Baby Boomers
My friend texted:
“I think this D-Day gaffe will hurt Sunak more than his other cock-ups [sic], because it is a slight of his core demographic of patriotic white 70+ in age.”
As a relative youngster who anticipates reaching his three score years and ten in 2025, I reflect, 80 years later, on the sacrifices of D-Day servicemen and women. Nobody could deny the significance of the Second World War on the time and culture into which I was born. When I arrived, ‘The Fuhrer’, had been dead for almost exactly 10 years. Europe was undergoing reconstruction and political change was afoot. Cries of ‘this must never be allowed again’ were audible for a second time in the 20th century.
My younger son teases me by declaring: ‘Dad that is such a Boomer thing to say’, when he feels I have overstepped some red line in humour that is assumed by present-day young adults. Furthermore, he implies that my life has been blessed compared with those who came along afterwards. This may be correct in terms of house prices, education offered at modest costs, job opportunities and access to pensions, but whether he (or I) can really comprehend the experiences of Britons who went before us is open to question. Yes, I am lucky, but so too is he. We both follow ‘ordinary’ lives.
Spike and the wartime generation
My parents’ generation picked up a settled lifestyle after their youth was overshadowed in ‘The War’. They saw our cities bombed, and most males (bar reserved occupations such as the Bevin Boys) served in the armed forces in one way or another. The enigmatic phrase ‘a good war’ having suggested little more than that someone was alive and well after the event. It sounds ironic today. Typically, serving in the armed forces caused four or five years of one’s life to be diverted in active service. As a commentator recently put it, they would otherwise have been doing what young people normally do in order both to enjoy and become established in life. Normality was compulsorily put on hold, as was personal safety, including the risk of death.
Spike Milligan’s expanded wartime trilogy started with ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, a humorously surreal account, by a comic genius who may well may well have had PTSD. In the Goon Shows, I remember exploding shells being featured. I imagine these somehow take the place of what, until The War (for Spike), might have been projectile custard pies.
The American film Saving Private Ryan graphically depicted the Normandy Campaign from D-Day onwards, in all its horror, starting with the blood, guts, suffering and death of men (in real life some were still in their teens) on the Normandy beaches. This Boomer was utterly disturbed by the portrayal of young men who certainly did not have a good war. And of course it was not just Normandy; one uncle of mine served in the Eighth Army in Africa. After he was demobbed, he was a changed man from the cheerful young conscript who had entered the military. Yet he did return, resumed his trade, established a business, and raised his daughter. That he resisted ever talking about The War, gives an indication as to what was going on inside.
We had a job to do!
Those conscripted from 1939, who served in the Second World War, were from all walks of life, and were no different from anybody else. My friend’s sardonic comment about Rishi’s core demographic is aimed at us ‘Boomers’, or perhaps at the earlier phase of ‘Boomery’ for those born roughly 1945 to 1954 (phew!). Another observation is that few civilians ponder the ethical implications of what they do by way of occupation, even if one sometimes wishes they did! For ‘old soldiers’ and fellow travellers, it is different. The few conversations I have shared along these lines with ex-service people generally have impressed me with their military-acquired insights and philosophical stances.
The cry about 1939 to 1945 was so often along the lines: ’We had a job to do, and we got on with it’, yet this was far from jingoistic nonsense. Reflection was tempered by knowledge of the absolute evil that had to be stopped, be it in Europe, North Africa, the Far East, or anywhere else. From my father (who could be said to have had a ‘good war’), I came to realise just how politicised the British Army was in the 1940s. The mass of conscripts would inevitably ask why their jobs, careers, apprenticeships or education etc. had been disrupted; that is aside from the chilling fear that they may never return to Blighty. The British establishment had long come to realise in respect of servicemen, that the welfare of the troops included not only entertainment and morale boosting but also training and education for the outside world. Is this surprising?
However, the Tories of the day accused the army of allowing a left-wing bias to creep in, a case well-made by Penelope Summerfield. Apparently ‘at fault‘ were governmental institutions that reached into the armed forces such as the Army Bureau of Current Affairs and the Army Education Corps. I know that, while ENSA was giving morale building and recreational outlets for Spike and many more, there was also discussion of current affairs, and Literary and Debating Societies, echoing university practices. The Beverage Report (1942), which concerned establishment of the Welfare State, was circulated among the troops, who were encouraged to discuss what they were fighting for, and what kind of country they wished to return to.
Readers of West England Bylines: we too have a job to do!
Winston Churchill was famously badly upset when his bid to be elected PM in 1945 was overturned by one Clement Atlee in the so-called ‘khaki election’ of that year. Lloyd-George’s 1918 offer of a ‘land fit for heroes’ just had to be improved. By the 1970s, independent of party politics, a referendum confirmed continuing UK membership of the EU. It should be stressed that at this time many who engaged in the political process had lived through the Second World War, and there was a massive problem because Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. Indeed, Churchill himself had supported the notion of better European integration, although his view of the role of Britain (still an Imperial power in 1948) remained unclear. He understood division and human suffering although commentators have since stripped him of his near-saintly status.
Some time back, the struggle to remain in the EU was fronted in my city by a ‘Salisbury for Europe’ stall and I recall a comment from a man of the Boomer generation that he had ‘lost three uncles in The War and wanted out.’ This obviously ignored the notion that divided continents create conflicts. Would he wish a similar thing to re-occur? No-one could ask these unfortunate young men what they might have thought, but would their nephew re-run the risk of a full European war? It is probable that he thought Winston Churchill a heroic figure. Yet the wartime leader was indeed a proponent of European co-operation, or even more. The political right-wing gets things so wrong, when it suits them. And they probably won’t yet go away, given the recent European Parliamentary elections and the return of Nigel Farage. We too have a job to do!
Rishi, I trust you enjoyed your TV interview concerning a ‘mistake’ in a debate about taxation instead of standing by a Normandy beach with other World leaders, remembering hundreds of thousands of dead. You just don’t get it.
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