Dunkirk: The Fight to the Last Man (review)

After victories in battle, retreats are probably the most fascinating of all military accounts. From Xenophon's famous "March of the 10,000" to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow and Rommel's withdrawal across North Africa, the fate of vanquished warriors who refuse to surrender but make their way home, fighting as they do so, possess the quality, generally, of epic. Many soldiers—often most—will be killed or captured; but those who make it to safety will be heroes, despite defeat.

Hugh Sebag Montefiore's Dunkirk: The Fight to the Last Man is a new and welcome addition to this literature. It a sincere attempt, by a former journalist, to rechart the Allied defense of the West in the spring of 1940 and its dénouement: the evacuation of over 300,000 British and French soldiers, after only three weeks of active war, at a small seaport on the Franco-Belgian border that would become legendary: Dunkerque.

Like my own father, the author's cousin fought at Dunkirk, and he wishes naturally to honor his service. Had the retreat and evacuation failed, as Sebag Montefiore points out, the consequences for "all Anglo-Jewish families" would have been "catastrophic." He decided therefore to assemble as many unpublished or little-known accounts of the saga as possible, and weave them together with new maps and almost a hundred unusual photographs; these he presents as examples of "the most important and heroic actions," in a larger politico-military campaign—picking out those that will give the reader "a feel for what it was like to be in the British front line as the great events were unfolding."

In this respect—rather like Ian McEwen's recent novel Atonement, which exploited documents in the Imperial War Museum's collection to great effect—Sebag Montefiore has been both diligent and successful. There are many actions, skirmishes and records that will be unfamiliar to even the well-versed military reader, and they are well told. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the author in the additional role he has taken on: namely that of historian.

The problem—an interesting one for military writers—is the author's complete unwillingness to exercise his judgment. A cast of famous, infamous, and completely unknown characters—Hitler, Churchill, Weygand, Gort, Dill, Dixon, Vranken—mount the stage of northern Europe, completely bereft of military evaluation, authorial discipline or strong opinion. Since the author holds no powerfully argued overall view of the proceedings—despite an earlier career as an attorney—there is neither argument nor epos, save perhaps the claim to new respect for those British Expeditionary Force soldiers who defended the final outer perimeter, many of whom perished in the last days. Their self-sacrifice explains the book's subtitle—which is misleading. Yes, some British units did fight bravely to the bloody end—but the truth is, most didn't. And therein lies the book's shortcoming for any military-minded reader.

The tragedy of Dunkirk is far too serious to heroicize. Sebag Montefiore points benignly to the usual suspects: deficient weaponry, subordination to French command, poor French morale. While these factors doomed the Allied defense of the West, the British army's performance (which is the focus of the book) cannot and should not be so simply papered over. The fact is, Britain not only had a major peacetime army, with officers experienced from service in World War I and two decades of active operations across an interwar empire, but had eight months of World War II (the so-called Phoney War, which began on 3 September 1939) in France to prepare for combat against the Germans if, as expected, Hitler invaded the West. Sebag Montefiore makes much of the Mechelen affair (in which German attack plans were first captured by the Allies, but were then, as a result, altered by the Germans), but he utterly...