Bring on the Trump protests

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green young officer ran out in front of them and cried ecstatically: ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!’ This was received in silence, which the lieutenant tried to break by waving his hat and shouting: ‘Hip, hip hooray!’ Then somebody laughed, and ‘a great torrent of mirth’ swept the line, ‘punctuated by cries of “Git the boogers oot here!” and “Ev ye told Tojo, like?” and “Hey, son, is it awreet if we a’gan yam?”’ This was the Border Regiment, and the author explained that ‘Gan yam’ is Carlisle dialect for ‘Go home’. Then they fixed bayonets and attacked even as, back home, crowds danced in Piccadilly. George thought our generations wimps. In old age he wrote to me from his eyrie on the Isle of Man, expressing scorn for British soldiers in Afghanistan, who could not run fast enough to keep up with the Taliban, because they were burdened with body armour. He enclosed a wartime photo of himself, saying: ‘This is what we wore to chase Johnny Jap’ – shorts, boots, bush hat, sten gun.

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My new book, Sword, explores one corner of D-Day, not to retell the ‘big picture’, but rather to describe the sensations of virgin soldiers plunged into action for the first time, mostly after four years in Britain training relentlessly and bored out of their minds.