The best way of summing up my personal experience of the Second World War is to say that it took six and a half years out of my life, six of them in the British army. I had neither a ‘good war’ nor a ‘bad war’, but an empty war. I did nothing of significance in it, and was not asked to. Those were the least satisfactory years in my life.
Although I was clearly not the military type, and still less a potential commander of men, the main reason why I wasted my country’s time and my own during most of my twenties was almost certainly political. I had, after all, some qualifications relevant to a war against Nazi Germany; not least a native knowledge of German. Moreover, as a rather bright history student at King’s, whose intelligence veterans of the First World War were given the responsibility of recruiting for the future staff of Bletchley, and which sent seventeen of its dons there, it is inconceivable that my name would not have crossed the mind of one of these. It is true that I lacked at least one conventionally accepted qualification for intelligence work, namely doing the Times crossword puzzle. As a central European I had never grown up with it, nor did it interest me. It is also true that I did not rate highly on the other traditional qualification, the one that had got my uncle Sidney into codebreaking in the First World War, namely chess. I was an enthusiastic but very far from distinguished player. Still, had I not been quite so public and prominent a bolshevik as an undergraduate, I rather think that I would not simply have been left in Cambridge to await the decisions of the East Anglian call-up authorities.
On the other hand, the official view that someone of such obvious and recent continental provenance and background could not, in spite of his and his father’s passports, be a 100 per cent real Englishman, may well have played some part. (Such a sentiment was far from uncommon in the Cambridge of the 1930s and was shared perhaps by my supervisors.) After all, plenty of Party members did serve in intelligence during the war, including some who made no secret of their membership. Certainly my nomination a few weeks after call-up for what turned out to be a divisional cipher course (two officers, seven NCOs, three other ranks) was aborted for this reason. ‘Nothing personal, but your mother was not British,’ said the captain as he told me to take the next train from Norwich back to Cambridge. ‘Of course you’re against the system now, but naturally there’s always a bit of sympathy for the country your mother belonged to. It’s natural. You see that, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I mean I have no national prejudices. It’s all the same to me what the nations do, so long as they behave themselves, which the Germans aren’t doing now.’ I agreed. He promised to recommend me for an interpreter’s job. Nothing further was ever heard about it. Curiously enough, my memory completely wiped out this episode, although I recorded it at the time.
Did I already have an intelligence file when I was at Cambridge? There is no way of knowing. I had certainly acquired one by the middle of 1942, when a friendly sergeant in Field Security told me that I was supposed to be watched. It is possible that I acquired one in 1940 shortly after I was called up, for as a good communist I made arrangements to stay in contact with the Party, which meant that when in London, I met Robbie (R. W. Robson), a sallow, lined, hard-smoking working-class full-time cadre since the early 1920s, in one of those small, dusty, second-hand-looking offices up a dark staircase in WC1 or WC2, in which such people were to be found. These were very likely bugged by Security.
Whenever I acquired my file, I was clearly seen as a suspicious character, to be kept out of sensitive areas such as abroad, even after the USSR became Britain’s ally and the Party devoted itself to winning the war. While the war lasted (and indeed from 2 September 1939 until my first postwar visit to Paris in 1946) I never left the soil of Great Britain – the longest unbroken period I have ever spent without crossing some sea or land frontier. Nobody after May 1940 appeared to take an interest in my languages. At one moment I got as far as an interview on the subject in what I took to be a secret service office at the top of Whitehall, but nothing came of it. Reluctantly I got used to the idea that I would have no part in Hitler’s downfall.
What could the officers do who found themselves lumbered with an intellectually overqualified and practically underqualified oddball with minimal gifts for the military life? Since I could drive a car I was called up as a driver, but I did not take to the company’s requisitioned 15-cwt- and 3-ton trucks, or to motorbikes, and soon became merely a pair of unskilled arms. What could be done with such a figure? I was presumably regarded as unpromotable. In the end the 560th Field Company of the Royal Engineers found a way of getting rid of me. I was recommended for transfer to the Army Education Corps, which – since this was a people’s war – was being rapidly expanded. I was sent on the required course to a building behind the jail in Wakefield, taking with me – why should I still remember this so vividly? – Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. There I discovered the enormous superiority of northern fish-and-chips to what I had hitherto been used to, and passed, in the company of another historian and future vice-chancellor of London University.
My transfer came through some time later, in the early autumn of 1941, a few days after we had moved to Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh borders, near which, exactly fifty years later, I found myself buying the Breconshire cottage in which I write these lines. It may well have saved my life, for in the meantime the unit had been ordered abroad, and we already had our embarkation leave behind us. As usual, I spent it among the bombs in London. Naturally nobody told us where we were bound for, though the Middle East seemed the most likely. But the 15th East Anglian Division, including the 560th Field Company RE, did not set sail for the Middle East, but via Cape Town and Mombasa for Singapore, where they were captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Those who survived spent the next three years building the Burma railway. About a third of them did not. I never saw my mates again. Would I have survived? Who knows. In any case, I did not find out how lucky I was until much later.
II
My army career thus falls into two sharply distinct parts. The first of these, my time with the Royal Engineers, was by far the more interesting. As might be expected, a field company of sappers was a purely working-class unit, except for its few officers. I was the only intellectual in it, indeed almost certainly the only other rank in it who habitually read the news pages of the daily newspaper before or instead of the racing pages. This unusual habit gave me my nickname during the weeks when France collapsed: ‘Diplomatic Sam’. For the first time in my life I found myself a member of the proletariat whose emancipation was to bring freedom to the world, though an uncharacteristic one. To be more precise, I found myself living in the country in which the majority of the British people spent their lives, and which had only a marginal contact with the world of the classes above them. Being called up in Cambridge dramatized the contrast, since for two or three months I lived in both worlds. After duty (i.e. mainly learning the elements of drill on the green turf of Parker’s Piece) I moved from one to the other as I walked to the centre of university Cambridge from the working-class street where the military authorities had quartered me and a barber’s assistant and former hotel porter from Lowestoft called Bert Thirtle, on an elderly widow, Mrs Benstead, We shared what had been the Benstead matrimonial bed which was fortunately a wide one. It was not an ideal introduction to the world of the proletariat, since Thirtle lacked the social reflexes which I found so striking in my otherwise politically disappointing mates, and which explains so much about British trade unionism. Most of my mates saw themselves essentially as civilians who put on uniforms as their dads had done in 1914–18. They saw no special virtue in the martial life or look: civvy street was where they hoped to go back to as soon as possible. But Thirtle had always secretly dreamed of wearing a uniform, although it did not get him far with the girls (any girl was a ‘tart’ in our jargon) he picked up in Petty Cury. His fiancée, a seventeen-year-old who worked in a kitchen, wrote him daily letters and sent parcels containing the local papers, The Wizard , Comic Cuts
and American strip cartoons.
In retrospect I am amazed how powerful an instinctive sense or tradition of collective action was in a bunch of young working men, ranging from the unskilled to some apprenticed tradesmen, mostly builders, assembled in the same NAAFI canteen or games room by the accidents of conscription. This struck me less at the time than their wavering uncertainty – and indeed my own – about what we should all do at moments that called for some action, and the general sense of helplessness in the face of authority. And yet, as I read the notes of my diary, what impresses me is the familiarity with the procedures of collective action, the constant, almost intuitive, potential for militancy. They were at home in the ‘public sphere’ of the British working class. Had not someone, during one protest, suggested that we should organize a proper meeting at The Locomotive like a real union, with a table and a bell and a glass of water?
The proletarian experience was novel in other respects. I think it is safe to say that in 1940 few Kingsmen had had occasion to operate a road drill, and I found the experience of doing so tiring but exhilarating. The Sappers were essentially a formation of workers skilled and less skilled, more from general manufacture and the building trades (for a lot of metal workers were in reserved occupations and those needed by the army went into other, more specialized corps) from many parts of Britain – the Black Country, London, Nottingham, a sprinkling from the Northeast and Scotland – but mainly from the eastern counties, since ours was essentially an East Anglian division. A few anomalous Cantab recruits found themselves in its ranks – myself, slightly older friends and acquaintances such as Ian Watt, later a distinguished professor of literature, whose work on the origins of the English novel the student Marxists were already discussing, and slightly younger ones such as the witty graphic satirist, Granta’s cartoonist Ronald Searle. Both returned, marked for life, from Japanese gulags. Ronald, whom I occasionally saw during our common time in the division, was already being discovered by the admirable Kaye Webb, then commissioning editor at Lilliput, a pocket-sized and very hip magazine founded by an emigrant Mitteleuropean, and much appreciated by our generation, who later married him. (She also took a few articles from me during and after the war, until the magazine disappeared.) Meanwhile, he became one of the most successful cartoonists of his time, thanks largely to the invention of St Trinian’s, a girls’ school peopled by the most appalling pupils, inspired, one understood, by the small terror-bringing Japanese of his wartime prison camps.
By and large in my days as a Sapper I lived among workers – overwhelmingly English workers – and in doing so acquired a permanent, if often exasperated, admiration for their uprightness, their distrust of bullshit, their sense of class, comradeship and mutual help. They were good people. I know that communists are supposed to believe in the virtues of the proletariat, but I was relieved to find myself doing so in practice as well as in theory.
Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark and the war really began. As soon as the Germans – we could hardly believe it – began to overrun the Low Countries, the 560th Field Company had something real to do. For anything up to fourteen hours a day, virtually isolated from the civilian life of Norfolk which went on around us, we improvised defences for East Anglia against a potential invasion. We shifted sandbags, revetted the walls of giant anti-tank trenches round the town that were being dug ahead of us by a civilian excavator, inexperienced, clumsy and above all utterly unconvinced that the ditch would stop any tanks, especially since there were no anti-tank guns or anything else, but our main work was mine-laying and attaching explosive charges to bridges, ready to blow them in case of need. As spring turned into summer, we had absolutely miraculous weather for this work. I can still feel the wonderful elation of climbing (a bit nervously) up the sides of the girders of the great bridge across Breydon Water, just outside Great Yarmouth, to work on the high span between blue sky and salt water, the (deceptive) sense of power that comes from the routine handling of explosives, fuses and detonators. I can remember the holiday idleness of lazing in small detachments of three or four posted to some remote lock or bridge with a tent and 200 lb of explosives, waiting for the invaders. What would we have done, had they come? We were raw, without military experience or even arms: in addition to our clumsy Lee-Enfield rifles the company had exactly six Lewis guns with which to keep enemy aircraft at bay. We would not have made an impressive first line of defence against the Wehrmacht.
The lads’ reaction to the German invasion of Denmark and Norway was a confident indignation. Gloom, depression and even defeatism had been the mood by the time they invaded the Low Countries, in the middle of the political crisis that finally threw out Neville Chamberlain. ‘What kind of English soldiers are you?’ said the company Irishman, Mick Flanigan, surrounded by barrack-room talk about how much better the German army obviously was than ours, and what things might be like under a German government. Chamberlain’s fall cheered them up again, for he had obviously been a major cause of the general depression. Patently the new Churchill government was welcomed by our company. (I noted at the time how strange it was that the heroes of the British workers were Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden, ‘aristocrats, not even demagogues’.)
Discouragement grew again in the next few weeks of backbreaking physical work and virtually complete isolation in our camps. Whatever the effect on civilians of Churchill’s famous radio addresses, the one on ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, including presumably those of Norfolk, was given at a time when we could not have heard it. Indeed, at the time I described the mood of the lads as ‘terrible’. We were working all hours of day and night, virtually confined to barracks and workplace (‘our biggest entertainment,’ I wrote, ‘is going to have the weekly shower’), without explanation, recognition or appreciation and, above all, ordered about, anonymous and inferior. Middle-class recruits dreamed of getting to the front where ‘they’d forget about blanco and polishing cap-badges and we’d all be in it together’. Most of my mates simply concluded: ‘This is no life for a human being. If the war finishes, OK. I want to get out of this and back into civvy street.’ Did they mean it? Plainly they did not, as their reaction to the fall of France on 17 June was witness.
I heard the news on a trip to a nearby pub from our post by the small bridge we were guarding on the table-flat road to Great Yarmouth. None of us had any doubt about what it meant. Britain was now alone. Let me transcribe what I wrote a few hours later in my diary:
‘Who was responsible?’ Half an hour after the radio announcement the English are already asking the question. In the pub where I heard the news, in the car that gave me a lift back to the bridge, in the tent with the two mates. Only one answer: it was old Chamberlain. The unanimous view: whoever is guilty must pay for it somehow. It’s something, even if it should turn out to be just a passing impulse …
A car stops at our bridge. I’d guess the driver, specs and false teeth, is a commercial traveller. ‘Have you heard the news on the radio?’ I say, ‘Yes, we have.’ ‘Bad, bad,’ says the man shaking his head. ‘Bloody bad, terrible.’ Then he drives on. We call after him, ‘Thanks, anyroad’ and go back to lying on the bank in the long grass and talking things over, slowly and in dismay.
The other two cannot believe it.
Not only could my mates not grasp what had happened. They could neither take in nor even imagine that this might mean the end of the war or making peace with Hitler. (Actually, reading my own immediate reactions to the fall of France, and in spite of the official Party line since September 1939, neither could I. A victory for Hitler was not what we had had in mind.) They could envisage defeat at the end of a fighting war – nothing was easier in June 1940. It was also clear to anyone near the East Anglian coast that, if Hitler invaded, as everyone expected him to, there was nothing much to stop him. What they could not envisage was not going on with the war, even though it was plain to anyone with a sense of political realities (even one reduced to an occasional sight of the Daily Telegraph on
the East Anglian marsh), that Britain’s situation was desperate. This feeling that Britain was not defeated yet, that it was natural to go on with the war, was what Winston Churchill put into words for them, though with a tone of heroic defiance which, pretty certainly, none of my mates felt. He spoke for a British people of ordinary folk, such as those of the 560th Field Company, who (unlike many of the better-informed) simply could not imagine that Britain might give up.
As we now know, in the words of Hitler’s Chief of General Staff, General Halder, ‘the Fuhrer is greatly puzzled by England’s persistent unwillingness to make peace’, since he believed himself to be offering ‘reasonable’ terms. 1 At this point he saw no advantage in invading and occupying Britain which (to quote Halder again) ‘would not be of any benefit to Germany. German blood would be shed to accomplish something that would benefit only Japan, the United States and others.’ In effect, Hitler offered to let Britain keep her empire as what Churchill, writing to Roosevelt, correctly described as ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’.2 In the 1990s a school of young Conservative historians argued that Britain should have accepted these terms. If Lord Halifax and the powerful peace party in the 1940 Conservative Party had prevailed it is not impossible – indeed, it is not unlikely – that the bulk of Britons would have gone along with them, as the bulk of Frenchmen went along with Marshal Petain. Yet nobody who now remembers that extraordinary moment in our history could believe that the defeatists had a real chance of prevailing. They were seen not as the peace-bringers but as the ‘guilty men’ who had brought the country to this pass. Confident in this massive popular backing, Churchill and the Labour ministers were able to hold their own.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 20
