Letters from the Front: From the First World War to the Present Day

by Roberts, Andrew

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The First World War

  The Second World War

  Modern Warfare

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Andrew Roberts

  The Storm of War

  Masters and Commanders

  The Art of War: Great Commanders of the Modern

  World (2 volumes)

  A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900

  Waterloo

  Hitler and Churchill

  Eminent Churchillians

  To my step-mother Charmian, whose father, Lieutenant Colonel Robin Lindsay, won an MC fighting his way into Libya and a DSO fighting his way out.

  INTRODUCTION

  Soldiers’ letters home to their loved ones have a raw power denied to almost all other epistolary writing. Written for the most part without thought to publication, or to live for the ages, they try to make that seemingly impossible connection: between the writer who has seen the terrible face of war and the reader who generally has not. The fact that the writer is facing the horrors of war precisely in order to protect his reader from those selfsame horrors adds another powerful dynamic to the correspondence. In publishing these superb letters home from British soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, Osprey is performing a fine service to scholarship, as well as allowing us to glimpse into the lives of heroes on the front line.

  The knowledge that each of these letters might be the last communication the serviceman ever had with his loved ones gives every page of this book a poignancy that is only otherwise found when hearing the voices of pilots of doomed aircraft from black-box flight recorders, or seeing a living-will videotape. The fact that all too often the writers of these letters did not survive gives them a profundity usually reserved only for deathbed confessions. And somehow the very fact that they are not over-written or self-consciously ‘literary’ merely adds to their haunting power. This is life and death in the raw, expressed by British serviceman across nearly 100 years.

  The subjects the letters cover are the elemental ones that have not altered much since the dawn of war. Men writing home from the Peloponnesian and the Punic conflicts wanted to downplay their heroism but also their fears, to grouse about their rations, to discuss their love of country and city, to lament the deaths of comrades, to ponder the nature of the enemy, to ask for news and provisions, to comment on their leaders, to wish the war could end quickly but victoriously, to complain about their billets, and so on, but above all they wanted to express their love for their families and friends, whom they feared they would never see again. Human nature can’t have changed much in the intervening two millennia, for those are also substantially the same subjects written about by the British Tommy in this fascinating and beautifully produced volume.

  A man’s immediate prospect of death, as Dr Johnson said in the inexact but related context of being hanged in a fortnight, ‘concentrates his mind wonderfully’. Of course some housekeeping remarks do occasionally get written – ‘Thanks so much for the hankies’ – but overall it’s remarkable how these letters are shorn of much of the minor paraphernalia that can otherwise fill day-to-day existence. They get to the point quickly, and in every area except one they tend to tell the truth, for what’s the point of dissembling when on the brink of eternity? That is what makes soldiers’ letters home such an important tool for historians. However, the one area where the soldiers routinely downplay the truth is in estimating their likelihood of death. This is not because they have not considered the odds themselves – of course they have – but because they desperately want to protect their parents, wives, lovers and children from the terrible thought that lies behind every letter written: that this could be the last.

  When it comes to soldiers’ testimonies about how to avoid the sniper’s bullet, or what it’s like to sleep in a lice-ridden blanket, or how to get by on three hours sleep a night, or what the ‘weird shrieking noise’ of shells sounds like compared to the high-pitched whistle of bullets, this book is a veritable treasure trove of invaluable first-hand information. These letters pulsate with immediacy: you are there with them, alternating between empathizing with the young man who has just returned from vicious, often hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches of the Great War and empathizing just as powerfully with his readers – ‘My darling Mother and Father’, ‘My dear Vera’, ‘My own beloved wife’ – who received the letter all those years ago. Trying to imagine their emotional response to getting aletter from the postman, rather than a constantly feared telegram from the War Office, makes this book an emotionally powerful experience. I defy you to read the haunting letter from Francis Herbert Gautier to his four-year-old daughter Marie, written for ‘when she is able to understand’, without experiencing a lump in your throat or a tear welling unbidden to your eye. I couldn’t.

  As well as being a fine tribute to the Tommy through the ages, this book is a very valuable social document. The Great War was fundamentally different from earlier conflicts in which Britain had taken part, in that ordinary Britons were conscripted for service. Besides the press-gang of the Napoleonic Wars, which generally only operated in coastal towns and largely on an ad hoc basis according to immediate manpower needs, Britain’s wars had hitherto been fought by volunteers. The decision in January 1916 to allow the government to force citizens to serve was hugely controversial, and it radically changed the nature of the British Army. For the rest of the war, and into the Second World War when partial conscription was adopted even before it broke out, the services effectively became ‘the nation in uniform’, and a number of the letters in this volume reflect social concerns that were mirrored by the nation at large.

  As well as relating the pulse-quickening, adrenaline-pumping rush of clashing arms, some of these letters reflect that other well-known side to soldiering: stultifying boredom. ‘Nothing very exciting happens,’ complains a soldier of the Great War here. Until, of course, it does. Also highlighted is the way in which the stress subtly affects social relationships among men living on the precipice, in ways one might not automatically have considered. ‘We laugh much more readily these days,’ writes a soldier, ‘at things that normally we would consider merely amusing.’ This book also underlines the importance of cups of tea to the Tommy, something that differentiates the British soldier from the Prussian grenadier or French poilu.

  The enduring power of a soldier’s letter home was reinforced as recently as October 2010 when the group The Soldiers released their album ‘Letters Home’, whose title song’s lyrics featured words that were written in a real last letter of Tony Downes, a young soldier in the 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards, who had died in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in June 2007. It was the first time that a last letter had ever been set to music for commercial release, and it works on a musical, as well as emotional level. ‘I’m sorry to put you through all this, I’m sorry there was no last kiss,’ reads one stanza. ‘I’m up here in heaven, you’re free to start again. My love will never end. I’m sorry to my family and friends.’ The group – composed of Lance Corporal Ryan Idzi, Staff Sergeant Richie Maddocks and Sergeant Major Gary Chilton – dedicated the title track to Downes, whose mother Sheryl said: ‘It shows how much my son was a loving and caring person. I can just see him now, looking down on us all with his million-watt smile. He will be so proud.’ If The Soldiers need any more last letter lyrics from earlier conflicts, they need look no further than this volume, several of which would not be out of place in an operatic libretto e
ither, despite having been originally written for an audience confined to grieving parents or a widow.

  The letters from this volume come from the Imperial War Museums (IWM), and form a tiny fraction of the vast collections that they expertly curate there. The IWM name has been put into the plural in order to reflect the fact that it now extends far beyond the magnificent central museum building in Lambeth, to the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, HMS Belfast moored on the Thames, the historic airfield at Duxford and IWM North in Manchester. The IWM is one of the truly great British institutions; its archive collection was inaugurated in 1917 and now comprises the largest collection of servicemen, servicewomen and civilian’s wartime letters to be found in the British Commonwealth. Any reader of this book who would like to read the actual letters themselves, or continue investigating the life stories of individual soldiers mentioned in it, can do so easily at their superb research facilities in Lambeth, with iwm.org.uk as an invaluable first step.

  So what do we learn from soldiers’ letters home that can’t be found in the multi-volume regimental histories that were published after the fighting was over, or the propaganda put out by the Ministry of Information while conflicts were still going on? The first thing is that, for all they might have tried to minimize the horror for their loved ones, war is hell. Not just the ever-present peril of death and mutilation, but also the flies, rats, exhaustion, exposure to the elements, the powerlessness – ‘We are simply pawns in the great game’ – and the catastrophic waste of time and effort and life that should have instead been dedicated to the progress of civilization.

  The two world wars that were unleashed by Germany in the first half of the 20th century really were ‘crimes against humanity’, not simply because of what humanity had to suffer during them, but for what it was held back from achieving through having been sidetracked by war for a total of ten years. Reading these soldiers’ letters reminds us of what might have been achieved if so many talented people had not been ground up into the charnel houses of the Marne, the Somme, Passchendaele, the Japanese death camps, El Alamein minefields, the massacre at Arnhem, and elsewhere. One is also reminded by this book just how young they were; the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Lancashire Regiment, who lived to announce Armistice Day to the town he had liberated in November 1918, was only 27.

  We learn how the British Tommy had – and indeed still has, because the last letter is from the ongoing war in Afghanistan – almost superhuman capacities for simply muddling through, and, grumbling and grousing all the time in best Army tradition, for making the best of what was happening. ‘A good grumble eases our minds,’ writes one soldier. Similarly, those other ancient army traditions of ‘scrounging’ (which is very often indistinguishable from petty pilfering) find their way into these pages, which is in no sense an unthinking hagiography. Overall, though, the picture of the British Army is hugely uplifting. ‘Like good British troops,’ writes one soldier from the Second World War, ‘we always hope for the best.’ Humour, modesty and sangfroid – ‘We had a bit of a battle yesterday’, or describing a trench as ‘rather cosy’, or calling a battle ‘a picnic’ – pervade this book. When a Great War second lieutenant writes ‘I keep alive, and bucked my men up’ his words obviously mask a very great deal more than that.

  With death dealt on an entirely unpredictable basis, we are reminded how superstitious soldiers can quickly become. ‘I have a strong feeling of Kismet,’ writes one, ‘but nevertheless do not go out trying to be hit.’ This is a well-known phenomenon among soldiers, because there seems to be no rational explanation for why some men survive while others don’t. The attitude towards the enemy ranges from genuine hatred to a more common healthy respect. ‘The Germans in this part of the line are certainly sportsmen if they are nothing else,’ writes one Tommy of the Christmas Day truce of 1914. Overall, Conscientious Objectors seem to be objected to more than the Germans, except of course the Nazis, who were cordially despised.

  Censorship of these letters used to be undertaken by regimental officers in their (rare and much-prized) spare time during the Great War. So long as no operational details that could be of use to the enemy were included, the men’s freedom of speech was widely indulged; it was one of the things for which Britain was fighting, after all. That explains why occasional remarks were let through in the Great War that would have been construed as demoralizing civilian morale by the professional, full-time censors of the Second World War. ‘The idea of breaking the Germans is so much nonsense!’ writes one squaddie from the trenches, for example. Yet, even if the soldier thought it he rarely wrote it, for the simple reason of not wanting to sound defeatist. There is also remarkably little about high politics, let alone individual politicians in these letters. The overwhelming sense is that they were doing the right thing in trying to stop German hegemony in Europe, but ultimately, in the words of the plaintive First World War song, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ Local patriotism is present, of course – ‘They did not disgrace the name of Ulster’ – but not ultra-nationalism, let alone jingoism.

  Censorship was thus not used as a means of controlling the men, let alone civilian morale. This book tends to support the theory prevalent among military historians today that the men glossed over the worst horrors and the most dangerous moments in order to avoid distressing their families, as the daily casualty lists were quite long enough to achieve that. Yet the fact that the soldiers tended not to dwell on the mutilation of friends by ‘whiz-bangs’ (German high explosive shells) does not mean that these letters are not invaluable to historians and the general reader for what can be gleaned about rations, billets, recreation, conditions, relations with officers and NCOs, training, leave, friendly-fire incidents, enemy abuse of the white flag and so on.

  While some soldiers plainly enjoyed their Great War experiences, a point made forcibly in Professor Niall Ferguson’s revisionist book The Pity of War, there were more who would have agreed with the soldier who writes, ‘The Army is undeniably the most dismal experience I have had yet.’ Osprey has done an excellent job in choosing testimonies from a broad cross-section of the theatres and campaigns, as well as witnesses from a wide array of the units that fought in them, providing therefore a really representative sample of opinions and viewpoints. A good summing up of the emotions felt by the troops, as well as an insightful commentary into the human condition, is provided by the soldier who writes, ‘We are all fairly shouting with joy at going and I daresay we shall soon be cursing the day, and when we get back we shall say we had the time of our lives.’

  One predictable and constant emotion that comes through strongly in this volume is the desire for news from home, any news, however trivial, that could take the soldiers’ minds off their own circumstances. ‘Write me any news – anything,’ begs a soldier from the trenches. Of course there are some things they don’t want to hear. ‘Don’t tell me you are lonely,’ writes a soldier from the Second World War, ‘or I’ll probably desert.’ Nazi black propaganda made a great play of the soldiers’ sexual fears, trying to provoke suspicions that their girlfriends were being unfaithful while they were serving abroad, especially once over a million Americans were billeted across the United Kingdom in the build up to the Normandy landings. Today, the modern squaddie in Iraq or Afghanistan has a huge advantage over his First and Second World War counterpart through the use of satellite phones, which was technologically unthinkable in earlier conflicts when they had to make do with black-and-white photos of their loved ones. ‘The most real and living thing in the life that I’ve had has been you, Phyl Kirby,’ writes a romantic soldier from the Second World War, though he never posted the letter.

  The role of rumour in the life of the Tommy is vividly demonstrated in these letters. The British Army has long been an active – some say wildly overactive – rumour-mill, where orders to camp, decamp, retreat and attack were vigorously posited by the men, often with nothing more than guesswor
k to go on. Here, too, modern technology has altered the dynamic somewhat, with websites like that of the British Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) taking the place of whispered speculation in the sergeant’s mess. Endemic in the British Army too were swearing and obscenities, yet for obvious reasons these are not reflected in letters home to loved ones, although there are references to ‘some other words I won’t repeat’. Shell-shock, or something approaching it, is elliptically referred to as well, as in the admission: ‘I am afraid I am a mere nervous wreck, in fact when we got back I sat down and had a jolly good cry.’

  Britain was a far more religious country in the first half of the 20th century than in the first part of the 21st, so it is not surprising to see God mentioned regularly, not least because soldiers’ closeness to death forced them to consider the concept of the hereafter much more than civilians. Lieutenant Eric Marchant of the 7th Battalion, London Regiment, recalled after the war how, when reading his men’s letters, ‘The percentage which showed a realization of religious truth and faith in God was tremendously bigger than I ever suspected, and such phrases as “We must go on trusting in God” were in dozens of letters I read.’ The belief in heaven and a loving God was clearly a huge comfort for many Tommies as they contemplated the future. ‘A firm belief in the Christian faith goes a long way,’ writes one soldier in the Second World War, and when Lieutenant Leefe Robinson won the Victoria Cross for shooting down a Zeppelin in the Great War, he wrote to his parents to say, ‘I thanked God with all my heart.’ The cheering spread across London when the Zeppelin exploded into flames, which could be heard for miles into the suburbs and beyond. Robinson felt a powerful sense of ‘the relief, the gratitude, the thanks of millions of people’.

  If wild cheering and public celebration over what was, after all, the deaths of other human beings, is considered at all politically incorrect, it needs to be seen in the context of the death and destruction that the Zeppelins rained down upon London’s civilians. Similarly the references to ‘Huns’, ‘Chinks’, ‘Japs’, ‘gooks’, ‘Argies’ and ‘rag-heads’ need to be seen in their proper historical context of total war. By contrast, those martial non-Britons who fought on Britain’s side, such as the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, were held in high respect, and racial barriers started to break down during the world wars, just as shared experiences of trauma began the process of breaking down class barriers. ‘In their letters I saw for the first time a new world,’ wrote the Old Rugbeian Charles Douie of the platoon he commanded, ‘with interests and standards of which I had previously no experience. Most of the letters were frank in a degree with surprised me. I found the world of the private soldier wholly natural and without reserve.’ The future prime minister Harold Macmillan wrote in April 1915 of how ‘some of the older men, with wives and families, who write every day, have in their style a wonderful simplicity which is almost great literature.’