Popular memory and the Second World War

Contemporary Review, July, 2005 by Albert Hobson

We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War. Mark Connelly. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]19.99 p.b. vii 328 pages. ISBN 0-582-50607-7.

For the British as a whole--and for large groups in America, Australia and Canada--the Second World War has now overtaken the Trojan War as the compendium of tales, ideas and anecdotes of personal, social, political and military behaviour under extraordinary conditions and pressures. A 'myth' has constructed itself, which is largely accurate historically, but, where it isn't, overrides boring or contradictory facts. It is essentially a narrative of national behaviour: Britain was unprepared, unwilling and pacific, but was dragged into war by an aggressor; fighting as little as possible but then suddenly overwhelmed. For a year and a half she 'stood alone', defended by 'knights of the air', developing an unprecedented degree of national cohesion which enabled her to endure years of hardship and suffering until stronger, or at any rate, larger, allies built a Grand Alliance in which Britain, although small and very tired, remained one of the Big Three, largely because she had produced the dominant national leader. It had, by the end, become a People's War, crowned in 1945 by the election of a People's Government. The force of this myth is still very great, for both good and ill. Now that the generals and ministers have departed, and the obituary columns are recording the last fighter pilots and company commanders who did memorable things as very young men, personal memories are hardly available to correct or fulfill the myth.

Mr Connelly examines, rather cursorily, the evidence for this myth being, in part, a fable. Not having been around during the War, he was bound to miss some of the most telling facts, for example, that in the month of Dunkirk there were still over a million unemployed. He also fails to catch the atmosphere of boredom and gloom which settled during 1941-42, and the dreadful conviction, born of defeat in Norway, Belgium, France, Greece, Libya and Crete, that the Germans were simply better at soldiering and that an Englishman was not turned into a Panzergrenadier by dressing him in a brown suit in which he resembled a London County Council park-keeper. He misses the too-general opinion of working-cIass women (noted by the War Cabinet) that 'it would make no difference to the likes of us if Hitler were in charge instead of Mr Churchill'. This reviewer remembers a First World War widow, ill-treated by life, who instructed her two sons on conscription that they were to get themselves taken prisoner as soon as possible: they managed, with some difficulty, to get the Italians to do this in Libya--somewhat denting the myth. He also underplays the emotional surge which followed el Alamein, coming as it did in that short period when Hope changed sides. But he does quote that late-evening news broadcast saying: 'After twelve days of heavy fighting, the Afrika Korps has broken, and is in full retreat'. Before the Americans could get in, before the Russians had started to advance, a British-Indian-New Zealand army of very ordinary men had broken Germany's best army under Germany's best general, and as my headmaster said: 'This means that in this school German will remain an optional subject'.

Mark Connelly then turns to the way in which the myth was disseminated in the postwar years. He refers to 104 films and thirty-nine television series, and seems to have seen them all. He refers to only one novel, Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, because it was turned into a film: it is true that the War still lacks its War and Peace (there is still time as War and Peace was only finished in 1869), but he might have noted Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, the three central volumes of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, or Verney's Going to the Wars. More factually, what about Churchill's own memoirs, best-sellers and leaving an indelible personal stamp on the record? The author is good on what one might call the Boys' Own corpus of fanciful Commando tales, all the way from The Guns of Navarone downwards, and is interesting on the static visual images of paintings and photographs. He reproduces Dame Laura Knight's memorable Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring--a picture with a programme if ever there was one: a young woman helps the war effort as much as any soldier, works alongside men in a heavy engineering plant, and does a difficult job with competence and concentration--although it is a pity that Miss Loftus's curls are outside her hairnet, something that would not have been allowed.

The argument of the book is simple. The Great Myth has been disdained by the Left and annexed by the Right, who have tossed bits of it to feed football hooligans (who to this day sing at international matches with France, etc., 'If it wasn't for the British, you'd be Krauts ...'). It is altogether too strong a force in modern Britain for our social or psychological health. Its only later rival has been the much weaker 'Thatcher Myth', which Mr Connelly misunderstands, which fed off the Great Myth. We ought to grow up.