Category Archives: Second World War

Arts, Britain, Films, History, Second World War

Film Review: Dunkirk

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE haven’t been many good films about the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940. Strangely, however, two of the most notable were made in the same year, with World War II still raging. William Wyler’s Oscars-festooned Mrs Miniver, and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, both came out in 1942.

In 1958, the film Dunkirk directed by Barry Norman’s father Leslie, made a pretty decent fist of showing why Churchill called the events of May 26 to June 4, 1940, “a colossal military disaster”.

That is perhaps why not too many movies have been made about it. By contrast, D-Day and its aftermath, received oodles of cinematic attention. That event was just four months after the events at Dunkirk. But that was based on an advance; Dunkirk was merely about the definitive retreat.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan receives plaudits from many for tackling it again now, so unambiguously many of the protagonists say. Despite some of the gaps that historians will exploit, such as the absence from the film of some 15,000 Scottish soldiers of the Highland Regiments nearby, or even that of the assistance provided by India and its soldiers, this gripping and unconventional film is a mighty accomplishment all the same. It will be interesting to see whether the film will collect as many Academy Awards as Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (six).

Contrary to some over-excited reports, its main achievement is not to offer proof that the One Direction boyband star Harry Styles, who makes his screen debut can really act. Rather, it is to show, in much more vivid detail than Norman’s 1958 film, why a French place-name that is synonymous with British stoicism more accurately reflects Churchill’s infamous and grave assessment. Read enough reports, for example, of townsfolk battling against rising floodwaters, and it won’t be too long before you come across the evocative phrase “Dunkirk spirit”.

The new Prime Minister’s famous bulldog exhortation to fight on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets, was delivered in response to Dunkirk. But the same speech included the declaration that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

EMOTIVE

NOLAN uses that line as his mantra. From the film’s first frame to its last, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing a catastrophe. After all, some 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) returned home, but around 68,000 were lost.

The film begins, quite dramatically, with a young soldier, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), running from German gunfire through the streets of the small French seaside town.

His arrival on the beach yields a breathtaking sight, for him and us alike. Tens of thousands of men are lined up, almost as far as the eye can see, waiting to climb into boats that have yet to arrive. And there are German bombers overhead.

Tommy hooks up with a French soldier and together they carry a wounded man on a stretcher towards the sea, not so much to save his skin as theirs. Indeed, one of the reasons this film is so moving is not so much its frequent displays of doughty heroism (not least from Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, one of the many civilian skippers who took their boats to help with the evacuation), but more its powerful depiction of an intense will to live, against seemingly insuperable odds.

Survival instincts can sometimes look like the very opposite of bravery. Cillian Murphy plays a shellshocked soldier, saved from the sea by Mr Dawson, who cannot bear to return to Dunkirk. However, we are encouraged not to judge him, even when he does something with terrible consequences.

The film has emotive scenes. One is where an elderly blind man, back in Blighty, welcomes home the bedraggled returning soldiers by telling them “well done”. But all they did, one of them responds, was survive. “That’s enough,” says the old man.

Another is when Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander first spots salvation in the form of all those fishing-boats and pleasure crafts helping in the rescue effort. Yet, the film does not feel manipulative. Nolan could have made more of his opening shot of the rescuing flotilla. It could have been breathtaking; thousands of boats bobbing all the way to the horizon. But he keeps it real, with a suitably motley, but relatively small, advance fleet.

With astute screenwriting, Nolan offers us a series of small, personal dramas rather than any overall narrative thread, which we must suppose is precisely what war is.

There are no scenes with Churchill and his top brass back in Whitehall trying to orchestrate Operation Dynamo, the somewhat grandiose seat-of-the-pants exercise. Instead, Nolan is far more intent on evoking the frantic chaos of that momentous week.

There is a strong sense, too, which even the best war films sometimes fail to convey, of nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. The director communicates this by keeping dialogue to a minimum, daringly considering his heavyweight cast. Hoyte van Hoytema’s rousing cinematography tells the story just as eloquently and powerful as any words. At times, though, there is an almost documentary realism to proceedings, which won’t please everyone. Not all viewers will be spellbound.

The film is presented from three perspectives – from land, sea and air – each within a different time frame. The fate of Tommy and a few other desperate soldiers unfolds over a week. Another is played, splendidly, by Styles, who reportedly auditioned without Nolan having the slightest idea who he was, but whose presence should tempt youngsters to watch this film. Let’s hope so. They’ll perhaps realise that ‘one direction’ has a much more solemn meaning when applied to Dunkirk.

Dunkirk (12A)

Verdict: Unmissable epic ★★★★★

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Britain, History, Military, Second World War, Society, United States

Dresden and the Allied bombings of World War II…

70 YEARS ON

Today, the blossoming of Dresden in the east of Germany stands in stark contrast to how the city looked from the ruins of the Allied bombings towards the end of World War II.

British and American bombers dropped 3,900 tonnes of explosives on the Saxony city during four raids on 13th-15th February 1945, killing an estimated 25,000 people and reducing the city to rubble.

The bombing, ordered by Royal Air Force marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, was widely criticised because of the indiscriminate and ‘blanket bombing’ which hit civilian areas as well as military targets – killing thousands of innocents.

Over two days and nights in February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), turned the city into a sea of flames and rubble.

The resulting firestorm is said to have reached temperatures of over 1,500C (2,700F), destroying over 1,600 acres of the city centre.

The victims – mostly women and children – died in savage firestorms whipped up by the intense heat of 2,400 tons of high explosive and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs.

It was initially claimed that up to 250,000 civilians lost their lives in the Dresden bombings but an official report released after the war showed the casualty figure was in fact closer to between 22,500 and 25,000.

A police report written shortly after the bombings showed that the city centre firestorm had destroyed almost 12,000 houses, including 640 shops, 18 cinemas, 39 schools, 26 public houses and the city zoo.

The destruction of Dresden has been subjected to much fierce debate in the 70 years since the war. No one has ever been charged over the bombings, but several historians both in Germany and former Allied nations hold the opinion that the bombing was a war crime.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, ultimately responsible for the attack, distanced himself from the bombing of Dresden shortly afterwards.

An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack said:

… ‘Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas.

… At one time, and well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance…. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front… and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.’

Bomber Command, which suffered the highest casualty rate of any British unit, losing 55,573 of its 125,000 men, eventually gained a memorial in 2012, but sections of society in Britain were outraged and disgusted with public recognition being given to such attacks. It is the view of many that such a memorial should never have been authorised by the British Government because of the attacks on civilians and on non-strategic targets.

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History, Human Rights, Legal, Second World War, Society

International Re-evaluation: ‘Were the Nuremberg War Trials (1945-6) a Travesty of Justice?’…

(From the archives) Originally posted on February 7, 2011 by markdowe

HISTORY: NUREMBERG WAR TRIALS

Intro:-

THE ACTIONS carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War led the Allied powers as early as 1943 to promise to bring war criminals to justice. These trials were held in Nuremberg between November 1945 and August 1946. The Allies set up an international Military Tribunal to judge the accused, the bench comprising four judges, with a deputy for each in case of illness, representing the four main Allied powers: Britain, France, the USA and the USSR. Some 199 were accused at Nuremberg, but thousands of others were tried elsewhere: in Allied military courts, by their own countrymen after the Allied withdrawal, and in former occupied countries. Important questions about the legality of the trials were raised even at the time, and continue to be asked by those who think they were inspired more by vengeance than by justice.

 

AT NUREMBERG, the prisoners were tried on four counts: crimes against peace – preparing and carrying out acts of aggression; war crimes – the ill-treatment of prisoners of war and civilian populations; extremes of brutality against individuals or groups; and conspiracy – participation in plans to commit the other three offences. A number of the accused, including Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, were already dead. Another, Robert Ley, former Head of the Nazi Labour front, hanged himself before the trial started; another, Hermann Goering, swallowed cyanide when it was over in order to avoid the gallows. Another Gustav Krupp, was senile and did not understand the charges; his son Alfred was later tried and sentenced in his place. Of the twenty-four who were brought to trial, three were acquitted. Three, including Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, received life imprisonment. Two got twenty years, one fifteen and Doenitz, who had made the final surrender to the Allies, got ten years’ imprisonment. A number of the accused, including Adolf Eichmann (responsible for administering the ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews) and Franz Stangl (the former Commandant of the camps at Treblinka and Sobibor), were later found abroad, brought to trial and convicted. Twelve were hanged on 16 October 1946.

Week after week, the evidence had mounted up during the trial, evidence at the same time chilling and overwhelming. One of the accused, Hess, gave every sign of mental derangement; only Goering maintained his quick-witted awareness to the end. The others were broken men. One, Hans Frank, whose thirty-eight volume diary gave irrefutable evidence of his involvement in murder, starvation and extermination, despaired completely and summed up what many of them felt when he said: ‘A thousand years will pass, and this guilt of Germany will not pass away!’

How justified was this trial and its outcome? Few disputed the moral justification for it. The crimes involved were so dreadful and so overwhelming that no one imagined there was no redress; everyone supposed that the legal basis for the trial lay in The Hague and Geneva Conventions. The general reaction, therefore, was to welcome the trial as going some way towards atoning for unprecedented atrocities.

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YET THERE REMAIN disturbing features. How could aggression be illegal if there was no legislative agreement under which it could be punished? It was highly unusual for any state or individual ruler to be punished for breaking a treaty, though a number of such trials have been held since Nuremberg. To spare the Soviet Union’s embarrassment, for the USSR had also been guilty of exactly the same offences against Poland and Finland, the charge was confined to aggression by the Axis powers alone. Thus the offence seemed to be specially designed to fit the crime and was applied only selectively. No Italians were ever charged. Italy had changed sides, and to indict an ally would have opened the door to a similar indictment against the USSR.

The accused were also condemned for crimes that were not crimes in international law at the time they were committed. If extreme crimes against humanity, or conspiracy to commit such crimes, were now offences against international law, the same charges could have been brought against Churchill for his complicity in the bombing of Dresden, if the Germans had been victorious instead of defeated.

Furthermore, the accused were not allowed to say: ‘But I was only obeying my orders.’ To expect an individual subordinate to be able to distinguish between a legal order and a criminal one was quite unrealistic. The Allies themselves, throughout the war, considered men bounded by superior orders, and not legally liable for them. But now the Allies were saying that obedience to orders was not a defence, but only a mitigation. This would have certainly been bad news to the bombardier aboard Enola Gay who was ordered to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima.

But the most fundamental criticism was the simplest. For punishment to have at least the appearance of justice, the prosecutor must not also be the judge. The judges at Nuremberg represented the nations that were parties to the action, and therefore could not be said to be impartial. It would have been better that the judges should have been empanelled from among neutral nations such as Sweden or Switzerland, for this would have given a greater impression of impartiality. The partiality of the bench gave ammunition to those who maintained that the trials were merely acts of vengeance carried out by the victor against the vanquished. As Goering himself shrewdly observed at the trial: ‘The victors will always be the judge, the vanquished the accused.’ Such a criticism will always weaken the moral justification of the Nuremberg Tribunal, though it will not lessen the frightfulness of the crimes that brought the trials about.

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