bridge of one of HM ships, being talked to by the captain as an equal, and knowing that she was to be in my sole care for the next few hours. Who would not rather die like that than live as so many poor people have to, in crowded cities at some sweating indoor job?’ Hichens was killed in 1942, but he was a happy warrior.
Special forces – the ‘private armies’ regarded with mixed feelings by more conventional warriors – attracted bold spirits careless about risking their lives in piratical enterprises by land and sea. Between 1940 and 1944, partly because Churchill’s soldiers were unable to confront the Wehrmacht in Europe, British raiding units conducted many small operations of a kind the US chiefs of staff mistrusted, though American Airborne and Rangers later played conspicuous roles in the north-west Europe campaign. The prime minister promoted raids on German outposts to show aggression, test tactics and equipment, and sustain a façade of momentum in the British war effort. Probably the most useful of these took place on the night of 27 February 1942, when a small contingent of the newly formed Parachute Regiment assaulted a German radar station on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre on the French coast.
The objective was reconnoitred by local French Resistance workers before 120 paratroopers led by Major John Frost dropped into thick snow, secured the position against slight resistance from the surprised Luftwaffe radar crew, and held it while an RAF technician, Flight-Sergeant Charles Cox, coolly dismantled key components of its Wurzburg scanner. The force then fought its way down to the beach for evacuation by landing craft, having lost only two men killed and six taken prisoner. The captured technology proved invaluable to British scientific intelligence. Churchill and the chiefs of staff were impressed by this first test of their paratroops, and endorsed a big expansion of such units. The Bruneval raid, trumpeted by Allied propaganda, was indeed a fine example of daring and initiative, aided by luck and an unusually feeble German response.
Such operations worked best when carried out by small forces pursuing limited objectives; more ambitious raids achieved more equivocal outcomes. A month after Bruneval, 268 commandos landed at Saint-Nazaire, while an old destroyer rammed the gate of the port’s big floating dock. Next day, five tons of explosive detonated as planned aboard the destroyer, demolishing the lock gates and killing many German sightseers as well as two captured commando officers who had concealed their knowledge of the impending explosion. But 144 of the attackers were killed and more than two hundred army and naval personnel were taken prisoner. During the big assault on Dieppe in August 1942, the Germans suffered 591 ground casualties, but two-thirds of the 6,000 raiders, mostly Canadian, were killed, wounded or captured. By 1944, when Allied armies were deployed in major campaigns, British commando and airborne forces had been allowed to outgrow their usefulness, absorbing a larger share of elite personnel than their battlefield achievements justified. In the earlier war years, however, they made a useful moral contribution and delighted their participants.
Many professional soldiers welcomed the career opportunities Hitler provided. Those who survived and displayed competence gained promotions in months that in peacetime would have taken years; commanders unknown outside their regiments one summer could achieve fame and fortune by the next. In five years Dwight Eisenhower – admittedly an exceptional example – rose from colonel to full general. ‘One of the fascinations of [the] war,’ in the words of British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, ‘was to see how Americans developed their great men so quickly…Ike grew almost as one watched him.’
Britain’s Sir Bernard Montgomery advanced from being a lieutenant-general in August 1942, unknown outside his service, to become an army group commander and national hero just two years later. At lower levels, many regular officers who entered the war as lieutenants became colonels or brigadiers by their mid-twenties. Horatius Murray, for instance, in 1939 after sixteen years’ service had only attained the rank of major, but finished the war as a lieutenant-general. On the other side, the Wehrmacht’s Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder remembered his campaign experience ‘with gratitude’, despite being wounded three times. Likewise Major Karl-Günther von Haase, who survived captivity in Russian hands: ‘In the early war years we were proud to belong to the German army. I look back on my military career not without satisfaction.’
Some people found that bearing their share of their nation’s struggle for conquest or freedom rendered sorrows tolerable, ennobled loneliness and danger. But the humbler their personal circumstances, the slighter seemed the compensations for sacrifice. William Crawford, a seventeen-year-old Boy Second Class serving aboard the battlecruiser Hood, wrote home miserably: ‘Dearest Mum…I know it’s wrong to say but I sure am fed up. I feel kind of sick, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We struck bad weather today. Talk about waves as big as houses, they’re crashing over our bows…I wonder if it would do any good Mum if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was no chance of me getting a shore job at Rosyth. You know, tell them you have got two sons away and that. Be sure to tell them my age. If only I could get off this ship it would not be so bad.’ Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands in May 1941.
As his letter illustrates, stoicism was no more universal among sailors at sea than soldiers on the battlefield. ‘I am absolutely fed up with everything,’ a naval paymaster-commander named Jackie Jackson wrote to his wife from the Mediterranean in May 1941. ‘The dirt and filth, the flies and heat and more than anything the fact that I am not hearing from you.’ He complained that he had received only one letter in six weeks, ‘the most depressing I have ever received in my life. Add to that a cable which more or less implied that the house has been wrecked and you can get a fair idea of how much I want to hear from you occasionally, and at the same time how I dread it, as I am probably going to have even worse news and more complaints…I’ve had a hideous time and I wonder why I’m alive.’ It is easy to see why such people as Winston Churchill, George Patton or pilots flying Mustangs or Spitfires – a small and privileged minority – enjoyed the war. It is equally apparent why many others – especially a Russian infantryman or Chinese peasant, a Polish Jew or Greek farmer – could not.
Most of those who fought clung stubbornly to their own amateur status, performing a wholly unwelcome duty before returning to their ‘real’ lives. As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in action against the Germans with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Peter White, reflected: ‘It must take about seven years…to make a being feel really like a soldier and not just a civilian dressed up. The situation seemed so ludicrously unreal and yet grimly real at the same time. We could at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the poor blighters opposite us were in the same boat even though it was a boat of their seeking.’ John Hersey wrote of the Marines on Guadalcanal: ‘The uniforms, the bravado…were just camouflage. They were just American boys. They did not want that valley or any part of its jungle. They were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-schoolboys, boys with a clean record…not killers.’
RAF Corporal Peter Baxter lamented: ‘My whole generation…are wasting some of the finest years of their lives in the dreary business of war. Our manhood has come to full fruition, but it is stifling and decaying in these wasted years…The deadening, paralysing influence of service life has blighted my middle twenties.’ Many young men had never before lived away from home, and hated the indignities and discomforts of barracks existence. Frank Novy, a twenty-one-year-old, spent his first night in the army at a depot in Leeds. ‘After a few minutes on the palliasse I heard complaints from all sides. My own was terribly hard, and I had no pillow, my teeth were aching and soon I had a headache. I felt depressed and tired out. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of home, and all I had left went round and round in my head, ceaselessly, persistently…At times I felt so depressed that I wanted to cry, but couldn’t.’
Recruits found themselves growing new skins. Len England described how a fellow soldier delivered a stream of wisecracks to a girl behind the counter in the YMCA, then turned to England and said in surprise, ‘I’ve never flirted before in my life. I’ve only been in the army five days, and now look at what I’m doing.’ England observed that he and his new comrades felt different people, ‘more authoritative and self-assertive in uniform’.
