10 Huge Historical Inaccuracies In Chris Nolan's Dunkirk
2. Ships Sink Way Too Quickly
Several ships buy the big one in Dunkirk, and indeed several Allied ships were sunk during the evacuation effort. However, in the movie they all seem to go down within a couple of minutes. A medical ship goes down instantly after its deck is hit by German bombs and another ship is holed by a single torpedo and immediately begins its descent to the drink.
Ships tend to take a long time to sink, especially when they're warships specifically designed not to. Examples such as the HMS Hood, which was blown clean in two by fire from the Bismarck in 1941 and sank in three minutes, are famous precisely because they are so rare.
One ship, the Comfort, sank immediately when it was rammed by the far larger minesweeper HMS Lydd which mistook it for a German ship, but actual torpedo and bomb strikes usually left enough time to evacuate survivors before the target sank.
A more typical story is of the HMS Jaguar, which was badly hit by a close bomb blast. She stayed afloat long enough to be towed away by another ship that took on her 1,000 rescued soldiers.