Nigel Farage launched his campaign to become Clacton’s MP by citing a recent survey that revealed more than half of 18- to 34-year-olds couldn’t correctly identify what happened on D-day. Praising a local veteran travelling to Normandy for the 80th anniversary commemorations, the Reform party boss described the poll as representing “a complete failure of the education system … as if we’re telling our youngsters to be ashamed of our past”. It formed a key part of a speech full of supposedly patriotic, anti-immigrant, anti-trans rhetoric.
A narrow, nostalgic view of the second world war that connects the conflict with culture war issues and a sense of contemporary British decline is frequently exploited by reactionaries such as Farage, both as a political tool and a stick with which to beat supposedly ignorant young people. Jibes that millennials and Gen Z are “too woke” to fight might in fact be familiar to anyone who has read letters between British commanders of the second world war. General Montgomery, one of the architects of the D-day invasion, wrote in 1942 that “the trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature”. A 1943 army report, meanwhile, blamed books, cinema, plays and education for making soldiers weak under fire.
Yet the generations are not so different as the harrumphing buffoons of today seem to think. Instead of insulting our young people, we can find new ways to remember those who fought and to make those events of long ago relevant. After all, there are stories about D-day and the wider conflict still to be told, many far from the fetishised narratives of British glory that Farage and his ilk want to force-feed us like wartime-rationed Spam. Some are poignant in their ordinariness, men and women just doing what they could to survive. In my book Men at War, I explored the sexual revolution that took place during the years of the second world war, including some of the LGBTQ+ people whose service was just as brave and devoted as that of their heterosexual comrades.
Take Peter de Rome, who in later life worked on Star Wars and made gay erotic films. A wireless operator, he was shipped to Normandy in the immediate aftermath of D-day. In his memoirs, he recounted an assignation in an orchard near Bayeux with a Mauritian man called Papillon, “while the muffled sound of gunfire rumbled from the frontline only a few miles away”. It’s an intimate account of companionship under the threat of violent death. In 1951, Roberta Cowell became the first trans woman to receive vaginoplasty surgery in an operation conducted by Sir Harold Gillies, using techniques developed to treat badly burned servicemen that are still used in gender reassignment today. During the period of the D-day landings, the pre-transition Cowell flew a Spitfire on reconnaissance missions over France. Perhaps Cowell’s bravery might give Farage pause to reflect on his views on trans rights. Important work is being done by historians on the involvement of non-white troops in the battle – the actor Idris Elba narrates and is an executive producer on a new series called Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color.
It’s understandable that people are wary of commemoration of the second world war, given its easy relationship to nationalism and jingoism. Indeed, it didn’t happen in a major way until the 1990s, in part due to these concerns. In 1985, the Tory peer Lady Young wrote that she feared that celebrating VE Day, let alone D-day, would be “at best nostalgic and at worst anti-German”. She had a point: during the EU referendum, the leave campaign exploited a nationalist, nostalgic tale of Britain fighting on alone in 1940, a myth that ignores the vast resources of the British empire and dominions, and the immense power of the Royal Navy.
It’s a stark reminder of what happens when reactionary politics is allowed a monopoly over our history. Nostalgic war tat such as D-day gin (“The Taste of Freedom”) is the twee distraction from something more unpleasant, where rhetoric can easily become extreme. Far-right groups have militarised patriotism as part of their ideology, while in Russia the glorification of the war dead has been used as a propaganda tool to bolster support for the illegal invasion of Ukraine. This isn’t dead history: it shapes so much of our society today, at home and abroad.
It’s extremely likely that the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war next year will be the last for which anyone who participated in the conflict is still alive. With that generation now disappearing, we owe it to all who suffered in the horrendous fighting not to use them as a weapon in tedious culture wars but, in thoughtful remembrance of their complex humanity, gain a greater understanding of our present.
Luke Turner is a writer, editor and the author of two books, Men at War and the Wainwright prize-shortlisted Out of the Woods
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