Will we EVER be honest about the Second World War?

HOW we love to wallow in the Second World War. Though it ended more than 70 years ago, it is the bit of our past we refer to most, in politics and fiction.

The film Their Finest is no exception to the usual rule: lots of smoking, lots of sirens, lots of joy snatched in the midst of grief and danger. Though it mocks ever so slightly some of the pretences of propaganda, it still treads delicately around what has become our national religion.

And it is accompanied by trailers for yet more of the same. Here comes another film about Winston Churchill, and a movie about Dunkirk. Will either tell the truth, that Dunkirk was a dreadful, needless defeat caused by political posturing, which almost cost us the war; and that after 1940 and the ‘Finest Hour’, Churchill’s leadership was often gravely mistaken?

I doubt it. Because we lost so much wealth and power in the Second World War, we still have to keep telling ourselves that we won it. Or did we – as my father (who served in a pretty rough bit of it) used to ask from time to time, as he contemplated the state

of the country he had helped to save.