The author of these pages (DRF) circa 1938
Chapter 14 of our biography of William Bateson describes the Blue Funnell Line ship Ascanius blissfully steaming south in early 1914 with the 68-member British contingent attending the British Association meeting, being held for the first time in non-UK territory - Australia. There were deck games and music and interesting ports of call. There was no "Marconi news" and it was only during a brief stay in Cape Town that they learned of the Serajevo murder that was to turn their world upside down. I recall this when seeing Roy Adlington Forsdyke decades later blissfully entertaining his son only a year before his world was to be turned upside down. The following article by one of Roy's grandchildren outlines his family's involvement in "the people's war."
A united front? How class and ethnic divisions affected
WWII
How my military family history has inspired my career and writing
Jonathan Fennell
Irish Times 7th
Feb 2019
Jonathan Fennell’s paternal
grandfather accompanies President Sean T O’Kelly as he inspects an Irish Army
guard of honour
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Whatever happened to
complexity, to nuance, to an understanding of the honour implicit in compromise?
In this digital age, we’ve become accustomed to seeing the world in 1s and 0s,
in black and white. Persons of integrity, so it seems, can no longer be seen to
find middle ground lest they be accused of “U-turns”, “surrender” or “perfidy”.
To paraphrase a wonderful line in the movie Braveheart, it is the ability to
compromise that makes a person noble; but all around us politics is once again
polarising rather than uniting the peoples of these islands.
I have spent the last five
years of my life grappling with another period that had profound and
long-lasting effects – the second World War. It has often struck me that for
those trying to explain the past, or the present for that matter, a look in the
mirror can be a good place to start; family dynamics often prefigure or mirror
wider social dynamics. In that context, it is hardly surprising that I developed
an interest in things military.
Jonathan
Fennell: The great defeats of 1940-1942 were to a large extent caused by morale
problems related to a disconnect between the citizen and the state
In my parents’ house in Rathfarnham, there are photographs of my grandfathers, one in an Irish Army uniform, leading a guard of honour for the President of Ireland, and the other in the uniform of the British merchant navy. Beside the fireplace, there is a German bayonet resting on the brass outer casing of an artillery shell. A German helmet and belt, with GOTT MIT UNS (God with us) emblazoned somewhat incongruously alongside the swastika on the buckle, and a tattered Nazi flag lie in a box in the cupboard in the study. All these “memorabilia” were given to my maternal grandfather when, as captain of a British oil tanker, he accepted the surrender of a German vessel at the end of the war. He had landed in Normandy on D-Day +2 with a shipment of aviation fuel; he was later interviewed by the BBC as the commander of the first ship back from D-Day. He had served on the Atlantic run and his ship had been sunk with considerable loss of life. But, in his moment of triumph, he could empathise with his defeated foe and they corresponded with one another after the war.
Jonathan Fennell’s maternal grandfather, as captain of a British oil tanker,
was interviewed by the BBC as the commander of the first ship back from D-Day
My paternal grandfather had
volunteered for service in the Irish Army at the start of the “emergency”. He
was surprised that he was sent for officer training on foot of the combat
experience he had gained with the Irish Brigade under O’Duffy during the Spanish
Civil War, for which he had volunteered from Christian motivation. I found it
strange that he too had been in correspondence with a former foe after the
conflict.
When the
platoon he commanded had captured a group of Englishmen who were deserting from
the Republican forces because they claimed they had been forcibly coerced into
fighting, he decided, based on his experience of the savagery on both sides of
the conflict, that his Spanish allies would probably have executed these
prisoners. So his comrades sheltered them with the Irish Brigade and brought
them back to Dublin before putting them on a boat home; my grandfather and the
English “deserters” corresponded for many years; this was slightly odd as he was
no great lover of the English and had been awarded a “Black and Tan” medal for
his services as a member of Fianna Eireann in the War of Independen against Britain.
My family history, therefore,
speaks to the complexity of military service and to life on these islands. I
have one grandfather who was a member of an organisation that was in armed
conflict with the British empire and another who repeatedly put his life at risk
to protect it. They met late in life and were able to relate to one another’s
very different experiences and perspectives. Both of them could respect their
foes and behave outside the norms of many standard military narratives.
These vignettes are just a
part of a wider Irish, or Anglo-Irish, story – deeply personal, complicated,
nuanced and certainly not one that can be told in a binary manner. If our
personal stories are this complicated, how can the story of the state be any
less so? That brings us back to the second World War.
In the process of researching
and writing Fighting the People’s War – the first in-depth history of the
British and Commonwealth armies in the second World War – I was struck by the
extent to which global war tore families and communities apart. It was my good
fortune to discover a series of censorship and intelligence reports compiled
from the assessment of about 17 million letters sent by soldiers and their
families during the war. Their story, much to my amazement, was radically
different to the “good war” and “finest hour” narrative fed to us by war leaders
and popular culture. As with my own family, the facts and patterns of
correspondence have a deep story to tell that often call martial and political
myths into question.
The censorship reports
revealed that even in those parts of the Commonwealth where the trials and
tribulations of the interwar years were better managed, there was a distinct
disconnect between the rhetoric of nations united in a “people’s war” and the
reality as it unfolded on the ground. In the United Kingdom, given the cultural
memory of the first World War and the highly fractured nature of Britain’s
class-based society this, perhaps, should not be all that much of a surprise.
The same applies, in many ways, to the ethnically fragmented dominions of
Australia, Canada and South Africa and the quasi-dominion of India, where large
proportions of the population, in some cases the majority, were extremely
anti-British in sentiment. Thus, when Britain’s pledge to support Poland against
German aggression was made a reality on September 3rd, 1939, Britain and the
Commonwealth, on the outbreak of a second World War, were forced to face some
harsh truths about the cohesion of the empire and its constituent peoples.
Fractures on the home front, in turn, had implications for the performance of
citizen soldiers on the battle front. We cannot understand the performance of
great armies without reference to political, social and economic factors. In
understanding the state, ideas matter; power is intimately related to legitimacy
and consent.
So, the story of the imperial
armies in the second World War is complex. The great defeats of 1940-1942 were
to a large extent caused by morale problems related to a disconnect between the
citizen and the state. These defeats destabilised and then put the nail in the
coffin of empire. Meanwhile, the soldier, as a consequence of his experience of
shared danger on the battle front, became deeply aware of how dependent he was
on the actions and attitudes of those around him. In time, the experience of
combat cohesion influenced political persuasions – with profound implications
for voting behaviours in critical elections during and after the war. The
soldier became not only a military tool, but an agent of social change. The
story of the state, just like the story of the family, is full of shades of
grey, of compromise – far from an easy tale of good versus evil.
Jonathan Fennell is the author
of Fighting the People’s War, the first single-volume history of the British and
Commonwealth armies in the second World War, which is published on February 7th
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