Liam Ostermann's Reviews> Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk

I got this book to read via carelessness, I saw Kershaw and automatically assumed Ian, so as soon as I got the book I was disappointed because I am not a aficionado of military history but, having said that Robert Kershaw is a very readable military historian and I am sure he can be read with profit and pleasure by many.

I enjoyed reading the wealth of memoir, particularly letters and diaries of German soldiers, which provides a welcome broadening of the perspective on WWII. It is always welcome to put the 'glorious' tale the English wove out of Dunkirk under a more critical spotlight. I would have enjoyed more of an analysis of the 'legend' contrasted with the reality. Also at times what we get is not so much a tale about Dunkirk from a German point of view but an account, a radically shortened and simplified one, of the German invasion of France in 1941, with Dunkirk as the only part of the campaign looked at in detail. I understand that 'context' is necessary but a more ruthless concentration on Dunkirk would have been better.

I am not sure how much in this book is 'new'. The legends of WWII are too embedded in the psyche of popular English language culture to ever be replaced. The reality of WWII was already so forgotten that it was used in films like the 1967 'Dirty Dozen' as stand in for Vietnam and nobody even noticed the absurdity of desegregated American units fighting in WWII. 'Print the legend' (see another film 'Who Shot Libert Vance') is still the cultural norm where WWII is concerned, though now it appears that the legends are simply manufactured to suit (Ingloriou Bastards and the Man Who Killed Hitler and then Bigfoot are examples that immediately spring to mind).

I would have loved it if the author had explored the belief that Hitler allowed the British army to withdraw because he wanted the British empire to survive or some other such idiocy. It is fascinating to learn more about the practical reasons, like terrain and failures in equipment and clashes between Hitlers command centre and the armies, but the real meat of these issues tend to get lost in the m minutea of deployment and personal reminiscence from Germans who took part. But then I was looking for a book that Ian Kershaw might write, not the book Robert Kershaw (no relation as far as I know) actually wrote.

The one howler in this book was the author's comparison of the use of Pervitan by German soldiers to the use of LSD by American soldiers in Vietnam. I won't even begin to enumerate how wrong such a comparison is. Like a great many historians Robert Kershaw can't ignore 'Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany' by Norman Ohler but he isn't very interested, or happy, in doing more then repeat what could not be denied. It is an area that needs more investigation and more thought about what it might tell us.

This book was not my cup of tea but others will enjoy it and the more perspective we get about ordinary Germans, soldiers or otherwise, the better. Not because to understand is to forgive or forget but because it is essential in all circumstances to understand what others really thought, not what we think they thought.