The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

evaporated. Now, in middle age, I recoil with horror at the parochialism, narrow-mindedness and bigotry of these views, but they were commonplace in my childhood and many still share them.⁸

      Third, the war was well-managed. After initial setbacks, mostly attributed to the malign influence of the ‘Men of Munich’, the British eventually got their act together. Churchill provided not only effective but also inspirational leadership at the political level. Montgomery and Slim emerged as ‘great commanders’, with an almost unbroken record of success. Both had learned from the mistakes of the First World War. They were prudent with men’s lives. They left nothing to chance. They understood technology. They had the common touch. If, in Montgomery’s case, it was that of a shameless vulgarian, no one seemed to care. But Slim was what would now be called ‘cool’. He exemplified the ironic mode of late-20th Century heroism. Most of all, however, they had, in the words of Slim’s own account, turned defeat into victory at a price that seemed worth the paying.⁹ Casualties lie at the heart of British perceptions of the two World Wars. British casualties in the First World War were unprecedented in the national experience. British military casualties in the Second World War were hardly small (c305,000) but they were considerably less than half of those of the First. The superior nature of British military leadership and technology in the Second World War is still generally given credit for this by popular opinion.

      Fourth, the Second World War was not only a war of national heroism but also a war of individual heroism. There was something almost bijou about Britain’s war, a war of commando raids and operations behind enemy lines, small scale, human scale, dramatic, filmable and easy to follow. It was a war in which individuals and small groups seemed to make a difference: Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; Orde Wingate; Vian of the Cossack¹⁰; ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and the Kelly, the ‘little ships’ and their crews at Dunkirk; the Chindits; the Long Range Desert Group. When, in later years, I learned in the pages of Professor Fussell that the First World War had changed for ever the nature of heroism, it was the cause of some consternation.¹¹ The heroes of the Second World War seemed then, and seem now, to sit easily with those of the past: Grenville, Drake, Wolfe, Nelson.

      Finally, the Second World War represented the triumph of brains. It was a war of the ‘boffin’ and the ‘gadget’. Few books are better designed to lift the spirits of the Briton than R. V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945¹², in which a motley collection of mathematicians, linguists, classicists, engineers, chemists and physicists, even the odd historian, often eccentric and unwarlike individualists in horn-rimmed spectacles and decaying sports jackets, conspired to destroy the Nazi war machine. The centrepiece of this was, of course, the development of radar. Though the name of its originator, Robert Watson Watt, was well known, his personality was not. The iconic figure of the boffins’ war became, instead, Dr Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, a concept so bizarre that it must have been the work of a genius. Only later, however, did history offer up the pièce de resistance of the British war effort, Enigma. Revelations about the code-breakers’ war at Bletchley Park, which appeared in the early 1970s¹³, merely confirmed the importance of British brain power and discovered a new hero, the mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer pioneer, Alan Turing, who was not only a genius but also a tortured gay, very much a hero for the late 20th century.

      During my childhood, the First World War struggled for visibility in the glare of attention paid to the Second. There was no one to reminisce with me about the Great War. Both my grandfathers died before I was born, one as the result of war service. My maternal grandmother died when I was three. My paternal grandmother was not a woman who invited questions. My first, dim, awareness of the First World War came through the powerful injunction never to wear a poppy. This stemmed from my maternal grandmother, Louisa Sheldon, a formidable personality who never forgave the war for killing her husband and leaving her in poverty to bring up a family of five, including four girls. She regarded poppies as a means of extorting money out of gullible people who could ill afford it for the enrichment of those who had done well out of the war.

      Beyond the family, the First World War seemed to exist only as a guilty secret. My loud, childish enquiries about why some men had only one arm or one leg was met with a whispered, ‘He lost it in the first war.’ My native North Staffordshire was no stranger to respiratory disease: white lung for potters, black lung for colliers. During the early 1960s I began to notice coroners’ reports in the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel in which the cause of death was given as ‘pneumoconiosis, with gassing in the First World War as a contributory factor’. Gassing. The Second World War had gas masks, but no gas. The First World War evoked no nostalgia. Politicians did not summon the nation to show the ‘spirit of the Somme’ as they routinely did the ‘spirit of Dunkirk’ or the ‘spirit of the Blitz’. It seemed to be a war of victims, not of heroes. It was, in short, a very different kind of war.

      How different became apparent as soon as I began to read about it. My introduction was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys¹⁴. It was not necessary to read far in this book to get the message. The caption of the first photograph, adjacent to the title page, read ‘Donkey decorates lion’. Between pages 80 and 81 there were photographs of No-Man’s Land showing ‘human remains and detritus’ and of an advanced dressing station (something that rarely seemed to adorn the pages of books on the Second World War) in a ruined farmhouse. These contrasted strikingly with the photograph of General Rawlinson, captioned ‘Rawly’, standing in the sun on the steps of a chateaux, immaculate in dazzling boots and leather gloves.¹⁵

      When television finally turned its attention to the First World War, it did so with extraordinary effect. Tony Essex’s epic documentary The Great War (1964) proved so compelling that it was repeated on BBC1 even before the 26 episodes had concluded on BBC2. Much of the modern British fascination with the First World War stems from the impact made by this series. The impact was not that intended by some of those who made the programme. The series’s haunting, mournful music (written by Wilfred Josephs), its contemporary film (some of it now known to be fake) showing men ‘going over the top’ and dying ‘on the old barbed wire’, its still photographs of trenches deep in water and stretcher-bearers carrying wounded men through thigh-deep mud, its interviews with veterans, its extracts from contemporary memoirs, conspired to reinforce an image of the war that was completely at odds with the script of Correlli Barnett and John Terraine. The stage production of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) (followed by Richard Attenborough’s film version in 1969), and A. J. P. Taylor’s wonderfully readable, witty and damning The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963)¹⁶ further discouraged the revisionist cause.

      By the time I went to university, in 1967, there was a clear public consensus. The First World War was avoidable; the Second was not. The First World War was not really about anything, or not about anything important; the Second World War was about national survival at home and the defeat of a vile tyranny abroad. The First World War was hopelessly mismanaged by incompetent generals whose aristocratic, rural backgrounds ill fitted them to come to terms with industrialised war; the Second World War was well run by generals who understood technology, allowing them to fight a war of manoeuvre that avoided costly battles of attrition. The outcome of the First World War was futile, merely creating circumstances in which political extremism would fester, making another war inevitable; the outcome of the Second World War, sanctified by discovery of the Nazi death camps, was not only a military but also a moral triumph.

      The differences embraced not only the origins, purposes, conduct and outcomes of the wars but also the ways in which they were experienced by ordinary soldiers. Trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War has come to be regarded as the epitome of human suffering and degradation, a sort of hell on earth. Two of the books on the First World War recommended as further reading at the foot of this chapter contain the word ‘hell’ in their titles. This is rarely the case with books on the Second World War. The implication is that the business of soldiering in the Second World War was easier. Only after many conversations with veterans of both wars did I discover the extent to which they themselves often