I was born in 1983, and when I was a child, the second world war still had a significant cultural presence in British life. The youngest veterans – men born in the mid-twenties – remained relatively sprightly. The war was recent enough that there were men around who had been senior officers or otherwise involved in important decision-making. War films were a staple of Sunday afternoon and Bank Holiday TV, and we played ‘English versus Germans’ in the playground. Not until 2007 did the House of Commons lose its last member who had been under arms in 1939-45: the Indian-born Piara Khabra died just a few days before Tony Blair stood down as PM. Robert Runcie, who was Archbishop of Canterbury for the first eight years of my life, had won the MC on the Rhine.
It’s noticeable too that any emphasis on derring-do and pluck, and the island nation standing firm against invasion, has more or less vanished
We geriatric millennials had perhaps the last glimpse of the war as a great Boy’s Own adventure, part of a long British tradition of martial exploits that went back hundreds of years. That view of the conflict was well on its way out, even then, but it was still influential. As far as my friends and I were concerned, plucky Britishers spent the six years breaking out of POW camps, flying Spitfires against impossible odds, conducting brilliant commando raids on occupied Europe, and seeing off U-boats in the North Atlantic. The brainboxes who weren’t cut out for such capers could break Nazi codes at Bletchley Park, or invent weird and wonderful new weapons for the chaps at the sharp end. The Germans were certainly villainous, but almost cartoonishly so, and we often encountered in fiction the stock character of The Good German, usually a professional soldier who disliked Hitler but was simply doing his patriotic duty.
However, as the twenty-first century has unfolded, the way we think and talk about the second world war has noticeably changed. For one thing, the sombre tone of remembrance now seems to have cast a shadow over all discussion of the war, and the rather lachrymose sentimentalism that has grown up around remembrance in the last two decades further unbalances folk memory. Part of the problem is that all the men left to talk about the war are enormously old, and largely unable to give animated or exciting reminiscences. The narrative is dominated by those lamenting the misery of war and the terrible losses sustained.
This affects popular perceptions of both the old soldiers and the great enterprise in which they participated. During the actual war, any surviving soldiers were very young, and therefore unlikely to have been in positions of command or responsibility. This means that their recollections tend to be fragmented, low-level and impressionistic – this is not inherently bad, but is liable to lead to a simplistic ‘War is Chaotic Hell’ narrative if not balanced by the perspectives of more senior officers or politicians.
It’s noticeable too that any emphasis on derring-do and pluck, and the island nation standing firm against invasion, has more or less vanished. Instead we are encouraged to understand the war as an idealistic conflict against fascism or racism, fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of elite thinking – equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on. The fact that our enemies were other countries, concrete entities whose interests clashed with our own, has been quietly de-emphasised. Some left-wing activists claim the wartime generation for their own cause, suggesting absurdly that the men who stormed Normandy were ‘Antifa’ avant la lettre.
In this way of thinking, the immediate post-war years are understood implicitly as a kind of national refounding, with the creation of the NHS a rebuke to the allegedly heartless Toryism of the supposedly benighted interwar years, and immigrants arriving to reinvigorate the tired, dull, racially bigoted Old Britain. In the war we defeated fascism, and exposed the folly of patriotism and national interest, so that we could proceed to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence. Such a reconfiguration of the popular imagination has been undertaken not only because demographic change has upset ideas of national history and popular memory, but also because ‘old-fashioned’ wars are politically uncongenial for modern folk. To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for Britain, for King and Country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people like Keir Starmer uneasy.
Now it is true that even at the time the war was understood, and justified, as an existential contest with barbarism. Eisenhower’s war memoirs are called Crusade in Europe. In 1940 Churchill was already referring to the ‘abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister… by the lights of perverted science’. Hitler was explicitly named as an enemy of civilisation. The horrific revelations later in the war about the death camps and other atrocities made it very clear that the Western Allies were fighting a diabolical evil.
But this is not quite the full story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic conception of the war in Europe. The Battle of Britain was important, said Churchill, because ‘upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire’. The ‘Fight Them on the Beaches’ speech, meanwhile, placed the Nazi menace as the latest in a long series of threats to British independence from tyrants across the Channel, and invoked the need to ‘defend to the death [our] native soil.’ This reflected a widespread and reasonable understanding of the war as a basically national project, similar to the Great War, the Napoleonic Wars and the War of the Spanish Succession. In all those conflicts, as in the second world war, the initial and fundamental strategic priority for Britain was to maintain our own freedom of action against a powerful continental opponent.
To allow this aspect of history to fall by the wayside, in the service of contemporary political preoccupations, is to leave a great gap in our self-understanding. Retooling the war as essentially a kind of post-patriotic abstract fight for ‘values’ also does a disservice to those who fought, by construing their service and their sacrifice in anachronistic terms that would not make sense to them.
The British combatants saw themselves, by and large, not as the representatives of a new internationalist order, or the armed wing of the Guardian, but as the descendants of Drake, Cromwell, Wellington and Nelson.
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