How the second world war shaped the sons of its soldiers

Spectator

3 days ago

The 80th anniversary of VJ Day today marks the passing of the generation that took part in the second world war. The few surviving veterans must now be a hundred years old, or virtually so. They are departing; most have already left. This seems an appropriate moment to reflect upon the next generation, those whose fathers fought in the war and who grew up in its shadow.
Much has been written about the luck of the 'baby boomers', those born in the two decades after the war, who benefitted from post-war prosperity, buying houses cheaply and seeing their values soar. Later generations have envied their affluence. But less has been written about their mindset, which was so much shaped by the recent past. One might argue that as children, boomers were inculcated with one set of values, which as adults they were then pressured to renounce.
I am thinking especially of the boys, though of course women played a significant role in the war effort, and what they experienced must have influenced their daughters too. But for boys the war was formative; for better or worse, it sculpted their sense of what it meant to be a man.
I am one of those myself, born less than ten years after the fighting finished. I grew up in a capital in which the effects of bombing were still visible in the occasional bomb sites which made exciting though generally forbidden places to play. For us, 'the war' meant the second world war, without need for further identification. War stories were ubiquitous, on the screen and in print; James Bond had served in the war, as had George Smiley. In the boys' comics of my childhood, gallant British Tommies invariably overcame superior numbers of Germans, who were portrayed as mindless automatons and referred to contemptuously as 'Krauts' or 'Jerries'. (This was at a time when the United Kingdom was seeking German help to join the European Economic Community.) We boys played a game called 'commandoes', loosely based on war stories we had imbibed.
Our fathers had lived through the war. Many of them had served in the forces; their uniforms could be found hanging at the back of wardrobe. So had most of the schoolmasters who taught us. I remember one who had several fingers missing from one hand, and another whose face was terrifyingly scarred by burns. In my teens I once played squash against the father of a girlfriend, a fighter pilot with a 'gammy leg' as a result of injuries sustained when his plane had come down (he trounced me nonetheless). I am named after an uncle who had been rushed through training as a pilot and was killed in a plane crash on his 19th birthday.
All the men we looked up to had been affected by the war, or so it seemed. Even those who had not been in combat had been damaged. The father of a schoolfriend of mine had been in the camps and was still so traumatised that the sight of anyone in uniform, even a humble traffic warden, could cause him to panic.
It is a commonplace that sons model themselves on their fathers. For boys of my generation, their fathers' war records could be a source of pride or shame. I was immensely proud of my father's service as a naval officer and remain so, even since I discovered that some of what I had been led to believe was not wholly true. (His uniform still hangs at the back of my wardrobe.)
I remember the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, a solemn occasion in which (so it seemed) the whole nation was in mourning. We accepted the myth that Churchill had promulgated: that the period after the fall of France, when Britain had stood alone against the Axis powers, had been our finest hour and that the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany made all the sacrifices worthwhile.
What were the qualities we were taught to admire? Courage – obviously, duty, obedience, self-denial, reticence, restraint. These were the qualities that had won the war, or at least these were the qualities that had enabled our fathers to survive it. This is what being a man meant, then. They are not values that resonate today. Rather than keeping a stiff upper lip, we are encouraged to show our emotions; rather than keeping it in, we are supposed to let it all out. Like most of us today, I share these modern, peacetime values; yet I retain a respect for the men of my father's generation. Without them, our lives would have been very different.
'I'm no good at being noble,' Rick tells Ilsa in Casablanca (1942), 'but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, renounces his love for Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, so that she can be with her husband, a resistance leader. He sacrifices personal happiness for the greater good. In The English Patient (1996), the moral is the opposite: the protagonist Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is willing to surrender secret maps to his German captors if they will help him to find his beloved. The contrasting messages of these two films show how far we have come.