Commando magazine and a whole host of other books and comics about WWII were as mother’s milk to me when I was growing up. But let’s face it many of my teachers, especially at Primary School were veterans of that conflict, it was only 20 years old when I was starting at school. That was more recent to my generation than the Falklands’ War is to this one.
Which makes it difficult to explain the total obsession with the war, more books than ever are being published, the TV has channels devoted to little else and there is always a new angle or subject. I do not get the sense that even in America or Russia that this continual diet of WWII history is normal and I don’t think that it is healthy.
It all explains a lot about the “Very well, alone” attitude that the UK is now almost boasting of. Strangely forgetting that in 1940 the country still had the active or passive support of the USA, Canada, NZ, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, India Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa, the West Indies, Kenya, Nigeria and many, many others including the Free French, Dutch, Poles and the Merchant Marines of Norway and Greece.
By 1945 the UK was struggling to be part of the Big Three and that was more than 75 years ago and it hasn’t got any bigger since. School boy comics about war do not make for sensible policy.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.