Michael Korda has seen a lot. He served in the Air Force for two years in Germany, he remembers World War Two, and he's published countless books on everything from the Battle of Britain to watch making. His next, Alone, is about the Dunkirk evacuation (available September 19th). So the question had to be asked: What does he make of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, heralded for its nontraditional structure and historical accuracy? And what's the worst war movie he's ever seen?

GQ: So let's get into it: what did you think of the movie?

Michael Korda: I was very, very impressed by the film, I have to say. I suppose it would be possible, if I really put my mind to it, to nitpick about certain things. But they really would be such small things. I did not find that there were many things that were wrong. At no point did I say, "Well, that just looks totally wrong and doesn't correspond to anything that happened."

You would know. You've written books about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, which in some ways happened because of Dunkirk.

I know a lot about Dunkirk stuff, my book about Dunkirk is being published on September 19. Dunkirk is really the opening act of the Battle of Britain, as it were. Dunkirk took place end of May, beginning of June 1940, and the Battle of Britain is generally assumed to have begun late July, early August 1940.

The Best Part of 'Dunkirk' Is the Sweaters Our takeaway from the film: War sucks, knitwear is awesome.

How does Dunkirk shape up against other war movies?

[Christopher Nolan] clearly did not want to do a slightly artificial docudrama like Saving Private Ryan. So he doesn't set up a fictional story, there's no central character or narrative to it, and I think that was a very courageous and the correct decision to make. The characters of the film are composite characters. The Kenneth Branagh character is an amalgamation of several naval people who were on the beach and speaks for the general situation at the time. Otherwise, the audience is not going to know that as the crow flies, or as the seagull flies, it's only about 23 miles, 25 miles I think, from Dunkirk to Dover. Or that there are 400,000 men on the beach. So he supplies those facts. But there's very little of that in the film and I think that that's good and impressive. You get the experience of Dunkirk without the artificiality of scenes in which you see Winston Churchill talking to General Ismay. There are none of the usual cliches of war films in here.

Right, you never even see a German properly.

Yeah, you see two German soldiers at the very end of the film, but you only see them as shadows. If you were not of an age to recognize a German helmet from somebody's else's helmet you wouldn't know who they were. Germans are never mentioned, nobody in the film ever mentions the Germans! That also makes sense because [the movie is] not about that. It's about survival on the beach, and I don't suppose that anybody gave a thought about the Germans. They were simply the people who were shooting at you. [Nolan] does all that very, very well.

You were in the Air Force for two years, so I have to ask, what did you make of the arial sequences with Tom Hardy's character?

I think more important to me, is that they were overwhelmingly visually amazing. It's just that dramatic expanse of sky and the smallness of the aircraft. I've not seen aerial or photography of aerial fighting done that well ever before. The overriding concern of the Spitfire pilot with his piece of chalk and so forth—the amount of fuel he has left. [Nolan] makes you understand that perfectly well that the very basic thing is how much fuel you have left because it determines how long you can stay over the beach and if you decide to stay longer, then you're committing yourself to not being able to return to England. He does that without any tedious explanation at all. I also think his handling of the small boats is absolutely wonderful. You have a complete sense of what it was like to be in the English Channel with a 25-foot long motor boat going to Dunkirk.