In 1940, during the most desperate part of World War II, amid an
avalanche of disasters, a British ship named the Lancastria was
bombed and sunk as it was evacuating British troops from the
collapse of France. It is thought that more than 3,000 soldiers
died aboard this one ship — the equivalent of an entire brigade
gone at a stroke.
Newly-appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not knowing
how many more disasters Britain could take, at once ordered that
the story be suppressed. Nothing was said about it in Britain
during the war, and it has remained little known to this day.
There may be times during war when it is a soldier’s duty to lie
— to prevent giving either hard information or that more
loosely-defined thing, aid and comfort, to the enemy. All manner of
lies and propaganda have been an inevitable part of successful war,
and this has been taken for granted from at least the time of
Sun-Tzu. Even camouflage is a lie of a sort. Many people are
uncomfortable about this and there are philosophical propositions
that lying is wrong in any circumstances. Whatever the morality of
lying, however, it seems quite unquestionable that there are times
in war, and perhaps after war, when it is a soldier’s duty to say
nothing.
And not only soldiers. During World War II an elderly crook,
Maundy Gregory, a British civilian, was captured by the Germans in
France. To have called his past murky would have been to indulge in
gross understatement. He had been a positive broker of political
corruption. Principally he had sold and purveyed Honors for Lloyd
George, but was prepared to make his services available to any
party. There was even circumstantial evidence that he might have
murdered a wealthy mistress and also possibly a political rival. A
special Act of Parliament, the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act
1925, was passed in an attempt to put a stop to him (the same act
that now threatens Tony Blair’s associates) and he was jailed for
flouting it. He had had some shady involvements with the half-world
of various secret services.
Anyway, by the time the Germans captured him in France in 1940
he probably knew more of the secret scandals of the British
Establishment than anyone in the world. And he was an alcoholic, to
the point that if deprived of alcohol, he would die. The Germans
did deprive him of alcohol, promising it to him if he told them the
scandals he knew. A further inducement was that he was 64 years
old, past military age, and could have been repatriated, as was P.
G. Wodehouse upon turning 60.
Maundy Gregory refused and did die, probably a terrible death,
but he died with his lips sealed, not divulging anything that could
help the enemy against his country. He had long since lost any
claim to be a gentleman, but by his code there were still some
“things no fellow could do” — and giving aid and comfort to the
enemy was one of them.
It is, perhaps, reasonable to compare the behavior of this
whisky-sodden old criminal with that of the young British
servicemen captured in Iran recently, who, perhaps following
sensible orders not to provoke an international crisis, did
everything their captives wanted, or the fresh-faced,
wholesome-looking young Jessica Lynch, who publicly accuses her
military superiors of lying about the whole incident of her capture
and rescue.
Maybe they were lying. Maybe she is telling the truth. I have no
evidence or reason to believe that she is not. But at the end of
the day, who benefits from these revelations being made while the
war is still on? Only, as far as I can see, the enemies of her
country and of the West, as only the Nazis would have benefited
from the revelations of the sinking of the Lancastria or the
broadcasting of the contents of Maundy Gregory’s notebooks.
(Perhaps the men whose corrupt behavior in 1930 Maundy Gregory
might have pin-pointed were some of the same men who in 1940 were
helping keep alight the torch of freedom.) Who loses? To a certain
extent, her former comrades in the field, if the bond of trust
between officers and men is eroded. We saw in Vietnam, and indeed
with the Russians in Afghanistan, how the mightiest, best-equipped
Army can be damaged if that trust is destroyed. Soldiers die when
an army’s morale goes. It’s the lesson of John Ford and John Wayne
in Fort Apache — the thing was a fiasco but you shut up
about it.
It’s not necessarily a matter of lying, it’s a matter of
shutting up for the sake of others who may be putting their lives
on the line and who don’t need to be questioning the integrity of
the thing they are a part of.
The anti-war left is gloating, of course: “The fabric of war
consists not of gallant battles fought by hardy soldiers for some
noble collective good yay yay go team, but of manufactured tales of
valiant brotherhood and purebred heroism designed to make the vile
pill slightly less bitter,” according to San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Mark Morford.
In a sense, none of this says anything much about justification
or otherwise of the war. But, added to certain other incidents, it
does look like further evidence that in some ways the West has
forgotten what war means, which is another way of saying that it
has forgotten how to fight.
