WarTalk

Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe, 1940-47

Hilary Footitt, Simona Tobia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349348749, 9780230362888
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305077
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Offering a new perspective on the British experience of the Second World War in Europe, this book provides a series of snapshots of the role which languages played in the key processes of British war-making, moving from frameworks of perception and intelligence gathering, through to liberation/occupation, and on to the aftermath of conflict.

1

Preparing for War: the British and Foreign Languages

‘We inhabit an island and have no familiar contact with other peoples who cannot understand our tongue’ (Leathes 1928: 17). So said Sir Stanley Leathes, the chair of the Modern Studies Committee, set up by the Government in July 1916 to examine those deficiencies in the British educational system which the First World War experience had recently revealed. It was widely felt that an inability to understand allies and enemies, and to communicate with them, had left Britain radically unprepared for the 1914–18 war (Bayley 1991). The assumption that underlined this part of Leathes’ investigation was that cultural isolation might be an inhibitor of efficient war-making; that there was some sort of relationship between the cultural knowledge about foreign friends and allies which Britons possessed, and their ability to speak the native languages of these ‘other peoples’. Some 23 years later, as the world moved towards another conflict, the country faced much the same issues of how to engage with foreigners in war. Finding out information about the enemy, communicating with allies, preparing for operations on the Continent would all necessarily involve the British in processes in which foreign languages were deeply embedded and where some measure of cultural knowledge might prove to be vital to the success of future war efforts. This chapter examines three aspects of Britain’s inter-war relationship with foreignness: cultural knowledge, language skills, and representations of the ‘foreign’. All of these would serve as critical framings for war preparations and were to become recurring motifs in the whole story of Britain’s foreign language experiences of war. Firstly, the store of informed cultural knowledge about Europe which was available to the British was unevenly spread across the countries concerned. The existing networks of institutional cultural contacts and the breadth of educational provision in languages were overwhelmingly focused on knowledge about one particular country, France, at the expense of all other potential enemies and friends. Secondly, traditional British perceptions of foreign languages had created a long-standing hierarchy in language skills, a representation which was highly gendered, with certain linguistic competences – speaking the language, as opposed to reading and writing it – accorded a lowly and problematic status. Finally, the existence of the ‘foreign’ tended to be exiled to the margins of the British experience – in the popular imaginary, at the very heart of foreign language teaching itself, and ultimately within British society.

Cultural knowledge

The British authorities had a long tradition of developing cultural knowledge about key parts of their Empire. The British imperial mission, governing by indirect rule through native administration, had given language training a central place in the education of its colonial officers. In Tsang’s study of colonial administration in Hong Kong, for example, it is clear that of the 85 colonial service officers recruited between 1861 and 1941 the overwhelming majority had gained a good knowledge of Cantonese (Tsang 2007: 22). In civil service exams in the early twentieth century, Sanskrit and Arabic were awarded a high percentage of the overall marks (Waterhouse 1920: 11), and passing language exams were seen as crucial stages in the process of any formal appointment to the colonial service (Kirk-Greene 2006: 50, 89). The service even managed to produce a composite form of Hindustani so that its officers would be able to communicate easily with the local population (Pupavac 2012). Once in post, a newly-appointed colonial officer was expected to immerse himself in the district, touring the area, and talking to all those he met: ‘here he was, out for several weeks at a stretch, accompanied by a handful of messengers, visiting and talking to headmen and villagers . . . Touring was the epitome of learning on the job’ (Kirk-Greene 2006: 127). The framework of knowledge adopted by the British in this imperial context was a broadly anthropological one in which colonial subjects would be understood, and thus ruled, through a close reading of their behaviour, a process in which knowing about the area was intimately related to knowing its language. An elite cadre of personnel was thus prepared linguistically for the direct ‘on the ground’ experience of ruling regions which were understood to be remote, and well outside the norms of British society.

If British elites, uneasy with modernity, were seeking some form of cultural vitality in this romance of difference with non-European cultures (Cannadine 2002), their relationship with their European neighbours was of course predicated on very different assumptions. Europe might speak in many languages and have a palette of slightly distinct customs, but these differences were generally containable within a broad understanding of a shared European civilization. The imperial impetus to develop a cadre of close anthropological readers who could effect good governance was clearly lacking in the western continental context. Official measures to ensure that there was sufficient cultural knowledge to prepare for any future European conflagration were thus a good deal less structured than those which had related to Empire.

In the aftermath of the First World War, when it was recognized that there had been specific gaps in cultural understanding, the remedies suggested tended to be ad hoc, the result of individual initiatives. In 1923, for example, a lecturer at the Royal Military College had produced a new booklet of military and official conversations in French with the express aim of ensuring that Sandhurst officers of the future would never find themselves in the invidious position of their 1914–18 colleagues who had apparently been unable to understand much of what their co-belligerents were saying: ‘Had they done so, mutual understanding and collaboration in matters grave as well as gay would have been more rapid, and fewer mistakes would have been recorded in the official history of the war’ (Gettins 1923: iii). The implicit working model for the military, as it had developed on the ground during the First World War, was one in which limitations of cultural understanding would be addressed by employing local personnel with a good knowledge of the terrain and the civilian populations (Heimburger 2012). Collectively, the strategy of the British military in the inter-war period was to train up a small number of officers who would be able to act as cultural intermediaries should the need arise, volunteers who were willing to learn the foreign languages needed, and accredit the competences gained via the forces’ own examinations for interpreters, first and second class. Although some financial inducements were offered, the success of this voluntary system was relatively limited: in the RAF, for example, only three serving officers had taken qualifications in French, with three in German and one each in Italian, Spanish and Russian (Muckle 2008: 99).

If there was no equivalent of the linguistically-trained colonial District Officers who would be ready to be deployed to war-torn Europe, the authorities could at least rely on a rich web of cultural contacts and educational provision relating to the continent which could provide the basis of that cultural knowledge which would be so important in the event of war. These networks, framed by recent history, cultural institutions and the curricula of schools and universities, would in practice, however, give the authorities very different levels of resources with which to understand each of the individual countries of Europe. In the case of France, for example, the recent experiences of the First World War had brought into being a number of cross-Channel connections which engaged a broad range of the population. Several British towns had adopted devastated cities in France: Newcastle with Arras; Sheffield with Bapaume; Llandudno with Mametz; and Birmingham with Albert (Tombs and Tombs 2006: 497). As well as the many folk memories from the British Expeditionary Force in France, a considerable number of British visitors now journeyed to Flanders and Picardy in order to mourn their dead. More officially, in 1918, professorships in French (the Marshall Foch chair at Oxford), and in English (the Field Marshal Haig chair in Paris) were established with the express intention of preparing for the ‘intellectual entente of the coming years’ (The Times, 21 November 1918). The British Institute in Paris, the Alliance Française, the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni and the Association France–Grande Bretagne provided a rich network of institutionalized cultural exchanges between the two countries,¹ whilst a language assistants’ scheme, launched in 1904 at the invitation of the French Government, continued throughout the inter-war years, although the numbers of exchanges involved were admittedly quite modest.²

Compared with this, formal cultural relationships with other European countries were relatively limited. In the case of Germany, one major bilateral cultural institution, the Anglo-German Academic Bureau, worked in the inter-war period to develop academic and educational relationships between the two countries, co-operating with the Akademischer Austauschdienst in Germany and the Anglo-German Board in Britain in order to arrange student/teacher exchanges.³ Similarly, with Italy, one key Anglo-Italian Society promoted a knowledge and understanding of Italian culture, cooperating with the British Institute in Florence and holding lectures on Italian literature, art, music and contemporary society, both in its London offices and in private houses.⁴ In the case of the USSR, formal cultural links of this type were impossible in the inter-war period, so that even the British Embassy in Moscow had taken to relying on indirect sources in order to arrive at any understanding of Soviet attitudes and behaviour (see Chapter 8).

If the networks of cultural transfer with France were markedly more developed than those with other European countries, so also were the provision of educational resources. French was overwhelmingly the dominant foreign language taught in British schools. As Table 1.1 illustrates, numbers of students taking French at the public examination stages of School Certificate (GCSE equivalent), and Higher School Certificate (A-level equivalent) were respectively approximately eight times, and four times higher than those sitting German. Even a public school like Stowe taught German only to a small minority of students, with a teacher who apparently ‘knew hardly any German himself’ (Ramsden 2007: 151). In this situation, contacts between British schoolchildren and those in Europe, if they existed at all, were most likely to operate in a Franco-British context alone. Thus, the Modern Language Association’s pen friend scheme had created over 5700 partnerships in France, in comparison with just 50 in Germany.⁵ The consequences of this markedly different level of provision were evident both in the numbers of those qualified at an advanced level in these subjects and in the general vivacity of the cultural conversation about these countries. During the 1930s, fewer than 90 students graduated from British universities with a Single Honours Degree in German. Even among the highly educated Britons with whom he mixed, the émigré Ernst Gombrich found that any knowledge of German culture among the British was relatively slight: ‘they all knew French, they all knew Italian, and they all knew the classical languages’.⁶ In fact, in the case of Italian, the language had virtually disappeared altogether from British secondary education by 1922, whilst Russian survived only within a handful of independent schools (Muckle 2008: 94). Between 1920 and 1939, the total number of students graduating in Russian from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) in London was no more than ten. In the commercial day-release and evening programmes meanwhile, as illustrated in Table 1.2, French was also dominant, but in this sector at least, where commercial necessity and personal choice were important factors, German was comparatively more popular than it was at secondary school level.

Table 1.1 Entries for School Certificate and Higher School Certificate, 1938

	School Certificate	Higher School Certificate
French	72,466	4752
German	9935	899
Spanish	1338	138
Italian	245	2
Russian	4	0
Other Modern Languages	15	103 (including Welsh)

Source: Hawkins 1987: 66, 67.

Table 1.2 Class entries for commercial day-release and evening programmes, 1932–3

French	47,410
German	20,387
Spanish	8673
Italian	1969
Russian	463
Danish	103
Portuguese	102
Dutch	97
Swedish	88

Source: NA ED 12/227, British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education.

The cultural knowledge resources on which the authorities could rely in the event of war were thus strong in relation to France but considerably less robust in relation to Germany, Italy and the USSR. Rather than the direct contact with the contemporary region on which the teaching of colonial languages had been predicated, the cultures of Europe were mediated, at least within the traditional secondary and higher education systems, through an indirect engagement with the country, normally via key canonical literary texts which dated from centuries gone by. Thus for example, a survey of French exam syllabuses in 1935 concluded that all of them, with the exception of the Northern Universities JMB board, were focused exclusively on the literature of the classical or romantic periods.⁷ Whilst Cambridge University had been notable in extending its Modern Languages Part II Tripos beyond 1900, with the latest period 1789–1914 rather than the nineteenth century,⁸ most university language departments in the inter-war period concentrated on the earlier periods of literature and philology: ‘The greater part . . . is spent in studying Old French, Historical French Grammar, and the History of French Literature’.⁹ Several commentators compared this type of historical cultural knowledge with an ideal more related to ‘the living speech of a living people . . . instruction relating to the characteristics of the foreign countries concerned’.¹⁰ A letter signed by 31 professors and readers called on universities to start examining, ‘in broad outline, the customs and institutions and the social conditions of the foreign peoples concerned’.¹¹ It was time, some argued, to ‘walk backwards towards the future’, to realize that it would be impossible to understand the contemporary situation of a European country solely through its past literature. By 1937, the urgency of such appeals was being couched in the language of near-apocalypse: ‘For those who believe that we are at the end of a phase of our civilization the static “stay put” a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Preparing for War: the British and Foreign Languages
• 2 Intelligence in Translation: Finding Out About the Enemy
• 3 Role-Playing for War: the Human in Human Intelligence
• 4 The War of Words: Psychological Warfare in a Foreign Language
• 5 Continental Invasion: Liberation and Occupation
• 6 Pursuing War Criminals: Military Interpreters in War Tribunals
• 7 The British and the War Victims: Bringing Relief to Refugees and Displaced Persons Overseas
• 8 The Russian Ally: Moving to Cold War
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index