Rhyming History

Many readers have already seen Darkest Hour, the movie about events in the fateful month of May 1940, when Winston Church became British Prime Minister. The Nazis invaded Netherlands and Belgium, then swept through the Ardennes Forest into France. The French Army collapsed almost immediately, and 300,000 British solders (for all intents and purposes, the entire British Army) fell back and were trapped on the beach at Dunkirk.

If you have not seen Darkest Hour yet, now is an excellent time to watch it. It is available for streaming on Netflix. Spoiler Alert: The Brits escape with the help of a citizens' flotilla of small boats, and live to fight another day.

Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes," and we're hearing rhymes of Dunkirk in the impressive resistance of the Ukrainian people to Russia's invading forces.

Although Darkest Hour does not mention it, one reason the British troops succeeded in escaping is that on May 24 Hitler ordered a halt to the advance of the German Army, though it was only 25 kilometers from Dunkirk. Historians of the war understandably point to this as a decisive event in the war. If the British Army had been captured, the war – and world history, for that matter – would have gone in an entirely different direction.

Can you hear a rhyme in the stalled column of Russian tanks and troop carriers pointed at Kyiv? The longer the column is stalled, the more vulnerable it is to Ukrainian attacks, and the more time supporting nations have to provide arms. When the history of the Russian invasion is written, might this be pointed to as a decisive factor?

Darkest Hour does mention a peculiar episode of American support for the Allied cause. In May 1940 the United States was still a year and a half from being in the war. Even so, President Roosevelt knew what was at stake and wanted to provide Britain with whatever military assistance he could. An isolationist Congress kept throwing up roadblocks to that. Britain had purchased planes from the United States, but Congress passed a law which prevented them from being delivered. In the movie, there is a conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill in which Roosevelt says the planes could be taken to the Canadian border, and the Canadians could then use horse teams to pull them across the border.

This actually happened.

Can you hear a rhyme in the current discussion of providing Polish MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine? Ukrainian pilots are not trained to fly American F-16s, but are very familiar with the Russian-made MiGs. The idea is that Poland transfers its jet fighters to the Ukrainian air force, and the United States  replaces them with F-16s.

But how do the jets get delivered? Polish pilots cannot fly them into Ukraine, because that would be a NATO pilot entering Ukrainian air space, an action that would trigger a wider war. It is probably not that big of a problem (hide it in a hay wagon?), but it is kind of a rhyme, isn't it?