THE tales my father told about the second World War were very different from the official histories and news reels, let alone the cinema. William I Hitchcock's recent book Liberation, which looks at how civilians experienced the closing stages of that conflict, is a lot nearer to his recollections and those of other old soldiers I knew.
As Hitchcock acknowledges, they had little interest in civilians, or sympathy for them. My father was probably typical of men who volunteered for the duration of the war. He grew up in the Dublin tenements, left industrial school at 14 and lived from hand to mouth before the war rescued him from poverty. It was the first time in his life he knew where next week’s food, wages and shelter would come from.
Whatever curiosity he had about war itself disappeared on his first day in North Africa, when the landing craft ahead of the one he was on disappeared beneath the waves after a direct hit from a Vichy shore battery in Bougie. By the time his own vessel reached the spot, there was nothing to see but a pall of black smoke and a few bits and pieces bobbing on the surface that no one looked at too closely. They all thought they were going to die, but somehow made it ashore.
Language was an obvious barrier to communication with civilians, especially the Arab and Berber populations, and the army command discouraged fraternisation. Posters appeared everywhere warning soldiers that an hour’s pleasure could lead to a lifetime of pain; this sparked endless speculation on how to make the pleasure last that long. The people being “liberated” in North Africa were generally regarded as dirty and dishonest – by members of an army where half the men were lice-ridden at any given time, large numbers were incapacitated by dysentery and routine pilfering supplemented meagre rations and low pay. Despite the warnings about fraternisation, there were visits to the kasbah in Algerian and Tunisian towns and the army itself organised educational trips to the ruins of Carthage, Paestum and Pompeii. But the most educational experience of all was discovering the power of the American black market machine.
The key difference between the British and Americans in the second World War – apart from the superior discipline of the former – was that British troops walked everywhere and Americans drove. Anyone relying on the cinema for their knowledge of the black market could be forgiven for thinking it revolved around nylons, sex and cigarettes, but food, medicine and above all transport were the key commodities. British soldiers with little to trade except cigarettes and food rations watched enviously as their American counterparts sold jeeps, trucks and fuel oil to farmers and businessmen all the way from Bougie to Brussels. Far more trucks were casualties of this insatiable market than of the Wehrmacht.
The sheer poverty of the locals kept them safe from the attentions of allied troops in North Africa. Things were different in Italy, where my father spent most of his wartime service. Later he was one of the thousands of British and American troops fortunate enough to take part in the Anvil landings on the French Riviera in August 1944. The pickings were even better there and looting in certain circumstances was not only tolerated but encouraged. Coming into a town or village, soldiers would often have the property of collaborators pointed out to them. That was generally taken as permission to loot. Afterwards my father wondered if it was a defence mechanism by local communities. They knew soldiers would loot anyway, so why not make collaborators bear the brunt? Deserted houses were also fair game, not to mention the dead, whether the corpses were civilian or German.
Wine, brandy, fresh fruit and chickens were the staple supplements to army rations in country areas. Food was scarce in the towns but that made trade possible – army rations for jewellery, in most cases. Prisoners of war would have to hand over valuables such as watches, signet rings and cigarette cases, but were not otherwise ill treated, except for snipers. In Italy, in particular, snipers could expect little quarter, whatever the Geneva Conventions said.
Paradoxically, any spare sympathy my father had seemed to be for German prisoners. Perhaps he realised that, but for chance, he could have been in their situation. Or perhaps it was because they were so grateful to be spared and happy to be coming through the war in one piece. They were a pleasant contrast to the often bitter and resentful French civilians.
Welcomes from the latter were rare. More frequent were the occasions when soldiers would be paraded to hear complaints about their behaviour from the local mayor. The speech almost always ended with the same refrain: “German soldiers would never behave like this.”