A Son of the Rock

This morning I read yesterday’s Long Read article in The Guardian, which was entitled The Myth of the Good War.

In it Geoffrey Wheatcroft argued that the general understanding of the two major wars of the twentieth century is somewhat skewed, with World War 1 being thought of as wasteful and useless while the Second World War (he makes a good case for that itself being two separate wars, one in Europe the other in the Pacific) is looked at as unquestionably fought in a good cause.

The contrast he highlighted in the casualty rates of the two World Wars is noteworthy. Millions more died in WW2 compared to the Great War, but the vast majority of them were civilians (figures only slightly unbalanced by the systematic slaughter of Jews by the Nazis; even taking the six or seven million killed in the Holocaust out of the equation still vastly more civilians died in the prosecution of World War 2 than in the First World War.) A good war?

And the British experience of the two wars differed. Many fewer Britons/Empire citizens died in the second war than in the first. On this last point Wheatcroft doesn’t quite bring out the fact that for most of WW2 Britain and its Empire/Dominions was a very minor combatant, with its armies not involved in the main fighting – a very different situation to, for example, 1917/18 when British/Empire/Dominion forces bore the brunt of the war on the Allied side.

Wheatcroft suggests this notion of the good war has been pernicious, leading to a willingness on the part of politicians to contemplate war far more readily than they ought – especially those who have never experienced a battlefield for themselves. Very unlike their First World War predecessors. In that war many MPs joined up, or their sons were killed – and the casualty rate for officers was higher than for other ranks.