"Is he a coward?" one of the boat's crew asks its skipper, played by Mark Rylance.
"He's shell-shocked, George," the captain replies. "He's not himself. He may never be himself again." It's a foretelling of the reality for many of those who returned, changed from Dunkirk.
Preserving the voices of survivors
Documenting the reality of those shell-shocked survivors is what London's Imperial War Museum had in mind when it recorded interviews of scores of veterans in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those interviews show that the horror stayed with many of them long after they were freed from a deathtrap between the German Army, the Luftwaffe and the sea.
As a WWII historian, I've found those tapes substantiate the film's depictions of anguish. But, even more, they add the dimension of time and the long echoes of that anguish which the film can't capture.
On his 1999 recording, Will Harvey tells how shrapnel from a German bomb tore through his legs as he waited for his chance to board a ship. In the pain and confusion, he mistakenly thought his legs were gone. "You lost a bit of your senses." His voice cracks, but he covers it up with an out-of-place laugh.
Asked about his recovery, Harvey says, "I used to get aggressive, at times, with the blokes, you know. I'd try to control it". He tried to return to his unit but, suffering a series of breakdowns from then on, he was discharged from the Army.
As a 21-year-old, Al Tyers found himself directing men on to waiting ships at Dunkirk, told to give priority to the Army and male refugees of fighting age over the many civilians who were also trying to get away from the Germans. "They packed you in like cattle," he says.
But then, "they put that siren on, that screaming siren," just before the German dive bombers would rush over the treetops aiming for the departing ships. Moments like this are depicted with hair-raising effect in the film.
"A ship would get loaded up ... and get half a mile out. And the next thing, you'd see the ship going down." Tyers fails to hide the emotion in his voice.
Back in Britain, Tyers suffered from debilitating claustrophobia. He spent three months in a psychiatric hospital, but even afterwards newsreels depicting war scenes would send him rushing outside.
Treating the 'sufferers'
There's plenty of evidence of Dunkirk survivors being institutionalised.
Doctors documented that many evacuees deluging hospitals in Britain were "suffering", in the words of one psychiatrist, "from acute hysteria, reactive depression, functional loss of memory or the use of their limbs". But the wartime government didn't keep track of the numbers. They also didn't track veteran suicides, an epidemic among today's combat veterans. But there's evidence of them.
Suicides on the beaches around Dunkirk were also uncounted, but some are documented. Christopher Nolan's depiction of a soldier striding into the waves, apparently intending to "walk home", is based on more than one real incident. Many others wandered off, senseless, to unknown fates. Others shot themselves.
Indelible memories
For those evacuees, eventually shifting to civilian life was hard. "Started having psychological problems, you know ... Almost passing out every now and again ... You've come unhinged," Reg Dance says on his 1999 tape. "It took an awful long time for that to go."
Fred Walton made it off the beach, but the paddle steamer he was on was bombed while he was on the upper deck. A man nearby had both legs blown off. The man next to Walton was cut by shrapnel and almost leaped into the sea, panicked. Walton had to pin him down.
"How do you forget those sorts of things?" he asked his interviewer.
- The Conversation
