I'm guessing you've transposed your numbers there. To be honest I had an issue with the scale (probably about the only issue I had with the film) and would have loved to have seen more little boats. That said, I think what Nolan was trying to do was show a snapshot rather than encompass the whole damn evacuation which would have necessitated Churchill, strategy meeting etc. I mean, did Saving Private Ryan feature the entirety of the Normandy landings? A larger scale film may well have swamped the screen with men, Spitfires, little boats, Messerschmitts and the like, and frankly whilst I don't hate CGI, I like the fact that Nolan eschewed it here for the most part.
My understanding is a lot of men were in the town rather than on the beach, and from a stylistic angle the lack of hundreds of thousands of men on the beach only added to the apocalyptic isolation those men must have felt.
There were women on the Royal Navy ships in the film so they weren't just waiting at home. Again though we're talking about a snapshot, and the same applies to non white characters. My understanding is that there were some colonial troops at Dunkirk, but we were talking hundreds within hundreds of thousands, and one imagines they were clustered together rather than scattered amongst the troops. It seems likely there were probably more black French soldiers than we saw though.
There's no doubt films to be made detailing the experiences of many people at Dunkirk, doesn't mean Nolan is beholden to detail every one of those stories, and who knows, maybe the very success of Dunkirk will help someone get the funding for a film about those telephonists, or the Indian troops who were there.
This is interesting
