In fact, well over 800 British warships, merchant marine boats, fishing trawlers, and yachts formed a huge armada that dotted the horizon off the Dunkirk coast. Yet that vast maritime landscape is never captured by the film's portrait of a seemingly smallish private flotilla.
The film also shows the littered beaches of Dunkirk, but again the effect of the screen's occasional flotsam and jetsam is understatement. In fact, the wreckage of the British army was unimaginable. Almost all of its artillery‐well over 2,000 field guns of various sizes‐over 60,000 wheeled vehicles, 700 tanks, and over 11,000 machine guns were lost, much of them left scattered on the beach, a reality that again is hardly captured by the film.Do read the whole thing, and if you have a few weeks, or retire, read Churchill's The Second World War, too.