大象传媒

MY WAR: Part 1

It was May 1943 before my services were required, the build up for the invasion of Europe was beginning and it was undoubtedly that factor that hastened my departure.

Dorothy, my fianc茅e, accompanied me to the railway station where we said our goodbyes on the platform by the open carriage doorway. By this time I was regretting the action I had taken, I certainly didn鈥檛 want to leave Dorothy behind, but yet I was longing for adventure, foreign travel in particular. I can鈥檛 remember any particular sense of patriotism; even in those days I didn鈥檛 feel that this little Island was anything so very special.

The war was to be an adventure, an experience of a lifetime, to get away from parental control, unfortunately, that meant leaving Dorothy. It never entered my head as the train pulled away that what I was about to become involved in could possibly cost me my life. I am not aware of any of my compatriots feeling any differently to that, we didn鈥檛 think for one moment that we could be killed; likewise it never entered our silly heads that we could possibly lose the war.

Even before the Americans came into the action after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, even then we were confident of final victory, standing alone or otherwise. This wasn鈥檛 arrogance, just total acceptance of the massive propaganda campaign launched upon the uneducated working class by the wartime government.

Every scrap of news, newspapers, cinema and radio, was rigidly censored, the enemy was portrayed as the embodiment of all things evil. Atrocities carried out by the enemy were exaggerated and embellished to create in the British people, the necessary will to survive and to give at all times their maximum effort towards winning the war against the Nazi terror.

We had no freedom of self will, labour was directed into the war effort or into the armed forces, treason was a capital offence and carried a death sentence, only the medically unfit were excused some form or other of national service. Food was strictly rationed to a level, which would seem like a starvation diet to the young people of today.

However, money could make life slightly easier and it is well known that the middle and upper class members of this class besotted wartime society were able to procure food, clothing, and escape the rigours of the austerity most of us had to endure. Expensive hotels still offered multi-course dinners for non-residents who could afford the high prices. A black underground market existed for luxury items not available to the majority and sometimes, jobs could be bargained for, giving exemption from service in the armed forces, for those who wished to dodge their national duty and had the necessary money to do so.

Unfortunately, the armed forces were dominated by the class system, just as society was then and still is, today. It seemed that officers were commissioned according to their social standing, not according to capability; here again, money played a very large roll in the securing of a commission in HM forces. I am not referring to bribery, merely to the fact that people from a wealthy background secured the best jobs, not necessarily the safest, but certainly the most interesting.

This system was the cause of a very unsatisfactory form of leadership in the British army, which became only too apparent by the blunders of strategy, throughout the campaigns.
You鈥檙e probably now thinking, 鈥渉ow the hell did we manage to win the war?鈥� The answer to that is simplicity itself. There are two main reasons, the first is Hitler鈥檚 stupidity in attacking the USSR instead of invading these islands and the second, which is probably the most important, the USA came in on our side armed with the greatest manufacturing capability on this planet. They were able to produce the war materials obligatory to defeating any adversary and the British Isles gave them the necessary European base in which to do so.

There is little doubt that our 鈥渟pecial relationship鈥� with the American people is of paramount importance even to this day, and the British government does well to maintain that position.

I really must apologise for diverting from the main theme, I do get carried away, don鈥檛 I, so, to get back on track (not intended as a pun) as I sat in the third class carriage of that slow, smoky and uncomfortable steam train bound for Markeaton park on the outskirts of the city of Derby the magnitude of my previous action began to sink in. I was bound for six weeks of initial training, the purpose of which was to transform indolent teenagers into uniformed automatons. Not that I realised this at the time, to the contrary, I was assuming that I would be escaping not only parental control, but the rigid regime of my Grammar school. The old adage 鈥榝ools rush in where angels fear to tread鈥� fits in very well at this juncture! I was escaping the relative peace and security of home and school for the most autocratic system ever devised by man.

A system built up over centuries, well tried and trusted and based on the principle that all human beings other than HM Commissioned Officers are completely without brains or initiative and must be thoroughly trained to perform like animals in a circus. The trainers were the Non Commissioned Officers (NCO) who were the handmaidens of the Commissioned Officers. The NCOs, (Sergeants, Corporals and Lance Corporals) existed to make the Private鈥檚 (common to garden soldiers, referred to as cannon fodder) lives a complete misery and to ensure that the plans, whims and idiosyncrasies of the Commissioned Officers were carried out to the letter, even if chaos, was the consequence!

The system worked extremely well by virtue of the fact that there was a set procedure for every part of the Private鈥檚 training which was learned by the Sergeants and rigidly put into practice, leaving the Officers free to strut around with their swaggering sticks, trying to look intelligent.

Not of course that all the soldiers were of greater intelligence than the Officers; no, I'll concede that some of the soldiers were even less intelligent than some of the Officers but in the main it鈥檚 perfectly correct to say that there was little or no difference between the ranks with regard to intelligence: anyway, certainly not at the initial training stage. The situation in that respect was different later in the campaign.

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