DUNKIRK - The TRUE STORY Explained! - Nolan Fact vs. Fiction

hi I'm Eric Boss and Christopher Nolan's new film dunker tells a story of a critical event World War II now Nolan uses his filmmaking Mastery that he perfected in movies like The Dark Knight to tell a true story that everyone needs to know how several hundred th000 stranded Allied soldiers miraculously escaped the Germans narrowly avoiding a future for us that could have looked like the man in the High Castle now the real backstory of Dunkirk is one of the most dramatic and controversial narratives in modern history so I'm going to explore all those details both things that we see in the movie and things that we don't and real quick big thanks to World of Tanks we're getting to make this video because of them it's an amazing game and as I'll get into tanks actually played a pivotal role in the events leading up to Dunkirk so stick around for a special offer and preview at the end and heads up this movie is based on true events so me talking about history could be a spoiler I mean I'm speaking English right now not German so I guess history spoiled you sorry so in the movie Dunkirk Nolan breaks up the narrative into three perspectives of the event land the soldiers on the beach C the British civilians on a yacht and Sky the RAF pilots who were defending the soldiers as they evacuated but we don't really see the villains of this movie the German soldiers pilots and commanders Nolan instead stages this evacuation more as a Race Against Time and I'll talk about why he does that later but for now let's go back and look at the Germans and how a faithful decision by Hitler made the miracle at Dunkirk possible okay A little background in the early months of World War III German Blitz Creeks caught Allied Forces off guard blowing past their World War I style trenches on France's eastern border and flanking them forcing the Allies to retreat North to the French Resort town on the coast dunk this was May 1940 and the Allies were cornered Germany at this point had taken over Poland Denmark and Norway and they were weeks away from forcing to surrender from France they had Advanced way further than they had in World War I and now 400,000 combined British French Belgian and Canadian troops were stuck on this beach with little hope for rescue as the German forces closed in on them now keep in mind the English Channel is only 30 or so miles across and on a clear day these soldiers could see their Homeland but the water in the channel was too shallow for large transport vessels to pick them up actually German planes dropped leaflets showing maps of the area with English words telling the British soldiers how boxed in they were essentially trying to scare them into surrendering but then something really surprising happened Hitler ordered a halt on the German advance so why did he do this this has been one of the most hotly debated questions among historians for decades and it's considered one of the biggest military missteps by the Germans in the war since they arguably could have ended the war if they finished off the Allies then and there now over the years there have been some conspiracy theories to try to explain this one debunked theory was that Hitler ordered the halt as a sporting gesture to the British in order to try to like gain Goodwill either to make make peace further down the road or because he was a white supremacist and didn't want to kill too many of his fellow anglos now this explanation probably wasn't the case the evidence of it is shaky at best and really this theory has largely been Advanced by people who like to revise history to make Hitler looked like more of a military Mastermind than he really was you got to be careful around people who start saying too many nice things about Hitler he was a really good speaker uh yeah yeah we get it but the more likely reason is also super interesting German Blitz Crees were so successful that their tanks outpaced their infantry foot soldiers so these German tanks were left stranded as well without supply lines of fuel and ammo and food they were too exposed to Allied fire so enter General gervon runed commander of German Army group a and he requested that the German Advance stall to give time for the Infantry to catch up radad brought this up with Hitler and Hitler agreed because apparently when he was a soldier in World War I he fought in this same M part of northern France and he remembered how marshy and uneven the terrain is which would make it difficult for tanks then on top of that Hitler was receiving pressure from the head of the LT baa the German air force Herman gorin he wanted to use planes to wipe out the Allies on the beach and to Hitler that seemed like less of a potential cost of German soldiers lives whatever the exact reason for it those three days with the Germans not advancing on the dunker Beach gave the Allies just enough time to fortify the defenses and the Inland areas around the beach so that they could could hold off the Germans long enough when they did eventually arrive and the day after the German halt Winston Churchill who had only been British prime minister for a few weeks went on the radio to announce operation Dynamo ordering all available civilian vessels to cross the channel and assist in the evacuation unlike the large British Navy transport vessels these smaller ones could go through shallower Waters and we're talking about pretty much any type of vote that British people would have been using at this time fishing boats yachts and some claim to have come from as far north as the Isle of Man in Glasgow but really we should say the decisive call came from Captain William Tennant he was the one who led the evacuation effort for the British Navy so the docks at Dunkirk were all damaged so tenant ordered to dock the ships Instead at the mole a mole is a rocky seaw wall that closes in a beach so by docking the vessels at this mole they were able to get way more people off the beach this way in fact in just one of those days they got 68,000 men off the beach in fact that's why in the movie Dunkirk Chris Nolan names the third of the movie that takes place on the beach the mole meanwhile as the Germans got wind of this the halt ended in a huge battle raged on over the heads of these stranded soldiers in the first few days of the evacuation the Allies got really lucky with weather the waters on the channel were calmer than usual and there were low clouds that made it harder for the German Luft vafa to Target and attack the soldiers on the beach still this was an extremely perilous 11 days with hundreds of thousands of men anxiously waiting to be picked up praying that the clouds wouldn't clear and unfortunately on many of those days it did end up being good flying weather and the German planes did drop bombs on them and spray them with gunfire this is why Nolan is so effective depicting in this movie As a Race Against Time these soldiers didn't really see the faces of the Germans that were attacking them they were just waiting for any boat large enough to arrive to get them the hell out of there and even then those boats were being targeted by Torpedoes by German OTS in fact of those vessels 243 of them were sunk and some of the soldiers were so Des desperate that they tried swimming across the channel but yeah that's a really hard swim even for good swimmers and these soldiers had gear weighing them down and German Pilots up above targeting them the movie gets into all of this on a deeply personal level which we get glimpses of in the trailer Killian Murphy plays a British soldier who's so desperate to escape that he begs the yacht that picks him up in the channel to Desert his fellow troops there's also this line was the bloody Air Force yeah another issue for the Allies was that the British royal Air Force pilots were relatively untested like many of the Spitfire Pilots had never been in real aerial combat compared to the German lifafa mmid Pilots many of whom had fought in the Spanish Civil War but luckily the British ended up prevailing in the skies the exact numbers aren't certain but the lefta did have more planes shot down than the RAF did but we shouldn't forget the real unsung heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation the French rear guard they stayed behind engaging the advancing Germans holding them off until the last of the British left on June 3rd Winston Churchill ended up ordering his na maybe to turn around to make good on a promise to rescue the French as well and the next day 26,000 more French soldiers were evacuated but by that time 30 to 40,000 had already surrendered to the Germans now to be clear in the short term Dunkirk was a huge military defeat for the Allies the Germans had essentially forced them to retreat out of Continental Europe and ended up marching into Paris 2 weeks later also the Allies were forced to leave all their equipment behind huge supplies of ammo Firearms tanks and vehicles whatever they couldn't disable fell into the German hands and the Allies returned to Britain with just a fraction of their equipment which they now had to replenish but in the long term Dunkirk was a major victory for one on a practical level these rescued soldiers would later be part of the war effort to liberate France from German occupation but really on a symbolic level Dunkirk played a major role in war propaganda inspiring the allies with this story of British military and civilians coming together in their finest hour in fact the term Dunkirk spirit is still used to describe the British public coming together to overcome times of adversity now that you know the history a little better hopefully do you think Chris Nolan's Dunkirk accurately depicts what these soldiers really went through okay again the reason we even got to make this video is because our friends at World of Tanks sponsored it so thank you so much to them World of Tanks is a game where you can command history's most powerful tanks and experience tactical combat like never before it's set in the mid 20th century and you have access to an impressive roster of over 450 authentic tanks from powerful steel Brawlers to light and fast Scouts for me seeing a great war movie like Dunkirk has really gotten me into war history lately so it's awesome to feel part of the action and to join this armored Warfare sensation along with 150 million other players worldwide click on the link below in the description and the first 300 viewers to use our unique code of Tanks rule 2017 get 7 Days of Premium Time 350 gold and a free premium tank so get on this this game is definitely worth trying out also like this video and and share it around tweet your thoughts about Dunkirk with me directly at eaos or follow new RockStar at new rockstars And subscribe to this channel to get more of these in-depth looks at these movies in fact we have another really interesting video coming out about Dunkirk so keep an eye out for it all right thanks for watching bye

Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 563,198

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Id: 9RPviCT7SWU

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2017