Ww2

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Press regulation, heroic Bulgarians and the case for Scotch on the rocks

Beyond the law Sir: In your leading article of 28 June you make the point that the hacking trial demonstrates why political oversight of press regulation, not press regulation by politicians, would be an unnecessary ‘draconian step’ because ‘hacking is already against the law’. Later you compare the illegal but honourable behaviour of Andy Coulson with that of Damian McBride, who ‘broke no law but behaved criminally’. In doing so you weaken the earlier argument. Regulation of the press should not solely be focused on illegal activity; rather it is to ensure that the press does not behave in a way analogous to that you criticise McBride for. In the

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Brave, noble, forgotten – the other side of Italy’s second world war

At the time of the armistice of September 1943, when the kingdom of Italy formally transferred its allegiance from the Germans to the invading Allies, there were some 40,000 British prisoners-of-war languishing in camps around the country. Camp gates were thrown open by fleeing Italian guards, but on orders from Whitehall thousands of PoWs stayed put until the Germans arrived and packed them off to other camps in Germany. Some 4,000 of them, however, set off to seek freedom either by heading north towards Switzerland or south towards the advancing Anglo–American forces, which had just arrived on the Italian mainland after their conquest of Sicily. Most of these escapees were

Alan Judd

The cold, remote plateau of Vichy France where good was done

It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome or too familiar, or because — in Solzhenitzyn’s memorable phrase — you need only a mouthful of seawater to know the taste of the ocean. No: my reluctance to contemplate that world, even as a distant spectator, is because it was so awful and the detail so compelling that I’ll be unable to put the book down. It will echo inside my skull for as long as I inhabit one. So it is with this vivid account by Caroline Moorehead of remote mountain villagers high up in France’s Massif Central

Friday

David Blackburn

Three cheers for all those who fought fascism, from Cable Street to Berlin

70 years have passed since, in the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies on the northern coast of France.’ Operation Overlord, or D-Day as the invasion is known to posterity, was astonishing in every sense; not least because weather conditions on 5/6th June 1944 were far from ideal to execute an amphibious landing against a well-entrenched enemy. Even military men were surprised by the comparatively light casualties (4,413 killed); many had anticipated a bloodbath. Major General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice (a retired soldier who later turned to teaching military history at the University of London) wrote in the

Thursday

David Crane

Patrick Leigh Fermor and the long, daft tradition of Brits trying to save Greece

Twenty-odd years ago, while on holiday in the deep Mani at the foot of the Peloponnese, I got into conversation with an old and only partially reconstructed Greek communist shop-owner. I had been showing him a bit of pottery I had found on the sea bed at Asomati, and he wanted to know what had brought me to the Mani in the first place and was it Patrick Leigh Fermor? I said no — not strictly true — and he seemed pleased.  Leigh Fermor, he said — and he was not prepared to elaborate — had not been good for Greece. It came as something of a surprise, as in

Thursday

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley’s diary: Do you have to be American to love Downton?

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States: ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire. It turned out to be a wonderful time, despite us arriving in, according to the papers, ‘the wettest winter since 1755’. For what seemed like weeks, every time I turned on the television while cooking, there was Mr Cameron beneath a brolly (as I think you call them) shouting into a microphone, ‘Money is no object!’ There was a lot to

Thursday

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s diary: Boris would make a great PM – but he must strike now

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not. But I am painfully aware that he would not matter if there was a strong man in Washington. As it is, President Obama is a feeble and cowardly man who

Thursday

James Delingpole

Generation War does something very un-German – bottles it

I was so looking forward to Generation War (BBC2, Saturday) — a three-part drama series covering the second world war from the perspective of five young men and women on the German side. Any nation capable of producing the ME-109, the 88mm gun and the Tiger tank, not to mention Das Boot, really ought to have no problem making one of the most authentic, searingly honest war dramas ever to hit our screens… How wrong I was. Consider a scene from this week’s opening episode involving Friedhelm — bookish, bolshie, anti-war younger brother of the more pugnacious and efficient Leutnant Wilhelm Winter. There they are on the Eastern Front, in

Wednesday

Molly Guinness

From Göring to Hemingway, via Coco Chanel – the dark glamour of the Paris Ritz at war

In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by previous generations who’ve passed through Paris. Going back through the years, each group of geniuses turns out to be just as drunk and silly as the next, albeit with longer cigarette holders. Tilar Mazzeo, who has written biographies of Coco Chanel and the woman behind Veuve Clicquot, has done a similar service with this history of the Ritz. Focusing on the hotel is partly a device to write about the German occupation, but it’s mainly a way of gathering all the old Paris icons under one roof. Marcel Proust, Ernest

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

Land sakes! Another book about Winston Churchill? Really? Give us a break, the average reader may think. Actually though, as title and subtitle suggest, this isn’t just another biographical study. It’s at once odder and more conventional than that. More conventional because, in some ways, it is just another biographical study. Odder because — instead of being a straightforward discussion of Churchill’s literary work — it sees literature as the key to his biography. More than that, its author seems to think he has hit on a ‘new methodology’ in which ‘we can write political history as literary history’. Well, perhaps. At one end of that notion is the banality

Thursday

Byron Rogers

When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door

John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to get given a sword, which he could then brandish. After all, he knew about swords; they were things that came out of props baskets in his cavalry epics, but that was in films. Unfortunately in real life he found he had an arthritic thumb, which meant that having once drawn one he needed help to put the sword back in its scabbard. It had not been like that in his films, where he had only to say the word for anything to happen. There he could put a coal mine

Thursday

David Blackburn

Our own folly may yet lead us to a second dishonourable Yalta

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

Thursday

David Crane

How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one. Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of

Thursday

Christopher Booker

How the first world war inspired the EU

Among the millions of words which will be expended over the next four years on the first world war, very few will be devoted to explaining one of its greatest legacies of all, the effects of which continue to dominate our politics to this day. One of the best-kept secrets of the European Union is that the core idea which gave rise to it owed its genesis not to the second world war, as is generally supposed, but to the Great War a quarter of a century earlier. It was around that time that the man who can be described as ‘the Father of Europe’ was first inspired to the

Thursday

Simon Akam

Write what you know — especially if it’s the second world war

Adam Foulds’s latest novel is less successful than its predecessor. In 2009 he reached the Booker shortlist with The Quickening Maze, which saw Victorian poets orbit a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, he has shifted his attention to the Mediterranean theatre of the second world war. Will Walker is an English field security officer, Ray Marfione an American GI. Both find themselves in North Africa and Sicily, as ancient corruption permeates Allied liberation. The subject matter is Foulds’s primary failing. The Quickening Maze fizzed because the author, who has a separate reputation as a poet, knows what it is to write verse and that

Thursday

Mishal Husain

Mishal Husain’s diary: Sachin, women secret agents, shipbuilding .. and telling the time.

I’ve worked for the BBC for years and have been listening to the Today programme all my adult life, but joining it as a presenter feels like exploring a new frontier. Being on top of your brief is one thing; the mechanics of a three-hour live radio programme quite another. Take the junctions leading up to the ‘pips’ at the start of each hour. From television, I’ve been accustomed to directors counting presenters down to these junctions while they ad-lib on air — the idea being to stop talking as the voice in your ear says ‘zero’. But radio presenters are pretty much on their own, watching the clock and

Thursday

Peter J. Conradi

Blonde, beautiful — and desperate to survive in Nazi France

Around 200 Englishwomen lived through the German Occupation of Paris. Nicholas Shakespeare’s aunt Priscilla was one. Men in the street stopped to gaze at this blonde with the careless allure and raw beauty of Grace Kelly. Some fell instantly in love. Her second mother-in-law thought her face showed truth and sincerity, and the reader shares this impression of integrity under duress. She was a reckless driver, yet was also shy, gentle and biddable. She had a beguiling habit of stroking your arm to show affection. She was not vain. Born in 1916, hers was a rackety childhood. Her self-engrossed parents, imprisoned within a failed marriage, then in new partnerships, rejected

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: It’s great there’s a World Islamic Economic Forum — now can we have a Jewish one?

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?  And once it is officially proclaimed a

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: Why aren’t Italians angrier about Nazi atrocities?

Given that more than 9,000 innocent Italian civilians, many of them women and children, died in Nazi massacres during the dreadful last 18 months of the second world war, it is amazing how few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Only five members of the German occupying forces were ever imprisoned in Italy for war crimes; and with the death last week, aged 100, of Erich Priebke, the former SS captain who in 1944 helped organise the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome, none of them is now still alive. Hundreds of others were, of course, involved in these crimes, but

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: It seemed a little creepy that thousands of people wanted to

My village, Stoke Bruerne in south Northamptonshire, is just getting back to normal after a great influx of visitors for its annual weekend festival called ‘Village at War’. Stoke Bruerne is a small place that sits astride the Grand Union Canal about halfway along its route from London to Birmingham. Its fame, such as it is, rests on its seven locks and the fact that it houses a Canal Museum; and the ‘Village at War’ event was started six years ago by the Friends of the Canal Museum to raise money for that excellent institution. I don’t yet know how well it has done this year, but last year it