charlesmessenger Posted 11 October , 2012 Share Posted 11 October , 2012 Yes, it would seem that there is a large official gap between Passchendaele Ridge (November 1917) and the Armistice. We must pay tribute to the resilience to the peoples of what was then the British Empire. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the course of 1918. Charles M PS Charles Carrington was quite correct with regard to many of those who fought, but he did not take into account the many women in black by the end of the war. At least the Two Minutes Silence and the ceremony at the Cenotaph gave them the opportunity to grieve openly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris basey Posted 11 October , 2012 Share Posted 11 October , 2012 To spend £50m on celebrating the start of WW1 is ludicrous! I believe it is right that we have annual remembrance of the fallen which, I hope, will go on for many years but let's leave it for another four years before we mark any centenary. Can we honestly say that 1939 should be celebrated rather than 1945? Casting our minds further forward can we believe that our grand children will be celebrating our entries into Iraq, Afghanistan, et al? If there's any celebration in relation to war it should be of thankfulness that it is over. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alix23 Posted 11 October , 2012 Share Posted 11 October , 2012 While I agree with the points about celebrating Britain's victory in protecting itself and stopping Germany's plans, I would have though this side of things isn't going to be taken on by the government because of the anti-German side to it. Shouldn't the centenary be marking the losses and part played by the soldiers of all nationalities? Maybe we should celebrate the personal victories and resilience instead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Armstrong Custer Posted 11 October , 2012 Share Posted 11 October , 2012 PS Charles Carrington was quite correct with regard to many of those who fought, but he did not take into account the many women in black by the end of the war. At least the Two Minutes Silence and the ceremony at the Cenotaph gave them the opportunity to grieve openly. To be fair to Carrington and his friends, he makes clear in the quote that they had no issue with the introduction of the two minutes' silence and ceremony at the Cenotaph as introduced on the second Armistice. It was the ensuing creeping extension of this, and the elimination of any celebratory sense of achievement until there was no other element left for those who had served and survived but the funereal commemoration of the dead, which he and other ex-servicemen specifially took issue with: "The do-gooders captured the Armistice, and the British Legion seemed to make its principal outing a day of mourning. To march to the Cenotaph was too much like attending one's own funeral, and I know many old soldiers who found it increasingly discomforting, year by year. We preferred our reunions in private with no pacifist propaganda." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KGB Posted 11 October , 2012 Share Posted 11 October , 2012 Gosh never realised that Gallipoli went on that long! To clarify! 100th anniversary of Gallipoli, 2015, Battle of Jutland (1916)...hope that tortoise in Norfolk is going to be interviewwd, he knew my Grandfather. My Grandfather knew Lloyd-George. Hey you don't think the tortoise is Lloyd-George?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Armstrong Custer Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 Another frontline veteran, Sidney Rogerson, echoed Carrington’s dismay at the way the war he had fought was increasingly being presented in a slanted way by the early 1930s: "Recently there has been the war of the Sewers, in which no one ever laughed, those who were not melancholy mad were alcoholically hysterical, and most of the action took place in or near the crude latrines of the period. The simple soldier smiled as he read about himself in the heroics of the war scribes. The bemused survivor is slightly irritated to find his experiences exploited by marrow-freezing agents of peace for all time. [……] But this post-war propaganda, piling corpse upon corpse, heaping horror on futility, seems bound to fail from every point of view. In its distortion, the soldier looks in vain for the scenes he knew." Judging by what the BBC has so far produced in response to yesterday’s political announcement, it seems a shame that it looks like the melancholy perspectives of unmitigated death, disaster, and futility, which many of those who had actually fought the war found so distorting, look set to dominate the story told in the planned centenary presentations. Nor am I a fan of ideas to mark the centenaries which pretend that all sides were equally the victims of this terrible war. I don’t subscribe to this sort of early 21st century politically correct moral equivalency, in which every side in all wars were brothers in victimhood. This is the doctrine which lies at the heart of pernicious claims from some in Germany and elsewhere that in the Second World War Bomber Command were as much war criminals as the Germans' own Einsatzgruppen. The kind of thinking behind such approaches to history, it seems to me, is related to, and is as flawed as, that which sees school sports days in which there are no winners, deserving or otherwise – the latter bears no relation to the realities of life, and the former airbrushes history into a morally amorphous lie. This insults two generations who, at great cost, stood up to the ambitions of Germany and her partners twice in the first half of the twentieth century. The alternative was to stand aside and let Germany get on with things in 1914 and 1939, which in both cases would only have delayed our becoming the object of their attentions. Getting these facts right in the planned centenary presentations, in which so much money is being invested for educational purposes, ought not to cause offense to a Germany which today is comprised largely of generations born after these historical periods, and for which they bear no responsibility. If it does, then I’m sorry, but history is not about pretending that things didn’t happen as they did. Do I think that the centenary presentations will go much beyond, rightly, commemorating the dead? Sadly, no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roughdiamond Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 To spend £50m on celebrating the start of WW1 is ludicrous! I believe it is right that we have annual remembrance of the fallen which, I hope, will go on for many years but let's leave it for another four years before we mark any centenary. Can we honestly say that 1939 should be celebrated rather than 1945? Casting our minds further forward can we believe that our grand children will be celebrating our entries into Iraq, Afghanistan, et al? If there's any celebration in relation to war it should be of thankfulness that it is over. Can't find one mention of CELEBRATING/CELEBRATIONS in Cameron's speech but he uses the word COMMEMORATION in its various tenses no less than 16 times. So why do you complain about "CELEBRATING the start of WW1", you're the only one using that word? maybe you should read the speech, NigelS posted a link to it in post #12 here's another link to it http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2012/10/11/david-cameron-great-war-centenary-speech-in-full Sam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slick63 Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 The French have had their centenary plans in the pipeline for quite some time, so it`s just possible that Cameron has jumped on the bandwagon. As for the £5 million for school kids to visit the battlefields, it looks like there will only be two child 'ambassadors' and one teacher going from each school, not exactly a broad learning experience for all. Call me a cynic but I get the feeling that this will be a public relations exercise more than anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan Tucker Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 There is going to be an advisory committee chaired, I think, by the Culture Secretary. It includes historians Michael Burleigh and Hew Stachan, Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, Lord King (former Tory Defence Secretary), Lord Roberston, Labour, ex-Secretary General of NATO and Menzies Campbell. I am not very happy about Burleigh whose expertise is Nazism and whose recent obituary of Eric Hobsbawm could not see beyond the Marxism to credit the work one of our most impressive historians. Hew Strachan fine but who else might reflect the new thinking about the First World War of recent decades. A sign of things to come is when I heard on Radio 5 late last night a Manchester Uni historian - who I have never heard of - only able to comment on the 'futility' of it all. It is a pity he could not tell that anymore to those who came back! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris_Baker Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks ... says a lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMarsdin Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 I noticed the two little projects (heritage fun funded) that he singled out were sowing poppies in the UK and a kids' football tournament to reflect the Christmas truce 1914. I suspect the latter will get a disproportionate billing. Michael Morpurgo was talking about it in the Yorkshire Post today; how the world would have been completely different if they hadn't gone back to fight after the "truce". I hope 2014-2018 isn't going to be just a series of remembrance services to commemorate those killed at certain events, without a proper telling of the history that goes with their sacrifice is a disservice to those killed of all sides. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Mackenzie Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 Nor am I a fan of ideas to mark the centenaries which pretend that all sides were equally the victims of this terrible war. I don’t subscribe to this sort of early 21st century politically correct moral equivalency, in which every side in all wars were brothers in victimhood. This is the doctrine which lies at the heart of pernicious claims from some in Germany and elsewhere that in the Second World War Bomber Command were as much war criminals as the Germans' own Einsatzgruppen. George I agree with you on the Bomber Command v Einsatzgruppen issue but I think, in the Great War, the average German soldier was as much a 'victim' as the average Tommy. Personally I hope that the dead of all sides will be commemorated and that a rounded overview of the whole war will be portrayed. I wouldn't bet on it being Blackadder 4 (part 2) though! I would have liked to have seen this process kicked off about two years ago to be honest but many of us (including me) thought that the Olympics would be a complete balls up so fingers crossed I am wrong about this as well. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roughdiamond Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 Is it just me or does anyone else think it's ironic that the centenery of the declaration of War is being treated with lowered flags, reverence, quiet reflection, commemoration, sadness and remembrance when the actual event was greeted with flag waving and joy nationwide. I wonder if anyone will suggest recreating that? Sam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Armstrong Custer Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 I personally don't think of the average Tommy as a 'victim', Neil, and I think a lot of them might have been mightily insulted at the part they played in winning the war being so described - certainly the likes of Carrington and Rogerson would have been, as, I suspect, would a lot of those who appeared as sprightly late-middle-aged men telling their stories in the 1964 BBC 'Great War' series. As to the Germans, I don't imagine very many denizens of Belgium and those parts of France which fell under the often harsh heel of the occupying jackboot in 1914 would have been too inclined to regard the occupying forces as 'victims'. After two world wars it became fashionable for many in Germany to adopt the line that 'we were all victims'. But there wasn't too much of that attitude when their forces seemed to be in the ascendant in both wars, and I doubt if they'd have identified themselves as fellow victims with defeated poilus as they paraded through Paris if France had fallen in 1914, as it did in 1940. Where I entirely agree with you is that the proposals which were announced yesterday have come far too late in the day. France has many projects in hand for the centenaries which have been developing for some time. Fortunately there have been some British initiatives which have also been building steam for some time, including the very worthwhile Expeditionary Trust, whose very able Director Terry Hughes I have had discussions with through the DHF. The Expeditionary Trust has relevant experts on board, rather than novelists. They have been up and running in good time to make themselves properly organised for the approach of the centenaries, and they are working hand in glove with centenary organisations in France. What I like about the Expeditionary Trust's mission is that it seeks to bring recognition and education during the centenaries to the fact that the absolutely massive set-up of the BEF in France was not all about the combat echelons who manned the front line. The logistical and communication infrastructures behind the lines were enormous, and the role played by the ordnary men who served to keep these operational was a vital part of the victory achieved in 1918 which is all but unknown. So I'd like to see some pretty generous chunks of the funds announced as being available yesterday go to existing projects which know their onions, such as the Expeditionary Trust, rather than the Johnny-come-lately cloud cuckoo land or futility stuff which will be dreampt up under the aegis of government appointed 'experts' like Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker. Anyone interested in finding out more about the Expeditionary Trust project can access their website here: http://www.expeditionarytrust.org/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Mackenzie Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 George I agree with you - which is why I used the word 'victim' rather than victim. No need to start an argument where none exists. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMarsdin Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 There seems to be a broad agreement amongst posters that initial signs of the way events will develop aren't good. As it is all still in the planning stage can't we collectively or individually make representations to help drive a more balanced agenda ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Armstrong Custer Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 George I agree with you - which is why I used the word 'victim' rather than victim. No need to start an argument where none exists. Neil Neil, you said you agreed there was no equivalency between Bomber Command and the Ensatzgruppen, but that you "think, in the Great War, the average German soldier was as much a 'victim' as the average Tommy. Personally I hope that the dead of all sides will be commemorated and that a rounded overview of the whole war will be portrayed." I merely begged to differ with you on that clear expression of an equivalency, regardless of whether 'victim' is in quotes or not. Hardly 'starting an argument'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMarsdin Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 There are three similar threads running on this topic; could they be amalgamated or just one left open so we can have all the discussion in one place ? We might then get a concensus to present to the organising committee. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tank Posted 12 October , 2012 Share Posted 12 October , 2012 It seems a bit off given my current project with the war MEMORIAL but I'd also add those that survived and endured the PTSD - and by that I'm including the families. We know what it is now but back then they certainly didn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimSmithson Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 There needs to be no concern over how the modern German may view events in the UK over the period of the 100th Anniversary. For most of the 30 odd years I have lived in Germany, including being related to a German family, the nation has fought to come to terms with its modern history. Every step of the way, for example agreeing to German troops being involved abroad, has been met with much hand wringing and debate. If you observe the youth camps that the Volksbund organise every year you will see a great deal of involvement of the younger generation in the furtherence of rememberance but at the same time acknowledgement of what happend in the both wars. They see it as learning about peace through the medium of what can happen when that is jeopardised by the state they live in. The anniversaries will not gain the high level of publicity etc. that they will in the UK but I am sure many in Germany will follow events with interest. I feel the Germans have moved on from the victim attitude that prevailed after the 2nd WW, more now a reflection on how misguided their citizens were to allow events to embroil them in two wars they should never have fought. I agree with George and Steve above in that what is emerging is making me feel uncomfortable and maybe something needs to be done. Are there not enough established experts on this Forum who, with we lesser folk behind them, could collectively voice their concerns? There are plenty of authors on here who do not live in the non-fictional world to match the Barkers of that genre, are there not? Such a consortium, allied with those they are connected with at the IWM, NAM etc. would pose a powerful lobby. Jim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GlenBanna Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 Mr Cameron described the commemorations as a truly national commemoration. The 5.3m education programme for pupils including school trips to the battlefields will not be available to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When he says "national" he must mean England. Glen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KGB Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 Mr Cameron described the commemorations as a truly national commemoration. The 5.3m education programme for pupils including school trips to the battlefields will not be available to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When he says "national" he must mean England. Glen Scotland will be independent by then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roughdiamond Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 Scotland will be independent by then. To go all pantomime, Oh no we won't! The Scots as a nation wanting independence (every poll has a NO majority) is as much a falacy as us all being ginger, porridge eating, haggis hunting, skinflint, alcoholic kilt wearers. Don't confuse a backlash against the Blairite Labour Party for rabid Nationalism, many people just couldn't stomach the thought of voting Tory or Lib Dem. Yeh I know I'm biting, but it's possible to be a proud Scot and Brit and I'm sick of being told by a vocal minority that you can't be. Sam (Bored and sober because I'm on earlies tommorow and narky because the Wife is watching X Factor) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 "Nothing could have been more decorous than the British Legion when it had united the various groups; too decorous as some old swaddies thought. The first Armistice Day had been a carnival; the second Armistice Day, after its solemn pause at the Two Minutes' Silence which King George V was believed to have initiated, was a day of festivity again. For some years I was one of a group of friends who met, every Armistice Day, at the Cafe Royal for no end of a party, until we began to find ourselves out of key with the new age. Imperceptibly, the Feast-Day became a Fast-Day and one could hardly go brawling on the Sabbath. The do-gooders captured the Armistice, and the British Legion seemed to make its principal outing a day of mourning. To march to the Cenotaph was too much like attending one's own funeral, and I know many old soldiers who found it increasingly discomforting, year by year. We preferred our reunions in private with no pacifist propaganda." I found this quite the most thought provoking paragraph that has appeared on the Forum for many a day. Similarly this thread is a very interesting one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trooper159 Posted 13 October , 2012 Share Posted 13 October , 2012 Every 11th November is a special day, my Grandfather lived through the carnage ( Sherwood Foresters ) each time i see a film or programme about WW1, i wonder how the hell he survived, brave men all Barry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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