The Great World War 1914–1945

1. Lightning Strikes Twice

Peter Liddle, John Bourne, Ian Whitehead

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780007598182
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Comparing and contrasting the World Wars.

PART I

THE FRONT LINE EXPERIENCE

Chapter 1

A personal reflection on the two World Wars

J. M. Bourne

Dates resonate in history, and in life. Few dates in 20th-century history resonate more than ’14-’18 and ’39-’45. They are not only instantly evocative and significant in themselves, but they also give meaning to other dates.

‘Would you mind telling me when you were born?’ I asked an elderly Lancastrian while taking part in an oral history project 25 years ago.

‘1903,’ he replied. This was followed by an infinitesimal but palpable pause, a silence that has followed me down the years. ‘A grand year, 1903,’ he added.

‘Why is that?’ I enquired.

‘Too young for the first war and too old for the second,’ he explained with a chuckle.

I was born in 1949, too young for both wars; too young even for conscription. Old enough for the welfare state, antibiotics, mass working-class prosperity, the coming of television and the expansion of higher education. Like the vast majority of professional historians of my generation, my experience of war is entirely second-hand. It is, nevertheless, real.

No British child born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War could possibly escape its influence. Samuel Hynes’s felicitous description of the Second World War as ‘Everybody’s War’ is certainly true in my experience.¹ Everybody appeared to have taken part in it. Not only fathers and uncles, but also mothers and aunts. I was taught by veterans of the war. My eccentric and charismatic English teacher, J. E. ‘Boris’ Simnett, landed in Normandy on D+3, carrying a wireless set that he promptly (and accidentally) broke, for which hamfistedness he was threatened with court-martial. My equally eccentric physics teacher, E. W. ‘Daddy’ Knight, enlivened lessons with tales of his time in bomb disposal.

As an undergraduate I sat at the feet of the Rev J. McManners, who fought in the Western Desert as adjutant of the 1st Battalion Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and later with the Greek resistance, and R. H. Evans, who spent much of the war with 7th Armoured Division and actually witnessed the German surrender to Field-Marshal Montgomery on Luneburg Heath. When I entered the world of work, as a civil servant, most of the middle managers were veterans. ‘I slept next to my tank all the way from Normandy to the liberation of Belsen and never got a cold,’ one wistfully recalled. ‘Now if I go out without a hat, I risk pneumonia.’² The undoubted nostalgia that many seemed to feel for the war is apparent in the last remark. ‘No one in this country comes alive until you mention the war,’ observed a young American on his first visit to Britain in the early 1960s.³

Nostalgia was not confined to those who fought the war. Many in my generation grew up believing that they had missed something that was not only really important but also really exciting. This was due not only to the influence of adults but also to the new, powerful medium of television, especially perhaps to the long-running series All Our Yesterdays, which showed – almost nightly, it seemed – extracts from British newsreels from the same week 25 years earlier. In this way it was possible to live through the descent into war and the war years vicariously. And I did. Few major figures of the war adapted better to the new medium than Field-Marshal Montgomery. More even than Churchill, he was, for me, the great British hero of the Second World War. I cried the day he died. Churchill was a remote figure who appeared in newsreels and waved at the cameras from the steps of aircraft or the decks of Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Montgomery gave interviews. And what interviews. ‘Now, I’ll call you Cliff and you call me Monty,’ he declared to the television journalist Cliff Michelmore, himself a veteran of the war. It was captivating stuff.

What television failed to achieve was completed by the cinema. War films were a staple of the British film industry throughout the 1950s and 1960s: They Were Not Divided (1950); Albert RN (1953); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Colditz Story (1954); The Dam Busters (1954); Cockleshell Heroes (1955); Reach for the Sky (1956); Ill Met by Moonlight (1956); Battle of the River Plate (1956); The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); Dunkirk (1958); Sink the Bismarck (1960); The Battle of Britain (1969); and many more. Television repeated films made during the war itself: The Foreman Went to France (1941); In Which We Serve (1942); Went the Day Well? (1942); The Bells Go Down (1943); San Demetrio London (1943); Desert Victory (1943); Western Approaches (1944); and Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Feature films tended to portray what were, to the British, key moments of the war. By the time I was ten I could recite the litany: the Graf Spee; Dunkirk; the Home Guard; ‘the Few’; the Blitz; Coventry; the Bismarck; Tobruk; El Alamein; Singapore; the Prince of Wales and the Repulse; the death railway; Burma and the ‘Forgotten Fourteenth’; Anzio; the Dambusters; D-Day; Arnhem; Doodlebugs and the V2; Belsen.

Samuel Hynes and Gary Sheffield have shown that young men who grew up in the 1930s and went to war in the 1940s did so with a war already in their heads.⁴ That war was, of course, the First World War, or at least the First World War depicted in the ‘anti-war’ memoirs of a small number of middle-class veterans. By the time I reached my teens the war I had in my head was the Second World War. David Lodge’s novel Small World has a hero who is writing a PhD thesis about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. There is an important sense in which it is possible to talk about the influence of the Second World War on the First. When, eventually, I came to read and think about the First World War, it was difficult to rid my mind of images of the Second. Doubtless, these distorted my view but they also illuminated it.

The Second World War in my head had several distinguishing features. First and foremost, it was clearly glorious. This is now a deeply unfashionable thing to say. Many would regard the statement as wicked. It would be meaningless to my mother-in-law, a Pole, to whom the war brought nothing but suffering, loss and displacement. But most people in my childhood seemed to feel it. ‘No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor in the elegiac final paragraph of his volume in the Oxford History of England.⁵

Second, the noble crusade had been a quintessentially British victory. ‘We’ had won the war. This was the source of much national pride. Although the Second World War was a global conflict, fought by armies numbered in millions across four continents, the British always seemed to be at the heart of it and to be playing the key role. Persons who questioned this often got short shrift. The British were very proprietorial about their victory. During the 1960s an American television series about a US unit operating behind enemy lines in the Desert War had to be taken off by the BBC after a couple of episodes following howls of outrage from British Eighth Army veterans. Early attempts at revising the heroic ‘myth’ of 1940, by Len Deighton in Fighter (1977), also brought odium upon its author. Foreigners had only walk-on parts in this drama. Germans were efficient and brave in a bad cause. Italians were useless soldiers, worthy only of contempt. ‘I’ve got no time for Italians,’ one British veteran recalled. ‘When we put them into the POW cages in Algeria they just sat around in their own shit. Not like Jerry.’⁶ ‘Japs’ were cruel and unfathomable. One decent, humane, well-read, liberal-minded provincial Englishman recently observed to me that he still found it almost impossible to be civil to Japanese, whom he characterised as ‘vicious little bastards’.⁷

Allies, except perhaps for the brave and exotic Poles, fared no better. The French (and the Belgians) had ‘let us down’. The Yanks prevailed because they had lots of ‘kit’, not because they could fight. Eisenhower was no more than a glorified clerk, whose failure to submit to the military genius of Montgomery had handed half of Europe over to Communism; Patton was a madman who slapped shell-shocked soldiers. The war on the Eastern Front was vaguely recognised as bloody and important, but the war there had been won by a country that was now our mortal enemy, whose nuclear missiles were pointed at our shores. Wartime admiration for the achievements of the Red Army soon evaporated. Now, in middle age, I recoil with horror at the parochialism, narrow-mindedness and bigotry of these views, but they were commonplace in my childhood and many still share them.⁸

Third, the war was well-managed. After initial setbacks, mostly attributed to the malign influence of the ‘Men of Munich’, the British eventually got their act together. Churchill provided not only effective but also inspirational leadership at the political level. Montgomery and Slim emerged as ‘great commanders’, with an almost unbroken record of success. Both had learned from the mistakes of the First World War. They were prudent with men’s lives. They left nothing to chance. They understood technology. They had the common touch. If, in Montgomery’s case, it was that of a shameless vulgarian, no one seemed to care. But Slim was what would now be called ‘cool’. He exemplified the ironic mode of late-20th Century heroism. Most of all, however, they had, in the words of Slim’s own account, turned defeat into victory at a price that seemed worth the paying.⁹ Casualties lie at the heart of British perceptions of the two World Wars. British casualties in the First World War were unprecedented in the national experience. British military casualties in the Second World War were hardly small (c305,000) but they were considerably less than half of those of the First. The superior nature of British military leadership and technology in the Second World War is still generally given credit for this by popular opinion.

Fourth, the Second World War was not only a war of national heroism but also a war of individual heroism. There was something almost bijou about Britain’s war, a war of commando raids and operations behind enemy lines, small scale, human scale, dramatic, filmable and easy to follow. It was a war in which individuals and small groups seemed to make a difference: Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; Orde Wingate; Vian of the Cossack¹⁰; ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and the Kelly, the ‘little ships’ and their crews at Dunkirk; the Chindits; the Long Range Desert Group. When, in later years, I learned in the pages of Professor Fussell that the First World War had changed for ever the nature of heroism, it was the cause of some consternation.¹¹ The heroes of the Second World War seemed then, and seem now, to sit easily with those of the past: Grenville, Drake, Wolfe, Nelson.

Finally, the Second World War represented the triumph of brains. It was a war of the ‘boffin’ and the ‘gadget’. Few books are better designed to lift the spirits of the Briton than R. V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945¹², in which a motley collection of mathematicians, linguists, classicists, engineers, chemists and physicists, even the odd historian, often eccentric and unwarlike individualists in horn-rimmed spectacles and decaying sports jackets, conspired to destroy the Nazi war machine. The centrepiece of this was, of course, the development of radar. Though the name of its originator, Robert Watson Watt, was well known, his personality was not. The iconic figure of the boffins’ war became, instead, Dr Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, a concept so bizarre that it must have been the work of a genius. Only later, however, did history offer up the pièce de resistance of the British war effort, Enigma. Revelations about the code-breakers’ war at Bletchley Park, which appeared in the early 1970s¹³, merely confirmed the importance of British brain power and discovered a new hero, the mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer pioneer, Alan Turing, who was not only a genius but also a tortured gay, very much a hero for the late 20th century.

During my childhood, the First World War struggled for visibility in the glare of attention paid to the Second. There was no one to reminisce with me about the Great War. Both my grandfathers died before I was born, one as the result of war service. My maternal grandmother died when I was three. My paternal grandmother was not a woman who invited questions. My first, dim, awareness of the First World War came through the powerful injunction never to wear a poppy. This stemmed from my maternal grandmother, Louisa Sheldon, a formidable personality who never forgave the war for killing her husband and leaving her in poverty to bring up a family of five, including four girls. She regarded poppies as a means of extorting money out of gullible people who could ill afford it for the enrichment of those who had done well out of the war.

Beyond the family, the First World War seemed to exist only as a guilty secret. My loud, childish enquiries about why some men had only one arm or one leg was met with a whispered, ‘He lost it in the first war.’ My native North Staffordshire was no stranger to respiratory disease: white lung for potters, black lung for colliers. During the early 1960s I began to notice coroners’ reports in the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel in which the cause of death was given as ‘pneumoconiosis, with gassing in the First World War as a contributory factor’. Gassing. The Second World War had gas masks, but no gas. The First World War evoked no nostalgia. Politicians did not summon the nation to show the ‘spirit of the Somme’ as they routinely did the ‘spirit of Dunkirk’ or the ‘spirit of the Blitz’. It seemed to be a war of victims, not of heroes. It was, in short, a very different kind of war.

How different became apparent as soon as I began to read about it. My introduction was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys¹⁴. It was not necessary to read far in this book to get the message. The caption of the first photograph, adjacent to the title page, read ‘Donkey decorates lion’. Between pages 80 and 81 there were photographs of No-Man’s Land showing ‘human remains and detritus’ and of an advanced dressing station (something that rarely seemed to adorn the pages of books on the Second World War) in a ruined farmhouse. These contrasted strikingly with the photograph of General Rawlinson, captioned ‘Rawly’, standing in the sun on the steps of a chateaux, immaculate in dazzling boots and leather gloves.¹⁵

When television finally turned its attention to the First World War, it did so with extraordinary effect. Tony Essex’s epic documentary The Great War (1964) proved so compelling that it was repeated on BBC1 even before the 26 episodes had concluded on BBC2. Much of the modern British fascination with the First World War stems from the impact made by this series. The impact was not that intended by some of those who made the programme. The series’s haunting, mournful music (written by Wilfred Josephs), its contemporary film (some of it now known to be fake) showi...