Christopher Nolan’s breathtaking film ‘Dunkirk’ was released to much critical fanfare in 2017, praised for its visual storytelling and realism.
However, according to one of the Second World War’s greatest historians, there are several huge mistakes that filmmakers have gotten away with.
In discussing the film starring Harry Styles, which he worked on in an advisory capacity, James Holland identifies the small but crucial details overlooked by the movie’s creators.
In one scene, where a group of allied soldiers are engaged by rifle fire in a Dunkirk residential street, Holland points out that the street is “too clean” given that in reality, it would have been shelled to “within an inch of its life”.
Speaking on the Penguin Books UK YouTube channel Holland says: “Christopher Nolan famously doesn’t like using CGI and this is a bit of an issue.
“At this time, Dunkirk has been shelled to within an inch of its life, it is on fire the whole time, there are huge great clouds of smoke, and there would have been debris everywhere, broken glass, telegraph wires on the ground.”
Holland also points out that the coats that the soldiers are wearing do not represent how soldiers would have been dressed at the time, given that the film is set in May.
He said: “I’ve seen lots and lots of photographs and film footage of British Tommies at Dunkirk and I am not aware of any of them wearing grey coats.”
The British evacuation of Dunkirk, also known as Operation Dynamo, was the emergency evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the shores of France after they had become surrounded by the advancing German Army in May 1940.
The operation is often seen as a sliding doors moment for the conflict, where failure to evacuate such large quantities of troops could have been fatal to the British war effort.
Holland, who has written several supremely successful books on the conflict including, Normandy ‘44, Sicily ‘43 and Cassino ‘44 points out a number of other errors that are often overlooked by the average film enthusiast.
One particular famous scene sees a British Spitfire engage in a dogfight with a German Luftwaffe plane.
Holland said: “I love these aerial sequences, I really think they are fantastic but in terms of historical accuracy, it gets a pretty low rating I’m afraid.
He points out that the planes used are different models to the ones they are depicting whilst it is unlikely that there would be just two British planes operating together.
He said: “Spitfires always operated as a Squadron, which would always send out 12 aircraft, but there are only two of them in the scene.”
Holland also can’t help but point out that scenes showing long bursts of machine gun fire could never have happened due to ammunition constraints, whilst the height at which the planes are operating in the film is thousands of feet too low.
James Holland is one of the UK’s most prominent historians on the subject of the Second World War and is one-half of the hugely popular podcast ‘We Have Ways of Making You Talk” which he hosts with comedian and author Al Murray.