We must remember what might have been if D-Day had failed
I was a few months short of my sixth birthday on D-Day and have only a hazy memory of the excitement – and apprehension – it aroused. In truth the war made little impression on a small boy growing up in rural Aberdeenshire and it’s likely that my mother may have been more concerned with the progress of the war in the Far East since my father was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. But by the time my generation was in its teens we had heard and read a lot about the war, and, rather more influentially, had seen numerous war films. So we grew up in the proud knowledge that Britain had stood alone against Hitler, survived the Blitz, seen “the end of the beginning” at El Alamein, and on June 6, 1944, triumphantly returned to the continent to liberate France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and then defeat Hitler.
We knew of course that the Americans had played a part, even that General Eisenhower had been the Supreme Allied Commander, and we were even aware that there had been a terrible war in Eastern Europe and that it was the Red Army which had taken Berlin. But we didn’t make much of this, nor did the British film industry.
It wasn’t only 1940 that was “our finest hour”. The whole war was that, and Europe, or at least Western Europe, was in debt to us. The sun might be beginning to sink on the British Empire, but nobody could take the years 1939-45 away from us. Nobody and nothing could diminish our achievement.
Of course, as the years passed, one learned that this picture, if certainly not completely false, was inadequate, that things had been more complicated, the British role in the war and the Allied victory less than we had happily believed. In time when I came to write novels, I found myself turning more and more to the years between the wars and then the war itself, even if none of these books was greatly concerned with the actual fighting. I have been more concerned with France, because the moral dilemmas of the war years were more acute there. Quite often – always indeed – when speaking about these novels at book festivals – I have been asked if I thought there would have been a Vichy sort of government here if we had lost the Battle of Britain and a successful German invasion had followed. My reply has always provoked indignant, even angry, disagreement from some members of the audience. I would have been surprised if it hadn’t.
Only Shadows of Empire, the last novel in my trilogy about the mid-twentieth century, is written from a British perspective. It’s my favourite of these books, not necessarily the best – many think better of the French one, a Vichy novel entitled A Question of Loyalties – but apart from other considerations it still seems in some respects relevant to our present concerns and discontents, whereas the French appear, at long last, to have been able to put Vichy behind them, to relegate it to history.
I made my narrator a journalist – foreign correspondent, war correspondent – partly for convenience because this enabled him to be a witness to the descent into war, aspects of the war and then the first years of peace. The novel begins in his old age with his reflections on a First World War novel Corners of Foreign Fields, written by his father, an author and Member of Parliament who owes more than a little to John Buchan. Now, fifty years after his father’s death in 1940, it has been made into a television film, and he writes:
“The television success of ‘Corners’ surprised many. I can’t think why. It was just the sort of thing, half-true, half-trashy, bitter-sweet, nostalgic, sentimental, to be a popular success even in its third manifestation – book, film, serial on the telly. This last time round it fed a mood which was already established – regret for the days when Britannia ruled the waves and the flag flew over a world-wide empire – a mood which Mrs Thatcher may be said to incarnate…”
Well, I wrote that more than twenty years ago, and it seems that the mood expressed in this book, film and TV serial, which never existed except on that first page of my own novel, still prevails today. It is evident in our Brexit arguments in which there is also a note of resentment, absent from previous commemorations of D-Day.
That resentment is evident in both camps, felt by both Leavers and Remainers. For the Leavers, Britain or the United Kingdom trapped in the legalistic net of the European Union is less than it was, less that it should be, less than it is capable of being. Cut the tender that ties us to the EU and global Britain will flourish again. The territorial Empire may, as Kipling prophesied be one with Nineveh and Tyre and our navies may indeed have melted away, but there is another empire – an empire of global trade to be won, or rather regained, for it was the imperatives of trade which led our ancestors to win that territorial empire. This is not an ignoble ambition. It may not even be an unrealistic one.
Nevertheless, the resentment felt by Remainers is at least equally valid. Indeed, the commemoration of D-Day and even those war films that stocked our imagination in the post-war years may be held to justify it. For if the first necessary purpose of the Normandy landings was the defeat of Nazi Germany, the second implicit one was the winning of a better future, the making and establishment of a different Europe, one in which peaceful collaboration would guard against a return of armed conflict between the nations.
That Europe has been made and we have enjoyed long years of peace and prosperity. The fire of national rivalry has not been extinguished, but it has been damped down, and arguments are settled round the conference table not on the field of battle. Now Remainers resent our impending abandonment of that commitment to the idea of Europe, and feel a sense of loss. Nobody would pretend that men died on the beaches of Normandy and in the battles that followed in order to create the European Union that we now know. Equally no one can deny that it came into being, and has flourished, as a consequence of their victory. So Remainers – at least those with a knowledge of history and a feeling for history – may have reason to regard Brexit as a betrayal of the men who crossed the Channel on the 6th of June seventy-five years ago. As Walter Ellis has written for Reaction, if the Normandy landings had failed, our history would have been different and very much nastier.
I confess that in recent years I have often thought that the time has come to let the Second World War slip away into the past. Very soon there will be no one left alive who fought in it or experienced it as a civilian and so it has seemed that we have displayed a tendency to indulge in memories which are both nostalgic and sentimental – sentimental because we lay claim to achievements which are not ours but belong to our father and grandfathers. Yet I now think I have been wrong. It is necessary to remember the war not only because of what it was, but because of what might have been if it had not been fought, and because of what might have been if D-Day had been a disaster. We are right to remember it if only, to quote Kipling again, “lest we forget”.