The World at War (88 page)

DR FRANKLAND

The principal effects of the war on people and political systems bore upon the countries in
eastern Europe,
Poland most of all, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and those countries. These people were hoping that the war would liberate them from the threat of Nazi tyranny and in fact at the end of it they found themselves in the Communist bloc, which was far less sinister than the Nazi bloc. This was a very solid achievement of the Second World War, a very much less sinister type of tyranny replaced a highly sinister tyranny. But this was not the freedom for which they'd hoped, and for which we had fought. But this was the product of Soviet power, which was necessary to the destruction of Germany. This was simply the price that has to be paid in order to gain the fighting alliance of the Soviet Union.

AMBASSADOR BOHLEN

The gains and losses from the war are a very big question and I don't know that I could answer because in the first place, if we hadn't won the war it would have meant that the Japanese and the Germans would've won it. And I just think you can imagine what kind of a world that would have been. It's true that the problem of Russia emerged shortly after the war, but I would say on the whole that was certainly the lesser of the two evils. Their society certainly didn't get much satisfaction out of the results of the war but I think this was inevitable within the Soviet system. On the other hand a large portion of the world is still able to exercise a certain degree of freedom, particularly in their internal affairs, and I think the world would have been quite intolerable under Nazi and Japanese rule.

GENERAL ALBERT WEDERMEYER

Well – did we win? The verdict of history will take account not only of the military victories won by the Allies but also of the tragic political results which flowed from those victories. We eliminated the tyranny of Nazism from Europe and of Japanese militarism from Asia, and we substituted the tyranny of Communism.

DR AMBROSE

There's a view around today that World War Two turned out disastrously for all concerned except possibly the Communists. I think one can be very positive about World War Two: the most important single result is that the Nazis were crushed, the militarists in Japan were crushed, the Fascists in Italy were crushed, and surely justice has never been better served.

MAJOR GENERAL OTTO-ERNST REMER

I am quite convinced that Hitler never wanted a world war because at the beginning of it we were not at all prepared for one. Our production was in no way up to it. One has to regard Hitler as a reformer and an innovator for Germany and for Europe. He wanted a new kind of society and he wanted Europe to be a counterweight to America's pure capitalism and Russia's pure Communism. He wanted to create a form of living which suited us Europeans because we have to live in a very limited space compared to the two world giants. One has to look at Hitler in this light, as an innovator of a new form of life.

CHAPTER 35
REFLECTIONS

Remember,
the last episode of the series, began with an aerial shot of Oradour-sur-Glane, the French village where the Waffen-SS massacred the population as a reprisal for partisan activities. Hundreds of villages suffered the same fate on the Eastern Front. The programme did not mention that the officers responsible for the atrocity at Oradour died fighting with fanatical bravery in Normandy, perhaps because it would have pointed to the uncomfortable conclusion that men indifferent to their own survival are unlikely to be respectful of the lives of others. The tone was elegiac, dwelling on human loss but also, through the agency of J Glenn Gray whose important book
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
was published in 1970, seeking to say something profound about conflict. I think it worked well, and I have also used Dr Gray's eloquent words to give structure to what would otherwise be a grab-bag of quotable quotes.

I am a baby-boomer, born ten months after VE day, and my life and career have been dominated by an acute awareness of what J owe to the sacrifices of the two generations before mine. They fought and killed and died in battle so that I should not have to, and for the freedoms we all take for granted. Perhaps they were not, intrinsically, better people than we are, but their times called for sacrifice and heroism and if afterwards they felt a sense of entitlement it is entirely forgivable. Hard cases notoriously make bad law and perhaps the same may be said about whatever conclusions may be drawn from the Second World War. We may not be called upon to find out whether we lack 'moral fibre', or to explore the ambivalence of lethal vengeance, but video footage of 'smart bombs' at work seems to have increased the fascination with destruction that worried Dr Gray so much. Humanity remains much
the same and the world has been at war throughout history – it was simply convulsed by it, on an almost unimaginable scale, in 1939–45.

DR J GLENN GRAY

US Army Intelligence Officer and author

War is a study in extreme situations and one's mood does shift at an astonishing rate. You can be scared to
death one minute and laughing the next, you can be filled with hatred one minute and filled with love the next. War is excruciatingly boring; I have never been so totally absolutely bored as I was in the Army. But I could also say that I have never been so
intensely engaged and involved – a few minutes later, very often.

LEO GARIEPY

Canadian tank commander, D-Day

Sir, I was frightened when I left Canada in 1940 and I didn't stop being frightened until I got back home in 1945.

DR GRAY

I noticed different soldiers had different relations to death. One of the more common was that of a coward's relation, for him death is the greatest enemy. I had a friend called Mac who was convinced that every German was out to lull him personally and that every spot of earth where he was, was going to be the target for a shell or a bomb. He died a thousand deaths in my presence. He used to sleep beside me and he could tell even in his sleep when incoming shells landed within a mile or two. That kind of relation is negative. The opposite perhaps is the dare-devil soldier who almost courts death. In our southern France landing I was cowering under our Jeep because German shells were landing all around our boat, and I watched through the mass of harness and gear an American captain smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash off into the water, and I watched his hand, fascinated. It wasn't even quivering as much as mine is right now. I had the most irrational desire to creep through the gear and put my arms around him and embrace that fellow – although I've never wanted to embrace a man in my life.

SERGEANT BILL BECKETT

Sherwood Foresters group, Nottingham pub

We were in the front line at Anzio and there was somebody, one of his pals got sniped, got hit by a sniper, and he just grabbed his rifle and just went charging out of his position straight across into no man's land trying to find the bloke that had done it. I think Jerry stuffed about fifty bullets in him before he dropped. Everybody just stood there looking at him as he went crazy. A young chap. This is the kind of thing that people would never believe if you tell them. You know you've got to see these things happen to believe them.

DR GRAY

After a few weeks in the line I got away one afternoon and climbed up into the Apennines, and met the old
hermit. I think he was significant for me, a perspective on the war. Here was an old man who was curiously uninvolved, remote from the war. I had been totally cut up by the war and couldn't imagine anybody who wasn't so. And the old hermit had a simplicity, a kind of naivety that enabled me to raise my consciousness. I happened to be reading
War and Peace
at the time and discovered that Tolstoy had found a few Russian peasants that never knew what Napoleon's army was doing in Russia or that it was even a foreign army. This doubled the perspective that I, a hundred years later, should meet somebody in Italy who didn't know that there was a war on, and what it was all about, gave me a kind of perspective and an insulation against the total involvement that hitherto had been my lot. He was sitting smoking dried Italian grass and I gave him a bowlful of my own good tobacco. I came from a farm and feel at home with farmers and country people. His donkey was near by and he had a little grass hut where he slept. We sat down and began to talk and of course the artillery in the valley below opened up and he began to ask me questions about the war and I gradually became aware that he didn't know what was going on. My attempts to explain faltered, not only because of my rather poor Italian but because I suddenly realised that I couldn't explain to him why Americans and Britishers were fighting in Italy against Germans, with Italians on both sides. It seemed an impossible task. Even had he been speaking my own language I wouldn't have been able to tell him what the war was about because I really didn't know myself in any deeper sense. It was one of those strange, curious experiences that enable one to step back, so I've never forgotten that old Italian.

BILL MAULDIN

American cartoonist with
Stars and Stripes

The British 56th Division was still taking Salerno when we moved into it, that is our little group moved in to publish a newspaper. We took over this apartment, which I guess belonged to one of the local-government officials because he'd left, and it was a large and very elegant apartment. One room had a piano in it and I was sitting at the piano playing with one finger and sort of noodling around trying to think up a cartoon idea and this British soldier, I mean you couldn't have made a better cartoon of a typical British infantryman – he was grimy, he was dirty, he had his helmet on, he had his rifle, he had grenades all over him, and he had this young fifteen-year-old Italian chick with him, who was a very buxom lass who did not look inexperienced in spite of her age – and he nodded very politely and then ignored me totally and went to the cupboard in the corner and found some nice lace table napery, whatever it is. He found a doily which he placed on the floor – he was very delicate because the room was full of plaster dust – and proceeded to co-habit with this girl on the doily. And meanwhile I'm sitting there picking out a tune on the piano, watching the whole thing. They never gave me a chance to leave, really, and so then they left and the girl smiled over her shoulder at me and the soldier said, 'So long, Yank,' or something like that and went back out, back to battle. It was the weirdest and most sort of dreamlike thing I can remember out of the whole war, this little episode, which lasted all of five minutes.

DR GRAY

I experienced, all the way through in Italy and in France, the most amazing paradoxes, the contrast between the miseries of war and the insistencies of love. This kind of
contrast made me think that love and war are indissolubly linked to each other in ways that haven't been dealt with sufficiently since the early Greeks – the very first documents of Western civilisation have dealt with the marriage of love and war, of Aphrodite and Aries. The women brought, specially in Italy and France but also in Germany, an element that was in striking contrast to the hideous experience of the day and I think many of the women themselves were tremendously moved by this experience. There was tenderness in these affairs that we found totally lacking in our ordinary military experience. The two complimented each other, often made possible soldiers day-to-day advances; I couldn't overemphasise the importance of the element that women brought. Many of the affairs were casual, much of it simply the kind of sexual outlet, but I was impressed by a deeper element of tenderness, of seriousness, softness, kindness – one felt awfully grateful to the girls in those days for the experience of joy that they brought in an otherwise joyless existence.

DAME VERA LYNN

Popular singer and. 'The Forces' Sweetheart'

I was trying to get over this togetherness bit, trying to bring the separated parties closer together. It was very difficult for a lot of the wives and sweethearts to actually write to their men folk what they really thought and what they felt, and by my singing the kind of songs that I did I was doing it for them, in a way that they could understand. The songs were simple, the lyrics were straight to the point and in a way interpreting their thoughts for them. I think that was what happened. In days of crisis there's always this feeling, this sentiment, which of course is nostalgia for the future. I had a set plan, and I hope it worked, and I think it did, just to bring separated beings together.

DR GRAY

I speak of the lust of the eye, a biblical phrase which I particularly like because much of the appeal of battle is simply this attraction of the outlandish. But there is an element of beauty in this. Soldiers learn to experience in warfare a kind of ecstasy which literally means getting outside oneself. I try to think of it in terms of an adjoining, one could be drawn into, absorbed by a spectacle, I think especially of southern France, the terrific bombardment. Our planes coming over, I literally expected the coast to detach itself and go into the ocean. But to watch this was to forget you had to get into landing boats and make off the shore. It was just a terrific spectacle in which, I think everybody, including myself, was drawn into it, so we forget all about ourselves and it's not quite right to say we enjoyed it, we were totally absorbed, lost in the spectacle.

PROFESSOR ALICJA IWANSKA

Warsaw-uprising survivor, exile and sociologist

I have lost some dear friends but I still think that in comparison with other ways of dying, in particular with Poles of Jewish origin who were lulled in the gas chambers, or in comparison with Poles executed by state execution, or death by accident, I think it's a great
privilege to be killed for something. I think everybody would feel that way. There's nothing worse than impersonal death, it's not connected, you know. When you lose connection between merit and when you lose the idea of guilt then there is nothing left, you stop being human.