Christoper Nolan did a tremendous effort to bring us a real feel of the bare survival story in WW2. Dunkirk tells a story of almost all United Kingdom’s professional army survival while is pushed into the corner in a few spring days of 1940. Lost of professional army surely would change the fate of entire WW2.
Dunkirk movie received positive reviews and earned 527 million dollars worldwide. Filmmakers tried to make a realistic look and feel so they did not use CGI. They used cardboard cut-out props of soldiers and military vehicles, real or scale model fighter aircraft, and real warships and private boats, but they did not succeed in everything.
Below are TOP 5 Dunkirk Historical Mistakes.
1. All The Characters Are Fictional
Although Dunkirk is one of best effort to bring history closer to the audience all characters in the movie are fictional. Perhaps, that it is a better way because no one could say; that is not a way it happened to me/my father/etc. The perfect example is Commander Bolton, played by Kenneth Branagh, which role in Operation Dynamo is most similar to unsung Canadian hero James Campbell Clouston. Relatives of Campbell Clouston wrote a letter to producers to use the real name of the hero in the movie. Emma Thomas, one of the producers of Dunkirk and wife of director Nolan, responded that they did not use historical names because the film is a fictionalized version, and Branagh’s character was inspired by the stories of several different men.
2. Planes
One of the intentional historical errors in the movie is to paint noses of German planes in yellow. German Messerschmitt Bf 109 planes featured in dogfights with British Spitfire planes. In the movie, the German planes have yellow noses for better telling which are German and which are British during the fast-paced aerial scenes. In reality, the planes were not painted yellow until about a month after Dunkirk.
Another thing is their planes number. Due to the lack of CGI and using real vehicles lead to a smaller number of main vehicles than in real events. In the whole movie, we saw three British Spitfires guarding Allied soldiers contrary to usual much larger formations. The Brits ware saving planes for the Battle of Britain, but three planes for Operation Dynamo is just craziness. It should be pointed out that Spitfires only had 14 seconds of ammo and couldn’t land on beaches.
3. Part of Small Boats
Like a The Darkest Hour, who showed us the political side of Operation Dynamo, Dunkirk put too much on the role of small boats. Ok, it is a warm human story showing that common people saved a big part of the army, but it is estimated that small ships saved about 5% of all soldiers. We only see two destroyers in movie contrary to 41 of them that was operating at Dunkirk at service of Royal Navy, along with legions of minesweepers and trawlers and lighters.
4. City of Dunkirk and Beach
Opening shots bring us town behind an evacuation beach, a town of Dunkirk. Real town of Dunkirk was severely damaged during WW2 so the scenes were shot in the nearby town of Malo-les-Bains. By the time that movie depicts, the town was already in ruins, although in the movie is still in pretty good shape. Contrary to town scenes, beach scenes were shot in the same place of evacuation.
5. Other nations
Part of other nations is highly neglect and overlook. French soldiers are shown as little possible and not in a good manner although they had a big role in defending the town of Dunkirk so British soldiers could evacuate. At the end of evacuation, 100,000 French soldiers did cross the channel and came to the United Kingdom.
The vast majority of the French who’d been evacuated returned to France after it came to terms with Germany. This isn’t because most were particularly fond of their conquerors or Nazism but because their country was no longer at war and their officers and government told them to come home.
Except for a few black French soldiers, there are only white characters in Dunkirk although in Commonwealth troops ware soldiers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The movie also forgets to mention other nations that had a huge impact on evacuation; the presence of Belgian soldiers is heavily downplayed and Canadians aren’t mentioned once.
