I have just been to see the film Dunkirk which is well worth a viewing. It tells the story through a series of interlinking personal stories of the miraculous deliverance of the British Expeditionary Force out of France in 1940 when it was about to be annihilated or captured by the Nazi war machine. It is an admirable effort in every way, tracing the stories of airmen, soldiers, a Royal Navy Commander, and a little fishing boat roped in to save the men on the beaches and return them to Blighty. It is full of dramatic footage of men being strafed and bombed by Stukas on the seashore, Spitfires engaging the enemy, holed warships going down, men struggling to survive in a sea molten with burning oil and trapped soldiers in a ship’s hull. No one can disagree that it is a triumph of modern cinematic technique and a tribute to its director Christopher Nolan and a fine cast.

An armada of small boats set out from English shores to rescue these men (338,226) from French beaches. These were just ordinary folk caught up in a scenario much bigger than themselves, and one has to admire their fortitude given the power of the Luftwaffe to cause mayhem in the English Channel and the strong possibility that German armies would just circle the allies and take them prisoner. How would you feel about to land in France possibly in a riverboat faced by German guns from land and air?

The one thing I noticed watching this movie was an absence of portrayal of the sheer scale of the evacuation, an operation involving a third of a million men. The film fails to reflect that reality, instead trying to recreate the picture by filming long lines of men waiting at the beach front or on assembled wooden piers jutting out into the ocean. This is understandable, short of using real life footage of Dunkirk the bill for so many extras would be prohibitive. No doubt there are techniques for recreating scale of numbers but it would be churlish to make too much of that point.

The fact that this historical event was a miracle of deliverance for the British army also comes through, both at the beginning of the film when the sheer desperate situation is laid out to the viewer, and at the end when a couple of the rescued lads slump in the train home after reaching England courtesy of a small boat and get hold of a newspaper making clear the wondrous nature of the deliverance.

What was missing from the film was perhaps the most important factor in this victory, and one which again would be missed by today’s politically correct media. Namely that King George VI and Parliament called a national day of prayer before Dunkirk and people streamed into churches across the nation to ask for Gods help, including Westminster Abbey. Incidentally this history is not always forgotten, one such prayer day was dutifully included in an episode of Foyles War, that excellent, quintessentially British detective series tracing the exploits of the quiet, understated but very effective fictional detective chief superintendent Christopher Foyle. As it happens, there were seven national days of prayer called by King and Parliament during the war, a fact I am sure most schoolchildren are never told when studying this era of history.

I wonder whether the Almighty really did answer the prayers of the British people at that time. No doubt there were quite a few even then that would have made references to ‘God botherers’ and sky fairies, but let’s look at what actually happened. Event 1 – Hitler gave the command for his armies to halt the advance to the west coast of France for no explicable reason before Dunkirk, giving the British extra time. Why would he have done this when he had the heart and brain of the British army at his mercy on the French coast? Event 2 – a terrible storm whipped up which grounded the Luftwaffe on the 28th May at a time when they could have caused maximum damage. Event 3 – the English Channel was like a millpond for several days at the time of ferrying the troops back on that armada of tiny boats. Glorious coincidence or divine intervention?

Hmm, that’s a difficult one. Great Britain used to be a Christian nation with a much more culturally homogenous population who were familiar with the stories from the Bible and were comfortable with David and Goliath, Joseph and his coat of many colours and Daniel in the lions den, as well as the message of the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus. This was par for the course in the Second World War. They would have been schooled in British history and other times when we perhaps knew the intervention of the Almighty such as the Spanish Armada and Napoleon.

If you doubt what I am saying just read what a British naval officer cabled to London when the allied soldiers were on the beaches facing disaster: ‘But if not.’ I hasten to say not even a tiny percentage of today’s population would have a clue of the significance of those three words. They come from Daniel ch 3 v 17 – 18 in the Old Testament and refer to the time when Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego faced the fiery furnace for daring to disobey King Nebuchadnezzar and refusing to bow down and worship his idol.

Here is the full passage: “Our God whom we serve,” they told him, “is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, let it be known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

That naval officer fully expected his superior to understand those three words which tells you everything about British culture at that time. He saw the possibility of deliverance from the Nazis but if not they would still resist the enemy.

Now Great Britain is no longer great, trapped between the forces of secular humanism, a bullying EU making it difficult for us to leave said construct, and militant Islam, with Christianity being choked by more aggressive forces from within and a generation that has been ruthlessly severed from its past by a gigantic onslaught from evil forces. For many this is not a pleasant outlook, but Britain needs to reach back into its history and rediscover some of the things that have exalted this land in the past. Perhaps it’s time for another national day of prayer!