British filmmaker Christopher Nolan's latest movie, Dunkirk, has attracted rave reviews in its epic depiction of one of the seminal events of the Second World War. Though the evacuation of 338,000 stranded British and French troops may have come as the denouement of an ignominious military defeat, it bolstered British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's hand in fending off capitulationists within the British political and ruling class who were agitating for peace terms with Hitler in 1940.
Though Churchill rightly described the evacuation as a "colossal military disaster" in his legendary 'Finest Hour' speech to the House of Commons after the evacuation from Dunkirk had been completed, warning that “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory,” writing of the speech and the event in his memoirs years later, he opined that “there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.”
Dunkirk involved a national mobilization, one that succeeded in waking the British people up to the momentous stakes involved in the war against Hitler, thus ending the 'phoney war' that had obtained up to then. Though in military terms Dunkirk does not come close to comparing to the Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad or D-Day in significance, it does belong alongside them in its seismic importance to the path that the war and, with it, history followed.
We'd love to get your feedback at radio@sputniknews.com
