Revised new edition of THE BANTAMS

REVISED MILITARY HISTORY BOOK,"THE BANTAMS",
BY CANADIAN AUTHOR TELLS LITTLE-KNOWN SAGA
OF FIVE-FOOT WARRIORS

"The untold story of World War One" is the sub-title of "The Bantams", a recently revised military history book by Canadian author, Sidney Allinson.

"The Bantams" provides fascinating additional details to the factual but well-nigh incredible story of how the British and Canadian Army recruited over 50,000 tiny men to serve as front-line soldiers. Such Bantam battalions numbered over twenty units in Britain, plus two battalions from Canada. They had their origins in Merseyside, England, in 1915. The movement spread all over Britain, particularly the coal mining regions of Wales and Northern England, then to Canada, until there were Bantam battalions in a score of famed regiments.

Originally published in 1981, this revised version reveals disturbing new information about battlefield executions by firing squads that was only recently released from British official records long held secret from the public. It adds even more poignancy to the story of how thousands of patriots not much taller than a rifle themselves, well below the 5ft. 3ins. minimum height, flocked to the colours.

Canadian military historian Sidney Allinson's researches took him off on a three-year quest for information, journeying across Canada, the U.S., the old battlefields of Flanders, and all over Britain. He contacted over 300 survivors of the Bantams, to obtain the many first-hand accounts of battle told in his book.

It also recreates the social conditions in Canada during the First World War. Patriotic fervour here enabled Col. Frank Burton to raise the 216th Bantam (Toronto) Battalion within one week, and the Vancouver-based 143rd B.C. Bantams was raised despite constant poaching of recruits by other regiments. Soldiers from both these now-forgotten Canadian units served at Vimy Ridge and other later battles.

Published by Xlibris Corp., Philadelphia, PA, "The Bantams" has already been recognized as an important new volume of original military research into the Great War of 1914-1918. Sidney Allinson served in the Royal Air Force, is a past director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he is Chairman, Pacific Coast Branch, The Western Front Association.

http://www.xlibris.com/thebantams.html

For more information, go to:
https://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=22708

Contact the author at sidneya@shaw.ca

Where "this band of brothers" once stood.

"Agincourt," by Juliet Barker.

Reviewed by Frances Stonor Saunders.

Shortly after dawn on October 25, 1415, 6,000 Englishmen under the command of Henry V looked across a sodden field at the French enemy, and soiled themselves. Their bowels loosened by dysentery and fear, many of them cut off their breeches and undergarments in an attempt to let nature take its course. This option was not available to the men-at-arms who were encased in 70 lbs of steel plate armour. Their discomfort can only be imagined.

Harry's army also creaked, from joints stiff after weeks of exposure to incessant rain, and from armour that had rusted. Some men were barefoot, their shoes having disintegrated on a desultory march across 250 miles of hostile territory. Sick, half-starved, outnumbered by five to one - how did this pitifully reduced host transmute into the noble force that with "terrible aspect" humbled the pride of France at Agincourt 600 years ago?

The French army was vastly superior in number, but its bulk outweighed its intelligence. With no leader (both the king, Charles VI, and his dauphin, declined to make an appearance) or proper chain of command, it lacked the coherence and discipline of the English. During the lengthy period of deployment on that wretched field of the Somme, the French nobles and knights jostled to get their armorial banners into the leading ranks.

Distracted by this competitive gallantry, they failed to take advantage of Henry's highly risky redeployment of his archers, who actually had to turn their backs to the French as they adjusted their position. Free to commence their deadly work, the archers unloosed volleys "as thick as rain" (in England, meanwhile, geese shivered after the involuntary donation of their feathers). The French, as Henry had intended, attacked, sending mounted men-at-arms and infantry crashing towards the English lines.

What followed was carnage on a scale not seen in the Hundred Years' War since the battles of Crècy and Poitiers, half a century before. The French horses, stung by English arrows, reared and bucked and threw their riders, who now became a grisly front line of bodies wedged into the sticky ground. After them came the infantry, who had to clamber on top of their colleagues, pressing them ever deeper into the mud, in order to meet the English corps. Eventually, unable to move forward or back across the mound of jerking limbs, the flower of French chivalry was hacked and clubbed to death by the English.

The military facts of the battle of Agincourt, insofar as they can be accurately reconstructed, are briskly delivered by Juliet Barker. Too briskly, perhaps. We have to wait until page 287 for the fight to begin, and a mere 20 pages later, it's over (give or take: a subsequent chapter deals with the mopping-up exercise). There is little or nothing to distinguish her treatment from, say, John Keegan's commanding chapter in The Face of Battle. But Barker's account, as her subtitle suggests, seeks a much wider perspective on this cherished episode in English national myth than conventional military history can offer.

From her introductory section on the background to Henry V's quarrel with France, through the massive logistical exercise of mounting an invasion, to the siege and fall of Harfleur and the increasingly desperate march towards Calais, this is narrative non-fiction in grand sweep mode. This allows Barker to gather up much rich material, but leaves her little room for analysis. We learn of the extraordinary sums raised to pay for Henry's campaign, and much about how it was disbursed, but there is no discussion of how this impacted the economy (we can guess: the survival of surnames like Bowyer, Arrowsmith, and Fletcher are a reminder of the medieval population's profitable invol-vement in war).

Barker dismisses stories of "Henry's wild, misspent youth and his dramatic conversion at his coronation into a sober, just and righteous king" as mischievous invention, but doesn't explain what animated this reverse hagiography. Nor does she explain why the chroniclers log Henry's every eyebrow movement up to and including on the eve of battle ("A little touch of Harry in the night"), only to leave us with such a pallid impression of his role on the battlefield itself.

Elsewhere, Barker is more vigilant in her reading of primary sources (not just for what they say, but for what they fail to say). She is right to warn of the "propaganda trap" that historians must dodge, "the one-sided, politically motivated or simply jingoistic" response to Agincourt that seasoned generations of prep-school history lessons and, most famously, provided Laurence Olivier with the excuse to prance and preen and speak in a ridiculous accent.

Barker is sometimes vulnerable to a bit of Old Vic nostalgia, but the weight of evidence she presents in this ambitious book speaks for itself: medieval war was a brutal business, and no amount of glamorous chivalric accessories can disguise that fact.

Memories of WWII air war.

A Walk In The Valley, by Robert C. Kensett, General Store Publishing, Burnstown, 120 pages, photographs.

Each time one reads a memoir by Allied veterans of the bomber war over Europe during World War Two, one is struck by their astonishingly matter-of-fact attitude about their bravery and what they accomplished. The title refers to the Biblical "valley of the shadow of death;" highly appropriate, considering that more than 10,000 Canadian airmen died during the British air offensive against Nazi Germany.

One of the lucky survivors was Robert Kensett, who volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Air Force and served three years as a navigator aboard Halifax bomber aircraft. Navigators were considered the "brainy" members of aircrew, with their requirement for mathematical and map-reading skills. They were responsible for directing the aircraft to target destinations and finding the way home again. Navigators did so despite their relatively primitive equipment and having to cope with foul weather, most often in darkness. Kensett was typical of the young volunteer flyers of his era, and recounts his dangerous experiences with modesty and humour.

Some of the impact of his book is lost early on though, by the way he starts with a sort of family history preamble. It gives the initial impression of a personal memoir aimed primarily for his relatives and friends. However, once he does get into his wartime service, interest quickens, and he is wise enough to include a good deal of minutiae about military aircraft routine.

The reproductions of pages from his actual flying operations and target charts convey rare details seldom available today. Though numerous other memoirs of Second World War experiences have been published, the specific details included in A Walk In The Valley will be of particular interest to air combat buffs.

-- Sidney Allinson.

Sic transit gloria ...

NELSON MUST BE TURNING IN HIS GRAVE.
By Tom Utley
21/10/2005)

At daybreak 200 years ago this morning, the people of Britain woke with the long-familiar threat of an invasion from France hanging over them. Napoleon had had his plan of attack ready for more than two years. He had built a vast fleet of barges to carry his Grande Armée of more than 100,000 battle-hardened troops over the Channel from Boulogne. All that stood in his way was that narrow strip of water and a couple of dozen ships of the Royal Navy.

By nightfall on October 21, 1805, the threat of invasion had been lifted for good - although it was not until November 4, a fortnight later, that news of what had happened reached England's shores aboard the schooner Pickle.

The crushing victory inflicted on Villeneuve's combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar had set history on a new course that would guarantee Britain's independence for as far ahead as men could see. It was Trafalgar that established Britannia as the undisputed ruler of the waves, Trafalgar that cleared the seas for the greatest trading empire that the world has ever known.

In not much more than five hours of battle, Nelson and Collingwood had made their country a superpower and ensured that Britons would continue to be ruled by governments of their own choosing for more than a century and a half to come.

A game that historians have always liked to play is What If…? It is usually a silly exercise, involving a great deal of guesswork. But we don't need to indulge in much fantasy to answer the question: "What would have happened if Nelson had lost Trafalgar, and Napoleon had been able to launch his invasion of England?" The question is fairly easy to answer, because we know how the French emperor treated the territories that he conquered, and there is no reason to believe that he would have treated us very differently.

It is safe to say, for a start, that the French invasion would have succeeded, with the Royal Navy out of the way. The Grande Armée was the most efficient fighting machine in the world at the time, and these islands were ill prepared to meet the threat that it posed. Within a matter of weeks, Napoleon would have established himself in power, perhaps crowning himself or one of his relations as King of England.

One of the new regime's first acts, apart from sending any organisers of resistance to the guillotine, would have been to sweep away the Common Law, and to establish in its place the Napoleonic Code. Like so many dictators - from the Roman emperors to Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot - Napoleon was a tidy-minded rationalist who believed in universal laws, applicable to all mankind. From a dictator's point of view, the trouble with Britain's common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

We can be quite sure, too, that Napoleon would have imposed on Britain his uniform system of decimal weights and measures - his absurd metres and centimetres, based on mathematical calculations (which have since been shown to be wildly inaccurate) of the dimensions of the earth. Another safe bet is that, before long, he would have imposed a single currency on Britain and the rest of his European empire.

Unlike the earlier French revolutionaries, who thought that Italy should be governed by Italians and Spain by Spaniards, Napoleon was never a believer in nation states. He believed in centralised European government - one law and one authority for the whole of his empire. This was the fate from which Nelson and Collingwood saved the peoples of Britain, 200 years ago today.

Readers will already have seen the direction of my thoughts: on this bicentenary of Trafalgar, the similarities between Napoleon's vision of Europe and the regime now being imposed upon Britain from Brussels are simply too glaring to be allowed to pass without comment.

Like Napoleon, the champions of the European Union believe that one law, one currency, one system of weights and measures, one centralised authority should be imposed upon all the peoples of Europe, whether they like it or not. Like him, they see no place for the nation state in the modern world. They insist that European law should always take precedence over the laws of national parliaments - and to hell with the principle that people should be allowed to choose for themselves how they are governed.

One of the great triumphs of the Europhiles has been to plant the thought in so many people's minds that Europe is the future, and that anyone who suggests withdrawing from the European Union is seeking to "put the clock back". Somehow they have made it the received wisdom that pulling out now would be: (a) an extremely complicated matter; and (b) ruinous to the British economy.

In fact, nothing could be easier than withdrawal. Parliament could achieve it in a single afternoon's business, simply by repealing sections two and three of the European Communities Act, 1972. These are the pernicious clauses that provide for the supremacy of European law over British law. Nor is there any reason to believe that the British economy would suffer from withdrawal. On the contrary, as my occasional colleague, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, points out in his brilliant pamphlet for Politeia, Voting on the Constitution, there is every reason to believe that our economy would prosper, freed from the daily increasing burden of European regulation. Europe is the only continent on earth, after all, with which Britain runs a trade deficit. The other nations of Europe need our markets more even than we need theirs.

If Nelson had lost at Trafalgar, Britain would have been locked into a centralised, protectionist Europe. Instead, his victory opened up the markets of the whole wide world to British enterprise. Two hundred years on, we could do with another Nelson.

Military leaders ...

"Generals," by Mark Urban.

At first glance, this line-up of great British generals contains a number of serious omissions. Henry V, Oliver Cromwell, Garnet Wolseley and Bill Slim are all overlooked. Surely they were better field commanders than, say, George Monck, William Howe, Charles Gordon and J F C Fuller - all of whom feature in this book? Doubtless Mark Urban would agree. But this is not a book about great battlefield commanders per se; rather, it concerns generals "whose deeds have resonance, and provide some definite legacy, even today". Measured by these criteria, his selections make perfect sense.

Monck, for example, is not remembered for his battlefield prowess, though his speedy reduction of Stirling Castle in 1651 is proof of his military competence. Instead it was his bold decision to restore the monarchy in 1660 by means of military force, or at least the threat of it, that gives him "a more significant legacy" than even Cromwell, the undisputed master of the mid-17th-century battlefield.

The Duke of Marlborough's fighting credentials are not in doubt. He won no fewer than four great victories during the War of Spanish Succession - including Blenheim in 1704 - and laid the foundations for "two centuries of British greatness". His life, says Urban, was the "ultimate male fantasy": victorious in battle; on intimate terms with half of Europe's sovereigns; rich beyond his wildest dreams; and trained "in the arts of the boudoir from a veritable sexual Olympian" (Charles II's mistress, Barbara Villiers).

General Howe, commander of British troops at the outset of the American War of Independence, is the only one of Urban's choices who does not merit selection. He is included because he was a talented soldier who could, and probably should, have snuffed out the rebellion as early as 1777. His failure to do so, therefore, changed the course of history: not just in America but also in Europe, where France, bankrupted by its long involvement in the war, eventually succumbed to revolution. The argument is compelling, but it still leaves Howe's achievements as essentially negative.

The Duke of Wellington is Marlborough's only serious competitor for the title of Britain's greatest fighting general. Yet the sword he used to defeat Napoleon - a reformed British Army - was forged by a quite different and less celebrated general: HRH the Duke of York, youngest son of George III. Remembered today for marching 10,000 men up and down hills during the failed Low Country campaign of 1793-94, the Duke made his mark as a reforming commander-in-chief. "The very royal pedigree that had become a liability in his field command," writes Urban, "proved a vital asset when scaling the mountain of army reform, for it placed him and his mission above petty political vendettas."

"Chinese" Gordon is important, says Urban, because the British government's decision to send him to Khartoum in 1884 was the first example of "powerful men using media manipulation of public opinion to trigger war". I'm not sure I agree. Palmerston did much the same thing in the months prior to Britain's involvement in the earlier Crimean War, though the overall point about soldiers acquiring "mastery of the media" is well made.

Few British generals were more overtly "political" than Herbert Kitchener, the avenger of Gordon who was appointed war secretary in 1914. Alone among his cabinet colleagues, he envisaged a long war and the need to create a vast citizen army if Britain was to survive. Without this foresight, Britain and France might well have buckled in 1915.

The "most intellectually influential" general was J F C Fuller, the great military theorist who developed the doctrine of armoured warfare in 1917. The great irony of Fuller's career is that his ideas were adopted by just about every European army bar his own, with Hitler calling his panzer divisions "Fuller's children". But only Soviet Russia took Fuller's theory to its logical conclusion by creating a fully mechanised and armoured army, designed to destroy enemy concentrations rather than bypass them.

And so, finally, to Bernard Montgomery whose greatest achievement was not the turning of the tide in North Africa, though that undoubtedly allowed Britain a key role in the final defeat of the Nazis, but rather his role in bringing Britain's army into line with the new "geopolitical reality" of American ascendancy. "The age in which British generals directed great armies in major wars," writes Urban, "was over."

In a fascinating final chapter, Urban outlines some of the threads that connect his 10 subjects. The most successful were typically outsiders with something to prove, thick-skinned and iconoclastic. They were also politically adept, capable of "dealing successfully with the civilian holders of power". Non-political generals have, in Urban's opinion, "always come second or been disasters".

Publishers tend to discourage books like this, with their gimmicky titles and self-contained chapters. Yet Generals succeeds because of the quirkiness of Urban's subjects, the quality of his writing and the originality of his conclusions. It is a book that relies not on exhaustive research (no archives were consulted) but on perspective and sound judgment. In scanning the first three centuries of the modern British Army through the eyes of significant generals, Urban has made his own valuable contribution to military literature.

Sic Transit Gloria ...

Nelson must be turning in his grave
By Tom Utley
(Filed: 21/10/2005)

At daybreak 200 years ago this morning, the people of Britain woke with the long-familiar threat of an invasion from France hanging over them. Napoleon had had his plan of attack ready for more than two years. He had built a vast fleet of barges to carry his Grande Armée of more than 100,000 battle-hardened troops over the Channel from Boulogne. All that stood in his way was that narrow strip of water and a couple of dozen ships of the Royal Navy.

By nightfall on October 21, 1805, the threat of invasion had been lifted for good - although it was not until November 4, a fortnight later, that news of what had happened reached England's shores aboard the schooner Pickle.

The crushing victory inflicted on Villeneuve's combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar had set history on a new course that would guarantee Britain's independence for as far ahead as men could see. It was Trafalgar that established Britannia as the undisputed ruler of the waves, Trafalgar that cleared the seas for the greatest trading empire that the world has ever known.

In not much more than five hours of battle, Nelson and Collingwood had made their country a superpower and ensured that Britons would continue to be ruled by governments of their own choosing for more than a century and a half to come.

A game that historians have always liked to play is What If…? It is usually a silly exercise, involving a great deal of guesswork. But we don't need to indulge in much fantasy to answer the question: "What would have happened if Nelson had lost Trafalgar, and Napoleon had been able to launch his invasion of England?" The question is fairly easy to answer, because we know how the French emperor treated the territories that he conquered, and there is no reason to believe that he would have treated us very differently.

It is safe to say, for a start, that the French invasion would have succeeded, with the Royal Navy out of the way. The Grande Armée was the most efficient fighting machine in the world at the time, and these islands were ill prepared to meet the threat that it posed. Within a matter of weeks, Napoleon would have established himself in power, perhaps crowning himself or one of his relations as King of England.

One of the new regime's first acts, apart from sending any organisers of resistance to the guillotine, would have been to sweep away the Common Law, and to establish in its place the Napoleonic Code. Like so many dictators - from the Roman emperors to Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot - Napoleon was a tidy-minded rationalist who believed in universal laws, applicable to all mankind. From a dictator's point of view, the trouble with Britain's common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

We can be quite sure, too, that Napoleon would have imposed on Britain his uniform system of decimal weights and measures - his absurd metres and centimetres, based on mathematical calculations (which have since been shown to be wildly inaccurate) of the dimensions of the earth. Another safe bet is that, before long, he would have imposed a single currency on Britain and the rest of his European empire.

Unlike the earlier French revolutionaries, who thought that Italy should be governed by Italians and Spain by Spaniards, Napoleon was never a believer in nation states. He believed in centralised European government - one law and one authority for the whole of his empire. This was the fate from which Nelson and Collingwood saved the peoples of Britain, 200 years ago today.

Readers will already have seen the direction of my thoughts: on this bicentenary of Trafalgar, the similarities between Napoleon's vision of Europe and the regime now being imposed upon Britain from Brussels are simply too glaring to be allowed to pass without comment.

Like Napoleon, the champions of the European Union believe that one law, one currency, one system of weights and measures, one centralised authority should be imposed upon all the peoples of Europe, whether they like it or not. Like him, they see no place for the nation state in the modern world. They insist that European law should always take precedence over the laws of national parliaments - and to hell with the principle that people should be allowed to choose for themselves how they are governed.

One of the great triumphs of the Europhiles has been to plant the thought in so many people's minds that Europe is the future, and that anyone who suggests withdrawing from the European Union is seeking to "put the clock back". Somehow they have made it the received wisdom that pulling out now would be: (a) an extremely complicated matter; and (b) ruinous to the British economy.

In fact, nothing could be easier than withdrawal. Parliament could achieve it in a single afternoon's business, simply by repealing sections two and three of the European Communities Act, 1972. These are the pernicious clauses that provide for the supremacy of European law over British law. Nor is there any reason to believe that the British economy would suffer from withdrawal. On the contrary, as my occasional colleague, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, points out in his brilliant pamphlet for Politeia, Voting on the Constitution, there is every reason to believe that our economy would prosper, freed from the daily increasing burden of European regulation. Europe is the only continent on earth, after all, with which Britain runs a trade deficit. The other nations of Europe need our markets more even than we need theirs.

If Nelson had lost at Trafalgar, Britain would have been locked into a centralised, protectionist Europe. Instead, his victory opened up the markets of the whole wide world to British enterprise. Two hundred years on, we could do with another Nelson.

Britain's Lost Virtues

	OUR CULTURE, WHAT'S LEFT OF IT The mandarins and the masses Theodore Dalrymple
	341pp. Chicago: Dee. $27.50. | | 1 5663 643 4

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Thirty years ago, Isaiah Berlin wrote a tribute to his Austrian friend Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who had settled in London after the war. “England seemed to him”, Berlin wrote, “the embodiment of a quiet, honourable, humane existence, above all of a civilisation singularly free from violence, hysteria, meanness and vulgarity.” Hofmannsthal’s sense of England was not over-idealized or inexperienced (he had lived in the United States too) but could not possibly be upheld today. The civic virtues, good manners, ingrained personal habits of self-control and moderation, and the national mistrust of excess have all been jettisoned or destroyed. Violence, hysteria, meanness and vulgarity are surely
now among the leading traits of the prevailing English temper.

Few people have been better placed to record the catastrophic effects of the collapse of English manners and habits than “Theodore Dalrymple”, the pseudonym of a physician who until recently worked in a decayed district of the Birmingham conurbation and as a prison doctor. His essays – written mainly for American magazines – collected in Our Culture, What’s Left Of It set out to map “the moral swamp that is contemporary Britain” and to study the “low-level but endemic evil” that he says is an “unforced and spontaneous” effulgence in the British underclass. He admires that most aristocratic of virtues, fortitude; and he detests the way that “the hug-and-confess culture” is extirpating emotional hardiness and self-reliance from British national character “in favour of a banal, self-pitying, witless and shallow emotional incontinence”. Overall, he argues strenuously – irresistibly – for the reassertion of traditional English virtues: “prudence, thrift, industry, honesty, moderation, politeness, self-restraint”.

Dalrymple has, it must be stressed, written an urgent, important, almost an essential book. Our Culture, What’s Left of It needs to be read and acted on by policy-makers, by opinion-formers, and anyone who wants to grasp why Britain has become so much less pleasant a country in which to live. The book is elegantly written, conscientiously argued, provocative and fiercely committed: “one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists”, Robert Louis Stevenson said. Dalrymple’s information is often unpalatable, but always arresting. He reports, for example, that many young Muslim women come to his practice in suicidal despair at their enforced marriages to close relations, “usually first cousins”, and deplores how journalists, “for fear of giving offence”, seldom allude to “the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages”. His measured polemics arouse disgust, shame and despair: they will shake many readers’ views of their physical surroundings and cultural assumptions, and have an enriching power to improve the way that people think and act.

He approaches his themes by four different routes. Many chapters describe with implacable force the brutal, sordid living conditions and the abysmal existence of the English poor. Others comprise a detailed indictment of the irresponsibility and fecklessness of the pundits from the educated classes whom he holds responsible for creating “a growing underclass devoid of moral bearings”. By contrast, in other chapters of delicate sensibility, Dalrymple extols and commemorates some great creative minds whose works exemplify the redemptive powers of art. “Human understanding, except in purely technical matters, reached its apogee with Shakespeare”, he declares. These essays comprise a collective plea for the restoration of cultural discrimination: for the recognition, which is crucial for human intelligence and for social well-being, that sharp distinctions are drawn between what is first-rate and what is third-rate. Dalrymple enforces this point by drawing on his extensive travels in the Third World to show what barbarism is, what barbarism means, and how closely barbarism is encroaching on contemporary England. Among many arresting images, one is unforgettable: his discovery, during the Liberian civil war, of the Centennial Hall in Monrovia, completely empty except for a Steinway grand piano, from which the legs had been sawn off and deposited on the floor nearby, together with little heaps of human shit. There are enemies nearer home, though, of intelligence, education and cultural discrimination.

“In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this, at least, we lead the world”, Dalrymple insists. “A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and anti-social attempts to satisfy them.”

The mass drunkenness every weekend which renders British town centres “unendurable to even minimally civilized people goes hand in hand with the appallingly crude, violent and shallow relations between the sexes”. In the course of a superb essay contrasting the dignity and humane pleasures of contemporary Italian life with the degradation and lack of self-respect of contemporary Britain, he recalls his experiences working in East Africa within a few miles of two construction projects, one Italian and the other British.

“The British construction workers were drunken, violent, debauched, and dirty, without shame or dignity. Utterly egotistical, yet without much individuality, they wrecked hugely expensive machinery when drunk, without a moment’s regret, and responded with outrage if reprimanded.” Dalrymple reckoned them “truly representative of a population which has lost any pride in itself or in what it does, and that somehow contrives to be frivolous without gaiety”.

The neighbouring Italians, by contrast, were “hardworking, disciplined and clean, and could enjoy themselves in a civilized way even in the African bush, drinking without drunkenness, or that complete lack of self-control characteristic of today’s British. Unlike the British, they never became a nuisance to the local population, and everyone saw them as people who had come to do a job of work”.

Part of the blame for this degeneration Dalrymple attaches to the Welfare State:
“Like French aristocrats under the ancient regime, [the underclass] are – thanks to Social Security – under no compulsion to earn a living; and with time hanging heavy on their hands, their personal relationships are their only diversion. These relationships are therefore both intense and shallow, for there is never any mutual interest in them other than the avoidance of the ever-encroaching ennui.”

Working in an English slum district, he sees what the sexual revolution has brought to the underclass: “No grace, no reticence, no measure, no dignity, no secrecy, no depth, no limitation of desire is accepted”. For Dalrymple, the proliferation of single-parenting among his patients has no benefits. “Britain’s mass bastardy is not a sign of an increase in the authenticity of our human relations but a natural consequence of the unbridled hedonism that leads in short order to chaos and misery, especially among the poor.”

He is appalled by the social irresponsibility and self-destructiveness of his women patients, who produce a series of children by different fathers, who are almost invariably violent, criminal or abusive. “The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism and joyous malignity” that leaves him “more horrified after fourteen years than the day I started”.

Dalrymple does not seem to be a Christian, but he regrets British secularization and its attendant social evils:

“The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition – that man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable – is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute – the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures – is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.”

He loathes the way that Christian ethics and community morality have been replaced by the puerile and fitfully livid morality of tabloid newspapers:

“To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.”

He suggests that the illimitable prurience of British newspapers, and their ruthless, sanctimonious targeting of public figures, “has an ideological aim: to subvert the very concept and deny the possibility of virtue, and therefore of the necessity for restraint”. Surely the collective intention of British smut-hounds is to deny or nullify any authority other than their own: to discredit specialized expertise, disinterested professionalism, educational superiority, technical precision, so that every over-emotional, stridently emphatic and ill-educated member of the public can believe that their opinions even on the most intricate subjects are as valuable as anyone else’s.

Intellectuals, writers and artists who frivolously or exploitatively play with images drawn from real-life cruelty, and who express mitigating admiration for violent ideas, self-immolation and sterile self-absorption draw Dalrymple’s sustained contempt. He cannot forgive “the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics” for ruining the British underclass with “disastrous notions about how to live”. He is an acute cultural commentator – as misanthropic at times as his fellow physician Céline – with a powerful ability to make uncomfortable connections. “A crude culture makes a coarse people”, he stresses.

He approaches the sink of contemporary emotional squalor from many angles: his account of the trial of the Soham child-murderer Ian Huntley and his accomplice Maxine Carr, his retelling for American readers of the sadistic serial killings perpetrated by Fred and Rosemary West, and his scornful essay “Trash, Violence and Versace” about Sensation, the exhibition of Charles Saatchi’s collection at the Royal Academy in 1998, demonstrate how a millionaire’s art accessories are part of the same mental world as a mass murderer’s torture dungeon. . . .

An airman frozen in time.

Some interesting new details are slowly emerging about that frozen body discovered in the Sierra Nevada, as it slowly thaws after decades encased in a glacier. Now, military forensic experts say a picture is emerging of a fair-haired man wearing a United States Army Air Force uniform. He is likely an American airman who suffered broken bones and died after his training aircraft crashed in the mountain wilderness sometime during World War Two.
For an update on evolving details, see:

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/10/21/frozen.airman.ap/index.html

A Canadian general speaks out.

WHY I WORE MY UNIFORM ONCE AGAIN
By M.Gen. Lewis Mackenzie.

The Globe and Mail, October 19, 2005.

In 1993, when I took my release from the Canadian Forces, I
promised myself that, in retirement, I would never don my uniform
when there was a chance I might criticize government policy while
wearing it. Loyalty to the principle of civilian control of the
military is an essential characteristic of democracy. I had not worn
my uniform for 12 years -- until this past week in Afghanistan.
Canada has more than 1,500 soldiers serving in Afghanistan and
surrounding locations. The work they do is tough, dirty and, yes,
dangerous. They are in the process of redeploying from the Kabul
area to a more volatile region in and around Kandahar, and their
numbers will grow to more than 2,000 in early 2006.
Appreciating that Canadians are less than well informed about
our military's largest overseas commitment, Defence Minister Bill
Graham and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Rick Hillier, invited a
number of them to spend a week in Afghanistan with the men and women
of the Canadian Forces.
Since Mr. Graham and Gen. Hillier would be meeting the Afghan
leadership during our Team Canada visit, details of the trip
including the schedule and participants) were tightly controlled. Of
course, enough was leaked to the media before our departure on Oct.
10 to draw the inevitable condemnation of our trip from some
quarters as a waste of time and money.
The critics cited costs, presumably without checking that the
military flights to and from Afghanistan were moving cargo and
soldiers in and out of the theatre, with Team Canada in the rear of
the aircraft. Eight hours to Zagreb, five hours to an "undisclosed
location," three hours sleep followed by five hours to Kandahar --
that's not the definition of a luxury boondoggle.
Team Canada included Mary Ann Burdett and Tom Irvine of the
Royal Canadian Legion; Rudyard Griffiths of the Dominion Institute;
Bob Sweet, the mayor of Petawawa, Ont.; Tim Page of the Canadian
Defence Industries Association; John Eaton of the Canadian Force's
Liaison Council; Raf Souccar, assistant commissioner of the RCMP; sports superstars Catriona Le May Doan,
Daniel Igali and Guy Lafleur; and entertainer Rick Mercer.
Our aim was to see as many soldiers as possible. We ate with
them, patrolled with them, played with them, slept beside them and,
most important, talked to them.
At first light and late at night, ball hockey games broke out,
and Guy Lafleur took to the "ice." Ms. Le May Doan and Mr. Igali
were inundated with requests for pictures and autographs, and Mr.
Mercer never failed to bring smiles to hundreds of dusty faces.
Toward the end of our visit, Gen. Hillier invited us to attend
a number of dusty parades, where he informally addressed his
soldiers. When he called on Mr. Igali, the Olympic wrestling gold
medalist, to say a few words, he spoke for all of Canada when he
reminded the soldiers that, when they patrolled the dark alleys of
some of the most dangerous places on Earth, every Canadian walked
with them. I truly wish that were true.
Here's my message to some opposition MPs: Don't play politics
with our soldiers. One defence critic who should know better
questioned the wisdom of the Afghan visit even before our departure
from Canada. The unit he commanded as a lieutenant-colonel in the
1970s is now serving in Kandahar. A number of the unit's solders
indicated they would have him drawn and quartered if he showed his
face in Afghanistan. Not exactly the type of
endorsement he would appreciate, but one he should have expected.
As someone who has served in and commanded numerous overseas
missions starting with the Gaza Strip in 1963, I can guarantee every
Canadian that I have never encountered a deployed soldier who didn't
appreciate the time, effort and risk volunteered by Team Canada
participants in the past. So, before the critics offer commentary on
such matters, perhaps they should contact the only people who really
matter in this debate -- the soldiers doing the dirty work for the rest of us -- and ask them what they think.

Canadian Major-general (Ret'd) Lewis MacKenzie
was the first commander of
United Nations peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo.

Warriors Frozen In Time

I hold an eternal fascination for incidences of the remains of warriors from distant wars being discovered many years later. From the famous case of the frozen body of Iron Age "Otzi" discovered a few years ago in the Italian Tyrol mountains, to the numerous finds of perfectly preserved bodies of ancient Danes found preserved in European peat bogs, and the many remains of soldiers of both world wars still being recovered ...
Now, today we have another interesting story -- this time that of a frozen American flier who died during the Second World War. For the rest of the story, go here:

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/10/20/frozen.airman.ap/index.html

CANADIANS ON D-DAY.

D-DAY: Canada's part in the 24 hours that changed
the course of world history.

by Sidney Allinson.

Each year, June 6th is honored as marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied American, British, and Canadian armies' landing in Normandy, France, to begin the liberation of German-occupied Europe, on June 6, 1944. But when I mentioned this recently to a roomful of would-be writers, there was a collective shrug and one asked, "What's the big deal?"

Contrast this attitude now often held in North America with the small communities along the Normandy coast, where schoolchildren are still gratefully taught what happened on that momentous day long ago to free their country from four years of Nazi tyranny.

Today, when the United States and other nations are divided over whether to support Coalition forces in Iraq, the close co-operation of Western Allies during World War Two seems a miracle of teamwork.

Back in 1944, the United States, Britain, Canada, and a score of countries were strongly united in one common goal – to destroy the German war machine that supported a racist Nazi regime.
After five years of war, Hitler's armies still occupied most of Europe and intended to keep oppressive control of it for "a Thousand-Year Empire." To do so, they had built the Atlantic Wall, an enormous line of fortifications along the entire coast of France; concrete bunkers, heavy artillery, barbed wire, mines, and underwater obstacles believed impregnable to any Allied landing.

Breaching this bastion was the purpose of the Allied Expeditionary Force, under the supreme command of American General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his British deputy General Bernard L. Montgomery.

Within 13 months, their team of planners devised and equipped the most ambitious seaborne invasion ever launched, code-named Operation OVERLORD on a designated "D-Day." (The "D" just signified the day when an invasion would start.) Some Canadian officers had serious doubts about OVERLORD's success, fearing a repeat of the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942 that cost the mainly Canadian raiders 900 dead and 2300 prisoners-of-war.

When US President Theodore Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King met at the Quebec Conference in August, 1943, an expedition target-date was set for the summer of 1944.

Though America and Britain would supply the bulk of manpower, Canada also could field a substantial fighting force. By mid-1944, Canada had close to half a million troops in Britain, a remarkable feat by our country whose population then totaled just 12 million.

Commanded by Lt. General Harry Crerar, the Canucks had been stationed impatiently in Britain for over four years, endlessly training for the invasion showdown that everybody knew was coming.

OVERLORD called for landings to be made on five Normandy beaches by each of the three main participants. UTAH and OMAHA were to be taken by the Americans, while GOLD and SWORD were British objectives. The JUNO Beach sector allocated to Canadians was a five-mile wide stretch of Norman coast between Courseulles and St. Auban-sur-Mer.

Strong winds and heavy rain forced postponement of the intended attack date of June 5th, but meteorologists forecast a possible break in the weather the following day. The awesome responsibility whether or not to risk a sudden storm wrecking the invasion fleet rested solely with General Eisenhower. After conferring pro-and-con with his senior advisors, 'Ike' sat silently for several minutes than spoke his famous decision, "Okay, we'll go!"

So at dawn on June 6, 1944, the biggest naval invasion force in history set forth from English ports. It was an incredible sight, the English Channel crowded with more than 7,000 Allied vessels of every size and shape and type, from huge battleships and converted ocean liners, to minesweepers and flat-bottomed landing barges.

The fleet was crewed by 285,000 sailors of a dozen nationalities, including 109 Royal Canadian Navy ships and 10,000 sailors. Above, flew thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft, among which were many members of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The fleet carried 6000 vehicles, 600 heavy guns, and more than 156,000 young Allied soldiers -- Americans, British, and the 3rd. Canadian Infantry Division under command of Major General Rod Keller from Kelowna.

During the initial 24 hours, more than 155,000 Allied soldiers were landed from ships and 23,400 from 2,300 aircraft. About 450 men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion were among the earliest to land on French soil shortly after midnight with the British 5th Airborne Division, and destroyed key bridges in heroic actions. Large contingents of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne landed in the area of Ste. Mere Eglise, wreaking havoc on the surprised German garrisons.

The Allied armada of ships approached a smoke-shrouded shore that was bombarded by aircraft and naval cannon which however did not crush all German resistance. At OMAHA, the Americans were pinned down on the beach under heavy enemy fire before scaling the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc at a cost 2000 casualties.

The British who stormed ashore at SWORD and GOLD also had to fight hard for their eventual triumph despite 1600 casualties.

On JUNO Beach, the first assault wave included troops of the Victoria-raised Canadian Scottish Regiment, plus the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Regina Rifles Regiment, North Shore Regiment, and Queen's Own Rifles.

Their landing was delayed a crucial 20 minutes, until 8 a.m., when the rising tide had obscured an offshore reef and beach obstacles which sank or damaged most of the 24 craft, drowning many men. Then heavy enemy gunfire began raking the Canadian infantry and tanks, but they fought their way ashore anyway.

A company of the Canadian Scottish served alongside the Royal Winnipeg Rifles during heavy street-fighting in Courseulles that lasted into late afternoon. At nightfall, the CanScots reorganized to consolidate their gains and tend 87 casualties.

At Bernieres, the Canadian assault landing lost 50 per cent of its strength in 100 yards, and the enemy resisted strongly until eventually outflanked. But according to plan, follow-up units passed through the assault troops clearing the beaches of snipers, and pressed on to their objectives ahead. Their courage exacted a high price: a total of 340 Canadians had been killed, 570 wounded, and 47 taken prisoner.

Throughout D-Day, Canadian troops were magnificent, having fought further inland than either the British or Americans. Still, the Allies had captured all five major beach-heads, crucial first steps towards the final victory 11 months later when Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

By then, Canadians had fought their way across France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, and buried 11,336 comrades who sacrificed their lives in the cause of freedom along the way.
So it was that Canada's participation on D-Day helped change the course of the Second World War and shaped our modern world as we know it. You could say that's a pretty big deal.


Sidney Allinson is a past Director of
the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

"IN FLANDERS FIELDS"

ALLINSON FAMILY LINK WITH THE MOST FAMOUS OF ALL WAR POEMS

"IN FLANDERS FIELDS."

A significant number of military historians who research the First World War do so in memory of family relatives who served in the Great War. My own late father, Pte. Thomas Allinson, served in The Green Howards Regiment, and to my eternal regret, I seldom took the opportunity to break through his modest silence and ask him about the horrors he faced in the trenches. However, one casual mention by my father only dawned on me as significant many years later, which sparked me to finally set about learning the factual details to confirm his anecdote.

The incident is described in "Welcome to Flanders Fields - The Great Canadian Battle of the Great War: Ypres, 1915", by Daniel G. Dancocks. It recounts, "On May 3, Canadian army medical officer Maj. John McCrae had spent 17 weary days performing surgery on hundreds of wounded soldiers. He took a brief respite on the back of an ambulance outside his forward dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried close by later that day, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

Dancocks goes on: "McCrae vented his anguish about the appalling suffering he witnessed, by quickly composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches there, and he spent twenty minutes or so of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook."

"A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. 'His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,' Allinson recalled. 'He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Lt. Helmer's grave nearby.' When McCrae finished writing, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO."

"Sgt. Maj. Allinson was moved by what he read, saying later, 'The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.'"

Remarkably enough, McCrae thought so little of his own poem, he was tempted to just throw it away. Fortunately, a fellow officer submitted it to editors in England, and 'Punch' magazine published it on 8 December, 1915. It quickly became one of the most famous of war poems, and continues to be highly regarded as such to this day.

I now feel quiet family pride that a Canadian cousin of my father -- an Allinson -- was the first person to read the immortal words of "In Flanders Field," moments after it was penned by Major John McCrae.

-- Sidney Allinson.

Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, by Richard Holmes, Harper Collins Publishers.

The typical British soldier has long been called "Tommy" – much like "Johnny Canuck" or the American "G.I. Joe." Most famouslyknown via Rudyard Kipling's sardonic poem:

"It's Tommy this, And Tommy that, and 'Tommy go away!'
But it's 'The Savior of 'is country,' when the guns begin to play."

The term originated from "Thomas Atkins," a for-instance example provided in military clerical instructions. Now this traditional nickname is used as the title of a magnificent new historical tribute to the millions of ordinary soldiers who fought in the First World War. "Tommy," by Richard Holmes.

Reviewed by Simon Heffer, Country Life Magazine.

Richard Holmes here takes a radically different approach, and in doing so has cast a fresh perspective on a catastrophe that becomes harder and harder for successive generations to comprehend.

Tommy describes almost every aspect of the life of the British soldier in France and Flanders. Starting with how he was recruited and trained, we follow him to the trenches. We learn how the trenches themselves were dug and maintained, and the minutiae of his routine, whether as private soldier, non-commissioned officer or officer. We hear how he spent his leisure time, how his spiritual needs were catered for, and how he conducted relationships with his comrades, superiors and inferiors.

Most poignantly, we are told how he was treated when wounded, how he died and what happened to him after his death. The result is a riveting, thorough and detailed picture of everyday life that goes way beyond the description of dates, politics and military manoeuvres typical of much other history. Prof Holmes has delved into the published and un- published diaries, letters and memoirs of soldiers of all ranks to find his basic information: and another of the fine qualities of this book is the way in which the soldiers speak for themselves. He also uses the facts he unearths to lay to rest some myths about the First World War.

For example, for all the hell of the trenches, many men enjoyed it. Some were properly fed and clothed for the first time. Many discovered a comradeship that, if they survived the conflict, would last for decades beyond it. The supposed rigidities of the class system, with officers distant from men, were far from the truth: the affection each felt for the other is manifest in many of the extracts Prof. Holmes quotes. Both officers and men were judged on their merits: cliche though it be, the war was a great leveller. Another myth was that generals had cushy wars while the men they commanded did all the suffering. In fact, a high proportion of generals — nearly 60 — were killed on active service.

The author explains the culture that grew up as a result of the war: the marching songs, the slang, the food. If you seek the origins of the words 'chat', 'Blighty' or 'bully beef' you will find them here. He also continually presents the reader with astonishing facts: such as that the most decorated other rank of the First World War was a stretcher bearer, L-Cpl Bill Coltman, whose principles would not al low him to bear arms. Happily, this Victoria Cross winner survived and returned to his peacetime job as a gardener.

While the author catalogues the horror of life for the Poor Bloody Infantry and the artillery, he also records the acts of heroism of engineers, signallers and tank crews. Nor will many readers have been aware of the use of the cavalry charge in what was an increasingly mechanised war, but the feats of that branch of the service are well recorded, too.

Prof. Holmes deserves his reputation as a great military historian. This, like his other books, is a serious work of scholarship that is also eminently readable and utterly fascinating. It is perhaps the finest book on the First World War that I have ever read. -- Simon Heffer.

The book also reflects the dissatisfaction he feels at the way we still remember it. Too often we approach World War I through the literature it inspired. The poems of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others have their own truths to offer, but Holmes would dispute the assumption that they represent the experiences of the majority of those who endured the trench warfare of the Western Front.

To discover new voices and new perspectives on the war he has trawled through the rich archives of letters, diaries and memoirs that still exist, most of them written while the fighting still continued. From these he has constructed an extraordinarily vivid and moving picture of what it felt like to be one of the millions of men who served in the British army during the four years between August 1914 and the armistice on November 11, 1918.

The Tommies, whom Richard Holmes rescues from obscurity, prove powerful witnesses to the diverse realities of the war. Beneath the stereotyped images of the First World War that we all carry in our heads, the real lives of the men who fought it are still there to be discovered and Holmes’s book brings them forcefully to our attention

Richard Holmes is by far our most famous and readable contemporary military historian. The strength of his writing is not so much his grasp of strategy and tactics as his understanding of the soldier. Holmes understands what makes the fighting man - and especially the British fighting man - tick. He knows all about the recruitment, training, equipment, doctrine, leadership, organisation of the Army through the ages. He understands the character of officers, NCOs, and most of all of the enlisted men - the Tommies of whom he writes in this account of the fighting man's experience in the trench warfare of the Great War.

"Tommy" is a long book, but Holmes is, as ever, impeccably readable. Rather than presenting a history of the Great War, he describes different aspects of the military experience through a dense web of reminiscences, official documents, and academic research. The structure of the book is somewhat reminiscent of Holmes' earlier "Redcoat", although the historical focus is much tighter.

As the veterans of the Great War diminish in numbers there is a very real need for a comprehensive portrait of them, of their experiences, and of their fates. I believe that this compelling and understated book commemorates the extraordinary experiences of that generation.

Richard Holmes had a hard act to follow - he has dominated popular military history on television ever since his 'War Walks' TV series in the 1990s. More recently, he achieved best seller status with a brisk, populist but highly readable biography of Wellington. This followed closely a deserved triumph for his volume 'Redcoat', detailing the ordinary soldier in the age of the musket.

Well, this new volume carries on the story of 'Tommy Atkins' who Holmes so touchingly personifies in the opening chapters of 'Redcoat' and 'Tommy'. This is the story of the greatest army the United Kingdom has ever placed in the field - by 1918 over 5 ½ million men were serving in the British Army, and Holmes takes as his subject their motivations, their hardships, their resilience, their morale, and their enduring sacrifice.

If you know Denis Winter's book 'Death's Men', then you have some idea of the content, but Holmes goes so much further than Winter. He narrates the entire story of the Army in the Great War, drawing on the expertise shown in his series and book 'The Western Front' by giving an efficient digest of battles and actions, before moving on to giving the men of the Great War their own voices, by drawing on a huge array of accounts and sources.

But this is no a 'veteran's accounts' book like Lyn Macdonald or Max Arthur. Holmes rightly leans his book closely to the values and ideologies that motivated these men at the time, rather than accounts heavily tailored by a world far more interested in the view of the war as 'futile', than the spirit that sent millions to volunteer in 1914. Holmes treads carefully through the 'revisionist' minefield, giving due credence to both sides. I feel he pins his colours to the mast by revealing the limitations of the popular view of the Great War given undue weight by the war poets, men who never intended to write history, but whose views so often stand in the place of more revealing historical accounts.

The Great War resonates still, and the world in many ways lives in its shadow. How many families were touched by dread hand of the Great War? This is obviously a book which takes a very British perspective, but I feel there is a classic in the making here. Holmes' account deserves to endure, as his outstanding scholarship and crisp, witty humanistic prose pays a loving tribute to the thousands of men who survive still as polished medals, neatly folded letters, faded photographs and names on innumerable war memorials.

A superbly realised history of the ordinary British soldier in the First World War. Richard Holmes deploys his outstanding skills of historical analysis to tell the human story of the men that comprised the British army. Richard Holmes, one of Britain's foremost military writers and popular TV broadcasters, combines incisive historical analysis with a broad social history to paint a profound picture of common men in a brutal war. Building on his magnificent REDCOAT, Richard Holmes draws on letters, diaries, memoir and poetry of the war to complete his picture of the 6 million men, 22 percent of the adult population and often as young as 18, that fought in the First World War. He examines their motivation, the impact of their service, their attitudes to war and to the enemy, and ultimately the legacy of their experience. Similar in its concerns to the work of Niall Fergusson and Lyn MacDonald, ATKINS explores territory that grand histories seldom cover. What is achieved is a wonderful sense of the real story of trench warfare, the strength and fallability of the human spirit, and the individuals behind an epic event.

Richard Holmes has included in Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918, his important study of the Great War.

Using the method of his equally masterful Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, a comprehensive and sympathetic scrutiny of correspondence and memoirs, Holmes assembles a compelling picture of the soldier's lot, from general to private. His book is not for those who like their history to be A Division going hither, B Division going thither and C Division operating some outflanking manoeuvre. Rather, through the accumulation of detail and experience, it examines minutely the everyday experience of trench life, with all the grimness that none of us today could hope to endure.

Detail such as rats. One unfortunate private woke up 'with a fully grown rat swinging from his nose with his teeth in the cartilage'. Lieutenant Roe continues: 'Clearly I could not shoot the rat with my revolver in such a confined space... there was only one solution, so I borrowed Appleford's bayonet and got on with the job.'

Detail such as the primitive defences soldiers had to adopt when first attacked by gas. 'French and Belgian chemists generously supplied sanitary towels for this purpose, with ear-loops already handily attached.'

Detail such as the primitive nature of weaponry in the early stages of the war, in this case a homemade grenade. 'Take a jampot, fill it with shredded guncotton and tenpenny nails, mixed according to taste. Insert a No 8 detonator and a short length of Bickford's fuse. Clay up the lid. Light with a match, pipe, cigar or cigarette and throw for all you are worth.'

Above all, Tommy is the story of the courage of ordinary men thrust into an extraordinary situation, summed up by a single sentence from Second Lieutenant PJ Campbell, an artillery liaison officer. 'We were all civilians who hated war, but knew that it had to be fought and would go on fighting until it was won.'

Book review: "Soldier Boys."

Soldier Boys, by G. F. McCauley, General Store Publishing, 317 pages, $22.95

This well-researched novel is set in the Second World War, about a group of young men from Northern Ontario who volunteer for military service overseas with the Algonquin Regiment. The six friends call themselves “the Little League of Nations” because of their various national origins -- Ireland, Lebanon, Italy, Russia, a Cree Indian, and a French-Canadian. Author McCauley says he based much of this story on the wartime letters of an uncle who joined up as a youngster. He explains, “Like most of the men who made it home, my uncle never spoke about his war experience, but the letters he wrote to his family and the newspaper clippings the family collected were enough to get me going on the primary and secondary source material.”
McCauley handles language well, as befits an ex-Member of Parliament as he is, and tells the story from the viewpoint of the diary of Barney Berman, a Jewish youngster. He voices a running commentary of the training in Canada, long months of waiting in England, sexual encounters, savage battles in Northwest Europe, and brutal ill-treatment in a German prisoner-of-war camp His accounts of army life and combat are for the most part accurate, save a few minor technical errors. The author also has done his homework in gathering contemporary details about life in 1944, often alluding the objects, sports, and entertainers of the era. The author takes the reader well into the spirit of the era, and the story rattles along well, though it is a bit disconcerting when the 1944 character interjects information about a movie that was actually produced 20-odd years later. All in all, Soldier Boys can be read at two levels – as a fictional novel and a factual summary of experiences of Canadian soldiers 50 years ago.

-- Sidney Allinson.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY – COUNTER-SPY.

by Sidney Allinson.

Famed novelist Hemingway yearned to get into World War Two,

and with his "Crook Factory" he managed to succeed.

Soldier, war-correspondent, bull-fighter, big-game-hunter and dedicated womanizer – famous novelist Ernest Hemingway managed to live out many macho fantasies in real life. Less well-known is his brief career as an amateur spy-catcher and submarine chaser in World War Two.

In the summer of 1942, America's best-selling and most celebrated author was frustrated. Pacing the grounds of his Cuban villa, 'Finca Vigia,' he often drank wildly as he chafed at his inability to secure an acceptable assignment covering action in a combat area. It did not help matters that his wife, Martha Gellhorn, was already a successful war-correspondent in Europe. While trying repeatedly to land a reporting contract overseas, Hemingway decided there could be plenty for him to do locally to combat American enemies on land and sea.

He began to organize his own private counter-spy ring in Cuba, intending to assassinate Nazi agents there and take the even more aggressive role of U-boat hunter. Ignoring proper US counter-intelligence channels -- then controlled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- "Papa" Hemingway used some high-level connections to quickly launch his private war. He approached the American Embassy in Havana, asking for discreet support and funding. As qualifications, Hemingway claimed he had organized a fifth column resistance network in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

In August, 1942, Hemingway was given backing by US Ambassador Spruille Braden, an admirer of his books. Braden publicly criticized the fascist sympathies among some Cuban nationals, being such an unusually out-spoken diplomat he was known as "Cowboy." On his own initiative, he began to advance government funds to Hemingway to finance personnel, weapons, and equipment for covert operations.

Delighted, the burly, bearded novelist jumped into the spy business, and code-named his operation, the "Crook Factory." He quickly hired a diverse crew of 26 unlikely recruits – smugglers, fishermen, gamblers, prostitutes, priests, playboys, and sundry drinking buddies – and put them to work as counter-espionage agents to scour the island for German spies.

At the time, though Cuba was nominally an ally of America, the island nation was still curiously lenient towards Axis citizens resident there. Tempted by the close proximity to US oil shipping ports, numerous agents of German intelligence services operated in Cuba, using forged Spanish passports. Wartime Havana was a strident tropical city of cha-cha music and laughter, yet with widespread grinding poverty for most amid incredible wealth of a pampered few at the top, all brutally controlled by dictator General Fulgencio Batista.

Hordes of US citizens visited Havana to sample the flesh-pots that catered to every vice – cheap drugs and booze, no-limit gambling dens run by the Mafia, and thousands of pathetic five-dollar streetwalkers available everywhere. More elegant tourists jammed luxury nightclubs like the lush 'Tropicana', where 50 scantily-clad chorines danced to erotic rumbas. This was the rowdy hunting-ground for Papa's Crook Factory operatives; often directed by Hemingway from atop a stool in his favorite Floradita Bar, on Calle Obisco near Morro Castle.

Information about the would-be Nazi-hunters quickly reached FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington. Angrily, he ordered that his 16 special agents in Cuba keep an eye on "these dangerous amateurs." He wrote an irate memo to Raymond G. Leddy, Special Agent In Charge in Havana, instructing him to thoroughly investigate and, if possible, discredit the bon vivant novelist, "whose sobriety is certainly questionable." Hemingway had earlier incurred Hoover's accusations of being a Communist because of his support of leftist causes in Spain, about which he wrote in his best-selling novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

The SAC sent regular reports to his fuming boss, and in April, 1943, stated that Hemingway was "receiving in excess of $1,000 monthly paid direct from the embassy here." Hardly lavish financing, and Hemingway had to add a good deal extra to the secret fund from his own pocket. Under-financed or not, his agents claimed to have tracked down and silenced a half-dozen clandestine radios being operated by Nazi sympathizers on the island. That was allegedly done by simply passing the word that anyone signaling to U-boats would have his throat slit.

Even a proverbial "beautiful Russian spy" fell into their net. Consuelo Radom was a Russo-Mexican call-girl who pandered exclusively to Allied naval officers. She was suspected of passing pillow-talk tidbits about convoys to agents of the German Naval Intelligence Service. Within days, Consuelo was so effectively silenced by Crook Factory threats she fled Cuba in fear of her life.

These and other melodramatic events were reported weekly by Hemingway to the US Embassy, which passed them along to G2 Intelligence in Washington. Though they likely included some exaggerations, there must have been enough useful wheat among the chaff to be taken seriously, as G2 over-ruled Hoover's attempts to have the Crook Factory shut down.

The infuriated FBI Director retaliated by instructing Leddy: "Any information you may have relating to the unreliability of Ernest Hemingway as an informant may be discreetly brought to the attention of Ambassador Braden." But Hoover's man in Havana could only reply on October 8, 1942, that "Hemingway has received authorization to patrol certain areas where submarine activity has been reported." It allowed Hemingway to convert his own 40-foot sport-fishing boat, El Pilar to a well-armed "Q-ship" – a disguised submarine decoy.

The Caribbean Sea was then swarming with German U-boats preying on Allied shipping carrying oil and supplies across the Atlantic to Britain. For a time, these undersea wolf-packs roamed virtually unchecked, lurking in the Gulf of Mexico to destroy their prey of unarmed merchant ships. Waiting until fuel-laden tankers were silhouetted against brightly lit cities along the American coast, U-boats could launch torpedoes at point-blank range. Some nights, as many as four tankers were hit just a few miles offshore, so common that crowds of beer-drinking spectators gathered along Florida beaches every evening. The tragic scene of doomed blazing ships so moved Hemingway that he used it later in his novel, Islands In The Stream.

A skilled deep-sea fisherman, Hemingway's plan was to cruise along routes where U-boats had the habit of surfacing alongside small vessels to pirate fresh food and water. He relished the idea of luring such an attack then suddenly machine-gunning the unprepared Nazi sailors on deck and sinking the submarine with explosives. He sold the idea to Ambassador Braden to authorize having Pilar secretly armed at the US Navy Base at Guantanamo. The tiny vessel took on a powerful radio, a brace of machine guns, automatic rifles, and grenades, plus a US Marine volunteer from the embassy guard section.

Each time it went to sea, it was shadowed by a boatload of binocular-wielding G-men who then told Mr. Hoover the purported anti-submarine patrols looked more like leisurely marlin-fishing trips. Hence, skepticism ran high when Hemingway proudly claimed to have interrupted a U-Boat that surfaced close to a Spanish liner on December 9, 1942. FBI agents checked out the claim so thoroughly, they interviewed 100 passengers and crew when the ship docked in Miami. Their findings were that Hemingway's claim was mainly false, and Hoover triumphantly presented this news to the embassy in Cuba.

The ambassador was so embarrassed, he abruptly cut off government funding from Hemingway's counter-espionage activities. However, Braden later officially stated, "So worthwhile was Ernest's information on the location of German subs that I have strongly recommended him for a decoration." Despite that, Hemingway never received any public recognition for his Cuban efforts, though later he was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery while a war correspondent in France.

Hemingway carried on financing his anti-submarine patrols himself for another four months, until mid-August, 1943, when he had to quit. The next year, he was heartened by an offer from Collier's Magazine to report on the coming Allied liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe. Papa took Pilar out for a final marlin-fishing cruise, perhaps already mulling over the story line of his future Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Old Man And The Sea. Grandly, he closed Finca Vigia, found homes for his 18 cats, and threw a huge three-day drinking party to say farewell to his Crook Factory comrades. Then, in May, 1944, Ernest Hemingway sailed away from Havana, eager to join a larger war.