Poet Andy Croft says novelist writing about World War II could learn a thing from those who experienced the conflict in the latest of our features about life during the war

IT’S hard to avoid World War II these days. One of the best-selling computer games of the year is Call of Duty (“delivers the gritty realism and cinematic intensity of World War II’s epic battlefield moments like never before”). Football supporters whistle for Premiership survival to the theme from The Great Escape. The film Downfall is showing at a multiplex near you. Charles Saatchi thought the general election would be a turning-point for the Tories like the battle of El-Alamein…
We have had new novels set during the war by Melvyn Bragg and Michael Frayn; Hollywood adaptations of novels by Sebastian Faulks and Robert Harris. Even poets like Tom Paulin and Glyn Maxwell have been joining in with collections about the war. Earlier this month Channel Five (which recently gave us Bad Boys of the Blitz) commissioned Simon Armitage’s long poem ‘May the 8th 1945’:

with teapots and doilies
on trestles and tables
we’re singing our hearts out
on war torn Joannas
we’re pissing on Wagner
we’re whistling Elgar
we’re hearing the call
so we’re off to Trafalgar
to ride on the lions
clown in the fountains
we’re draped on the railings
of Buckingham Palace

This may have entertained Channel Five audiences, but there is rather more to be said about the end of World War II (than that ‘Britannia was back on her throne’. Armitage’s is a vindicated war, not a justified one. For all its liveliness and warmth, the poem is shot in monochrome cliché, second-hand images from old news-reels and 1960s films. Not much room here for social change in Britain or the liberation of Europe, never mind the Holocaust, or the 27 million Soviet dead.
Sixty years ago British writers were generally more interesting – and more radical – than they are today. But then, Britain during World War II was a rather more radical place. This was a time when novelist and playwright JB Priestley was taken off the Home Service because his Sunday night broadcasts were too popular and too radical and when the driving force behind the Home Guard was the Communist poet and Spanish Civil War hero Tom Wintringham.
But who today remembers Dan Billany’s extraordinary POW novel The Cage or the Unity Theatre’s hit Sandbag Follies? Do you remember Cavalcanti’s film Went the Day Well or Bernard Stevens’ Symphony of Liberation?
Perhaps it is time to re-read some of the books that were written about the war during the war.
A good place to start would be John Sommerfield’s The Survivors (set in Burma and north Africa), Alexander Baron’s extraordinary novels There’s No Home (set in Italy) and From the City, From the Plough (set in France) or Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude, arguably the greatest English novel of the war.
There were some fantastic novels about life and work in munitions factories, like JB Priestley’s Daylight on Saturday and Monica Felton’s To All the Living.
Several novelists addressed problems of demobilisation, for example Jack Lindsay’s Time to Live and JB Priestley’s wonderful Three Men in New Suits. There were popular anti-Fascist thrillers like Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome and JB Priestley’s Blackout in Gretley.
Forget Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas, look at the work of soldier-poets like Hamish Henderson, Keith Douglas, Randall Swingler and Alun Lewis. They were convinced that the war was a necessary, unavoidable one. But they didn’t pretend it was pretty or dignified. As Swingler (who was at Salerno Bay and Anzio) put it:

Only this pride we have, both now and after,
Because we have grasped the fate ourselves created,
And to have been the centre of contradiction
And not to have failed, and still to have found it hateful.

Randall Swingler was in Yugoslavia with the Eighth Army on VE Day. Compare his ‘The Day the War Ended’ with Simon Armitage:

‘On the day the war ended
The sun laced the avenues with lime-tree scent
The silver birches danced on the sidewalk
And the girls came out like tulips in their colours:
Only the soldiers were caught, like sleepwalkers
Wakened unaware, naked there in the street.
Fatuous in flowers, their tanks, tamed elephants,
Wallowed among the crowds in the square.
There is a moment when contradictions cross,
A split of a moment when history whirls on one toe
Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal
And happiness could be impartial for once -
Only the soldier, snatched by the sudden stop
In his world’s turning, whirled like a meteor
Through a phoenix night of stars, is falling, falling
And as his trajectory bows and earth begins
To pull again, his hollow ears are moaning
With a wild tone of sorrow and the loss, the loss...’

• Andy Croft is a poet and writer. He has been published widely on the literary history of the British Labour Movement and is co-editor of Red Sky At Night, an anthology of British Socialist poetry.