The truth is an easy victim

One always needs to beware of history written by the winning side and even more so of entertainment masquerading as history.

One of the most powerful, and dangerous, sectors of modern society is the movie industry. That’s because, in most major productions with an historical flavour, fact and fiction are almost impossible to separate.

I haven’t yet seen the movie, but I suspect that will also be the case with the blockbuster Dunkirk, which has just opened on the local circuit and purports to tell the tale of how Britain snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by evacuating almost 350 000 of its troops from France in 1940 ahead of the advancing German armies.

The mythology of Dunkirk – assiduously created and promoted by Prime Minister Winston Churchill – is that a brave little armada of private boats sailed into a war zone to rescue the soldiers. And that army was preserved and able to go back to Europe four years later on D-day, the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

It also enabled the pugnacious Churchill to gain eternal fame for his “we will fight them on the beaches” speech, which was a prelude to the Battle of Britain.

The problem with that largely uncontested, London-generated, view of events is that there are some inconvenient facts and questions which arise.

Firstly, there is credible evidence the British Expeditionary Force did not tell its French and Belgian allies they were being abandoned, allowing them to hold a perimeter against the Germans while the British evacuation was prepared.

When French soldiers also tried to board the boats, they were, on occasion, forcibly turned back and, in one case, actually fired on by the British. (Perfidious Albion, anyone?) Then, the biggest question of all: Why did Hitler halt his troops’ advance for a crucial two days?

After the war, British historian and former army officer Basil Liddell Hart interviewed German officers, who said the order was given because Hitler did not want to humiliate Britain by destroying its army and he wanted to make peace with London.

Peace was not something Churchill would ever consider and there is a (admittedly minority) view that the failure to negotiate a ceasefire with the Germans prolonged World War II by five years and took millions more lives.

It certainly seems plausible that, had the Germans not been halted by their commander, they could have swept through to Dunkirk, forcing the most humiliating surrender in British military history.

That’s not likely to be covered in the movie, so another myth will be strengthened rather than questioned. Truth is not eternal and is an easy victim for propagandists.

Ask any Polish person, even today, about the massacre in the Katyn Forest in 1940, after the Germans and Russians simultaneously invaded. For decades, the mass killing of thousands of Polish army officers was blamed on the Nazis.

A number of German officers were sentenced to death in the Nuremberg trials for supposed involvement in the massacre.

Only in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, was it revealed the executions were carried out by Soviet soldiers.

So, one always needs to beware of history written by the winning side and even more so of entertainment masquerading as history.