Change for a Fifty?

Welcome as it is that Alan Turing's face is soon to adorn the £50 note, can't help if this is going to prove a 'hidden' honour not at all worthy of the man. After all, when did you last hold a £50? Many shops and pubs refuse to take them: is it just an empty gesture - and one that's far too late? Turing's work is credited as shortening WWII. Think about that for a moment - especially if your dad, grandad or great grandad came back safe. There's countless thousands of us - myself very gratefully included - who a possibly alive today thanks to Alan Turing. Putting his face on a fifty seems rather unambitious. His birthday should be a national holiday; Whitehall should be renamed; and the anniversary of his prosecution should be marked with at least a minute's silence so we can collectively recognise the hero who was persecuted, when he should have been honoured.

Europe's liberation, in dates and song.

Started with the landings in Sicily on 10 July, 1943. Or if you want to be pedantic about mainland Europe, 3 September 1943 at Reggio in Calabria, southern Italy. My father took part in both. And after D-Day, when Lady Nancy Astor castigated the Allied forces in Italy, who'd been sent by Churchill with the understatement of the war in that they were going to attack 'the soft underbelly of the Axis crocodile', saying they should be sent to the real war in Normandy, revelled ever more in the self-deprecating soubriquet of the D-Day Dodgers. It was a long and bloody campaign; doesn't detract from the bravery and sacrifices of D-Day and the long push east to Germany, but Normandy 1944 wasn't the first step in Europe's liberation.

Tomorrow you die, Andrew Coogan's autobiography

Have to declare an oblique interest in this title because it was written by a friend's grandfather.
Coogan's account details his childhood in Glasgow's Gorbals in the 20s and 30s, through to his athletic success with the Maryhill Harriers, to his call up for service in World War II in the Lanarkshire Yeomanry. This territorial cavalry unit was in the process of being subsumed into the artillery, and Coogan's battery - woefully I'll equipped - were shipped out to Singapore to face the full fury of the Japanese onslaught as it tore through Malaysia and Thailand to take the supposedly impregnable British fortress at the foot of the Malay peninsula.
From facing the horror of a banzai attack and a forced retreat to Singapore, to the brutality of imprisonment in the infamous Changi Jail Coogan presents an unflinching account of the sadism of his Japanese captors. The title is taken from a threat made to Coogan by a Japanese officer in response to a refusal to obey an instruction to stop digging a deep grave for a dead fellow POW (Coogan wanted to dig deeper than the permitted 18 inches to protect his friend's remains from scavenging animals). From Changi, Coogan and a small band of surviving comrades from the Lanarkshire Yeomanry, augmented by a changing group of British, Australian and Dutch POWs, are taken first to work as slave labour in a Formosan copper mine, then to a coal mine near Nagasaki. Enduring starvation, sea and rail transport in appalling conditions, and the casual violence of guards indoctrinated to believe that surrender made their charges completely worthless, Coogan never loses his belief in the innate goodness of humanity. While he encounters brutal treatment from some of his captors (two of whom he went on to present testimony against to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) he is eventually befriended by a guard who shares his love of running and, along with a Roman Catholic chaplain, manages to ensure the survival of a number of his comrades by stealing food from a variety of ingenious, and occasionally stomach-churning sources.
The book also highlights the futility and banality of war. He is scathing of the failures of those in authority, from Churchill's refusal to make proper provision for the defence of Singapore, to the senior officers and wealthy expatriate community who singularly failed to appreciate the danger posed by the advancing Japanese. A final indignity is recalled by the derisory £75 Coogan received as back pay on his return to Scotland. The payment, he recounts, was itself subject to a deduction for food and accommodation, giving rise to his observation that he was docked pay for the pleasure of being starved!
This searingly honest narrative pulls no punches but ends by bearing no hatred. In some ways it complements the Railway Man with its account of Eric Lomax's search for release from the brutalisation of such horrifying captivity in that this is an account of survival against the odds, but one that is suffused with a love for humanity. It deserves to be read by a wide audience. I hope also that it comes to stand as a testament to a passing generation that lived through World War II and stands as a counterbalance to the often cloying sentiment and sensationalised accounts served up on film and TV.

War - and the failure of politics

This is what political failure leads to . The images are striking and have had a profound affect on public opinion. War is not an acceptable or 'normal' part of the human condition - it certainly isn't 'generational' or inevitable. I'm reading a collection of pieces written by First World War veterans that was published originally in 1930. Time and again, they use the phrase 'never again', and many were firmly convinced that they had taken part in the last war ever to be fought; there was no way they could ever imagine another conflict after the horror and loss they had witnessed - no politician could ever make that mistake again. But now, we see remembrance used in a very different way: remember the past, but also with an eye to contemporary and future events - almost as if the past is being used to validate future political shortcomings: 'we fought before and we'll fight again' has replaced 'never again'. On Sunday, I'll stand before a war memorial, as I did in years gone by with my granddad and my dad - veterans of the First and Second World wars. When I was young, I wondered why dad didn't wear his medals when the others did. He replied that they 'meant nothing' to him, and that the regimental mascot, a bulldog, had been given the same ones. For dad - who fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy - war was neither normal or inevitable. He'd been brought up in a family where is dad and uncles had fought - and in one case died - in the war 'to end all wars' and he knew that the conflict he had had to endure was a result of the failure of politicians to secure a lasting peace, compounding the failure that led to the First World War. Now, I have to stand on my own, my granddad and beloved dad have gone, but I go to honour their memory and remember the suffering they and their comrades and former enemies had to endure. But I have a growing sense of unease when politicians now speak of war was inevitable, or of engendering military discipline in our schools, because this makes conflict seem commonplace, even acceptable, especially when fought in far away places, where its victims are not placed in the public eye - we hear about the casualties, but the ambulance trains do not bring the wounded home to the full glare of the public gaze, as in those earlier wars. The suffering has almost been sanitised and the media - especially the tabloid end - uses this language and imagery to perpetuate the old myth: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

When Dad and Uncle Harry Couldn’t get a Pint

Dad and his best mate Harry, home on leave from Italy. A Joiner and a Caretaker turned Sapper and Fusilier sergeant 'for the duration' went into Leeds for the night. Two lads from Burley walking down the Headrow and into Vicar Lane called in the Robin Hood for a quick one. That’s how the story starts. Start of a home town night out. Harry was a big man, a sergeant in battledress, he goes over to the bar. Dad’s the smaller one of the two. It’s Harry’s shout, and shout he does. The barman goes red in the face as the drinkers at the bar part. “And I’m telling you I can’t serve you in here. Leeds is closed to the British. We can only serve Yanks and Poles in here”. Now Harry liked the Poles, fought with them at Monte Casino, though neither he nor Dad really got the Yanks. Too much money, too many cigs, too many girls. Dad never forgot three days’ blinded from the flash of one of their anti-aircraft guns defending the harbour at Bari, always grumbled how “you’d think they’d won the bloody war” at war films on TV. But denial of beer in the Robin Hood was an indignity of war they remembered and passed on; for them it was a war story in their very own backyard. If they’d hailed from Białystok or the Bronx, instead of Burley, then that genial mine host would have pulled their pints, but there was to be no beer in the Robin Hood for those two squaddies that night. D-Day Dodgers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4hny_XRaw4 By the same author: Short and Curlies Gnosis