Inferno - Max Hastings [411]
Millions of humble folk thought not of global issues, but of movingly personal causes for gratitude. On 7 September 1941, the nineteen-year-old gunner Bob Grafton, an east Londoner, had written to his adored girlfriend, Dot, before embarkation for the Far East: “Darling I know that you will wait for me. Darling do you know this. I swear that as long as we are apart I will never never touch another woman either physically or mentally. I do mean that Dot an awful lot … Yours Ever, with Love and Devotion so deep that the fires burn even in sleep, Bob.” Before Singapore fell, Grafton escaped by junk to Sumatra, then lived wild in the jungle until he was captured by the Japanese in March 1942. Having survived a bondage which included two years on the Burma railway, in September 1945 he wrote to Dot from a homeward-bound troopship: “This I know: that it was you of the two of us who had the more difficult task. For I am a man (perhaps prematurely) and men must fight and women must weep. So my share was no exception, yours was … Even if we have lost four years we’ll make life so that it is never regretted.” Grafton’s story had a happy ending: he married his Dot, and they lived happily ever after.
David McCormick, a gunner, had been captured in North Africa in December 1941, and spent more than three years in Italian and German POW camps. A few days after VE-Day his wife met him at Salisbury station. “He was very thin, very pale and had the most enormous bump on his forehead. I wore a blue dress with white spots and bows on it, for which I had given several clothing coupons. I can’t remember if we kissed. I don’t think so, not until a little later on when we stopped on the back way to Ditchinhampton. We were both very nervous. He apologised for the bump, explaining that on his first night of freedom some Belgians had entertained a whole bunch of prisoners rather too enthusiastically, and afterwards he had met up with an anti-tank trap. He talked a great deal … He so desperately wanted to get four years ‘in the bag’ off his chest as quickly as possible.”
Many others, however, returned home to discover that old ties were shattered, former passions extinct; they were obliged to content themselves with their own survival. For more millions, there was no return at all: the previous autumn Kay Kirby had become a presumed widow at twenty-one when her husband, a navigator in Bomber Command, was reported missing over Germany. In the absence of an identified corpse, she nonetheless clung to hope. “For years I expected George to turn up. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back … Before George started his tour when he came back on leave unexpectedly, he used to knock on my window with a clothes prop. After George went missing, many times I went to the door because I thought I heard him knocking at my window. Of course there was no one there.”
Intellectuals reflected on the vast experience the world had undergone. Arthur Schlesinger wrote grudgingly: “It was, I suppose, a Good War. But like all wars, our war was accompanied by atrocity and sadism, by stupidities and lies, pomposity and chickenshit. War remains hell, but a few wars have been driven by decent purposes and produced beneficial results.” Schlesinger’s fellow historian Forrest Pogue, who had crossed northwest Europe with the U.S. Army, wrote: “The war, while giving me a chance to see more of the world and of all kinds of people, nevertheless confused me … I lived more thoroughly an ordinary life than ever before … I found how much man lives next to the animal … it made me tougher-minded and more tolerant and sympathetic of human frailty … [but also] sufficiently confused so that I have not yet been able to discover any answers.”
In Asia,