A friend and I saw the movie "Darkest Hour" the other day. It is a movie of movies and came at the perfect time for me, linking together the times described in Lynne Olson's book Troublesome Young Men and the movie "Dunkirk," released this past summer. I wrote a review of the book for the October issue of the Reporter.
Troublesome Young Men
tells the true story of how a half dozen young members of the British
parliament realized the great danger posed by Hitler's Nazi Germany when—despite
the German invasion and conquest of country after country in Europe—the British
parliament, the British king, the powerful prime minister Neville Chamberlain
and by and large the British people had turned a blind eye to what was
happening. Olson describes what this handful of "backbenchers" went
through in finally persuading parliament to see the Nazi danger, oust
Chamberlain, the appeaser of Germany, and replace him with Winston Churchill.
"Darkest Hour" takes the story from there,
overlapping it a bit, to the great evacuation of 300,000 mostly British and
French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk across the English Channel to the
safety of Great Britain, escaping decimation at the hands of the Germans by a hair's
breadth. I thought "Dunkirk" was a great movie. I thought after
seeing "Darkest Hour" that it was even better. The movie is in black
and white, which I think was a stroke of genius on the part of the director,
because it created a somber mood concerning a very somber time, at a time too
when movies were in only black and white.
See it if you possibly can. This is mostly about Churchill, whom some call the greatest man of the twentieth century. Whether true of him or not, the portrayal of him is
magnificent from his mien and bearing to his speech.
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Hi Lanny,
Do not miss Churchill speech "Sinews of peace".
Truly one of his best oratory, it was delivered in 1946, and was indeed the kickoff of the Cold War.
Also research the story of how it came to be delivered in nowhere Missouri, at an unknown college.
Dave Israel
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Hi Lanny,
Do not miss Churchill speech "Sinews of peace".
Truly one of his best oratory, it was delivered in 1946, and was indeed the kickoff of the Cold War.
I remember the speech. Our dad listened to it on the radio. Prescient as ever, in the midst of the Allied exultation at victory over Germany, Churchill spoke with solemnity of the Communist menace and an "Iron Curtain" that had come down over all of eastern Europe. I'm not sure why he spoke in Missouri , except it may have been because he visited Harry Truman at his home in Independence, MO? I would like to listen to the speech again. The movie "Darkest Hour" captures the most memorable parts of several of his speeches: "Blood, sweat and tears"; "We will fight them on the sea and in the air and in the trenches," etc. Missing was his great speech "Never have so many owed so much to so few," referring to the Battle of Britain, fought in the air, which came after Dunkirk. A mere handful of brave British pilots (the "few"), down to their last planes, withstood the German all-out air attack on Britain, sufficiently crippling the Luftwaffe so Britain could regroup and await the outpouring of troops to come later from America, launching "Overlord," the invasion of Normandy. Dunkirk was a close thing; so was the Battle of Britain.
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