Provocation

Well, I wrote the last post with the intention of being provocative. And look… I succeeded. My PhD student, Jack McGowan, swiftly proclaimed that what I had written ‘hurt my eyes and my brain’, and that he had to respond. That response is posted – unedited – below:

Reverberations? Indeed: so I’ll take my academic life in my hands and join you in taking the risk of “looking like a bit of a tit” You are absolutely right that this issue should be examined in a historical light, and that it is “surprising how little you hear of such rituals in British regiments earlier in the modern period”. However, given our discussions about assumed, shared, political-cultural-social norms – yours, mine, and many historians’ – I would suggest that the contemporary situation must be viewed within a wider cultural context. At the very least, some contrasting light can perhaps be shed by a different ‘cultural’ perspective?

Coming from the notoriously violent west coast of Northern Britain, I am no stranger to ritualized, coercive, ‘set-piece’ male violence, often to express and cement relationships of power. Moreover, Scotland’s unemployment black-spots have provided notably high per capita numbers of military recruits in recent decades (I believe???). It therefore provides a substantial proportion of those you rightly describe as coming “from backgrounds where physical violence is more present than it is in the world of the junior academic or the London reporter.” “Some of them are not that bright.” Absolutely correct on both counts: some of us went to school with them.

I can also well believe that “pretty much any junior infantry officer I have taught has been able to talk about having their eyes opened to the amount of low level violence that goes on amongst those they lead.” However, this somewhat contradicts your Reaction 2), i.e., that “boys will be boys.” Your implication, perhaps unintended, is that it is more understandable and/or acceptable that certain types of boys will be boys. Within certain social spheres it maybe indeed be “all fun until someone goes too far.” Within other mileux it is never fun. It is deadly serious – and deadly. It doesn’t occur within a ‘clubbable’, enclosed context; it happens on the streets and in the home. Is it not this latter (and often not very) “low level violence” which, at the national-cultural level in the 21^st century, is the physical and psychological raw material which must be moulded and integrated into a fighting force? This little-educated, non-enlightened, non-Fight Club school of contemporary male violence must surely, despite rigorous training, honing, refining and direction, remain the very backbone of the contemporary “army designed for war”.

I am, therefore, confused as to where you draw the distinction between “boys being boys” and “soldiers being soldiers”, and left wondering how many commandos from Salford or Airdrie have “been on a sports club night out” which might have ended in rituals bearing any resemblance to those reported. Which of the two apparently discrete models of male violence is harnessing the other? And who, precisely, is the ‘enemy’ in such a context? In other words, what – other than tacit institutional license – differentiates this from assault on the street?

Finally, none of this explains the apparently essential prerequisite of nakedness. This is the truly ‘bizarre’ element, which I find more than merely “puzzling”. While territorial gang fights occur in many British city centres, they do not, to my knowledge, involve group male nudity. Like you, “I’ve never got involved in a fight, or stripped naked (voluntarily or otherwise).” Unlike you, however, I’ve only ever seen other people (i.e. men) do the former.

Therefore, it is your relatively mild reaction to the nakedness which I find most striking. Perhaps someone better qualified than I will continue this beyond the realms of mere “male posturing and bravado and all that” to address the elusive borderline between male homo-sociability (even when expressed through anti-sociability) and homoeroticism (even when expressed through physical domination and subjugation). I do believe, however, that this is what these ‘ceremonies’ must be seen, at least in part, to represent.

Perhaps we have both merely revealed that there are no objective points of view; but we can never be reminded of that too often.

Join the club…

Still some reverberations from a story that broke in Britain on Sunday, when the News of the World obtained video images of Royal Marines engaged in a bizarre initiation ritual. The footage shows Marines from 42 Commando, at the end of their 32 week commando training, stripped naked, watching two of their comrades fight in a field. The fight was allegedly orchestrated by two junior NCOs who appear in the video, dressed as a surgeon and a schoolgirl. Initially, the two marines fighting do so with arms bound in bedding rolls. One of the NCOs then gestures for them to fight with fists: and when one refuses, appears to lay him out with a kick to the head.

Widespread denunciation of such behaviour from all and sundry, including conspicuously military rent-a-gob from Colonel Bob Stewart. Best of all, this from Patrick Mercer (a former Sherwood Foresters officer with a distinguished service record and now Tory MP): “Just imagine a young man turning up in his unit and being made to wrestle naked in a field while his non-commissioned officers are dressed up in women’s frillies. I mean, it’s not very dignified stuff, is it?” Only if you recognise the generations of rivalry and ribaldry between soldiers and marines will you get the full nuance of the tongue in his cheek: ‘Bloody Marines spend too much time with the Navy. Bound to rub off, eh?’

Reaction 1) Surprising how little you hear of such rituals in British regiments earlier in the modern period. I think – please correct me – that ‘milling’ in the Paras goes back to WW2, but I don’t remember encountering anything like this with regard to British regiments, even of regulars, during the First World War. I suspect that this is to do with problems of sources and evidence, rather than that it never happening. After all, many of the rituals associated with the end of apprenticeship in British working class popular culture before the 1950s (maybe later) would now be seen as harassment/sexual or physical abuse (some of them involving women as well as men). I find it hard to believe that some regiments didn’t have something similar.

Reaction 2) Boys will be boys. I think that any British man who has been on a sports club night out will have looked at that footage and only been puzzled by the Marines’ need to strip off before having a stupid fight (dressing up, on the other hand, is pretty much a given). In fact, wrapping their arms in bedding rolls looks like an excellent way to have them make fools of themselves without inflicting too much damage. And as usual, it’s all fun until someone goes too far. There’s always one. And yes, you look back at that stuff and think: ‘That was stupid and barbarous and potentially life-threatening and definitely illegal. God it was fun.’ Nobody’s shown us what happens next in the video, I note. I suspect that the footage of the appalled other soldiers dragging the NCO off the bloke he’s kicked and admonishing him is there, but won’t come out.

(DISCLAIMER: I should point out that I have always done my best to prevent real barbarity on such occasions. And I’ve been lucky enough to do my drunken misbehaviour with fairly genteel fratboys, rather than pissed-up Marines. I’ve never got involved in a fight, or stripped naked (voluntarily or otherwise), but I’ve seen other people do both. And there’s plenty of my behaviour that I’m very glad was never filmed to be played back to the general public.)

Reaction 3) Soldiers will be soldiers. Most of these men come from backgrounds where physical violence is more present than it is in the world of the junior academic or the London reporter. Some of them are not that bright. Pretty much any junior infantry officer I have taught has been able to talk about having their eyes opened to the amount of low level violence that goes on amongst those they lead. I don’t say it’s a good thing, I don’t say they it isn’t awful for those that find themselves on the receiving end. But I don’t think it’s that much of a problem for an army designed for war fighting.
When it does risk become a problem is if it become usual for power to be occasionally acted out with physical violence. If it becomes a given that those in authority may physically abuse those who are subordinate to them, that behaviour will be replicated. It’s more likely than ever before that misjudgements will be documented. Soldiers now regularly find themselves being filmed (or filming each other) in contact with people over whom they have great power. Captured Iraqis who’ve been looting supplies, for example. And if they make a mistake, even momentarily, about what is appropriate behaviour in that situation, it becomes not only a very bad thing for those involved, but for the army and its mission as a whole. That’s why the army will say that it will do its best to stamp it out – even if it will never succeed entirely.

Update:

I wrote the above offline about a week ago, and wondered about publishing it. Mainly because I thought it ran the risk of making me look like a bit of a tit – male posturing and bravado and all that. But I came back to it because I thought that the comments I made about seeing this in a historical light were worthy of the light of day.

Whilst sorting out the links, I came across this story from the Daily Mirror. They found the kickee in question – Marine Ray Simmons. He appears to be quite upset by the misuse being made of his experiences. By his account, it was all drunken misbehaviour gone wrong. Quote of the article: ‘Because of all the rushing about, games and the booze I can’t recall exactly what happened.’ Hm, either that or the kick in the head, yes.

Victor ludorum

Just searching out material for talking about ‘Bravery and Cowardice’ to the Writing War Seminar. Noted that an excess of bravery is recklessness, which is about what I feel now. Or would that just be stupidity? Last week of term, pick something stupidly big and complicated to talk about, in the company of brilliantly clever people. Main aim I think is going to be to raise some points for discussion – I’ll post ideas up here as I put them together.

One of those talking points is going to be about how we – historians, historians of war, men – sorry, how I use/ have used narratives of bravery and of cowardice. Do they have relevance, are they just fantasy fodder, that sort of stuff. Anyway, in the process I came across this miraculous site, which holds copies of all the covers of Victor comic annuals from 1967 to 1991. I grew up with The Victor. Each week’s flimsy paper edition had a different ‘true’ story of a soldier winning the VC as its first story. To my credit, I remember, aged about 9, writing a letter to ask them the publishers why it was always a British soldier and never a German one. Strangely it was never published….

These comic annual covers actually do a great job of charting the changing place of war in British youth culture. Note how they start to concentrate on fantasy, then move into sporting endeavour. Is that where our heroes are supposed to come from now?

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Irregular blogging at the moment due to the end of term. So it’s only now that I’ll get round to talking about Ben Shephard’s paper to the Writing War seminar on 23 November.

Ben provided exactly the sort of paper that I had hoped for in setting up this seminar – wide-ranging, entertaining and provocative of discussion. Ben began autobiographically, explaining how his career had developed from working for a military historical publisher, to researching and interviewing for The World at War, to writing on war and psychology in his brilliant A War of Nerves. Having studied extensively The Great War TV series, I was fascinated to hear Ben talk about the process of gathering eyewitnesses for its Second World War equivalent. I suspect that there was material here for a seminar in itself on war and television history – and what I forgot to ask Ben was how/if he thought television treatment of war had moved on since the 1970s, or if The World at War was the peak.

Ben then moved on to talk about the ideas he wrote about in A War of Nerves. Fortunately for this belated blogger, the two different narratives Ben discussed and analysed have been summarised by Esther at Break of Day in the Trenches. Simply put, A War of Nerves is a great book. Ben’s efforts to return to the empirical evidence, rather than to rely on contemporary discourse and assumption, made it a field-shifting work. A friend of mine who’s working on the treatment of ‘shell-shocked’ men in the First World War suggests that Ben is not completely right about the chronology of the topic – but then it’s a book about a century of war, and I think its overall analysis is persuasive.

Instead of rehashing the book, I’ll concentrate instead on the other controversial things Ben had to say. In no particular order:

1) ‘My Dad was tougher than your Dad’ – both in his paper and in subsequent discussion, Ben vigorously defended his view that the generation which fought the Second World War was tougher than his own, and that those who fought the First World War were tougher again. To a degree, I can see his point: famously, the army now has to allow recruits to wear trainers for the first couple of months of basic training, because their feet won’t cope with boots. Given the fairly poor standard of Edwardian health and safety, the lifestyle assumptions of many of the working-class men who fought the First World War were different from our own. With no real culture of compensation or trauma, neither of the two generations which fought the total wars of the 20^th century launched a series of negligence suits against the government in their aftermath (although if you look at some of those who campaigned for pensions in the 1920s, you could see some examples, I suspect). On the other hand, it is a traditional complaint of middle-aged male military historians that the younger generation doesn’t know it’s born, is a bunch of weaklings and so on. And horrible though parts of industrial Britain were at the start of the century, they weren’t the same as finding yourself under the hurricane bombardments of 21 March 1918. Does ability to withstand one equate into ability to withstand the other? As Alex Watson pointed out, purely in terms of physical size, we’re much larger and better fed as a nation than we were before 1914 or 1939. Physically, we might have become more resilient. I don’t know how Ben would answer this – but I’ve met enough small guys with something to prove to recognise that toughness is a mixture of mind and body

2) Gender and culture. Ben was rightly scathing of those who apply an overly theoretical cultural or gender studies approach to the history of war without really taking the time to understand what they’re writing about. I couldn’t agree with him more: without quoting examples, anybody who works on the history of war is well aware of the issue of historians applying a set of modern concerns to the past whilst distorting it out of all recognition. I’m not sure if that means that all these approaches are invalid in themselves. Bad history – polemical, ill-informed, reliant on theory to the exclusion of the facts – is bad history. Good history – analytical, evidence-based, nuanced and balanced, readable – is good history. What we have to work towards is a moment where it becomes an assumption that those who work on war will want to think about all its aspects – so if you work on the British army, you’ll want to think about how its soldiers constructed their own identity, but if you work on British masculinity in the twentieth century, you’ll want to actually have an accurate picture of the army and how it worked.

3) Whippersnappers. Ben argued that there was a real problem with young historians taking on big topics, like war or memory at the start of their careers. The great historians of the past, he suggested, cut their teeth on micro-studies before moving on to the grand themes. For this young historian, at the start of his career, with a book just out on war and memory, this hit home as a criticism. I am highly conscious of the difficulty of taking on these big projects with such a small amount of experience. And I am all too aware of all the things I don’t know and all the research I haven’t done. On the other hand, my ideas aren’t clouded by being the same thing I’ve proclaimed for forty years without additional thought, my brain is still agile enough to cope with new information, and the sort of nuanced history I write means that I can leave room to allow for the fact I might be wrong. So I suspect that we’re going to disagree on this one. Fortunately for Ben, since he comes from an older and therefore tougher generation, when it comes to fisticuffs, he’ll have me, no problem.

4) War and sex. Ben had a lot of very sensible stuff to say about the ways war makes servicemen obsessed by women – mostly not as oppressors or as rapists, but in a host of ways, complex, connected but sometimes contradictory. To give a couple of examples, for many of these young men, the image of ‘woman’ is still bound up with being mothered. Married soldiers become obsessed with what is happening back at the home for which they’re fighting. Ben seemed to suggest that marital infidelity was a major issue – at least for Britain in the Second World War. I was unclear about the degree to which he was looking here at discourse as opposed to reality (dread cultural terms). Was it that there was loads of infidelity going on, or was it that soldiers talked about it all the time? Or both? Catherine Merridale pointed out that, from her research into the Red Army, what often happened was that one soldier would get a Dear John letter, and that everyone else would read it or hear about it and get anxious about what was happening at home. Ben has since been in touch with me to suggest that some of the questions surrounding this issue may be resolved by Pat Thane’s upcoming project on war and illegitimacy. This will indeed be an important addition to our knowledge – but perhaps we should be just as interested in the infidelities that could have happened but didn’t. War presents young people with a host of opportunities. But my suspicion is that for most British married couples in both world wars, the most common sexual experience was abstinence and separation rather than constant infidelity. Everyone knew about those who strayed and everyone talked about them. That doesn’t mean that they all followed suit. As I point out to my WW2 students, it’s no accident that ‘Cleaning my rifle and thinking of you’ was a wartime hit.

Just as with Stefan’s paper, I’ve probably done a terrible disservice to Ben in reporting his paper in this way. For all that I disagreed with some of the things he said, I still think he’s on the side of the angels and I was hugely grateful to him for coming to speak to us. Again, those interested should try to contact him direct.