How was it John Lennon put it in "A Day in the Life" (1967)?
I saw a film today, oh boyThings haven't changed all that much in the sixty-odd years since then. The English Army are still winning the war, only now they're mostly doing it by being fiendlishly clever and outfoxing the Germans at their own game ...
The English Army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
But then, I too have read the book: in this case, Ewen Montagu's best-selling account of just how smart he and his chums at Naval intelligence had been in planting a bunch of forged letters on the body of a fake officer and floating it onto the coast of neutral Spain.
The idea was to persuade the German high command that the Allies' next objective, after their successful North African campaign, would be to invade Sardinia and Greece - not the actual (and most obvious) target, Sicily.
Not everything about this operation could be revealed in 1953 - in particular, the existence of Ultra intelligence - so another book has now been written to bring the story up-to-date: Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II.
But did it? Change the course of World War II, that is? Opinions seem to differ on that one. "The full effect of Operation Mincemeat is not known, but Sicily was liberated more quickly than anticipated and losses were lower than predicted", is Wikipedia's verdict.
Ultra decrypts of German messages showed that the Germans fell for the ruse. German reinforcements were shifted to Greece and Sardinia before and during the invasion of Sicily; Sicily received none.On the other hand, Michael Howard, in his book Strategic Deception in the Second World War (1995):
while describing Mincemeat as "perhaps the most successful single deception operation of the entire war", considered Mincemeat and Barclay [the larger scheme of "bogus troop movements, radio traffic, recruitment of Greek interpreters, and acquisition of Greek maps"] to have less impact on the course of the Sicily campaign than Hitler's "congenital obsession with the Balkans."
Thaddeus Holt, in his own exhaustive history The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War is particularly critical of the way in which Montagu's book - possibly through no fault of his - has led many people to assume that this was the only important piece of deception going on at the time of the invasion of Sicily.
John Madden's film goes far further in this respect. There's scarcely a moment where one character or another isn't emoting away about how their work could alter the course of the war, save thousands of lives, and affect the whole history of civilisation.
Ian Fleming, who did indeed have a minor role in the real Mincemeat operation, is also given an exceptionally pompous - and rather out of character, for anyone who's ever read one of his thrill-a-minute books - John le Carré-esque monologue to intone from time to time to spike up the action.
Ian Fleming: [narrating while typing] In any story, if it's a good story, there is that which is seen, and that which is hidden. This is especially true in stories of war.All in all, it certainly seems to have the makings of a rattling good yarn. The story is a fascinating one - true, too (for the most part) - and all the usual suspects from the pantheon of British acting are there in strength.
... There is the war we see, a contest of bombs and bullets, courage, sacrifice, and brute force, as we count the winners, the losers, and the dead.
... But alongside that war, another war is waged. A battleground in shades of gray, played out in deception, seduction, and bad faith. The participants are strange. They are seldom what they seem, and fiction and reality blur. This war is a wilderness of mirrors in which the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies. This is our war.
That it doesn't quite succeed in this endeavour is mainly down to Michelle Ashford's rather mawkish screenplay. For a start, did we really need the (completely fictional) love triangle between Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly MacDonald?
A rather portly Colin Firth, who plays former-King's-Counsel-turned-spy Ewen Montagu, looks far more interested in glugging down another glass of whisky than having a quick snog with his nattily turned out junior Kelly MacDonald (Jean Leslie).
Exactly what part the moustachioed Matthew Macfadyen - impersonating the actual brains behind the operation, Charles Cholmondeley - imagines himself to be playing is unclear to me. Certainly he does the worst job of trying to pick up a girl in a cinema, and subsequently in a nightclub, and finally in the office, that I've ever seen.
And yet Macfadyen succeeded completely in reinventing himself as a wolfish corporate predator in the Succession (2018-23) TV series. Why didn't they give him some of that material to work with here?
The point of this post, however, is not so much to slag off the film, which I did still enjoy - though it seemed to me that it could have been considerably better with a little judicious pruning of its longer, more weepy scenes - than to talk about its larger implications as a guide to prevailing British attitudes towards the Second World War.
The book above, which I picked up recently in a second-hand shop, is a condensation of Nigel Hamilton's exhaustive three-volume, authorised biography of Field Marshall Montgomery (1981-86), possibly the most controversial figure in Second World War historiography.
Monty's version of the war in Europe - expressed in his numerous volumes of memoirs, and repeated more or less verbatim by Hamilton's official biography - was that it could easily have been won by the end of 1944 if only the Americans had left him in overall command of all Allied ground forces after the breakout from Normandy.
Failing that, if they (meaning Eisenhower and his bosses in Washington) had just listened to Monty's suggestion that most of the available resources and manpower should be allocated to him in order to conduct his single-thrust attack into Northern German - rather than frittering it away on side-shows such as General Patton's advance in the South, and the subsidiary landings in the South of France - then he would have mopped up the Nazis easily.
This is certainly the view accepted immediately after the war by such influential witnesses as Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot. It also ties in nicely with the English view of the Americans - both troops and generals - as inexperienced and over-confident. Not to mention the "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here" mythology of discord between the two nationalities, as expressed with supreme wit and pin-point accuracy in the classic British sit-com Dad's Army (1968-1977):
The question remains, though, was Monty the supreme strategist he claimed to be? Were all of his reverses - Caen, Arnhem - other people's fault? Was it feasible to have so notoriously touchy and undiplomatic a general in charge of an army consisting predominantly of American rather than British troops?
Anxious as they are to promote Montgomery's virtues, the Brits suffer from the supreme disadvantage of not controlling Hollywood. Their occasional successes there come as flashes in the pan in a more uniform tale of American exceptionalism.
Take that propaganda masterpiece Saving Private Ryan, for instance. There's a scene early on where Ted Danson, playing a hardbitten combat officer, has a brief dialogue with Tom Hanks (Captain Miller):
Captain Hamill: What have you heard? How's it all falling together?That line about Monty being "overrated" has led to apoplectic exchanges up and down the internet. This, for example, from the History forum Historum (4/2/2014):
Captain Miller: Well, we got the beachhead secure. Problem is Monty's taking his time moving on Caen. We can't pull out till he's ready, so...
Captain Hamill: That guy's overrated.
Captain Miller: No argument here.
this comment about Monty being ''overrated'' was factually wrong, even if some US troops said it at the time.Which was answered, later that day, as follows:
The pre-D-Day plan was for Monty and the Canadians to take on the bulk of the SS and German armour (which were behind Caen), whilst the less-challenged US troops (in the western flank) in Brittany, under the dashing Patton, would break out (as they did) and deal a mighty blow in the enemy flank. Which they did.
I'm one of Montgomery's detractors. He is overrated, in my view. He had a chronic case of the slows that, while might have resulted in less initial casualties, may well have caused more casualties in the long run. As for Montgomery at Normandy, I might buy the argument that Monty was supposed to take the brunt of Rommel's reserve allowing the Americans under Bradley (Patton was still commanding a fictitious army in England) to break out IF the historical record supported that. It does not. Carlo d'Este has proven convincingly that that thesis was an invention by Monty after the fact."Endless are the arguments of mages," as Ursula K. Le Guin once put it - or, as in this case, of historians and history buffs.
... I might also buy that my view of Monty was a product of my American viewpoint IF I viewed all British generals as incompetent (I don't - Alexander and Slim were both exceptional, in my view) and all American generals as able to move mountains (I'm not a huge fan of Mark Clark, George Patton, and mostly Dugout Douglas MacArthur). Why is it that criticism of Monty must be based on national agenda?
If there is a concensus, though, I'd say that my own reading of some of the more recent accounts of D-Day by a range of historians, American and British - in particular, Stephen E. Ambrose and Antony Beevor - has led me to the conclusion that few of them now accept that Monty's failure to capture Caen on the day of the invasion was somehow "intentional."
Nor do many writers now repeat that idea of a "pre-D-Day plan" which involved little or not movement on the part of British and Commonwealth troops in order to "set up" a breakthrough by the Americans. That is indeed (more or less) what happened, but whether it was planned that way, as Monty's advocates continue to insist, seems increasingly doubtful. The facts appear to be otherwise.
The supreme argument for American bluster and incompetence against British calmness and professionalism is, of course, Hitler's Ardennes Offensive, the so-called "Battle of the Bulge." This was certainly an avoidable disaster, and Eisenhower apologists (such as the late Stephen Ambrose) have a difficult job arguing otherwise.
Whether Monty made a decisive contribution to the containment of the German forces on that occasion is debatable - his fans say yes, his detractors no - but one thing is for certain, the crowing press conference he gave on the subject destroyed once and for all any chance he had of being given command over any more American troops.
What's more, the complete - and equally avoidable - débâcle which was Operation Market Garden, the airborne assault on Arnhem and the single road leading to it, was presided over and largely designed by Montgomery. Though he attempted later to shuffle off the blame, this should have put paid to his reputation as a master strategist or tactician on the level of Marlborough or Wellington.
Hollywood has had a good deal to say on that subject also - not only in the classic war movie A Bridge Too Far, scripted by William Goldman from Cornelius Ryan's book (albeit with an English director and a largely British cast), but also in the supreme act of American triumphalism that is the TV mini-series Band of Brothers, created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in tandem:
"Strange all this difference should be / 'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee" ... Who did actually win the war on the Western Front? Well, if it hadn't been for British intransigence and stubborn refusal to admit that they were defeated in 1940, there wouldn't have been a war to win - there or anywhere else.
Without the resources (both in troops and matériel) provided by the Americans, there couldn't have been a successful invasion of Europe in 1944 or at any other time.
But then, for that matter, without the titanic victories of the Red Army at Stalingrad and Kirsk, the Germans would probably have been able to marshall the resources to overwhelm the fragile Allied bridgehead in Normandy.
All these great nations made immense sacrifices for their common cause - the Russian people far beyond any others. Maybe it's time to suspend these nationalistic squabbles, then, and admit the virtues as well as the vices of the squabbling British and American generals in Italy and Western Europe?
They do, admittedly, read like a pack of prima donnas at times - more concerned with their own press coverage and the number of stars on their shoulders than with winning the war. But, after all, they were victorious. And the Germans were far from being negligible adversaries at any stage.
The Imitation Game is another interesting test case in this discussion. It's far more fictionalised even than Operation Mincemeat, though one can see the dramatic reasons for that. It's also a far better film, mainly due to a taut script and excellent performances from its stellar cast.
But, once again, while no praise is sufficient for the genius of Alan Turing, it's a shame that the immensely important part paid by the Poles in the long saga of breaking the Enigma cipher had to be left out entirely from the cinematic record:
The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the principal crypto-system of the German Reich and later of other Axis powers. In December 1932 it was "broken" by mathematician Marian Rejewski at the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, using mathematical permutation group theory combined with French-supplied intelligence material obtained from a German spy. By 1938 Rejewski had invented a device, the cryptologic bomb, and Henryk Zygalski had devised his sheets, to make the cipher-breaking more efficient. Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, in late July 1939 at a conference just south of Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau shared its Enigma-breaking techniques and technology with the French and British.The Imitation Game ends with the statement that the deciphering of the German codes may have shortened the war by two years, and thus saved vast numbers of lives. However, "according to the best qualified judges", these Polish contributions "accelerated the breaking of Enigma by perhaps a year."-Wikipedia: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
Once again, the plucky little Britain narrative has to be pushed at the expense of historical truth. Those of us who "read the book" may know of the superhuman efforts already made to crack Enigma long before Bletchley Park was even born or thought of, but filmgoers are encouraged to see it as yet another example of inspired English amateurism winning the day over stultifying professional inertia.
Perhaps we need to go back as far as the 1962 wide-screen epic The Longest Day, based on the bestseller by Irish-journalist-turned-US-citizen Cornelius Ryan, to see anything resembling even-handed treatment of the respective contributions made by these warring nationalities to their eventual, hard-won success. Would it hurt us so much to try to emulate that attitude today?
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