Great film but....

Rating: 7/10 (30 July 2017)

Saw it this week-end - Bloody Brilliant film.
Excellent the way that it merges the 3 time-lines, One week on the ground, One day at sea and one hour in the air, even if it seems a lot of the American audience did not understand it!
The way the tension builds is brilliant - Go and see it, and if possible in 70mm IMAX .
However, no matter how good a film it is, its not good history - these are the things I picked up on...
1. Spitfire ammunition - a Spitfire only carried ammunition for 14 seconds of firing - Tom Hardy uses getting on for twice that. There is no way a Spitfire could shoot down that many German aircraft in one sortie - Sometimes Heinkel bombers absorbed the complete ammunition of 3 or 4 Spitfire or Hurricanes before going down.
2. Yellow nosed Bf109, they only appeared for one one unit of BF109s late in the Battle of Britain - Yellow noses were only adopted by the Luftwaffe fighter arm as a whole in 1941 during the attack on Russia. YNBs (Yellow Nosed B******s as the RAF called them ) would not have been seen at Dunkirk.
3. Limited number of aircraft - The Germans came over in 10s and hundreds, the RAF came over in Flight, squadron and wing strength - In the film we so no more than one German bomber and two fighters at the same time.
3. Dunkirk itself appears as intact, almost untouched, in the film, whereas the city was reduced to a smoking ruin by artillery and aerial bombardment.
4. Chaos, the streets of Dunkirk were littered with destroyed British and French lorries and equipment, with bodies littering the streets. In the film it looks like the most orderly town on Earth. Even the military stores on the beach are lined up in neat rows.
5. At the opening the British Tommy runs a few hundred yards from the Dunkirk "perimeter" to the beach, whereas the actual perimeter was at the string of canals that surround Dunkirk, 5 to 10 miles back from the beach.
6. The vast majority of those evacuated were taken off from the mole. The little ships played a gallant part, but it was the mole that played the major role.
7. The British trudged for miles to Dunkirk, fighting a rear-guard action and facing bombing all the way. Many British soldiers said once they reached the perimeter of Dunkirk they felt a huge sense of relief, and that Dunkirk itself was a "picnic" compared to what they had endured getting there.
8. Where is the "Treachery of the King of the Belgians"? - The king who ordered his army to stop fighting at the height of the battle (something for which he was kicked out as King by the Belgian people themselves once the War was over) forcing the British to take over defense of a huge portion of the front line. At the time the British and French blamed Dunkirk on the Belgians and all the newspapers of the time were full of stories of this "treachery" -All this seems conveniently forgotten today.
9. Lastly, and to my mind most importantly, in the film at no stage do the British soldiers fight back. The British army put up heroic resistance at a string of sites protecting the retreat to Dunkirk and then did the defense of much of the the perimeter for a crucial few days, repulsing the initial German assault, before giving up the perimeter to the French.