The ‘miracle of deliverance’ remembered

With Christopher Nolan’s war film ‘Dunkirk’ about to be released, Anthony Peregrine considers the reasons why the French town demands a visit

Christopher Nolan’s wannabe blockbuster Dunkirk – covering the epic 1940 evacuation – hits UK screens on Friday. Starring Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Fionn Whitehead and, unexpectedly, Harry Styles, it will doubtless educate, excite and make money. But should it motivate us to cross the Channel, to see the port in the flesh? Well, yes, obviously, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it.

Granted, Dunkirk is not a destination for a two-week break, any more than you’d spend a fortnight in Harwich. But a couple of days will be amply justified – even a long weekend. There are frequent ferries from Dover – I’d not hesitate. So let us count the reasons for a visit to this French port.

First, there’s a rightness to visiting the places where our fathers and grandfathers fought, suffered and died. In this sense, Dunkirk is like the Somme or D-Day beaches, but with added ambiguity. The fact that 338,226 good guys were hauled from the Dunkirk beaches – “a miracle of deliverance”, according to Churchill – doesn’t disguise the fact that we were on the run from the Germans. We’d lost. Or, to put it another way, this was a mini-success within “a colossal military disaster” (Churchill again). Standing on Dunkirk beach, you may not summon up the terror felt by exhausted young men – the threat these days is from runaway sandyachts, not Stukas – but that doesn’t mean the effort is worthless.

Secondly, tracking the movie around town is especially rewarding because, in so doing, you’re also tracking the real 1940 evacuation sites. Much of the film was shot on the spot – on the beach, for instance, all 10 miles of it, stretching away to Belgium. The queues of desperate thousands snaked to the waterline and then waded beyond: gentle shelving impeded even small boats from getting to shore. Nolan’s cameras were here in spring 2016, the more distant queues, incidentally, represented by cardboard cut-outs.

Meanwhile, on the seafront behind, 19th and early 20th-century villas – fancy items built by the Flemish bourgeoisie – provided the backdrop to both 1940 terror and to Nolan’s film, for many have survived through to our utilitarian times. They constitute a lively contrast to the old port, which takes up where the beach stops. Like all ports, it’s an incomprehensible tangle of water, metal, stone, cranes, wasteland, and hard work in abeyance.

But you’re going there to see the Eastern Jetty, which still sticks way out to sea, as it did in May 1940. With the main parts of Dunkirk port destroyed, the jetty – somehow ignored by the Luftwaffe – was the British forces’ best chance of getting men away in large batches.

The little ships – because they betokened popular commitment – forged the Dunkirk myth, but at least two-thirds of the troops were taken off the Eastern Jetty by destroyers and other big boats, up to 900 men at a time. The success was theirs, and the jetty naturally featured in the movie – thus film and reality fuse once again. Stand silent for a moment, and it’s as moving as a jetty can be.

Thirdly, should you wish properly to understand the evacuation – codenamed Operation Dynamo – then Musée Dunkerque 1940 is the place to start (dynamo-dunkerque.com/en; £7). I say that with confidence, though the museum is presently shut for an overhaul and re-opening is scheduled for July 17. Pre-closure, it was already a commendable spot; now it will doubtless be even better at illustrating how, by May 21 1940, the Wehrmacht had trapped the British Expeditionary Force and three French armies in and around Calais and Dunkirk.

The evacuation was planned. It was thought perhaps 45,000 men might be saved, but then, on May 22, Hitler stopped his Panzers outside Dunkirk. No one is sure why. Maybe it was just an enormous cock-up. Whatever the truth, the delay gave the Allies time to establish camps and defences and, on May 26, start the cross-Channel shuttle of 800 boats. Although tanks were held up, the Luftwaffe proved merciless – to both soldiery and Dunkirk civilians, of whom 2,000 died. Others got through, without food or much water. “I remember it as a very noisy nine days,” said a survivor, recently. By June 4, when the Germans