Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory
By Michael Korda
(Norton.)
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, Special To The Washington Post
Like Waterloo and Stalingrad, Gettysburg and the Somme, Dunkirk is a place that has become shorthand for a blood-drenched turning point in a greater war. Each name is resonant with misbegotten strategy, unforgiving terrain and the loss of life in truly epic proportions — even when measured by an already costly war. But Dunkirk has a particular distinction, one that Michael Korda captures in the subtitle to his fascinating and occasionally exasperating book “Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory.”
Now, for whatever reason, it’s Dunkirk’s turn for cinematic and popular attention. The story, even by World War II standards, is dramatic. Hundreds of thousands of British Expeditionary Force and French troops, having been defeated by the Germans as they tried to defend Belgium, the Netherlands and France, were stranded on a French beach from May 26 until June 4, 1940. Christopher Nolan’s eponymous film offers only the most glancing reference to how they ended up in such a fix and focuses instead on the sheer vulnerability, terror and discipline of the 400,000 BEF soldiers when they faced, seemingly out of nowhere, the Luftwaffe, which left them cowering and praying to be spared a fatal bullet — until the next assault. Or until the lucky ones were evacuated, provided, of course, they weren’t aboard a vessel that hit a mine or another German attack.
For Nolan, despite the carnage, the myth of the British victory involves the humble, plucky armada of private sailors and captains of all ages who commandeered fishing boats, sailboats, tugboats, ferries and nearly anything that could float to bring the boys back home. By the time they were through, 198,000 British BEF soldiers — half the force sent over — and about 140,000 French soldiers were evacuated. Korda offers a broader context to this great story by pointing out that while this fleet “captured the minds of most people, with yachtsmen and Sea Scouts performing miracles,” the reality “was that good planning by the Royal Navy was responsible for taking the lion’s share of those who were evacuated.”
With riveting detail and often pitch-perfect pacing of the dramatic tension of this early part of the war, Korda interweaves history, politics, geopolitical intrigue, backroom bargaining, generals, admirals, prime ministers and a führer, military strategy, and autobiography to tell the story surrounding those nine days. He begins with the “rumblings of war over Danzig and the Polish corridor in August 1939” and, more than 400 pages later, ends with the battered, often traumatized and fortunate last soldiers arriving in Britain. Korda was also a witness – albeit a pint-size one from a formidable family. “How we arrived there, on the brink of disaster is the subject of this book,” he writes, “at once the modest account of my family’s dispersal and a history of the greater events that led to Dunkirk, and to Britain’s ‘finest hour’ as Winston Churchill called it.” His use of the first person plural is revealing.
Korda’s massive literary output over 45 years includes biographies of Robert E. Lee, T.E. Lawrence and Ulysses S. Grant. “With Wings Like Eagles” explores the “untold” history of the Battle of Britain, and his 1979 memoir, “Charmed Lives: A Family Romance,” is the remarkable story of how three audacious and talented Hungarian Jewish refugee brothers arrived in Britain in the 1930s and reached the stratosphere in the American and British film industries. One of those brothers was Korda’s father, Vincent, the art director of the films, and his uncles were Alexander, a storied producer, and Zoltan, a writer and director. Throughout “Alone,” these famous relatives and spouses, including “Auntie” Merle Oberon, Alexander’s movie star wife, make cameo appearances, offering a kind of cinematic interplay between seismic historical events and inside stories of moviemaking during wartime, squabbling relatives and a little boy watching it all with his nanny.
“Over the years, ‘the Spirit of Dunkirk’ has largely erased the reality of it,” Korda observes. The paradox was how a catastrophic military defeat was transformed into a mythic victory, in almost the amount of time it took to cross the channel from Dunkirk to Dover. Korda remembers listening to the family’s portable radio when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced, “This country is at war with Germany.” Several months after that announcement, Chamberlain lost the confidence of his Parliament, and in May 1940, Churchill became prime minister, just as “the news came that Germany had attacked Holland, Belgium, and France.” The disorganized efforts of the British and French attempting to defend Western Europe were overwhelmed by the Germans, which led to the humiliation and glory of Dunkirk.
There are times when Korda’s re-creation is superb and panoramic — the movements of troops, the despair of politicians, the memories of soldiers, the engagement of the British public feel almost novelistic in pacing and dramatic tension. Photographs, maps, even cartoons offer still more opportunities for a fully immersive experience. What is less satisfying is the parallel story of his family, whose occasionally unexpected appearances have the quality of a Dickensian non sequitur. In the midst of a riveting chapter on inept communications on the ground within the BEF, and how dire military circumstances were presented to the British public, the scene suddenly shifts to the Korda nursery, where “the fate of the BEF was added to my nightly prayers, a sign that by then even Nanny Low, despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Information, understood that the BEF was in grave danger.” One longs for Korda to provide the same psychological insight, emotional resonance or glimmer of introspection to his own circumstances as he so deftly does with Churchill, Chamberlain, BEF commander Lord Gort and others.
In the end, however, these shortcomings might be yet another example of the British pluck and discipline that are so much a part of Dunkirk’s role not just in history but in the country’s psychology. When Korda says he seeks to explain “how we arrived there,” he may not be writing only about how Dunkirk embodied and foretold Britain’s solitary status in the world, but also how alone one 6-year-old boy felt when the world was at war.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones and the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.”
