‘In winter I get up at night, and dress by yellow candle light……
……..In summer, quite the other way. I have to go to bed by day’
So wrote Scottish poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his poems for children. Last Saturday evening (30th October) we put our clocks back an hour, giving us all an extra hour in bed, and bringing nightfall an hour earlier into the afternoon – a process that will continue inexorably until just before Christmas.
We can’t do anything about the period of daylight each day shortening in the winter and lengthening again with the spring and summer. We can though decide for ourselves how to alter our activities – ruled by our clocks – to make the most of what daylight there is. Is it more helpful to have the longer period of daylight in the afternoon and evening, or first thing in the morning? In the summer we have no doubt about it. Most of us don’t want broad daylight at 4.00 a.m. but we do appreciate the ability to work or enjoy outdoor leisure activities in the summer evenings, so we put our clocks forward an hour, bringing daylight an hour later in the morning and putting off dusk until between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. in May, June and July.
At the end of October we put those clocks back an hour to Greenwich Mean Time. Darkness, often enhanced by leaden overcast skies, advances into mid-afternoon.
During World War II every minute of daylight counted – especially for those working on the land. We put our clocks forward two hours in the summer (Double Summer Time) and brought them back just one hour to what we now call British Summer Time, in the winter. I remember when I returned from Germany in 1945 finding that it was still light at 10.30 p.m. in June!
After the war we experimented with British Summer Time throughout the year, from 1968 till 1971, but in 1972 reverted to British Summer Time in the summer months and Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. Attempts have been made to bring back the wartime Single and Double Summer Time but all have so far failed. This year though the idea has been revived and is thought to have a reasonable chance of success. We are again in crisis and once again we need every minute of daylight we can get both for work and leisure. In addition, it has been calculated that with lighter evenings, less energy will be used, and as there would be a lighter ‘rush-hour’ there would be fewer road accidents and fewer casualties. Children would be safer coming home in daylight throughout the year.
Strongest opposition comes from Scotland where it is pointed out that children would be going to school in darkness as it wouldn’t get light there till as late as 10.00 a.m. There’s nothing that can be done about the fact that the further north you are, the shorter is each winter’s day and, conversely, the longer each summer’s day. If the Scots prefer children to come home, rather than go to school, in darkness it would surely be possible to make Scottish school hours from 10.00 a.m. till 5.00 p.m. instead of 9.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. Could it be that last Saturday was the very last time that we shall have to put our clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time?
'Never mind the offender. Let’s punish the whistle-blower?’
Years ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the usual initial response of any Council tenant about whom a complaint had been made, was not to deny or justify his or her activities but to demand indignantly ‘Who told you that?’
It seems that much more distinguished people react in precisely the same way when their actions, or their failure to take action, are revealed to the public gaze. Thousands of documents, leaked from British and American Forces operating in Iraq and recently published by Wikileaks, revealed that captured Iraqi insurgents had been handed over to their compatriots in the knowledge that they would be mistreated or tortured, and that on at least one occasion Iraqi insurgents trying to surrender had been gunned down by a US helicopter gunship. It has been upon Wikileaks, and upon the news media publishing the content of the leaked material, that the wrath of the Establishment, particularly in the USA, has been focussed (‘Arrest Wikileaks’ head and try him for treason!’ was the predictable demand of some right-wing Republicans).
Wikileaks is accused of being unpatriotic. Its revelations would assist El Quaida and similar organisations in their recruiting campaigns. I suppose that they might have done so had not the insurgents already been well aware of what was going on. Unless we really believe that not one of the victims of this misuse had ever been released or had escaped, the insurgents are sure to have known what was happening – and will have already used it in their recruiting campaigns. Had they told us about the abuse we would simply have denounced the revelation as lying propaganda.
It is those who committed these war crimes and those who failed to seek out and punish the perpetrators, who have endangered the lives of our troops. It is they who have encouraged recruitment to the insurgents and the terrorists. It is significant that, in all the thousands of words condemning the whistle blowers, there has not been a single suggestion that the accusations are untrue.
Although the focus of the press has been on the misuse of prisoners and the slaughter of insurgents trying to surrender, a very large number of cases of ‘friendly fire’ also feature in the leaked papers. Between 2004 and 2006 United States and other coalition forces mistakenly attacked British forces on at least eleven occasions. Attempting to overtake US vehicles appears to have been a particularly hazardous venture. Early in 2004 three British vehicles overtook some Czech trucks near the Kuwait border and found themselves held up by a slow-moving American convoy. Attempting to pull out and overtake they were threatened by a US soldier with a heavy machine gun! This happened three times despite the clearly visible British military number plates on their vehicles. Later in the same year British vehicles were fired on in the same area and under similar circumstances, on three occasions from American convoys and once from a Bulgarian one.
It seems that ‘our boys’ in Iraq learned to regard these attacks from their allies with true British phlegm. In February 2005 a report from a three-vehicle British convoy about being strafed by an American gunner, concluded laconically, ‘both convoys continued on their journeys without stopping’.
Friendly Fire!
The ‘friendly fire’ revealed by Wikileaks seems, thank goodness, to have been remarkably ineffective. Perhaps itchy trigger fingers tend to be on shaky hands! Sadly, not all friendly fire is like that. There have been far too many incidents – culminating in the recent death of the kidnapped Aid Worker killed in a bungled rescue attempt – in which soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed by bombs, shells or bullets from their ‘own side’. Nor is it purely a recent phenomenon.
Thursday of next week (11th November) is what we used to call ‘Armistice Day’ when, at eleven in the morning (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I were silenced and four years of unparalleled carnage came to an end. On the following Sunday (14th Nov.) at War Memorials and in places of worship throughout our land, we shall be remembering and honouring the memory of those in the forces who lost their lives in two world wars, and in the armed conflicts that have gone on and continue to go on, ever since. A verse from Laurence Binyon’s To the Fallen will be recited again, and again, and again, together with the sounding of The Last Post, a verse and a trumpet call that never fail to stir the emotions of any old soldier – including myself.
They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Well, I am one of those who were left. I have grown old, age has wearied me – and I do remember them.
There were between seven and eight hundred of us in the 67th Medium Regiment RA. We were all young men mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, from Ipswich and the coastal area of East Suffolk who – with patriotic fervour – had volunteered for the Territorial Army when war threatened. We had been called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. One hundred of us were destined never to see Suffolk again.
On 21st June 1942, after six months almost continuous action in the Egypt/Libya border area, we were over-run in Tobruk by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps and ordered by our garrison commander to put our guns out of action, burn our vehicles and surrender to the Germans. I remember as we walked disconsolately along the desert track to the prisoner of war ‘cage’, a German soldier called out (a little enviously I thought!), ‘Hey Tommy, cheer up. For you zee war iss ovair’. Little did he, or we, know that we were all just entering the most perilous part of our army careers.
We had had battle casualties of course, but not very many considering how much action we had seen. By far the majority of those one hundred fatal casualties occurred after we had been taken prisoner. We lost a few in a diphtheria epidemic in a transit prison camp near Benghazi. We lost rather more of starvation related disease in vast prisoner of war concentration camps in Italy. One or two died in industrial accidents in working camps, at factories and on railway sidings in Germany, several, who had found themselves in POW camps in Poland, died of hunger and exposure as they were marched westward during the bitter winter of 1944/’45 to avoid their being liberated by the inexorably advancing Soviet Army.
No less than half of my regiment’s casualties though died as a result of ‘friendly fire’. In November 1942, as PoWs, they were loaded onto the Italian steamer SS Scillin in Tripoli Harbour, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. Halfway across the Mediterranean the Scillin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine! The fifty from the 67th Medium Regiment RA were by no means the only PoWs on board the ill-fated vessel. A very few were rescued by the submarine but some 680 British and South African prisoners were drowned by ‘friendly fire’ that day.
I survived all those perils and have lived to remember fallen comrades whose graves are to be found in North Africa, throughout Italy and Central Europe, and others who have no grave but the ocean. I have visited both Italy and Germany in peacetime and found friendship and hospitality in both. I now have good friends in Germany and I have a little German honorary nephew (aged 1) and niece (aged 4). It has been estimated that 50 million people – men, women and little children, combatants and civilians, of every country and every race – died directly or indirectly as a result of World War II. Is the world of 2010 so much better than that of 1938 as to have made all that human sacrifice worthwhile? Looking back over the years, I ask, ‘Was it all worth it? And could it ever happen again?
I recently read a ‘reader’s letter’ in the East Anglian Daily Times in which the writer (who I suspect was in his forties or fifties) claimed that the servicemen and women of World War II, had fought for a free and independent UK, and were being betrayed by those who were now urging ever-closer ties with the European mainland. Unlike that letter writer I had been one of those servicemen. I had thought that I was taking part in a world-wide struggle to end the petty nationalism of which Nazism and Fascism were extreme examples, and to create a new united Europe of co-operation, freedom and peace, a precursor of the day when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had put it a century and a half earlier,
Years ago, when I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the usual initial response of any Council tenant about whom a complaint had been made, was not to deny or justify his or her activities but to demand indignantly ‘Who told you that?’
It seems that much more distinguished people react in precisely the same way when their actions, or their failure to take action, are revealed to the public gaze. Thousands of documents, leaked from British and American Forces operating in Iraq and recently published by Wikileaks, revealed that captured Iraqi insurgents had been handed over to their compatriots in the knowledge that they would be mistreated or tortured, and that on at least one occasion Iraqi insurgents trying to surrender had been gunned down by a US helicopter gunship. It has been upon Wikileaks, and upon the news media publishing the content of the leaked material, that the wrath of the Establishment, particularly in the USA, has been focussed (‘Arrest Wikileaks’ head and try him for treason!’ was the predictable demand of some right-wing Republicans).
Wikileaks is accused of being unpatriotic. Its revelations would assist El Quaida and similar organisations in their recruiting campaigns. I suppose that they might have done so had not the insurgents already been well aware of what was going on. Unless we really believe that not one of the victims of this misuse had ever been released or had escaped, the insurgents are sure to have known what was happening – and will have already used it in their recruiting campaigns. Had they told us about the abuse we would simply have denounced the revelation as lying propaganda.
It is those who committed these war crimes and those who failed to seek out and punish the perpetrators, who have endangered the lives of our troops. It is they who have encouraged recruitment to the insurgents and the terrorists. It is significant that, in all the thousands of words condemning the whistle blowers, there has not been a single suggestion that the accusations are untrue.
Although the focus of the press has been on the misuse of prisoners and the slaughter of insurgents trying to surrender, a very large number of cases of ‘friendly fire’ also feature in the leaked papers. Between 2004 and 2006 United States and other coalition forces mistakenly attacked British forces on at least eleven occasions. Attempting to overtake US vehicles appears to have been a particularly hazardous venture. Early in 2004 three British vehicles overtook some Czech trucks near the Kuwait border and found themselves held up by a slow-moving American convoy. Attempting to pull out and overtake they were threatened by a US soldier with a heavy machine gun! This happened three times despite the clearly visible British military number plates on their vehicles. Later in the same year British vehicles were fired on in the same area and under similar circumstances, on three occasions from American convoys and once from a Bulgarian one.
It seems that ‘our boys’ in Iraq learned to regard these attacks from their allies with true British phlegm. In February 2005 a report from a three-vehicle British convoy about being strafed by an American gunner, concluded laconically, ‘both convoys continued on their journeys without stopping’.
Friendly Fire!
The ‘friendly fire’ revealed by Wikileaks seems, thank goodness, to have been remarkably ineffective. Perhaps itchy trigger fingers tend to be on shaky hands! Sadly, not all friendly fire is like that. There have been far too many incidents – culminating in the recent death of the kidnapped Aid Worker killed in a bungled rescue attempt – in which soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed by bombs, shells or bullets from their ‘own side’. Nor is it purely a recent phenomenon.
Thursday of next week (11th November) is what we used to call ‘Armistice Day’ when, at eleven in the morning (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, the guns of World War I were silenced and four years of unparalleled carnage came to an end. On the following Sunday (14th Nov.) at War Memorials and in places of worship throughout our land, we shall be remembering and honouring the memory of those in the forces who lost their lives in two world wars, and in the armed conflicts that have gone on and continue to go on, ever since. A verse from Laurence Binyon’s To the Fallen will be recited again, and again, and again, together with the sounding of The Last Post, a verse and a trumpet call that never fail to stir the emotions of any old soldier – including myself.
They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Well, I am one of those who were left. I have grown old, age has wearied me – and I do remember them.
There were between seven and eight hundred of us in the 67th Medium Regiment RA. We were all young men mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, from Ipswich and the coastal area of East Suffolk who – with patriotic fervour – had volunteered for the Territorial Army when war threatened. We had been called up for full-time service on 2nd September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. One hundred of us were destined never to see Suffolk again.
On 21st June 1942, after six months almost continuous action in the Egypt/Libya border area, we were over-run in Tobruk by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrikakorps and ordered by our garrison commander to put our guns out of action, burn our vehicles and surrender to the Germans. I remember as we walked disconsolately along the desert track to the prisoner of war ‘cage’, a German soldier called out (a little enviously I thought!), ‘Hey Tommy, cheer up. For you zee war iss ovair’. Little did he, or we, know that we were all just entering the most perilous part of our army careers.
We had had battle casualties of course, but not very many considering how much action we had seen. By far the majority of those one hundred fatal casualties occurred after we had been taken prisoner. We lost a few in a diphtheria epidemic in a transit prison camp near Benghazi. We lost rather more of starvation related disease in vast prisoner of war concentration camps in Italy. One or two died in industrial accidents in working camps, at factories and on railway sidings in Germany, several, who had found themselves in POW camps in Poland, died of hunger and exposure as they were marched westward during the bitter winter of 1944/’45 to avoid their being liberated by the inexorably advancing Soviet Army.
No less than half of my regiment’s casualties though died as a result of ‘friendly fire’. In November 1942, as PoWs, they were loaded onto the Italian steamer SS Scillin in Tripoli Harbour, to be transported to prison camps in Italy. Halfway across the Mediterranean the Scillin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine! The fifty from the 67th Medium Regiment RA were by no means the only PoWs on board the ill-fated vessel. A very few were rescued by the submarine but some 680 British and South African prisoners were drowned by ‘friendly fire’ that day.
I survived all those perils and have lived to remember fallen comrades whose graves are to be found in North Africa, throughout Italy and Central Europe, and others who have no grave but the ocean. I have visited both Italy and Germany in peacetime and found friendship and hospitality in both. I now have good friends in Germany and I have a little German honorary nephew (aged 1) and niece (aged 4). It has been estimated that 50 million people – men, women and little children, combatants and civilians, of every country and every race – died directly or indirectly as a result of World War II. Is the world of 2010 so much better than that of 1938 as to have made all that human sacrifice worthwhile? Looking back over the years, I ask, ‘Was it all worth it? And could it ever happen again?
I recently read a ‘reader’s letter’ in the East Anglian Daily Times in which the writer (who I suspect was in his forties or fifties) claimed that the servicemen and women of World War II, had fought for a free and independent UK, and were being betrayed by those who were now urging ever-closer ties with the European mainland. Unlike that letter writer I had been one of those servicemen. I had thought that I was taking part in a world-wide struggle to end the petty nationalism of which Nazism and Fascism were extreme examples, and to create a new united Europe of co-operation, freedom and peace, a precursor of the day when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had put it a century and a half earlier,
The war-drums throb no more and the battle flags are furled,
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’
1 comment:
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