Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [95]
At all events, from the summer of 1940 one thing was clear even to Party members as passionate and devoted as myself: in the army nobody would listen to the official Party line against the war. It made increasingly little sense and, from the moment when the Germans swept into the Balkans in the spring of 1941, it was clear to me (and indeed even to most in the Party leadership) that it made no sense at all. We now know that Stalin became the chief victim of its unrealism, stubbornly and systematically refusing to accept the accumulation of detailed and utterly reliable evidence of Hitler’s plan to attack the USSR, even after the Germans had crossed its borders. The probability of Hitler’s attack on Russia had been so great that even the British Party appears to have expected it by early June 1941, worried only about Winston Churchill’s reaction to it.3
Both communists and non-communists, therefore, felt the same sense of relief and hope when Hitler invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941. In what was essentially a working-class unit like our company, there was more than relief. Generations brought up during the Cold War are not aware how widely British workers and even Labour leaders before the war had thought of Soviet Russia as in some sense ‘a workers’ state’, as well as the one great power committed to opposing fascism, as it were ex officio. And, of course, everybody knew that its support against Hitler was indispensable. There was no shortage of deeply hostile observers and critics, but until the Cold War the dominant image of the USSR in the British labour movement was not that of totalitarianism, mass terror and the gulag. So in June 1941 Party members, sighing with relief, returned to what they had been saying before the war, and rejoined the masses of ordinary Britons. On my suggestion, I got a football signed by every member of the 560th starting with the company sergeant-major, and sent it to the Soviet Embassy in London for transmission to an equivalent engineers’ unit in the Red Army. I think the Daily Mirror, already very much the forces’ paper, published a photo. After 22 June 1941 communist propaganda more or less made itself.
III
However little I contributed to Hitler’s downfall or to the world revolution, there was a lot more to be said for serving in the Royal Engineers than in the Army Education Corps. It is far from clear what the traditional army thought of an outfit that claimed to teach soldiers things they did not need to know as soldiers, and to discuss non-military (or any) matters. It was tolerated, because its head, Colonel Archie White, was a professional soldier who had won a VC in his time and because most serving soldiers in the war were undeniably past and future civilians, whose morale required more than the inculcation of regimental loyalty and pride. The army did not like the AEC’s link with the new Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA),which issued regular monthly discussion pamphlets on political subjects, as like as not written by Labour sympathizers. Conservative politicians were later to hold ABCA responsible for the radicalization of the armed forces who, in 1945, massively voted Labour.
This is to overestimate the interest of the bulk of servicemen and women in specifically political literature. ABCA appealed