The real god of war is memory, because the actual objective of war is the creation of myth. National memory is base metal forged into national myth, and from war stories spring a people’s sacred identity.

Dunkirk is the memory, now myth, that reforged British identity and built it anew. The privation and sacrifice of defeat became the beginning of a national rebirth.

The new movie “Dunkirk” has subtly repackaged the mythic tropes of this now-eternal story. At the end of a calamitous campaign, here was the very cream of Allied power, the very best of the French Armée and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), reduced to a hopeless beachhead under a pitiless Wehrmacht full-court press.

The literary tropes that came after Dunkirk, however, worked to create a very different sacred narrative: (1) The Nazi war machine could have seized the Allied army whole, but the German hesitated: Not once, but twice. (2) It was a miracle to get the army off in the face of Stukas and U-boats. (3) Had the BEF been lost, Britain would have been broken and wide open to invasion.

This Dunkirk narrative, for every British generation since, is a stirring, reach-for-the-handkerchiefs story, and it deserves to be respun yet again for the cinematic memory of new young generations. Britons should be forever proud of their achievement. Dunkirk was indeed a heroically disordered strategic retreat.

But it was no miracle. Yet “miracle” is crucial to Britons’ neon-lit narrative. It is their miracle moreover that delivers the sacred message: Britain indomitable, moving from sacrifice to rebirth—to victory.

It is a mistake, however, to rework sacred narrative entirely into literature. To do so is to lead the national identity toward collective overconfidence and complacency, to the point that it forgets what really happened. Dunkirk, the story, is worth at least a modest reminder on that score.

First, the highly conservative top Wehrmacht leadership got suddenly cautious approaching the trapped Allied army. German lines of communication were overextended, armor had outrun infantry, and the BEF was suddenly fierce in counterattacks and defense.

Top generals are scolded for this, but their caution illustrates a reality in campaigning that myth encourages us to forget: In war, even the most decisive campaigns do not go perfectly. It is, however, in the interest of the Dunkirk narrative that the Germans seem invincible and unstoppable, only then to let the British and French slip away. The trope of German “mistakes” fits smartly into a longstanding element of British sacred narrative—namely, that of the “plucky” or “doughty” army escaping in the face of an overwhelming enemy. Here, the enemy is denied the vernichstungsschlacht (battle of annihilation) that they have already boasted is theirs. Thus, in robbing the enemy of their victory-expectation, the British earn a kind of victory. Thomas Moore’s sacrifice at Corunna in 1809 is the prototype and model for this unique English victory-narrative.

Hence, right after the battle, Dunkirk’s memory could be repackaged. Suddenly it was no national calamity, but actually a moral and strategic victory.

Second, Wehrmacht and Führer “loss of ball control” leads into the crucial trope of Dunkirk as a “miracle.” On the level of sacred myth, miracle hearkens explicitly to divine intervention (an Episcopal priest first made this linkage in his homily right after the battle). God and Britannia look after the empire.

On another level, a miraculous outcome also reinforces the weight and depth of Britain’s victory claim. Succor, so the story goes, rightly should never have happened. Hence, some elemental force deep in the heart of the nation rose up and transcended in the face of certain doom. The legend of motor yacht, pinnace and cockelshell heroes is essential to the salvational myth of Dunkirk.

But there was, literally, no miracle. The defense of the Dunkirk “pocket” was gallant and stubborn. But surrounded armies can often hold out for weeks. A comparably sized army in Stalingrad held out against bitter Soviet assaults for eleven weeks during peak Russian winter, with only a trickle of resupply. Backs against the wall, British and French forces held. Not a miracle, just good fighting spirit.

There was no way Wehrmacht forces were going to waste themselves in frontal attacks like British at the Somme or Japanese at Port Arthur. Remember, the Wehrmacht had yet to assault and conquer the rest of France. The battle of the Dunkirk Pocket faithfully followed the siege and breakout script of mid-twentieth century battle.

Nor, frankly, was Dunkirk a miracle in terms of men saved: Out of approximately 400,000 soldiers on the beachhead, nearly 300,000 escaped. One in five soldiers was left behind for capture, or killed (80,000 French and British captured, 11,000 killed). Overall numbers give the impression that the whole 300,000 soldiers evacuated were saved for the long-term war effort against the Axis. Yet this was not the case. Most of the 120,000 French soldiers rescued at Dunkirk were then ferried back to Cherbourg and other ports to return to the final, lost battle for the Third Republic. They either died or became German POWs. Only a handful of French rescued at Dunkirk fought the Axis for the long term. In the context of the entire battle of France, within weeks actual Dunkirk losses were closer to 200,000, constituting nearly 50 percent overall campaign losses.

Third, even had Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe pulled off the impossible, and captured the entire 400,000 men trapped on the beaches, Nazi Germany could never have invaded Britain.

For one thing, Germany was not ready to mount an invasion. However much they then rushed to build an invasion fleet for Operation Sea Lion (Seelöwe), their buildup never matched Britain’s response. Germany was no more ready to assault Kent and Sussex in October than they were in June 1940.

Moreover, Germany was never able to control the English Channel. During Operation Dynamo, the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe actually sunk one-third of all British vessels involved in the operation. Think: They sank nearly 33 percent of all rescue shipping to Dunkirk, and still failed to stop the evacuation.

Greater Germany and the British Empire were in many ways equally matched in 1940. Britain had the superior navy, Germany the stronger army and air forces had equivalent combat power. As Narvik, BEF 1, BEF 2, Greece and Dieppe showed, Britain could put modest expeditionary armies on the continent, where they would then be defeated. The Narvik operation was evacuated unscathed, but with BEF 1 (Dunkirk / Operation Dynamo), losses reached 25 percent. BEF 2 (Operation Ariel) losses approached 20 percent. For Greece and Crete (German operations Marita and Merkur), British losses were closer to 35–40 percent, as was Dieppe (Operation Jubilee).

Yet equally elusive was a successful German invasion of Britain. Any Nazi assault, with or without a rescued BEF, was bound to fail. Why? D-Day proved the negative, that no successful invasion could be mounted in the face of enemy sea control and airpower equivalence.

Plus there was one other decisive factor: Assured resupply. Right from the start on D-Day itself, the United States was moving 20,000 tons of supplies and 3 million gallons of fuel across the Normandy beaches every day. Germans could only have dreamed of such godlike logistics. Remember, in World War II the Wehrmacht, like the Deutsches Heer of 1914 supplied its armies with more than a million horses.

Modern analysis and wargaming judges Operation Sea Lion a likely Nazi debacle.

By all means let us join our British and Empire cousins, in remembering and celebrating the battle of Dunkirk. Yet we should be mindful how passion drives our memory of war—so as not to let passion wholly drive our understanding of war.

With national myth especially, Americans must try to keep a cool eye, and a clear head.

nationalinterest.org

In reality is Britain still a major military power? And when the broad sweep of 20^th century military history is taken into account, has the British military ever really been an effective fighting force? The views of General Sir Richard Barrons, one of the former chiefs of the four services, should give everyone who promotes the idea of Britain as an effective, major military power, pause for thought. Back in September 2016 General Barrons stated that due to nearly a decades worth of stringent cuts to the UK defence budget Britain's military had «withered» and would not even be capable of defending the UK against a serious military attack let alone fight in conventional wars. In a forthright and refreshingly honest ten page memo to the Tory British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, the General made clear that: «Neither the UK homeland nor a deployed force — let alone both concurrently — could be protected from a concerted Russian air effort». So, in the expert opinion of the former head of the UK's Joint Forces Command the British military would be wholly inadequate in protecting the UK against an external military force acting with hostile intent. The first duty of any military is to be able to secure and defend the homeland of its country. If the UK military are not even up to this task, how can they be called a major military power and how can Theresa May with any credibility lecture other countries about their defence preparations when the UK military could not even defend the UK in the event of a major military attack?

In particular, the performance of the British army throughout the 20^th century and early 21^st century raises serious concerns if the British army is really fit for purpose. Despite having vastly more troops than the Wehrmacht and the added strength of the French army, the British Expeditionary Force was unable to secure the borders of France against the invading Nazis and were resoundingly defeated and humiliated with their withdrawal to and subsequent scuttle from Dunkirk. Indeed, the British army were very lucky that they were not completely annihilated at Dunkirk and it was only due to ironically and perversely the mercy of Adolf Hitler and his peculiar admiration for England. The Nazis could have finished off the British army at Dunkirk but rather than delivering the killer blow Hitler allowed the remnants of the British army to escape. Indeed one of Hitler's last statements before his suicide on 30 April 1945, claimed that he had allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape as a «sporting gesture» in order to induce British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to conclude a peace agreement with Nazi Germany.

The rest of the performance of the British army during World War II was mediocre at best and embarrassing at worst. Comedy caricatures always contain a grain of truth and there was a reason why the BBC commissioned the comedy «Dad's Army» because in many ways that was what the British army were and still are to this day. The British military historian Max Hastings has been scathing in his critique of the British army's performance during World War II describing it as «poor». During the early years of the Second World War, the British Army suffered defeat in almost every theatre of war in which it was deployed, due mainly to neglect in the interwar period and poor strategic leadership. With mass conscription, the expansion of the British Army was reflected in the formation of larger armies and army groups. From 1943, the larger and better equipped British Army never suffered a strategic defeat (although there were failures, most notably the Battle of Arnhem, part of Operation Market Garden, in September 1944). 

Yet, the hard geopolitical reality is Britain's military would never have been able to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate the occupied European countries without the overwhelmingly superior fighting forces of the Americans and Russians. Alongside the United States as part of a UN force, the British army was unable to hold off against Chinese intervention in the Korean war and was driven back to the 38th parallel away from the Chinese/North Korean border and trapped in a war of attrition which finally ended in stalemate in 1953. The Suez Canal intervention was an absolute unmitigated disaster. Closer to home, the British army was unable to defeat outright the Provisional Irish Republican Army during its terrorist insurgency in Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s. It is strange how the British army were unable to bring to heel the IRA given the fact that Northern Ireland is such a small province of only six counties, roughly the size of Yorkshire with a population then of roughly only 1.5 million people. 

But sadly they proved incapable of being able to root out the IRA and restore law and order to a tiny province. With all the resources and sophistication of the British state and military the IRA were able to wage war against the British state, British civilians and the British military over the course of three decades and wrestle the British military and government to a stalemate by the 1990s resulting in the ensuing peace process. Perhaps the only bright spot for the performance of the British military acting independently during the latter half of the 20^th century was the Falklands War but then again the UK would never have been able to win the war without significant behind the scenes military technology assistance from the United States and it would really would have been shocking if the British could not take on and defeat what was at the time a developing, Latin-American banana republic in the form of Galtieri's Argentina.

Looking over recent conflicts of the early 21^st century that the British military have been involved in does not inspire much confidence in the performance of and leadership of the UK military. Iraq is an absolute disaster and breeding ground from radical Islamist extremist terrorist. It is a bigger security headache now that what it was prior to the UK-US invasion of 2003. Meanwhile Afghanistan is not much better. It was truly shocking, disappointing and deeply upsetting that after all the time and money and lives and resources expended by the British military in securing Helmand province that once the British army largely withdrew the province was once again overrun by Taliban forces. As Major Richard Streatfield, who spent seven months in Sangin in 2009 and 2010 with the Rifles, said it was «hugely disappointing» to see the Sangin under threat again. »I won't deny, on a personal level, it does make you wonder – was it worth it?» he said. «Because if the people we were trying to free Afghanistan from are now able to just take it back within two years, that shows that something went badly wrong at the operational and strategic level». Quite. Perhaps from a cold headed analysis of the performance of the British military in various theatres of war throughout the 20^th century and most certainly early 21st century would reveal that on an operational and strategic level the British military is not a major global military force as the British Government would have their public believe. As Mrs Thatcher said of spin: «Such is presentation. How different from reality». 

Mrs Thatcher’s entire reason for being in politics was to make Britain, «Great» again, if it had ever really been «Great» to begin with. By May 1979 – when Mrs Thatcher was elected Prime Minister and made history becoming the United Kingdom’s first female Head of Government – politicians, economists, businessmen, journalists, governments (both allies of Britain and enemies) had taken to calling Britain the «Sick Man of Europe». The once mighty British Empire, which had ruled one quarter of the world at the start of the 20th century (by stealing other countries land, resources and wealth through imperialism) had become a laughing stock to most of the developed and developing world by the 1970s incapable of governing authoritatively and efficiently her own affairs at home or projecting power abroad. In his last dispatch as British Ambassador to Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson wrote withering critique of Britain. In 1962, the former American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson quipped that «Britain had lost an Empire and yet to find a role». This neatly summed up the confusion and paralysis that gripped Britain after the end of World War II. It is still true of the Britain of 2015 and so too is the well-earned label the «Sick Man of Europe».

Acheson’s wise insight into Britain’s predicament in the early 1960s lies at the heart of the never-ending, boring and parochial debate on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The English have never been able to accept and adjust to the reality that while they may have won the First and Second World War (thanks to the United States and Russia), it has been Germany who won the peace with her economy far more dynamic, productive and efficient than the sclerotic UK economy and German wealth, political power and industry has been the dominant force in Europe from the late 1950s onwards. The English went out and colonized the world, and now the world has colonized England, and the English can’t stand it.

Hence the xenophobia of the anti-EU brigade exemplified by the overwhelmingly anti-European and anti-immigrant Conservative Party and it’s even more extreme twin the vile United Kingdom Independence Party.

There are quite a lot of English – people both in the general public and the political and media elite who seriously believe the UK could survive and thrive outside the European Union. The English have always suffered from delusions of grandeur throughout their history and have been afflicted by a superiority complex when it comes to other peoples, nations and cultures. There has always been a strand of ignorant, offensive and irrational arrogance within the English which has led them to believe they are better than the Americans, better than continental Europeans, better than Russians, Indians, Chinese et al. Only the English could be so insensitive and arrogant to call a stop on the Docklands Light Railway in the heart of the investment banking centre Canary Wharf the "East India Quay" after the East India Company which colonized India and Pakistan.

However, the reality of Britain’s performance economically, educationally, politically and on the battlefield has been patchy at best. In every major strategic theatre of military confrontation during the early years of WWII the British Army was humiliated by the superior fighting forces of the Wehrmacht symbolized most starkly in the infamous scuttle of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk and the Fall of France to the Nazis in the summer of 1940. Britain would never have been able to defeat Nazi Germany if it had not been for the United States and Soviet Union doing the heavy lifting.

Economically, the UK economy became such a basket case by 1976 it had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to be bailed out. Today UK national debt stands at a staggering and unsustainable £1.56 trillion, or 81.58% of total UK Gross Domestic Economic Output. At the start of 2015 the annual cost of servicing (paying the interest) on this public debt amounted to around £43bn (which is roughly 3% of GDP or 8% of UK government tax income). Due to the UK Government's significant budget deficit, the national debt is increasing by approximately £107 billion per annum, or around £2 billion each week. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development there is a considerable gap between the richest households in the UK and the poorest – the top 20% of UK population earn nearly six times as much as the bottom 20%. The levels of economic inequality in the UK of 2015 are now equivalent to the times of Charles Dickens while social mobility is lower than it was in the 1950s.

Educationally, England has one of the most polarized class-based education systems in the world which underpins one of the most rigid and static social class systems in Europe. Socially England is afflicted with one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the European Union, outdone only by Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia. According to the UK Office for National Statistics 23.3 per 1000 girls aged between 15-17 years old in England are giving birth. There were 5,740 pregnancies in girls aged under 18 in the three months to June 2014 according to data from the Office for National Statistics. One of these births alone will costs the UK taxpayer on average £100,000 spread over a five-year period. What does that indicate about the moral and social health of England? The culture of binge drinking amongst the emotionally repressed stiff upper lip English is one of the highest in the world as is the obscene culture of English football hooliganism dubbed the English Disease.

Now, with all the international and national problems that the UK faces in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world – from the exodus of refugees fleeing Syria, Libya and Iraq; the threat of ISIS; the impending global apocalypse of climate change and an out of control planetary population growth rate; to the domestic state of UK finances, youth employment, job opportunities, the quality and efficiency of British public services; the extortionate cost of living in the UK; the ticking time bomb that is the UK welfare state and the breakdown of social cohesion in the UK – the Government of David Cameron has decided to plunge the UK into a pointless, time wasting and deeply insular referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union and with it the UK’s place in the world for purely domestic party political reasons to keep Cameron’s overwhelmingly hostile anti-European backbenchers appeased.

There is a Cold War raging in Whitehall. Just as the visionary and brilliant Golden Age in enhanced Sino-British relations has revealed deep tensions and fissures within the Cameron Government and Britain’s security, foreign policy, intelligence and military Establishment so too are the issues of Britain’s membership of the European Union and policies on immigration battle lines within the stuffy and repressed, grey and drab, ugly, male dominated corridors of Whitehall. The overarching context to this Whitehall Cold War is not strategic, internationalist or policy orientated. It is pure domestic Party Power Politics, specifically the behind the scenes battle raging for the impending vacancy of the Leadership of the Tory Party and with it the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The lead protagonists in this Whitehall Cold War are the Home Secretary Theresa May whose department the Home Office (described by a former Home Secretary as «Not Fit for Purpose») is in charge of Britain’s domestic surveillance, security and intelligence (stupid) services such as MI5. May will stand for the leadership of the Tory Party when the Prime Minister steps down before the 2020 General Election. She has high hopes to become Britain’s second female Prime Minister following in the footsteps of Mrs Thatcher, though she is a pale imitation of Margaret Thatcher. It is her Department and by extension the UK domestic security (stupid) service MI5 who have been most hostile to Britain’s membership of the European Union, continued openness as a global country welcoming of immigrants and enhancing vital strategic relationships of profound global importance such as Sino-British partnership.

May draws support from the xenophobic, deeply bigoted, hang ‘em and flog ‘em, anti-European, little Englander, quasi fascist faction of extreme right wing Tories within the Conservative Party. Just as her Department has churned out poisonous anti-immigrant and anti-European propaganda so too is the Home Secretary and her acolytes and apparatchiks vehemently opposed to Britain being China’s «Best Friend in the West». Ironically, for all Mrs May’s tough talk on reducing the net level of immigration into Britain, after five years at the helm of the Home Office, she and her «Not Fit for Purpose» Department have failed miserably in the task they promised to carry out for the British electorate and have attempted to pass the buck in a cowardly and cack handed manner typical of the Home Office.

As Mrs Thatcher said of propaganda and spin: «Such is presentation. How different from reality." Interestingly, Mrs May has recruited a new apparatchik, a so-called «Special Advisor» who seems to be the inspiration for the cocky up-start Max Denbeigh in the new Bond film Spectre. Funnily enough, Mrs May’s «Special Advisor" who has carved out a career as an "expert" in national security and cyber issues was educated at Loughborough University which is a «Sports» University and does not even rank in the top ten of UK universities, though in Whitehall it is not «what you know but who you know».

The boys (for Whitehall is an overwhelmingly male though physically unimpressive) network based on the hereditary principles of birth, schooling and patronage rather than individual merit reigns supreme. This «Special Advisor» had previously, at a young age, worked in the Home Office within a unit called the Office for Counter-terrorism and Security as it’s Deputy Director. The Director at the time was a man called Mr Charles Farr, privately educated, who has just recently been appointed Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

On the other side of this Whitehall Cold War is the main rival to Mrs May’s leadership ambitions, the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and his more enlightened and globalist Treasury Department and the British Foreign Office (the main intelligence hub of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency with its Diplomatic Corps and network of Foreign Embassies). The well educated, erudite, intellectual, cultured and sophisticated true specialists of the Treasury’s Economist Civil Service and Foreign Office diplomats understand the profound dangers of the UK pulling out of the European Union, the catastrophic consequences this would have for the fragile and lackluster British economy which is heavily dependent on markets and trade with EU member states, inward foreign investment and the position of London as a leading World Financial Centre.

The Treasury and Foreign Office also understand, unlike the Home Office, that both Washington DC and Beijing as well as NATO are firmly against the UK pulling out of Europe and becoming an isolationist, tiny little island off the coast of France. The only value the UK has to the United States and China is if it is a leading member and partner in the European Union both for economic, political, military and intelligence reasons. This is the simple truth of the matter when it comes to Britain’s membership of the EU and position on the World Stage. Britain has been an American satellite in the EU while the rest of the EU especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq have become more hostile to, independent of and assertive against an American led Global Order.

This is why the referendum on UK membership of the EU is so dangerous and a complete waste of time driven by the fantasy of insular little Englander’s who still think it is 1945 and Britain is still a Great Imperial Power, when in reality, Britain would be an irrelevance internationally and a basket case economically without being part of the European Union. The British public (who know very little of their own history let alone the history of Europe and the World) forget the British already had a Referendum on membership of what was then called the EEC in 1975 while every Treaty change that has been undertaken by the EU has been subjected to intense Parliamentary scrutiny and debate in the National British Parliament in Westminster.

Each time an EU Treaty change has occurred the democratically elected representatives of the British public have passed these Treaty changes in the «Mother of all Parliaments». This EU referendum is a pointless waste of time, energy, money and resources going over stale, old ground. The simple fact of the matter is when it comes to British membership of the EU there is, in the words of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe: «No Alternative». The British and specially the English, both in terms of the masses and the elite, will either have to learn to like Europe or lump it. If the British/English do vote to leave the EU it will not only be an indication of national insanity but it will be the economic, financial, political equivalent of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Though when you look at how Britain has developed since the end of World War II and the Britain of 2015, it would not surprise me in the least if the UK/England voted to leave the European Union.