Posted on 12/27/2017 9:20:01 PM PST by Kaslin
The new film "Darkest Hour" offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie "Dunkirk."
The story unfolds with the drama of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill's predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.
Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies -- together larger than Germany's invading forces -- collapsed within days or a few weeks.
About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill's bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.
Churchill's greatest problem was not just saving the British army, but confronting the reality that with the German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.
The Soviet Union had all but joined Hitler's Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August 1939.
The United States was determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in "Darkest Hour" by Churchill's sad phone call with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while in fact he can do nothing.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Excellent, Kaslin. Thanks for posting it.
Some have objected to the portrayel of Churchill as altenately vigorous and doddering.
A little bit of an understatement. Germany and Russia coordinated their invasion of Poland. Germany invaded from the sea and the Russians moved in by train to Warsaw. Hitler and Stalin were allies during the start of the war.
The Soviets also supplied Germany needed raw materials like oil.
The last trains actually crossed the border just before Barbarossa in June 41’.
Back in the 1960’s I was in high school. I used a litmus test on history books to see if they could be trusted. Most of the books gave cover to Stalin by failing to mention that he and Hitler were allies during the start of WWII.
Another litmus test was to see if they mentioned temporal relationship between Stalin’s death and the conclusion of hostilities in the Korean War. The left was willing to concede that Mao was propping up the North Koreans, but they gave a pass to Stalin.
My father said that Americans were quite aware that Stalin had been allied with Hitler at the beginning of the war. Hitler turned on Stalin, or the Axis would have continued.
When the U.S. decided to send supplies to the Russians under the lend-lease program, the government actually engaged in outright propaganda to sell Stalin as a grandfatherly type of figure in order to justify the alignment. This propaganda program fit well with the leftist advisors to FDR, such as Alger Hiss, who were actually Soviet agents at the time.
When Senator Joe McCarthy uncovered Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government, he had to overcome the previous propaganda and the exuberance of having the Soviets as “allies” at the close of the war.
The movie Patton was one of the few to faithfully highlight the uneasy alliance between the west and the Soviets.
Stalin was never mentioned as a belligerent on the MASH television series. The only time Stalin was mentioned was to belittle Frank, the straw man weak conservative.
The reality was that China was not a power house and supplied only part of the support needed by the North. American troops faced a lot of supplies from the WWII lend-lease program which was handed over to the North Koreans by the Russians.
When Stalin died the Russian people insisted that more attention be given to food for Russians and less support for the war effort. Thus, Stalin died in March 1953. The treaty ending hostilities was signed in July of 1953.
The loud sounds under london these days is Churchill spinning in his grave as the current leaders of once great Britain happily surrender to the Islamic terrorists and the eu. Damn shame.
Stalin stabbed Poland in the back three weeks after Germany had done the heavy lifting.
In a way films like this and “Dunkirk’’ show a pre-Islamic Britain when it was Great Britain. To me it’s kind of sad in a way.
Watched Dunkirk a week or so ago. Showed Churchill as an over the hill idiot. The part where the boats picked up the men was good, but to treat Churchill that way was bad. He was doing the best he could with the hand that he was dealt. I hope the Darkest Hour treats him better.
bmp
Thanks to the importation of muzzies, Britain’s darkest hour is in the future.
In light of what has happened in Britain in the last year their darkest hour is upon them.
Thank you!
I’m looking forward to seeing it.
It was also the reason Whitaker Chambers,a communist here in the U.S.,turned against the Communists.
It’s in his book,”Witness”
>>Germany and Russia coordinated their invasion of Poland. Germany invaded from the sea
The German invasion of Poland was overwhelmingly by land. Baltic naval operations were at most tertiary, not even secondary to the effort by land.
Great post - and spot on!
In one of the few historical lapses in an otherwise superb film, Churchill is wrongly portrayed as seriously conflicted and about to consider the deal with Mussolini -- until he takes a subway ride and rediscovers the defiance of the average Londoner. The subway scene is pure fantasy.
Trump has ACTUALLY managed to tap into...
...the defiance of the AVERAGE American. !!
Ah, a kindred soul. I am an amateur McCarthy historian, and I think the slandering of him is one of the heinous things the left has done to this country. McCarthy should be revered as a hero in this country, before him, communist affiliation had been viewed as a peccadillo, or dalliance by people, slightly odd, but not necessarily a deal breaker for judging a person. It was not uncommon for someone in college in those days to have poked around with Communism.
This was aided by leftist apologists, cheerleaders, and propagandists that infested the New Dealers through the 1930’s leading up to WWII that made the Soviet Union appear to be things it wasn’t...efficient, humane, and respectable.
During and after McCarthy, it became a dirty secret with people, and openly regarded as disreputable. That is something good that came out of his public scourging.
But back to this subject...I have always felt that it should have been insanely apparent to anyone watching (as it clearly was to people like Whittaker Chambers) the nature of Communism and the nature of Americans who had Communist sympathies, when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed.
There were non-interventionalists (and I have a modicum of respect for many people at that time who were opposed to getting involved in the war unless we had to) who were protesting outside the White House and yelling with nearly insane religious fervor from any pulpit they could reach that we should stay out of the war and not get involved in it.
Then, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941...these EXACT SAME people, overnight, and with no shame at all, completely and 180 degrees reversed their interventionalist stance and became the people screaming the loudest to get involved in the war.
It was enough to make your head spin with dizziness. No shame. No explanations. They went to bed being fervently against joining the war on June 21st, and woke up on June 22nd feverishly FOR joining the war.
That tells you volumes right there.
And you are right...but I understand the concept of war making strange bedfellows. Churchill had an unusually difficult transition to make in this regard, and I respect him even more for being able to suck it up and make that horrible alliance with the Soviet Communists, being the staunch anti-Bolshevist that he was leading up to that.
A very odd time in history, indeed.
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