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,