I have not used their real names (except for one officer’s nickname) because while some of the conversation quoted is word for word, most of it obviously is not, although it is entirely faithful in gist, subject and style. Also, some details might cause distress to relatives or friends of those who died; for this reason I have shifted one incident out of chronological order. The rest is as I remember it, and if I have erred in matters which were beyond my ken, and of which I have had to write at second hand, or my memory has played me false in details like, say, aircraft markings, weapon calibres, or location descriptions, I apologise. I have checked as best I can, and must record my thanks to Lieutenant-Colonel John Petty, M.B.E., M.C., formerly officer commanding B Company, 9th Battalion The Border Regiment, 17th Indian Division, for reading the manuscript and correcting me on a number of factual details.
There is a third reason for writing: to illustrate, if I can, the difference between “then” and “now”, and to assure a later generation that much modern wisdom, applied in retrospect to the Second World War, is not to be trusted. Attitudes to war and fighting have, as I said earlier, changed considerably, and what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time. Myth, revisionist history, fashionable ideas and reactions, social change, and the cinema and television, have distorted a good deal over the past half-century. So I shall try to set it straight (or what seems straight to me, an eye-witness) in small and possibly unimportant matters of fact as well as in wider aspects.
Just to give three examples, the first trivial, the others rather more important:
I have read, in an essay by a respected military journalist, that the weapon known as the Piat (projector, infantry, anti-tank), while then in existence, was never used in Burma. Well, I carried the bloody thing, and fired it five times, with startling results.
Secondly, a couple of years ago I read a review of a book purporting to deal with “Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War”. The book was by an American scholar, and according to the review it concentrated on “the rationalisations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable reality”. I quote the review in part:
In chapters such as Chickenshit: An Anatomy, High-mindedness, and Typecasting, he underlines the lasting damage the war inflicted on ‘intelligence, honesty, complexity, ambiguity and irony.’ The frustration and disgust of the soldiers who knew that, for the benefit of those at home, their experience was being “systematically sanitised, Norman Rockwellised, not to mention Disneyfied” is documented, as are the stupidity and sadism that were represented by the media as tactical brilliance and noble courage.
Now, I haven’t read the book, and cannot say whether its author or the reviewer served in, or were even adults at the time of the war. Nor do I know whether the book is largely based on American experience or whether, as the review implies, it applies equally to Britain. If it does, then I can say without hesitation that the fifth word of the quoted passage is too kind a description of the rest of the paragraph.
But to start with, anyone who writes of “unacceptable reality” simply does not know what he is talking about; the reality of the Second World War was acceptable and accepted, and no “rationalisations and euphemisms” were required. They may well be required by a modern writer looking back; he may not understand that the rhetoric and propaganda of newspapers, broadcasts, and newsreels were recognised as such, at the time, both in the front line and at home. Of course media and government felt obliged to present the war in as favourable terms as possible, but that was understood, and nobody was fooled, and no softening was “needed” by the public in the condescending sense that the review suggests. The British people were not stupid; they had been to war before, and knew all about its realities at first hand.
It is difficult for later generations to understand this; they have a tendency to envisage themselves in the 1940s, and imagine their own reactions, and make the fatal mistake of thinking that the outlook was the same then. They cannot see that they have been conditioned by the past forty years into a new philosophic tradition, requiring new explanations; they fail to realise that there is a veil between them and the 1940s. They want to see the last war in their terms; they want it to conform to their notions. Well, it won’t.
To continue. Whatever damage the war inflicted on intelligence, honesty, etc., cannot be measured, let alone proved, even by a modern academic. I doubt if it had any special effect on anyone’s intelligence or honesty; how you can inflict damage on complexity, ambiguity, and irony, is not clear to me or, I suggest, to anyone who prefers plain English to jargon. Obviously the war influenced people’s thinking permanently, but to call such shaping of the mind “lasting damage” is fatuous. One might as well say that forty years of comparative peace have inflicted “lasting damage” on modern intelligence, and adduce modern theories about the 1940s as proof.
But the last sentence of the quoted paragraph is the real beauty. I have a fairly wide acquaintance among my generation, embracing most of the British campaigns of the war, and I have yet to meet anyone who felt “frustration and disgust” about the way his experience was presented to the public. To speak of sanitisation, Norman Rockwell, and Disney in this context is to employ cheap emotional cliché; it betrays the kind of blinkered mind which cannot appreciate that a Norman Rockwell idealisation (since his name has been dragged in) is not necessarily false for being an ideal, or for failing to satisfy a revisionist’s misconception of the truth. If you want to believe that soldiers felt “frustration and disgust” you will no doubt find some to agree with you, if you try hard enough, but my own experience suggests that, in Britain at least, they would be a small minority. As to stupidity and sadism: yes, this soldier saw plenty of one and a little of the other, but never knew them to be represented as tactical brilliance or noble courage. No doubt convenient examples could be provided, but it would be extremely unwise to draw a general conclusion from them.
The review goes on to say that “what, in time of war, was seen as necessary to uphold the morale of soldier and civilian alike has persisted for almost fifty years as a method of determining what should be accepted as reality”. So far as that has a meaning, it appears to be that misrepresentation of war was necessary at the time, and has continued until now, when presumably some omniscient revisionist has seen through the sham. Well, such a conclusion is false, and insulting. It fails to see that morale, far from being inspired by policy, comes from within, and is nourished by friends, family, and example. Government and media may reflect that – as Churchill did – but they cannot create it. Perhaps no one can understand that who was not alive and aware in Britain during the war, or experienced the Blitz, or was torpedoed, or confronted death and mortal peril at point-blank.
There is, for some reason which I don’t understand, a bitter desire in some to undermine what they call the “myths” of the Second World War. Most of the myths are true, but they don’t want to believe that. It may be a natural reaction to having the war rammed down their throats by my generation; it may have its roots in subconscious envy; it may even spring from a reluctance to recognise that today’s safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today’s intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves. I cannot say – but I do know that the review I have quoted is typical in presenting a view which is false. It is also dangerous because it may be taken as true by the uninformed or thoughtless, since it fits fashionable prejudice. And that is how history is distorted. You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to