank scored big – really big. When his unit was due to rotate back to Hawaii, Uncle Frank went to his commanding officer and asked if he could fly the Pan Am Clipper back to Hawaii instead of taking the normal troop transport ship. His CO told Uncle Frank that if he could show him the ticket, he would take care of the necessary paperwork so Uncle Frank could fly to Hawaii. So Uncle Frank headed to Manila and bought himself a ticket with his crap game winnings for the Clipper. He made the flight with no problem and flew back to Hawaii ahead of his unit. He arrived in Hawaii on Dec 6, 1941. Upon his arrival he met up with some sailors from the battleship USS Arizona. They went out partying, eating and drinking and living it up like they were Romans. When all the fun and games ended that night, his newfound sailor buddies offered to let him sleep that night on the ship. Uncle Frank said “no thanks” and took a taxi back to Schofield Barracks.

Early on the morning of Dec 7th, some of Uncle Frank’s comrades woke him up so they could get an early breakfast at one of the local establishments. Uncle Frank, who wasn’t feeling too well because of his adventures the night before, declined and decided he’d eat at the chow hall on the post when he became somewhat human again. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They also attacked Schofield Barracks. It turns out the place Uncle Frank’s friends went to eat got blown up by the Japanese. A hangover saved Uncle Frank. I asked Tom whatever became of the sailors from the Arizona that Uncle Frank partied with the night before. His response: they’re still on the Arizona. Uncle Frank cheated death at both Schofield Barracks and Pearl Harbor. I asked Tom what happened to Uncle Frank’s unit that was supposed to come home from the Philippines. He said they never shipped home – they participated in the Bataan Death March. Somebody or something was definitely looking out for Uncle Frank.

During World War II, the Army operated on a points system. Depending on what kind of missions or what kind of hazards you faced, you could earn a certain number of points to get to the required number to be able to rotate Stateside. Uncle Frank decided he was going to volunteer for as much hazardous duty as he could get away with in order to get home as soon as possible. He fought the Japanese hand-to-hand in the jungles of New Guinea. In one engagement he killed a Japanese officer and got his samurai sword for a war trophy. Uncle Frank carried that sword with him wherever he went. Tom told us that he and his brother heard these stories from Uncle Frank, but they didn’t really believe him because they sounded so outlandish. They do have sort of a “Forrest Gump” quality to them. Uncle Frank’s wife took Tom and his brother aside and showed him this box. Inside this box were Uncle Frank’s medals – two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and a few others. Also included in this box was a picture of Uncle Frank holding up a Japanese flag [see the picture above]. This was another souvenir from New Guinea. Tom told us that there were a lot of “spots” on that little Japanese flag. Those were Japanese blood stains. It soon dawned on Tom and his brother that “damn, Uncle Frank was a no-shit war hero!” Yeah, I think two Silver Stars and three Bronze Stars qualifies.

Uncle Frank volunteered for other hazardous duty. In one such instance, he volunteered to become a spotter for naval artillery. The practice during World War II was for the Navy to patrol offshore any island that was targeted for invasion, and then soften up the Japanese defenses with continuous artillery bombardment before the Marines would hit the beach. In one such instance, Uncle Frank and one naval officer was taken ashore in the Philippines in 1944 for just such duty. He and this officer landed during the night [taken there by submarine], and they were hidden by Filipino guerillas until it was time to go to work spotting for the Navy. Shortly thereafter, MacArthur’s army invaded the Philippines. It was MacArthur’s famous "return."

In another such instance of volunteering for hazardous duty, Uncle Frank discovered there were openings to become gunners on the then-new B-29 bombers. Uncle Frank volunteered, went through the training, and then became a B-29 crewmember. He flew on two or three missions over Japan without incident. The next mission didn’t go so well. Uncle Frank’s plane was shot down over the Pacific. He spent a couple of days in a life raft waiting to be rescued. Once he was rescued and returned to home base, Uncle Frank decided he’d had enough of air duty and went back to being a ground-pounder. I guess this was Uncle Frank’s last brush with death. He didn’t bring his samurai sword home with him, though. He had his war trophy with his gear ready to ship out to go home when the war ended. But when he was reunited with his gear at journey’s end, the sword was gone. Someone had stolen the sword that Uncle Frank took from that Japanese officer he killed in New Guinea. He’s still pissed about that – hell, after what he went through to get it, I’d be pissed off too.

Uncle Frank is one lucky man. I wonder if he’s ever played the lottery… Thanks Tom for letting me share a part of your family history. Of course, thanks to Uncle Frank, a genuine war hero.

Ivan’s War: Life & Death in the Red Army, 1939-45

Thousands of books have been written about World War II. I should know – a bunch of them reside in by bookshelves, much to Carol’s annoyance. But there haven’t been that many that have been written about life in the Soviet Red Army. What was it like for the Soviet soldier? We have been treated to what it was like for GI Joe, the British Tommies, or even the German Fritz. But what about the Soviet Ivan? Catherine Merridale writes an excellent piece of scholarship of the Soviet soldier, who it can be safely said had to endure much more than soldiers from other nations that fought in the Second World War.

Thirty million Ivans served in the Red Army during World War II. Eight million of these Ivans were killed, far more than American GIs or British Tommies. British historian Catherine Merridale applied to teach some history in Russian schools. She asked her students what it was they wanted to learn. She said that without hesitation, they all said they wanted to learn about the Second World War. During Soviet times there was the “official” version of The Great Patriotic War. At the center of the official version was the Soviet Hero myth. You can find it carved into stone on many a Soviet wartime memorial. It is described in countless wartime songs, in paintings and in epic poetry. The Soviet hero was an ideal everyman. He is simple, healthy, strong and kind, far-sighted, selfless, and unafraid of death. There was no hint of panic, failure, soldiers’ fear, self-mutilation, cowardice, or rape. Soviet accounts mention little of trauma, battle stress, or even depression. So rigid was the adherence to the official Soviet history of the Great Patriotic War that it was not a topic for scholarly research.

It is not surprising to me that tales of individual heroism in the Soviet Red Army are few and far between. Soviet society, and the dictatorship of the proletariat that ruled it, placed more emphasis on the success on the collective rather than the heroic exploits of the individual. If heroism was depicted, it was only in the guise of “this is what OUR state produced.” Genuine stories of death and struggle had been turned into patriotic myth. But in the 20 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, people are free to ask new questions. University students of today were not alive are too young to remember the state parades commemorating the victory over Germany. They haven’t had the myths of the Great Patriotic War continually crammed down their throats like their Soviet contemporaries. They’re free to ask new questions, and they’re asking them now.

By the time the war started for the Soviet Union in 1941, the generation that fought the Great Patriotic War had endured violence on an unimaginable scale. There was World War I between 1914-18. A three-year civil war that immediately followed the war brought shortages of everything from heating oil to bread and blankets, epidemic disease, and a new thing Lenin called “class war.” Famine followed in 1921, then Stalin, then an even more cruel famine that claimed seven million victims. Soviet society tore itself apart with many five-year plans for economic growth, peasants uprooted from lands and herded into collective farms. These folks endured a lot. Because of these events that preceded the Second World War, these are but some of the many things that contributed to the citizens’ antipathy toward the Soviet regime when the bombs started dropping on June 22, 1941.

For the first two summers of the war, the Wermacht looked invincible. Their tanks and horses raced eastward over sun-baked ground, encircling entire Soviet divisions at a time while instilling panic in the rest. There was a complete lack of preparedness on behave of the Red Army. To what does Catherine Merridale attribute this lack of preparation? Politics, and the emphasis on it above all else, including the training of an army top do what it was meant to do. In a look at a typical training schedule, Merridale uncovers one of many hours of lecture on politics, followed by working in the fields in order to feed the troops. If there was time left over, recruits trained with wooden rifles and cardboard tanks. Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukachevsky had a plan. His plan was a defense in depth of the Soviet Union. Stalin got rid of Tukachevsky and many who thought like him during the purges in 1937. Tukachevsky’s defense doctrine was replaced with one emphasizing the offensive. This emphasis on the offensive had the effect of feeding Soviet troops into a German meat grinder. In Stalin’s mind, the giving up even an inch of ground to be able to construct a decent defensive position was treasonous. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops would be captured, sometimes within hours. For instance, in the fight for Kiev, the Soviets lost 750,000 men killed, wounded, or captured. Two and a half million soldiers were captured by the Germans in the first five months of the war. The Germans captured so many prisoners they didn’t know what to do with them. By the end of the war, the Soviet Red Army was destroyed and completely rebuilt three times. We Americans have no concept of how such a thing could happen.

When war started for the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet troops were poorly trained, poorly armed, and poorly fed. If one has ever seen the movie “The Enemy at the Gates” [about the Battle of Stalingrad], the scene where troops are being forced into battle without rifles is an accurate one. These men were told there was an arms shortage, and if they wanted a weapon, they would have to get one from a dead comrade who fell before them. The Soviet regime imagined how the general population would react to stories of official incompetence, of total disregard for human life, and for not giving their sons [and a lot of times their daughters too] the means to fight their invaders. They were hungry, subsisting on a diet of soup, kasha, bread and tea. Rampant pilfering of army warehouses and supply trucks diverted more desirable food, as well as other war material, to the black market. Soldiers, lacking spades, dug trenches with their helmets, the same helmets in which they boiled potatoes. It’s no wonder that they wanted to keep such stories from the public. Imagine if such things happened in this country – imagine the outrage that would take hold in a free society. It was in the Soviet regime’s best interests to keep such things secret and to build up the Stalin personality cult, with Stalin as the sole architect of victory in the Great Patriotic War.

After the collapse of Soviet communism, scholars were given access to millions of documents that the Soviets had kept classified. In these records the author found bundles of soldiers’ letters the reports of the military and secret police, the army’s own notes about troop morale. Soldiers had been forbidden to keep diaries, but many did anyway. The author traveled to battle sites, to Kursk, to Sevastopol, Kerch, Kiev, Smolensk and in each place, she tried to find out who had fought, what they did, what the local people saw. She interviewed over two hundred veterans. She was able to look at archives that until then were kept secret from the public. She looked at the forbidden diaries and field reports. Theses soldiers came to understand what happened to their loved ones at the hands of the Germans in occupied territory. Until 1944, most of the Great Patriotic War was fought on Soviet soil. She describes an army fueled by rage and vodka, whipped into a frenzy by its political officers. In practice, this meant rape, pillage and plunder on a scale that has yet to be recognized. The Red Army, Ms. Merridale writes, embarked "on an orgy of war crimes." Yet in none of the interviewers, none of the Soviet veterans cop to taking part in any such activity.

At war’s end, Ivan didn’t reap any of the benefits like a GI Bill, no postwar prosperity. To relive such memories [besides the ones the state created for them], the shock and distress they witnessed in combat, were too painful for them.. Their wartime experiences manifested themselves in the postwar period in the forms of heart disease, hypertension, and gastric disorders. Ms. Merridale describes this as part of the hidden story of the Great Patriotic War. They came home to a country that needed rebuilding. They also came home to a county still controlled by a paranoid madman who imagined there were enemies everywhere. As Merridale writes, “the motherland was never conquered, but it enslaved itself.”