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Dunkirk

24

Comments

  • #32
    Arsemageddon
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,129 ✭✭✭Arsemageddon


    tac foley wrote: »
    Leaving the 'Brits who loved nazis' argument aside for a moment, I've noted, looking at the trailers, that there is an ENORMOUS and glaring error in this movie, one that sadly cannot be rectified.

    Without exception, every single British soldier portrayed in this movie has way too much hair.

    The military SBAS of the day was rigorously adhered to by both unit barbers and the part-timers in the unit who possessed the machinery to carry out this vital part of the maintenance of good order and military discipline.

    My late and much-missed Uncle Micky, who fought for the opposition, had a SBAS EVERY week of his rather curtailed life, bless 'im, and often noted that British and Commonwealth soldiers looked just like German soldiers from the neck up.

    tac

    A possible explanation for the hairstyles.......

    If most of the cast had the same uniform and the same hairstyle it would be a nuisance trying to figure out who's who. Directors of war movies often go for actors who look distinctly different from one another to make it easier for the audience to identify the characters.


  • #33
    beauf
    Closed Accounts Posts: 22,651 ✭✭✭✭beauf


    That's a plausible reason alright.


  • #34
    Manach
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,659 Mod ✭✭✭✭Manach


    I finally had to chance to view it and found it to be an excellent film. I was impressed by the directors use of sound, with that wail of the Stuka bomber being most unsettling. The numbers at the cinema were large, given the daytime showing, and comprised quite a large variety of ages so good to see.


  • #35
    Snickers Man
    Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    Full Marx wrote: »
    Sadly this is true...

    In fact the main square in the Garda College in Templemore is still named after the fascist O'Duffy!

    O'Duffy wasn't a fascist.
    He was a militaristic, anti-democratic, anti-communist, conservative, arch-Catholic, arch-nationalist buffoon. Very close in outlook to Franco. But that's not the same as being a fascist.

    Franco wasn't one either.


  • #36
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    Manach wrote: »
    I finally had to chance to view it and found it to be an excellent film. I was impressed by the directors use of sound, with that wail of the Stuka bomber being most unsettling. The numbers at the cinema were large, given the daytime showing, and comprised quite a large variety of ages so good to see.

    I went to the cinema yesterday evening to watch that film as well. Impressive as it was and it appeared that the producers kept a certain Level of accuracy in the light of the reality of that time. What I found a bit curious was the change of daylight to night between the scenes. That small ship set out to Dunkirk from a port in Co. Devon in the morning. I presume that it takes some hours for such a ship to make the route to Dunkirk. All the scenes on that ship are set in daylight, whereas on Dunkirk beach it changes from daylight to night and daylight again. One gets the impression that the whole film is about one single day out of a row of nearly 14 days, which was the time frame of the whole evacuation in May/June 1940. They probably pressed some developments during that period into the depiction of about 24 hours to give an example and sumarise of the sheer horror those men have been in at that time. So, one gets the gist of what they´ve been exposed to. All in all, a good film and more impressive is that it differs from the usual glorification of war time in such films.

    I´m sure that duing that evacuation period, the Luftwaffe committed some war crimes cos the bombardment of Red Cross ships is a war crime. Odd enough to say that the bombardment of other vessels which were not facilitated with a Red Cross Flag and mark it as a ship for the wounded, was no war crime cos the BEF didn´t surrender at Dunkirk beaches. But cruel it was anyway.

    It is stated, from German history sources, that Hitler ordered the advance to stop at Dunkirk to give the Brits the Chance to escape in order to "gain" some advantage for negotiating a cease fire with the Brits after France has fallen. The German Generals pressed Hitler to continue the advance and make the Brits surrender. For practical reasons, it would had been some bid deal to facilitate the capture of 350,000 men to be taken PoW. On the other Hand, Hitler was quite confident with Goering ordering the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb the inclosed BEF at Dunkirk beach.


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  • #37
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    Snickers Man wrote: »
    Full Marx wrote: »
    Sadly this is true...

    In fact the main square in the Garda College in Templemore is still named after the fascist O'Duffy!

    O'Duffy wasn't a fascist.
    He was a militaristic, anti-democratic, anti-communist, conservative, arch-Catholic, arch-nationalist buffoon. Very close in outlook to Franco. But that's not the same as being a fascist.

    Franco wasn't one either.

    I wonder what else do you understand by the term "Fascist" if not those who incorporated the very meaning of it in founding and in "practice" of the very ideology. The first Fascist was Mussolini and the others were copying him. Hitler, Franco, Mosely, O´Duffy et al followed the pattern he set.


  • #38
    whisky_galore
    Registered Users Posts: 15,719 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    I've seen articles on members of the Irish Navy unofficially helping out in the evacuation.

    Urban legend or not?


  • #39
    whisky_galore
    Registered Users Posts: 15,719 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Full Marx wrote: »
    It is a historical fact (which I have rarely seen seriously disputed) that a large section of the British establishment were sympathetic to Fascism and Hitler prior to WW2.

    We could play the 'who loved Nazis/Fascism more' game all day, a significant proportion of the population here loved the idea of Britain getting a bloody nose and Germany somehow 'liberating' this country, although they wouldn't have had the faintest idea what Fascism meant, apart from dressing up and marching in formation a lot.


  • #40
    knucklehead6
    Registered Users Posts: 6,734 ✭✭✭knucklehead6


    Thomas__ wrote: »
    I went to the cinema yesterday evening to watch that film as well. Impressive as it was and it appeared that the producers kept a certain Level of accuracy in the light of the reality of that time. What I found a bit curious was the change of daylight to night between the scenes. That small ship set out to Dunkirk from a port in Co. Devon in the morning. I presume that it takes some hours for such a ship to make the route to Dunkirk. All the scenes on that ship are set in daylight, whereas on Dunkirk beach it changes from daylight to night and daylight again. One gets the impression that the whole film is about one single day out of a row of nearly 14 days,

    nope.
    The film is set out telling three different stories, one from the perspective of the mole, one from the small boat and one from the air, and there are three different time frames referenced at the first scene involving each.

    The first scene on the mole states one week, and the scenes there are spread out over on week.

    This first scene of the small boat states one day, and it's scenes are spread out over the course on one day

    The first scene of the air states one hour and the story is told from the flight time of one hour

    Then all three strands come together at the end.


  • #41
    tac foley
    Registered Users Posts: 5,504 ✭✭✭tac foley


    'Co. Devon'?

    That's a new one.

    tac


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  • #42
    beauf
    Closed Accounts Posts: 22,651 ✭✭✭✭beauf


    Thomas__ wrote: »
    ... The German Generals pressed Hitler to continue the advance and make the Brits surrender....

    I think some generals (and not all agreed) asked ask for the stop, then realising it was a mistake asked to continue. Hitler had to approve all orders.

    Probably incidents like this that led to Hitler micro managing and removing and any independence of them later in the war.

    I think the idea of Hitler doing it as some sort of altruistic act is a bit of revision by Hitler after the fact. Common trait of domineering people. They can't admit they made a mistake.


  • #43
    whisky_galore
    Registered Users Posts: 15,719 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    tac foley wrote: »
    'Co. Devon'?

    That's a new one.

    tac



    I think that's in West Brit(ain)


  • #44
    beauf
    Closed Accounts Posts: 22,651 ✭✭✭✭beauf


    I'm not sure I would be so hung up on the timescale in a movie. Dramatic licence and all that.


  • #45
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    tac foley wrote: »
    'Co. Devon'?

    That's a new one.

    tac

    All right, it´s called Devonshire. Damn it.


  • #46
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    beauf wrote: »
    Thomas__ wrote: »
    ...  The German Generals pressed Hitler to continue the advance and make the Brits surrender....

    I think some generals (and not all agreed)  asked ask for the stop, then realising it was a mistake asked to continue. Hitler had to approve all orders.

    Probably incidents like this that led to Hitler micro managing and removing and any independence of them later in the war.

    I think the idea of Hitler doing it as some sort of altruistic act is a bit of revision by Hitler after the fact.  Common trait of domineering  people. They can't admit they made a mistake.

    Either way, I take it that there was some purpose behind that, given the talk he always did by "England isn´t our natural enemy". That was his stance all along and I wouldn´t exclude that this has led him to stop the advance and giving the BEF the time to evacuate. Well, he was more confident that he´ll break the Brits by the Blitz that followed a couple of months later. Didn´t pay off for thim though.


  • #47
    tac foley
    Registered Users Posts: 5,504 ✭✭✭tac foley


    With the best will in the world, a fair wind and following sea and all going well in the engine room, a Dunkirk-style 'small ship' might just be making 10kn. However, the prevailing wind in the English Channel does not favour smaller boats heading Easterly, nor do the many currents that abound in such a nautical bottleneck help in straight-line navigation of any kind.

    With a sailing distance of between 230 and 260 miles, depending on many other factors, this may have taken up to 36 hours of non-stop sailing to achieve.

    This is from my next-door neighbour, who is a yottie with an auxiliary yacht based in Kingsbridge, Devonshire.

    tac


  • #48
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    whisky_galore wrote: »
    I've seen articles on members of the Irish Navy unofficially helping out in the evacuation.

    Urban legend or not?

    Well the 'Irish Navy' consisted of about a dozen craft c1940, the biggest of them MTBs. But I guess the articles you've seen would also state that they were helping to refuel/reprovision the U-Boats off the W Coast.;)


  • #49
    whisky_galore
    Registered Users Posts: 15,719 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    pedroeibar1 wrote: »
    Well the 'Irish Navy' consisted of about a dozen craft c1940, the biggest of them MTBs. But I guess the articles you've seen would also state that they were helping to refuel/reprovision the U-Boats off the W Coast.;)

    Eh, no they didn't. No need to be smart.


  • #50
    beauf
    Closed Accounts Posts: 22,651 ✭✭✭✭beauf


    Thomas__ wrote: »
    Either way, I take it that there was some purpose behind that, given the talk he always did by "England isn´t our natural enemy". That was his stance all along and I wouldn´t exclude that this has led him to stop the advance and giving the BEF the time to evacuate. Well, he was more confident that he´ll break the Brits by the Blitz that followed a couple of months later. Didn´t pay off for thim though.

    Doesn't really fit with the air campaign. Destroying the docks and shipping. Why else were small ships needed. Or indeed anything else he did. Also Would have made more sense to capture the BEF then negotiate.

    I think people like the story, more than considering it makes no sense.


  • #51
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    tac foley wrote: »
    With the best will in the world, a fair wind and following sea and all going well in the engine room, a Dunkirk-style 'small ship' might just be making 10kn.  However, the prevailing wind in the English Channel does not favour smaller boats heading Easterly, nor do the many currents that abound in such a nautical bottleneck help in straight-line navigation of any kind.
     
    With a sailing distance of between 230 and 260 miles, depending on many other factors, this may have taken up to 36 hours of non-stop sailing to achieve.

    This is from my next-door neighbour, who is a yottie with an auxiliary yacht based in Kingsbridge, Devonshire.

    tac

    Thanks for that. In the beginning of the film, I didn´t noticed any sign giving a hint to the location of that small boat when they prepared to go to Dunkirk. It was meant that the ship be an example for the many who set out along the Southern English coast to come to the evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk. That they started from Devonshire came later in the film when they got back home.


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  • #52
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    whisky_galore wrote: »
    Eh, no they didn't. No need to be smart.
    Well, as this is a history forum, perhaps you would care to give us a source for the 'articles' to which you refer?


  • #53
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    beauf wrote: »
    Thomas__ wrote: »
    Either way, I take it that there was some purpose behind that, given the talk he always did by "England isn´t our natural enemy". That was his stance all along and I wouldn´t exclude that this has led him to stop the advance and giving the BEF the time to evacuate. Well, he was more confident that he´ll break the Brits by the Blitz that followed a couple of months later. Didn´t pay off for thim though.

    Doesn't really fit with the air campaign. Destroying the docks and shipping. Why else were small ships needed. Or indeed anything else he did. Also Would have made more sense to capture the BEF then negotiate.

    I think people like the story, more than considering it makes no sense.

    The French screwed it up in the first place and weren´t prepared good enough for the advance of the Germans. There are many things in WWII which happened and didn´t make sense.


  • #54
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    tac foley wrote: »
    With the best will in the world, a fair wind and following sea and all going well in the engine room, a Dunkirk-style 'small ship' might just be making 10kn. However, the prevailing wind in the English Channel does not favour smaller boats heading Easterly, nor do the many currents that abound in such a nautical bottleneck help in straight-line navigation of any kind.

    With a sailing distance of between 230 and 260 miles, depending on many other factors, this may have taken up to 36 hours of non-stop sailing to achieve.

    This is from my next-door neighbour, who is a yottie with an auxiliary yacht based in Kingsbridge, Devonshire.

    tac
    I have not yet seen the film - but my guess is that it will be as accurate historically as ‘Braveheart’ or the one where the US navy captured the Enigma machine from the UBoat.

    Small boats in the ‘30s generally had displacement hulls – they had to push the water out of the way when going forward. This creates a bow-wave in front and a stern-wave (drag) at the back, creating a hollow in the middle into which the boat ‘sinks’. As a result the maximum theoretical speed a displacement hull can attain is roughly 1.2 x √LWL (length water line). Thus a 30ft motorboat with a LWL of 25ft could motor at 6 knots, so a distance of c250miles would take about 40 hours. That is the time of a bit more than six tides, (3 ebbing, 3 flowing) and as they flow in /out the Channel they more or less cancel out. At this time of the year the wind generally is south-westerly in the Channel, so it would be a help if coming from any port on the Western Approach, and a hindrance on the return voyage.
    Pedro,
    (who will never forget his first time crossing the shipping lanes in the Channel, no Luftwaffe but lots of fast big ships with no brakes)


  • #55
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    whisky_galore wrote: »
    Full Marx wrote: »
    It is a historical fact (which I have rarely seen seriously disputed)  that a large section of the British establishment were sympathetic to Fascism and Hitler prior to WW2.

    We could play the 'who loved Nazis/Fascism more' game all day, a significant proportion of the population here loved the idea of Britain getting a bloody nose and Germany somehow 'liberating' this country, although they wouldn't have had the faintest idea what Fascism meant, apart from dressing up and marching in formation a lot.

    In some Irish documentary, perhaps it was that series "Seven Ages", a former German spy was interviewed in that part that was about the 1940s. He talked about the support of German Invasion on Ireland by the IRA, curiously he admitted that he had no clue about the difference between the Irish Army and the IRA, both were one and the same to him. One would presume that those IRA people should have had an idea about what it would mean to be "liberated" by the German Nazi Forces, but from what I have noticed, they didn´t and actually, they didn´t care much about it as long as they´d help to get the Brits out of Ireland completely.

    Not quite the same but I think that the attitude must be similar when the Irish Volunteers hoped and relied on the help of the German Empire helping them by promising to invade Ireland during WWI to support the Easter Rising in 1916, but the Volunteers waited in vain as this didn´t happen either. So it went in WWII, apart from some bombs over Dublin by accident for which the German govt apologised to the Irish govt officially.


  • #56
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    Deleted, double post.


  • #57
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    beauf wrote: »
    I'm not sure I would be so hung up on the timescale in a movie. Dramatic licence and all that.

    Of course, that´s some point. If you´re going to watch that film, be prepared that the noises of diving Stukas and exploiding bombs has some impact on concentrating to the flow of the film. Sometimes I couldn´t understand what they were talking that properly. Anyway, the film gives one the notion of how they must have felt back then, to either drown, getting shot or ripped into peaces by the bombs while being exposed on a long beach like sitting ducks and being the best target for the Stukas. Three Spitfires appeared in the whole film and two got down, one survived to the end landing on the beach after running out of fuel and before shooting a couple of Stukas down. As far as I remember, it is an historical fact that Churchill saved the many of the Spitfires and held them back in GB cos he reckoned with an air assault by the Lufwaffe on GB after they lost in France.


  • #58
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,021 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    The film does suggest that the British were conserving assets for the defence of Britain, even at the cost of hampering the evacuation, and I think this is historically accurate. It makes that point mainly in relation to naval assets, but no doubt it would have been true of air assets also.

    Overall, though, the film makes no attempt to explore why the British found themselves in the position they were in, why the Germans made the decisions that they did, etc, etc. The film doesn't look at the political or strategic issues at all. It simply explores some individual experiences of what it was like to be involved in this event, from the perspective of a (fictional) soldier detached from his unit and seeking to get home, a (fictional) small boat owner and a (fictional) RAF pilot. There's no exploration of the bigger picture, apart from a statement early on in the film that the British initially hoped to evacuate 30,000 men, and a statement at the end that they had in fact evacuated more than ten times that number.


  • #59
    Thomas__
    Closed Accounts Posts: 618 ✭✭✭Thomas__


    Peregrinus wrote: »
    The film does suggest that the British were conserving assets for the defence of Britain, even at the cost of hampering the evacuation, and I think this is historically accurate.  It makes that point mainly in relation to naval assets, but no doubt it would have been true of air assets also.

    Overall, though, the film makes no attempt to explore why the British found themselves in the position they were in, why the Germans made the decisions that they did, etc, etc.  The film doesn't look at the political or strategic issues at all.  It simply explores some individual experiences of what it was like to be involved in this event, from the perspective of a (fictional) soldier detached from his unit and seeking to get home, a (fictional) small boat owner and a (fictional) RAF pilot.  There's no exploration of the bigger picture, apart from a statement early on in the film that the British initially hoped to evacuate 30,000 men, and a statement at the end that they had in fact evacuated more than ten times that number.

    Wasn´t the concept for the film anyway and I´d replace "fictional" by "exemplary", cos every film made about that in the past decades was always like an excerpt of a few out of the many.

    There´s a wiki article about the film which gives some good explanations regarding the script and the making of the film. It´s just a war film but judged by the effects and the story told, a good one cos it takes a bit of a different angle from which it is told. On the subject itself I have seen two different ones, the first was that with Jean-Paul Belmondo from the 1960s, and the other one was that BBC docu drama from 2004. Another older one from the 1950s I haven´t seen at all, but from what I´ve read it is based on a very similar approach to the story by selecting a few characters to tell the story from two different angles.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_(2017_film)

    It´s rather possible that the film producers were going out from the fact that the content of the whole story is well known, to many Brits anyway.


  • #60
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,021 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Sure. I'm not suggesting that the film should have looked at the strategic, political, etc aspects. These, as you point out, are already much-discussed and quite well-known. To the extent that the film did touch on those issues, it did so through Kenneth Branagh's character. FWIW, I though Branagh gave a good performance but his character was pretty one-dimensional and a bit stereotypical - the weakest in the film.

    Not looking at these issues is fine. What the film set out to do is to explore what it was like to be involved in the events. In the beach/mole scenes, I thought the transition over the course of the week from the orderly lines of soldiers waiting for embarkation to the leaderless and disorganised stragglers watching people drown themselves from despair, and then waiting for the tide to float an unseaworthy trawler, was pretty powerful.


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  • #61
    beauf
    Closed Accounts Posts: 22,651 ✭✭✭✭beauf


    The 1950s film was always a favourite of mine. Very much of its time but also more focused on the experience of a the characters than historical overview.


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