Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture - Joshua Levine

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said about her parents, ‘Sometimes they just don’t understand what kids want to do, and they think we ought to act like they acted twenty years ago.’

      Other subjects referred to clothes and style. ‘Janet’s a big girl,’ said one, ‘and she doesn’t dress right; so she just isn’t accepted.’ Peer pressure was intense, and dressing right was possible because high school students had a disposable income. They lived at home, usually received money from their parents, and often had part-time jobs. Without rent or bills to pay, there was no excuse for not dressing ‘slick’, as one Elmtown girl put it. And even young people without money, living on the small amounts paid by the National Youth Administration, were keen to spend what they had to look good. American materialism, after all, has a proud history.

      The Elmtown study is interesting in relation to sex and marriage, revealing that it was a badge of honour among many boys to be sexually active. ‘A boy who is known or believed to be a virgin is not respected,’ writes Hollingshead, and he describes a clique of lower-class boys calling themselves ‘The Five Fs’. This near-acronym stood for ‘Find ’em, feed ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em’.

      A girl, on the other hand, had to tread a dangerously thin line between ‘having some fun’ and becoming ‘free and easy’. ‘Mary’ told Hollingshead about going to a dance with a young man. At the dance, she decided that the boy ‘could have it’ but she would have to get drunk to go through with it. So the couple drove to a bar where Mary drank a double bourbon and three double whiskies, before driving to an isolated spot. ‘Oh, it was wonderful!’ said Mary. Over the next few months, she had affairs with five other men, going on at least four dates with each before ‘becoming intimate’. She was adamant that none of the boys had known in advance that ‘she knew what it was all about’. And then, at the age of eighteen, she married a twenty-year-old mill worker. Mary’s brief but intense adventures were over.

      Yet for any social changes, it was the music that really marked out the new youth culture. Swing music had a terrifically fast tempo, and sounded terrifying to older white listeners. It encouraged wild, out of control dancing, even solo dancing without a partner. Numbers like Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing Sing Sing’ had a brutal, thumping drumbeat. Hep cats (aficionados) used jive (slang) when beating up the chops (talking). They wore wild drapes (clothes) and spent hard (enjoyable) blacks (nights) in the Apple (Harlem). But despite – and because of – its edgy street culture background, Swing became hugely popular with young white audiences.

      On the evening of 16 January 1938, Swing crossed over into the mainstream, when Benny Goodman’s orchestra played Carnegie Hall, New York City’s most prestigious concert venue. Asked how long an intermission he wanted, Goodman said, ‘I don’t know. How long does Toscanini have?’ And when, several months later, a hundred thousand people of all races attended a Swing Jamboree in Chicago, music seemed to be lifting the nation. ‘Swing,’ reported the New York Times, ‘is the voice of youth striving to be heard in this fast-moving world of ours.’ It was the voice of hope as America finally emerged from the depression.

      But it would be a mistake to think that the young had moved beyond their elders. A poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1940 asked young people across the country, ‘Would you favor changing to a different form of government if it would promise you more in the way of a job?’ Eighty-eight per cent of the sample answered ‘No’. ‘Ours is the only sound form of government,’ said one respondent, speaking for most.

      Young Americans may have grown more optimistic over the 1930s, they may have developed their own culture, but they were happy to remain American. And to a real degree, they were the benchmark by which the new Europe measured itself. Their culture was worshipped and copied in Britain, reviled and banned in Germany. But as detached as they were making themselves, they would not ultimately be able to escape the tensions brewing in Europe. The new world had not yet outgrown the old.

      Three

       The Long and the Short and the Tall

      On 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany. The Royal Air Force had already flown a small advance party to France. The next day, further advance parties set sail from Portsmouth. Within a week, the men of four divisions were arriving at French ports – just as their fathers and uncles had done a little over a quarter of a century earlier.

      But promptness does not indicate readiness. Major General Bernard Montgomery, commander of 3rd Division, writes that the British Army ‘was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe’. Britain was justifiably renowned for her Royal Navy; she had contributed fully to the development of aerial warfare. But the army that crossed to France in September 1939 was both undermanned and underequipped.

      As recently as April 1938, the government had determined that Britain’s response to a European war would be chiefly naval and aerial. Her land forces would not be sent to Europe; they would defend Britain and her still widely spread Empire. But by the start of war, a desperate reappraisal and a frantic burst of rearmament and troop training had taken place. Conscription had been introduced. There was a massive amount of catching up to be done.

      In fact, the nation’s soldiers were to be engaging in modern warfare against armoured divisions, yet most of their anti-tank rifles would prove useless, knocking out more British shoulders than German tanks. And though the British army had been the first to use tanks, on the Somme in 1916, 1st Armoured Division would not be ready to cross the Channel for many months. Through the period to the Dunkirk evacuation, the British had very few effective tanks. Only the Matilda Mark II – with its 2-pounder cannon, impressive speed and thick armour – was a match for the best French and German tanks. Montgomery, a divisional commander, wrote that he did not see a single British tank throughout the winter. Put simply, when the British Expeditionary Force sailed to France, it was not ready to go to war.

      Despite this, in November 1939, Lord Gort, commander-in-chief of the BEF, told journalist James Lansdale Hodson, ‘I have never had the smallest qualm about the outcome of this war.’ Gort was a buoyant man and he was doing his best to buoy the country. But beyond the state of his army, he had another major problem. As head of the Expeditionary Force, he was answerable to the local French commander, General Georges, who was in turn under the command of French supreme commander General Gamelin. On the face of it, this was acceptable given the relative size of the forces, but in practice it meant that the BEF could be treated in a subordinate fashion. The latest plans and reports could be withheld, advice and opinions could be ignored. Gort had a responsibility to keep a close watch on his ally.

      The British Expeditionary Force, as we have seen, was chiefly made up of young men whose attitudes were formed during the depression, who were influenced by the growing youth culture, and who joined up for reasons ranging from a search for excitement to an escape from unemployment. But the BEF was a broad church. Cyril Roberts, a lance sergeant in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, was the son of a black Trinidadian father and a white mother from Lancashire, disowned by her family for marrying a black man. At a time when roughly 0.0003 per cent of the British population was black or mixed race, Cyril was unusual not only in the BEF, but in British society as a whole.

      Growing up in south London, Cyril and his brother, Victor, learned to stand up for themselves. ‘If you were the only black kid in the class,’ says Cyril’s daughter, Lorraine, ‘you just had to get on with it.’ But the boys had a role model. Their father, George, had served with the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War, becoming known as ‘The Coconut Bomber’ for his grenade-tossing ability, a skill he inadvertently picked up (so the story went) while knocking coconuts out of trees in Trinidad.

      An apprentice telephone engineer before the war, Cyril followed his father into the army, joining up under age, and finding himself promoted above older, more experienced men. ‘He was very calm and organised,’ says Lorraine. ‘He had an air about him. He could take command and people did as they were told.’

      Cyril’s

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