an ingrained part of the British psyche that film-makers seemed loathe to challenge it. Heroism, sense of duty, making do, carrying on and stoicism in the face of overwhelming odds were the values expected by cinema-goers of their military men (and of course their women) and these were faithfully reflected by the film-makers, be the characters on a suicide mission in a midget submarine, dropping dam-busting bombs or escaping from a POW camp.
Whether or not the war films of the Fifties can be said to be a way of ‘reading’ British society at the time is still up for debate. It was always a precept of the sociology of cinema that when times were hardest, popular cinema responded with carefree, escapist fantasies; the example always cited being the Hollywood musicals of Busby Berkeley which waved a feather boa in the face of the American Depression of the 1930s. Britain was not replaying the Great Depression in the Fifties, but austerity was the watchword (and a word somewhat diluted in strength in the far more comfortable twenty-first century) as economic recovery from the bankruptcy caused by winning the war – if not the peace – came painfully slowly. This was surely a time when British cinema could have stepped up and lightened the mood with some spectacular dance routines or a few show-stopping musical numbers. Yet British audiences seemed to prefer squads of khaki-dressed soldiers (or POWs) drilling on a parade ground and the nearest they got to a musical number was the obligatory scene in an RAF Mess featuring a sing-song around a pub piano over half-pints of flat mild ale.
If the war films of the Fifties provide an unreliable lens through which to ‘read the British’ they certainly influenced what the British read when it came to popular fiction.
Cinema admissions in Britain declined throughout the Fifties and by 1962 were roughly a quarter of their peak in the post-war year of 1946. The biggest single factor in this decline was the growth of television, with a second broadcaster, ITV, challenging the BBC’s monopoly from 1955. The number of domestic television licences grew from around two million in 1953 – the year when an estimated television audience of twenty million viewed the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, presumably ten people watching each set – to over ten million licences by the end of 1959.1
The growth of television, a medium always hungry for product, may have torpedoed cinema-going but it provided a life-raft for British war films in the form of a new audience – teenage boys obsessed with all things militaria and who, after 1960, no longer had the opportunity to vent their excess adolescent energy in National Service.
War films became regular fare on television, particularly in the BBC’s Sunday ‘Film Matinee’ slot, and British studios and producers had ensured there was a healthy back catalogue of stories of derring-do featuring familiar faces (John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Jack Hawkins were rarely seen out of uniform) and they, almost invariably, guaranteed a British victory.
Taking the period between the first Bond book (Casino Royale) in 1953 and the first Bond film (Dr. No) in 1962, the British film industry refought the Second World War on land, in the air and on – and under – the sea and a surprising number of these films still surface on British television in the twenty-first century, some of them quite regularly The Cruel Sea, Malta Story, The Red Beret, Albert R.N., Appointment in London, The Dam Busters, The Cockleshell Heroes, Above Us the Waves, The Colditz Story, Battle of the River Plate, Reach for the Sky, The Man Who Never Was, A Town Like Alice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ill Met by Moonlight, Yangtse Incident (not actually WWII but close enough), Battle of the V-1, Carve Her Name with Pride, Dunkirk, I Was Monty’s Double, Ice Cold in Alex, Sea of Sand, The Silent Enemy, Danger Within, The Long and the Short and the Tall, The Guns of Navarone, The Password is Courage. With only a few exceptions, where big American stars were parachuted into productions to secure funding or transatlantic release such as Alan Ladd in The Red Beret, William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone, these were very British films (in spirit if not finance) celebrating British pluck, decency, and the fine art of keeping the upper lip stiff. They depicted heroes; British heroes, who could easily be distinguished from American film heroes, as British heroes won their medals by following orders however futile the outcome seemed, whereas gung-ho Americans tended to admire individual initiative and allowed their heroes to take matters into their own hands, disobeying stupid orders to grab the victory.
Throughout the Fifties the British were washed with a steady stream of wartime imagery and military life and even two of the hit film comedies of 1958, Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg and Carry On Sergeant (the first in the long-running – some would say interminable – series which would become a British institution) had WWII/National Service settings. Yet it was not only in the cinema. The war permeated the bookshops and libraries, two of the bestselling authors of non-fiction being Paul Brickhill and Lord Russell of Liverpool. Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot and POW in Germany, became an international bestseller (and a fixture on most teenage boys’ bookshelves) with his retelling of true wartime exploits of the Royal Air Force. His books The Great Escape (1950), The Dam Busters (1951) which was the first Pan paperback to sell a million copies, and Reach for The Sky (1954), about the fighter ace Douglas Bader who had lost his legs in a pre-war flying accident, were said to have sold more than 5 million copies, been translated into seventeen languages and all were eventually made into very successful films. Lord Russell of Liverpool, a lawyer and a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, was inspired and appalled by his legal duties and produced a controversial bestseller in 1954 in Scourge of the Swastika. This history of Nazi war crimes shocked and awed a huge readership, whilst attracting criticism for being sensationalist. Seemingly undeterred, Lord Russell followed up his success with The Knights of Bushido, dealing with Japanese war crimes and atrocities in the Far East, in 1958.2
The Dam Busters, Pan, 1954
Honour the Shrine, Coronet, 1968
Conditions in Japanese prison camps had already been chillingly documented in Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, published with drawings by Braddon’s fellow POW Ronald Searle (famous for his illustrations of St Trinian’s and the Molesworth books). The book’s original publication date in February 1952 was overshadowed by the death of King George VI and the initial print run cut to 3,000 copies. Despite few reviews and little publicity, the reputation of the book spread and by the summer of 1952, thanks to rapid reprinting, it had sold 100,000 copies. It was published as a Pan paperback in 1955 with a cover that became iconic – a defiant prisoner giving Churchill’s ‘V-for-Victory’ sign to a threatening Japanese bayonet (a variation of that cover still being used in the 1980s) – and went on to sell more than a million copies. Pan Books had another success on their hands with the epic escape story You’ll Die in Singapore by Charles McCormac (reprinted by Pan Australia as recently as 2009).
The biggest (in more ways than one) non-fiction blockbuster came in 1960 with American journalist William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the bestselling 1,200-page popular history title, and a positive text book for would-be thriller writers. If anything, it was to cause an even bigger sensation when it appeared in the UK as a paperback on 8 May 1964 at the unprecedented price of twelve shillings and sixpence (12/6).3
Therefore, it should be hardly surprising that in this climate, many a fledgling thriller writer would, either instinctively or at the behest of an editor or agent, make their debuts with a war story. The ultimate exemplar of this syndrome is Alistair MacLean, whose first novel HMS Ulysses (based on his personal wartime experience) set in the fierce and frozen battleground of the Arctic convoys to Russia launched his international career in 1955 when it became the first novel to sell 250,000 copies in hardback within six months of publication.
MacLean
