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(Warning: spoileralerts plus the rantings of one irate historian!!)

Christopher Nolan���s riveting screen telling of this epic World War II tale is breaking box office records. Enjoyable as it is, the film does a terrible disservice to one historical character, and left us all the poorer for it.

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History offers few more inspiring military tales than the���Miracle at Dunkirk.���ÌýIn May of 1940, German forces advancing through France wereon the verge of capturing an entire Allied army that had retreated to thecoastal town of Dunkirk in a desperate bid to escape across the English Channel.

The British Admiralty put out the call for every small craftit could find to help stage an emergency evacuation. Yachts, fishing boats,motor launches, tugboats, any vessel that could pull men off the beaches.Despite constant attack by German bombers, this motley fleet rescued more than300 thousand men and brought them home to England. Winston Churchill called ita ���miracle of deliverance.���

As he set about making his movie, Nolan chose not to use actualhistorical figures. Or at least so he said. "We have fictional characters with fictional names;we're not trying to tell anyone's story here," he told Ìý"Fiction frees you to be able to convey to the audiencetheÌýgreater truth of something. Which is why you end up wanting to combinecharacters or invent characters."Ìý

One of those characters is the quietly heroic Mr. Dawson,played beautifully by Mark Rylance. In fact, however, he is not fictional at all.Ìý He���s a very real person with a simple name change. And because of this transparent fictionalization, the real hero gets abslutely no credit in the movieor attendant publicity.Ìý

His name was Charles Lightoller.Ìý Lightoller owned a 58-foot-power cruiser.Navy officers informed him they were going to commandeer his vessel for therescue. Lightoller would have none of that. Instead, he captained the boat himselfwith just his son and one other teenage boy. Determined to rescue every man hecould, he crammed more than 130 soldiers on his small motor yacht. His sonliterally laid them down on top of each other down below, then all over thedecks. Once Lightoller had taken aboard every man he could, he piloted thedangerously overloaded vessel back across the English Channel, dodging bombsand bullets all the way.

Here���s an excerpt from Walter Lord���s Book The Miracle of Dunkirk.

���The entire Luftwaffe seemed to bewaiting for him. Bombing and strafing, the enemy planes made pass after pass.Fortunately Sundowner could turn on asixpence, and Lightoller had learned a few tricks from an expert. His youngestson, killed in the first days of the war, had been a bomber pilot and oftentalked about evasion tactics. The father now put his lost son���s theories towork. The secret was to wait until the last instant, when the enemy plane wasalready committed, then hard rudder before the pilot could readjust. Squirmingand dodging his way across the Channel, Lightoller managed to get Sundowner back to England without ascratch.���

If you���ve seen the movie, this will strike you as instantlyfamiliar.. The ���fictional��� Dawson���s story tracks Lightoller���s almost perfectly��� down to the son in the RAF who was killed, and the evasive maneuver heperformed to avoid being sunk by the Luftwaffe. The only difference is that inthe movie version, the young boat hand is killed. Nolan didn���t create Mr.Dawson out of his imagination ��� he brazenly stole the story of CharlesLightoller and changed the name to thinly cover the theft.

I don���t contest his right to do so. Since the time ofShakespeare, and undoubtedly even earlier than that, people making art out ofhistory have used creative license to shape their stories, and literature isthe better for it. I have no problem with chosing to use a composite character for the purposes of storytelling. But if you make a movie about a historical subject, and use areal person���s story with only minor changes, why not honor them, and honor thereal history by using their name? What a shame that audience���s rooting forRylance���s character aren���t let in on the secret that he was real.

Here���s what really hurts: In fictionalizing the character, Nolan left out the best part!

Lightoller���s zeal to rescue as many men as possible was undoubtedlydriven by memories of a night at sea nearly 30 years before. It was anunforgettable night: lifeboats heading out half full���cries of distress in thewater...despair at not being able to do more.

You see, Charles Lightoller was the second officer on the Titanic.

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He was one of the rare heroes of that terrible night inApril 1912, when 900 people perished in the icy North Atlantic despite his bestefforts. In 1940, fate offered him a second chance as a lifesaver . . . and hetook it. It is a story sublime in its equal parts of irony, heroism, and heart.

<br /><div class="MsoNormal">The portion of the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dunkirk</i>that tells Mr. Dawson���s story is exciting and moving. Once you know thereal story, however, it becomes dishwatery pale, at least to this historylover. Congratulations to Mr. Nolan on making a fine film. But shame on him forreplacing real history with an ersatz version that fails to do justice to oneof the true heroes of the Miracle at Dunkirk.<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><a href=" Beyer </a>is a New York Times bestelling author, an award-winning filmmaker, and a lifelong histry enthusiast. &nbsp;The story of Charles Lightoller appears in his book </i><a href=" Greatest War Stories Never Told. &nbsp;</a>&nbsp;He is also the author of<i>&nbsp;</i>&nbsp;<a href=" Ghost Army of World War II </a><i>and</i> <a href=" Unto Death: Hamilton and Burr.</a><br /><br /><i>Thanks to Marilyn Rea Beyer for the editorial oversight!</i></div>