A hard act to follow
Stars of Dunkirk and their real-life war hero relatives
IT is a film based on heroic deeds summed up brilliantly by its tagline: “400,000 men couldn’t get home, so home came for them.”
Dunkirk re-creates the historic evacuation in which military and civilian ships swarmed across the Channel to France to rescue stranded troops, dodging German bombs and machine-gun fire.
Around 340,000 soldiers were lifted in Operation Dynamo as Winston Churchill mobilised nearly 1,000 vessels. Some 70,000 soldiers were captured or killed. The film’s stars – including Harry Styles, Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance – were humbled to meet veterans at the star-studded premiere in London last week.
But it seems that many of the actors had already been inspired by tales of their own ancestors.
From survivors of the brutal Japanese prisoner of war camps and RAF aces downed over France in the Second World War, to family men who shrugged off their exemption to volunteer in the First World War, here we reveal the heroes in their family trees.