Dunkirk evacuation Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Nolan’s Dunkirk: “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”

5 August 2017 Comments 3 Comments

(Reviewed for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.) Dunkirk, produced by Christopher Nolan, sets out to portray the 1940 rescue of the Allied armies from the clutches of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in terms of courage, heroism, survival, and a few examples of cowardice. In that he succeeds admirably. In terms of context—in conveying an understanding of what Dunkirk was about—he fails utterly.

Drama Sans Meaning

Mr. Nolan says context wasn’t the aim. Dunkirk is about communal togetherness and universal goodness. But that could be shown on any beach in any war in the last hundred years from Gallipoli to Normandy to Inchon.…

“Never Surrender,” by John Kelly

17 November 2015 Comments 0 Comments

Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and Britain’s Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940, by John Kelly. Scribner, 2015, 370 pp., $19.88, Kindle $14.99.

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May 1940: Lord Halifax “sounded like a nervous solicitor reading from a half-thought-out brief….When Churchill spoke of fighting on alone, the mantle of history—Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Armada—sang through his sentences.”

Here is a well-written and organized review of mainly well-known events, retold with dramatic prose and crisp analysis. It’s an ideal book for young people unfamiliar with the scope of Churchill’s achievement in 1940, and, indeed, for anyone who wants a good account of the events that saved Western civilization.…