Dunkirk and Brexit

[Rhiannon]

I know we have threads on both but here's what I think is an interesting piece from Zoe Williams.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/30/dunkirk-lesson-nigel-farage-brexiters-war-stories-british

The link to the Gummer speech is worth a click btw.

'In the weeks running up to the referendum, when Peter Mandelson was trying to galvanise remainers with an appeal to their pockets, and Yanis Varoufakis was making complicated speeches about conjuring forth ever deeper democracy, one man gave a simple, passionate speech that at the time I found bizarre. John Gummer, speaking to the Environmentalists for Europe, said – almost tearfully – that, because of the EU, nobody had had to send their son to another country to kill someone else’s son for 70 years. A eulogy to peace seemed quite tangential to the argument, but only if you had failed to see, as I had, how much bellicosity the leave side were generating, how much their nationalism and sovereignty were rooted in nostalgia, not for any old Britain of yore, but for a victorious Britain.'

[Nearly Sane]

Farage and I are very close in terms of age, so the point made about his distance from Dunkirk strikes home. I am not really any closer to it than a 'youngster'. Given that my first encounter with it was via Mrs Miniver, I am sceptical of the value of a film in making any point of any depth. I think the difference between Williams and Farage illustrates what they bring to watching the film rather than what is necessarily to be taken from it.


More extraordinary for me, in terms of my life, that I remember Spain under a fascist, Greece under the military, Eastern Europe under communism, the Berlin Wall, and should we forget civil war in the continent in the break up of Yugoslavia. The achievement of theEurooean project was not that from the Treaty of Rome that everything was all of a sudden milk and honey but that things got a bit better.


Even today, I find the fear and soon saying about terrorist attacks, as if no one lived in the 70s and 80s. I don't think that single events such as Dunkirk tell ypumuch. Even the Second World War, or perhaps particularly it, are only understandable in a process of history, not separated from it. The English Channel, La Manche, is 22 miles overlaid with myth.

[Anchorman]

I''ll aye remember my aunt's brother -in-law. He was one of the family in a mining village who chose to join the army in january, 1939 - to avoid the hell of the pits. He was also one of the 51st Highland division sacrificed by a rather incompetant Churchill - the division 'left behind'. He was taken prisoner and served four and a half years in camps in France, Poland and Hungary. He became a pacifist after the war - except for one thing: he maintained that if he ever came within ten feet of the butchers' apron (union jack) he'd defacate on it. The cynical reconstitution of the 51st Highlanders was an act of cras propaganda; certain soldiers' songs referred to them - wrongly, as their war record shows - as "The second hand stand ins".

[Nearly Sane]

I''ll aye remember my aunt's brother -in-law. He was one of the family in a mining village who chose to join the army in january, 1939 - to avoid the hell of the pits. He was also one of the 51st Highland division sacrificed by a rather incompetant Churchill - the division 'left behind'. He was taken prisoner and served four and a half years in camps in France, Poland and Hungary. He became a pacifist after the war - except for one thing: he maintained that if he ever came within ten feet of the butchers' apron (union jack) he'd defacate on it. The cynical reconstitution of the 51st Highlanders was an act of cras propaganda; certain soldiers' songs referred to them - wrongly, as their war record shows - as "The second hand stand ins".

I think any incompetence is wider than Churchill. The entire BEF were outgunned and given the extent to which they were it's  hardly surprising that some were surrounded in an area where rescue was difficult due the terrain and weather. That their capture was played down at the time in comparison to Dunkirk seems understandable to me.

[Nearly Sane]

Anyway, here is the Battlefield Band with The Beaches of St Valery



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7INre6oo9es

[Anchorman]

Anyway, here is the Battlefield Band with The Beaches of St Valery



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7INre6oo9es

Yep.
I have this - along with others in my BB collection.
I could counter with the wonderful Dick Gaughan rendition of Hamish Henderson's "51st Hiland division;s fairewell to Sicily'
Henderson himself served with the division as reconstituted in North Africa and Italy.
Yes, not Dunkirk - but I think this is stunning - long, but worth a listen and reflection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-LFCAKGUUo

[Rhiannon]

Dunkirk was quite immediate for me growing up. My family are East Enders and my nan talked about her memories of watching the little ships setting off up the Thames, along with her other war time recollections. Ok, so it was some thirty or forty years ago, but not so very different from the stuff I've recounted here from the 80s. These were things that my family went through. I never felt detached from them.

[Sriram]

Probably not very relevant to this thread, but in the film, ignoring the role of Indian soldiers in the Dunkirk battle has been criticized by many people.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40724861

*********

Christopher Nolan's epic World War Two film, Dunkirk, which tells the story of the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the northern coast of France in 1940, has been getting glowing reviews in India.

But many are glowering over Nolan turning a blind eye to the role of Indian soldiers in the battle. The Times of India wrote that their "significant contribution" was missing from Nolan's "otherwise brilliant" work. Writing for Bloomberg View, columnist Mihir Sharma said the film "adds to the falsehood that plucky Britons stood alone against Nazi Germany once France fell, when, in fact, hundreds of millions of imperial subjects stood, perforce, with them".

Few can deny the role of the subjects. Some five million Commonwealth servicemen joined the military services of the British empire during WW2. Almost half of them were from South Asia. Indian soldiers played a key role in major battles like Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Kohima and Imphal. A multinational force of British, Indian and African units recaptured Burma (Myanmar) for the Allies.

What is well known, she told me, is that four companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, including a unit of the Bikaner State forces, served in France during the campaign on the Western Front, and some were evacuated from Dunkirk. Among them were three contingents of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. One contingent was taken prisoner by German forces.

"They weren't large in number, maybe a few hundred among hundreds of thousands, but their appearance in the film would have provided a good reminder of how utterly central the role of the Indian Army was in the war," he told Slate.

"Their service meant the difference between victory and defeat. In fact, while Britain and other allies were licking their wounds after Dunkirk, the Indian Army picked up the slack in North Africa and the Middle East.

**********

Otherwise said to be a good movie...though I am yet to see it.