LOS ANGELES: With the cream of the British army cornered by a lightning German advance into northern France, Winston Churchill is told they will be lucky to get 30,000 men out alive.

Yet over nine days in May 1940, more than 10 times that number of British, French and Canadian troops are rescued, many plucked from the beaches by a flotilla of “little ships” crewed by civilian volunteers who set out from England.

The audacious rescue, codenamed Operation Dynamo but immortalised as the “Miracle of Dunkirk”, is the subject of two movies vying for best picture at the Oscars on Sunday.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk sees events through the Allies’ eyes as they face what looks like certain death in France, while Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour follows the travails of Britain’s newly-anointed prime minister back in London.

Despite its relentless high-octane score and action scenes, Dunkirk isn’t really a war film, according to Nolan, who told AFP he wanted to make a “survival story” unlike anything “seen or experienced before in a cinema”.

For Wright, Darkest Hour is a nuanced portrait of a man berated as the irresponsible and reckless architect of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign from the previous world war, who nevertheless stepped up to become a national hero.

The movies have amassed 14 Oscar nominations — eight for Dunkirk, including best film and directing, and six for Darkest Hour, of which best actor is looking like a shoo-in for Gary Oldman, who is unrecognizable as Churchill.No war movie gets a free pass from the history scholars, of course, and experts have found faults with the accuracy of both movies.

“The German army scarcely interfered with the evacuation. There was no ground fighting in the town or port, so Nolan’s opening scene is spurious,” huffed British journalist and historian Max Hastings in The New York Review of Books.

Meanwhile, British military historian Antony Beevor said neither director has been particularly faithful to a monumental week or so when the direction of the entire war could have turned in Nazi Germany’s favour.

“I am afraid that British movie directors do not have much respect for historical truth. They feel compelled to ‘improve’ it even when it is not necessary,” he complained.

Among Beevor’s bugbears is what he sees as Nolan’s downplaying of the role of Britain’s own naval destroyers, which actually did most of the evacuating.

But it was this romantic notion of an armada of civilians leading the rescue effort — the movie’s dramatic centre of gravity — that provided the inspiration for Nolan.Beevor is as harsh on Wright as Nolan, dismissing as “ludicrous and totally fictitious” a scene in Darkest Hour in which Churchill takes a London Underground train and engages passengers on the rights and wrongs of the conflict.

Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2018