In Which They Served - 1 : Our Own Personal War

I feel bound to warn the regular reader of this blog that the Second World War will appear regularly either at the centre or hovering around the edges of my theme, and I make no apologies for it. As a military history and wargaming enthusiast I would in any case always reserve the right to discuss wars and their various aspects, but the fact is that for several successive generations of Britons the Second World War was a central historic event of unparalleled importance. Its causes, course and outcome defined several decades of British life and character for good or ill and it has cast such a long shadow that even now it colours discourse on all sorts of matters of national importance – often with baleful results. It has been well said that while all other engaged nations have long moved on from it, for some reason the Brits have never quite been able to relegate it to history.

I didn’t realise until relatively recently how intensely personal the war felt to my generation and to that which came before it. I was born in June 1964; just over nineteen years after the war in Europe came to an end. That is less than the amount of time that has elapsed since all those Millennium fireworks on the River Thames, a mere roll of a die. As kids we all knew someone whose father or uncle had fought in the war. I was only vaguely aware of this fact until I read the journalist Harry Pearson’s light-hearted memoir of growing up as a wargamer, Achtung Schweinehund:

“I am sitting on the arm of my Uncle Alf’s chair. Uncle Alf is the only man who is allowed to sit down. His knee is dick courtesy of some Jap shrapnel from the Battle of Kohima”

- Harry Pearson, Achtung Schweinehund, Abacus Books 2012, pg 10

“It was the same for every child I knew. This boy’s uncle had been in a POW camp and when he came back had had to be weaned off his habit of hiding bread and soap; this lad’s grandfather had served on the convoys that took relief supplies to Archangel and said it was so cold in Russia that when you spat it hit the deck as hail…Tobruk, El Alamein and Monte Cassino were names so familiar to us they might have been nearby villages.”

- Ibid, pg 11

It was our war and we felt somewhat proprietorial about it. And it was a damn fine war to own because it felt like those rarest of things, a war with easily identifiable good and bad sides, at least if you are able to conveniently forget about Stalin. The neat sort of conflict that could be taken as a model for the neat sort of conflicts required in works of fiction, from Middle Earth to the rebellion against the Evil Empire of Star Wars.

My own dad served in the Merchant Navy throughout the war, having run away after the death of his parents to join up in 1930 at the age of 16. He had a colourful 16 years in the service, seeing places as varied as India and the Persian Gulf, South America (where he found himself in Montevideo when the wounded German pocket battleship Graf Spee limped in in 1939), the Eastern Pacific and the Arctic, where he served on those terrible convoys. Memories of the Arctic convoys were especially grim, battling against the Germans, the sea and the extreme cold, working on the catapults that launched fighter aircraft from the deck of the converted escort carriers. Typically for men of his generation he was tight-lipped about his wartime experiences, willing to speak only when drunk of some of the worse things he had seen. An uncle was in the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy, where he entertained the lowest possible opinion of his commander Bernard Montgomery (I recall he told a story of Monty ordering handfuls of cigarettes to be thrown from his staff officers’ cars, for the soldiers to scrabble for them in the sand, but I have no way of knowing if this was true or, if it was true, whether it indicated any contempt for the lower orders on the part of the general).

When I was a little bit older I always wondered how those parents, uncles and grandparents had felt while we kids ran around pretending to be airplanes and making mad dakka-dakka-dakka and explosion noises.

My Mum had the domestic version of the wartime experience, her stories full of air raids and shelters, food shortages and rationing. She told me that she was never able to remember who was on whose side, so when reports of battles appeared in the newspapers she always had to ask someone which side was ‘ours’ and which ‘theirs’. I could hardly credit this when growing up with a keen interest in the war, but to be fair Mum was for most of her life scarcely interested in the news, and in any case it must have been perplexing for a lot of people to read about Arabs officered by Britons fighting the French in Syria, Indians fighting the Japanese in Burma or Poles, Punjabis and Gurkhas fighting the Italians in the Appenines.

But the war was the one single experience that their generation had in common, and the commonality of that vast experience came to be seen as something inspirational and transformational. The nation, it was felt, had come together in a way that was unprecedented, and the benefits and the lessons of that experience must never be lost. Despite the still rigid class consciousness of both the British Army (where officers were still gentlemen, especially in the more prestigious units) and the wider British establishment, it was felt to be a levelling, democratising experience that compelled the aristocracy to share to an extent the burden of the lower orders. Even a Socialist writer like George Orwell could speak of the salvation of the British aristocracy being their willingness to roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good in time of war, and it can scarcely be denied that the largely aristocratic and bourgeois officer class led from the front in both World Wars and a score of lesser ones and suffered the casualty rates to be expected from doing so.

The politicians who lived through the war felt that recent history had taught them some hard lessons which should never be forgotten. The origins of the war were seen in the grim economic conditions of the 1930’s with rocketing unemployment and its attendant social distress and unrest. The politicians who served through the period could never forget that connection between social hardship and war, and it is no coincidence that the war years saw the compilation of the Beveridge Report with its purpose of eliminating the factors that had produced the want of the 1930’s and fed into the currents that led to the war, and of rewarding the British people for the sacrifices that had been endured. Those who had fought the war, at home and overseas, should not be betrayed as the veterans of the Great War had; Britain should truly become a land fit for heroes. Wartime and postwar politicians came to fear high employment as much as their successors a few decades later feared high inflation. The postwar reforms that emerged from the Beveridge report – the founding of the Welfare State and the NHS – was the culmination of this national act of coming together. Poverty, unemployment, squalor and disease were the evils of the age and need to be banished from a victorious but exhausted nation moving forward in unity from its shared trauma.

Times change, and the reforms that followed on from Beveridge came to be regarded some thirty years later as ‘creeping socialism’. It is easy to be cynical of the New Jerusalem of the 1940’s, and political support for it was perhaps never quite as unanimous as it often seems in retrospect. But it was, undoubtedly, the beginning of an era of economic equality of a type that we can only dream about these days when low paid workers use food banks while the guys who own their company are likely to earn more in a day than their employees do in a year. And while it is easy to be contemptuous of the paternalistic, patrician politicians who created the Welfare State, products of an Edwardian England already back then disappearing from view, in retrospect they do not compare badly against even the least repellent politicians of our own day, who come from the same social class and were educated at the same schools and universities but feel compelled to effect a bogus everyman mask that would have been regarded as plain vulgar back then.

I’m sure I would have hated growing up in Postwar Britain; rationing still in force, bad food, drab clothes, no possibility of a holiday, grey filthy cities still showing the effects of the Blitz (even in the 1970’s my area of Liverpool contained many bombsites where air raids had taken out half a street at a stroke, and where we used to gather to play football and cricket and Kick The Can – these patches we would refer to as ‘the debris’ and they were our parks). And yet despite the hardships and the bleakness there was still a sense, perhaps diminishing with each year, of camaraderie, a sense that we had, by pulling together, won a war that had to be won and that as a result we had the promise that life one day might be better for everyone. We call it the Postwar consensus now, and it is startling to reflect at how quickly it disappeared, to be replaced by an age of less self-conscious individual greed. I feel that I must have grown up at the very tail end of it; indeed given my always intense fascination for history, it is possible that it had already ended and I was just showing an early inclination to indulge in my lifelong habit of living in the past.

Grey, poor - but united?

While as a historian I aim for a certain objectivity in my reflections – though the reader would be forgiven for thinking otherwise! – I always feel that for all its greyness and austerity I would perhaps have felt less adrift in the society the war made than in that of today, all movement and busyness, sound, colour, choice…though perhaps that says more about me than the world in which I live.

But, to return to the theme of the post, I think the war and its spirit was still alive when I was growing up because so many of the personnel were alive and the war was still so alive in them. When I used to go to Evered Avenue Library to pick up my own history or war books I would sometimes pick up a book about the Naval war for my Dad. He would always be interested and often while or after reading it we would talk about the war, though usually skirting round his personal experiences. My parents’ memories were so vivid that while they lived I always felt a connection to the war years, and as Harry Pearson observed it was one that I think came naturally to my generation of kids. As the veterans of the Second World War gradually pass from the world, and as the world itself changes with such disconcerting speed, one can’t help but feel that connection is broken; when we talked of ‘the war’ everyone knew which war we meant – there really was just one. I wonder how many people who grew up in the generations after mine know anything very much about that vast conflict that loomed so large over my childhood. That said of course, sadly there has been no shortage of recent wars with similarly devastating effects which continue to shape the world in a more direct way. One universal of the human experience is our failure to learn from the disasters of the past.

The immediacy of the Second World war of course was reflected in a number of ways as I was growing up – comics, movies, novels, toys…and as I indicated at the beginning, I can guarantee that these will find their way into further blog posts at some point in the future.