The World at War (89 page)

TOM FITZPATRICK

9th Australian Division, Eighth Army

The war was a
turning point in my life in many ways. I think I was probably a self-centred man before the war, had a rather high idea of my own importance. But serving, in the junior ranks particularly, that may have helped. I was just one of millions of men whereas up to the war I felt that I was something more exclusive – that's hardly the word, but I do feel perhaps it gave me a sense of humility.

GUARDSMAN SHEARER

Scots Guards group, Glasgow pub

Although we were all as thick as thieves, we were so preoccupied with the business of eating, sleeping, fighting, surviving that we didn't really find time to have the sort of conversation that we might have now, sitting here. I certainly never remember discussing the outcome of the war or whether the Germans were right or we were right or anything like that at all. I mean it was just day-to-day honest-to-goodness living together, and very pleasant it was.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

BBC radio broadcaster

The strange thing about war, it was awful, miserable, burning cities, unbelievable squalor, a
horror that no civilisation could go through, yet when you look back you don't remember the horror so much. The fact that there was somebody beside you who went through it all with you, and who occasionally took the burden on himself, was braver than you, who steadied your nerves, who was prepared to take risks that you weren't prepared to take, and a feeling of
comradeship is the one thing that emerges out of any war. I know it's a cliché but it's there and it's what takes you through the war. That's really why I've become far more sympathetic to the British Legion. When I was young I couldn't understand why people would want to go to Cenotaph ceremonies. I go now, I am proud to go and I remember the people who don't come back. Perhaps the younger generation don't want to know about the war, but they darn well should know that there were people as young as themselves who died and sacrificed themselves, and out of it comes this terrible feeling in my mind of waste, and yet of proud comradeship.

PRIVATE WHITMORE

Sherwood Foresters group, Nottingham pub

We were all one big happy family, there was no doubt about that, and what was yours was mine and what was mine was yours sort of thing. It helped to broaden your outlook on life a bit, especially someone like myself who'd never seen the sea till I was in the Army. I didn't realise there was such things as Geordies and Scousers and all that sort of thing. I suppose it did us all good in one sense – it'd perhaps do some of them good today to go in the Army.

DR GRAY

It's something less than friendship, it's one of the basic kinds of community, people who have been together in danger – exposed, hardship – have a certain feeling for each other, a dependency on each other that is very strong, a very intense emotion, much of it unconscious, unreflective at least, but very real. This deserter has lost his comrade and felt that he lost a particular part of himself. I couldn't exaggerate the importance of comradeship, it's what we mean by morale. In the Army, soldiers train together who fight together, eat and sleep together, begin to feel their egos are social and communal, no longer are they contained within their own skins. They can re-create this experience and these experiences are something at least I avoid as I would the plague. There's something very artificial about it if you have ever been to a Legionnaire convention, these middle-aged balding pot-bellied men, trying to behave as they did in the war and don't succeed – it's very sad, very pathetic. Perhaps one should say this experience of comradeship is something very different from friendship, it's real, it's intense, but it's brief and it's related to the context of the experience. There's no such thing as re-creating it; you can't have a buddy after you have been long enough in civilian life.

JIMMY THOMAS

Merchant seaman

What I found when I came home, and I've been disgusted with myself ever since, was that the readjustment to their kind of life, the life that I'd led before myself, was virtually impossible because however much you hate being in a war the things you come back to seem very, very
trivial. The local council talking about a new gents' lavatory and things like this don't seem to matter at all. And of course these things matter to the people around you so I shut up and shut myself in for about a year. I must have behaved extremely badly. I'm well aware of it and I've never forgotten it and never cease to feel sorry for it because I think it must have made life pretty intolerable for people around me. But it was just that I couldn't communicate. I had lost my sense of communication with people that I'd known all those years because I'd begun to understand an entirely new breed of people who were all sewn together – being in a common thing, I think that was it. A lot of people I know, when I've mentioned this have said exactly the same thing. I couldn't be bothered to talk to my family at table or anything and I just kept getting up and walking out of the house and not coming back for hours. I think they were very upset.

DR NOBLE FRANKLAND

Bomber Command navigator, historian and Director of the Imperial War Museum

It is extremely various: lots of people are maimed completely, either mentally or physically, but I suppose the majority of those who survive, survive apparently intact. But there must be marked effects and I think in some ways the effects are very good on people because they feel that, to a certain extent, they've been able to fulfil themselves and I think a lot of people go right through life without ever feeling a
sense of fulfilment. But those who take part in hectic war operations usually get a sense of fulfilment, especially if they believe in what they're trying to do, which I think in war people tend to do very readily. On the other hand there are very bad effects, perhaps one of the less obvious ones is that people who undertake these operations have a tendency to feel afterwards that society owes them something very special. And when the war is over they tend to go home and expect people to look up to them and to look after them, which is not what people are going to do at all. And I think that's one of the very bad effects of war; this produces a frustrated feeling in the man, and he feels society's cheated him and his effort was in vain and not worth while, which is tragic.

HERMAN PHEFFER

Disabled US service veteran

We had this orthopaedic surgeon from Baltimore and he gave the definition that I've used all these years about sympathy for the disabled. He says, 'Son, you know where you find sympathy? You find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.' I was very fortunate that friends of mine who came to visit with me brought along a fellow who had both arms off in World War One, plus his buddy who had both legs off, also in World War One, and he showed me his appliances and the way they were made in those days – he had a couple of nude bathing beauties stuck on this appliances. He said, 'You're not going to dance, you're not going to roller-skate but you're going to do anything you ever want just as much as you want to do it – but', he says, 'you're the one who's going to do it, no one else.'

GUARDSMAN SHEARER

There was one time during the advance, approaching Minister, we were driving through the woods and demolition experts had set the charges and the trees would drop down. And, lo and behold, coming cycling along as large as life was the fellow who had set them off, on a pedal cycle, and behind him the trees were just dropping and he cycled towards us. He couldn't care less. What happened after that I'd better draw a blank over. He didn't finish the war.

DR GRAY

It's human nature, you notice it with boys who love to break windows to hear the glass tinkle, but there are a great many soldiers who take a pleasure in destroying people, wasting things and would kill beyond any kind of necessity. They took a delight in shooting anything that moved. I find this aspect of human nature is not discussed enough but it is one of the causes of warfare. I don't know what the limits are but I did know certain soldiers, killers, who are very distinct from ordinary soldiers who kill only when they need to, and who never become killers. It isn't all that different I suppose from the delight hunters have in killing antelope or deer. I discussed it as one of the appeals of battle in addition to the lust of the eye and appeal of comradeship. It threatens our whole civilisation and we in America have this kind of thing now in civilian life. I think it is an extreme in human nature where you can't simply go back and regret a few minutes later, it grows on you. And if you get experienced killers such as some of the SS were, and I'm afraid some of our own paratroops, no, you can't revert very quickly to regret. I don't say that people are incurable or anything but they tend to be pretty joyless types. I noticed them in rest camp: they would sometimes simply attack the locals, they were notoriously restless and even their own officers were often afraid of them. I don't know about artillery men and pilots. Pilots are people who kill at a distance but have a great delight in implements and in precision bombing and so on. But the further you are from the target the less likely you are to have any kind of real understanding of what devilry your weapons arc causing. We're all unable to imagine what people are feeling a few hundred yards away. Lack of imagination is one of the greatest human weaknesses, I think.

DR FRANKLAND

There are always unhealthy members of society, this is one of the perennial problems of life, but I take, in general, the opposite view that it's unhealthy not to study these events; it's much better to come to terms with these dreadful things that have happened rather than try and sweep them under the carpet and pretend they didn't happen. I think children who confront these situations in the right way, at the right stage in their life, are far more likely to grow up as healthy citizens than those who, for perhaps idealistic reasons on the part of their teachers or parents, arc denied the opportunity. I think this leads to much more complex psychological results than simply studying the facts and bringing them out into the open.

HARRY MITCHELL

British 50th Division, Eighth Army

I was a stretcher-bearer, I had no rifle or anything like that and I was frightened, running about in a sweat, and we eventually got into these holes and tried to find out who was where. There was this Italian lying above the ground outside this hole with not a stitch on where the blast had caught him. I realised there was no good my going to him and I got in the hole with a friend of mine, another stretcher-bearer, and we decided to have a smoke, open our Players and have a cigarette and talk of the sort of thing we'd gone through, you know, how horrible it was. And there was this Italian laying on top of his trench and all he kept saying was, 'Mamma mia, mamma mia'. After an hour or so everything was so quiet and eerie that he got on people's nerves and along somewhere one of our fellows hollered out, 'I'll give you mamma mia in a minute, mate,' typical Cockney expression. And he still said 'Mamma mia' and the next thing we heard was a .303–rifle shot and the 'Mamma mia' stopped – that was his lot, you know.

DR KONRAD MORGEN

SS investigating magistrate

I can still remember a conversation I had with the Reichs Doctor SS, Professor Dr Grawitz, in Berlin just before I went to Auschwitz. Dr Grawitz had a good reputation in Germany and in the learned international circles, and in particular his father was a great humanist and his son had a classical education. This highly intelligent man said to me, in relation to the dental gold, whenever he slept he dreamt about it, and he could feel little men who were hammering on his teeth and then he had to think of the dental gold that was disappearing in Auschwitz. But the fact that millions of human beings, daily, hourly were losing their lives – he didn't think about that, that didn't cost him any sleepless nights. The only human feeling one can credit this man with is that he had considered how one could kill people painlessly. In fact his biggest problem was that not just the killing itself should be painless but also that the victims should have no mortal fear beforehand. Death must come unexpectedly and suddenly. And this man had thought it all out, from apparently humane motives, but it transpired in practice that the cunning way they camouflaged and hid the truth was the only reason that this whole system ran so smoothly without a hitch on this enormous scale.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

Belsen made me a stupidly determined optimist because you cannot believe that humanity is like this. If you do that, there's nothing ahead of us. If this is what lies underneath all our minds, if you take the lid off and there's a Belsen underneath, what are we talking about? I can't believe it, I mustn't believe it, I will not believe it.

URSULA GRAY

Dresden resilient, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray

I will always remember a couple under the next tree were quarrelling and it seemed to us so unbelievable. You are fighting for your life, you don't know if the next minute you are still on this earth and here they are quarrelling. It impressed me so deeply, we talk often about it, how people even under circumstances of despair still are basically the same. I'll bet these people were quarrelling at home and it made no difference that they are here in an air raid and next minute they might be dead. I have a very strong feeling that this should never happen to people. If they do not get any better for something like that there's just nothing we can hope for.

DR GRAY

It was a silly sight, when I first saw it everything was destroyed, his house and all of his premises, the fence even. The only thing left was the gate that was only partially destroyed and as I went by he was repairing the gate. I laughed but later I began to feel that this urge for preservation was a great contrast to the love of destruction and I've learned to cherish this preservation love because it is one of the few dependable enemies of warfare. After the war in Germany I noticed the Germans were building houses that seemed destined to last for a hundred years when they couldn't be sure that actually the houses would last for five years and I ask myself why do they build so solidly. The only answer is a deep
impulse in man to build for the future, it gives them a kind of assurance that peace will last.