Review: The Wartime Diary of WD Terry: A ‘Safrican’ at Cambridge, with selected letters 1938-1941 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2024
One of the lesser-known World War II UK and Dominion Forces unit types was the Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit (GREU), or the Graves Registration Unit (GRU). These units were located behind the lines and were responsible for curating the war dead between their burial—theoretically by front line troops but not infrequently by GRUs themselves—and their concentration into permanent war cemeteries. This volume presents the wartime diaries of the Officer in Command of one such unit, the New Zealand Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit (NZGREU), during and immediately after the war's North African campaign. The diaries run from January 1941 to July 1943 and cover his journey from the UK to Egypt, his initial service in Egypt with a training battalion based at Maadi Camp outside Cairo, his service in Libya and Egypt with the NZGREU, and his return to New Zealand. Also included are a short essay on the work of GRUs in the Middle East and Africa, possibly written by him for the NZEF Times, a free newspaper produced for Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF) personnel, a series of excerpts from his official unit War Diary, and an unattributed and undated protocol, apparently issued to him as Officer in Command of the NZGREU, outlining the duties of a GRU. Collectively, these forgotten and till now unstudied documents provide a unique insight into both the role of, and everyday life in, a GRU during and immediately after the campaign, revealing to us their attendant routines, frustrations, dangers, stresses and—at times—disgust and horror. In this way they add significantly to our knowledge and understanding of the campaign, and also of these essential, but lesser-known units. The volume concludes with a postscript on the post war and possible future trajectory of the region's war cemeteries, including several of those on which Wally and his unit worked. The full text was published on Anzac Day 2024. A high resolution colour version of the book can be accessed via the link above.
Bluemel EN 417: Writing World War II Britain
2019
Monmouth University English Major Elective: Course Description and Objectives: This course is intended to introduce students to some of the most significant writing in English to emerge out of World War II, a crisis time in British history when England lost its empire and almost lost its independence. One of the key concepts we'll use to organize our thinking about this literature is that of "The People's War." This phrase, used at the time of war, captured the notion that war was transforming a highly stratified, class-conscious nation ruled by an aristocratic elite into a democratic nation ruled by "the people" who together would save it from Hitler. Total war, one involving all the people and impacting almost every aspect of life, presented writers with extraordinary challenges. Until very recently, literary historians believed these challenges were too much for British literature and declared that WWII, unlike WWI, had produced no great writing. We'll start from the opposite premise and assume that extraordinary challenges produce extraordinary writing, but that we might need to search for new kinds of writers and new kinds of writing in order to recognize such quality. We will analyze texts published during a fifteen year period, from 1938-1953, all written by British writers, some focusing on distant landscapes and cultures, many preoccupied with questions of national, personal, and political identity. One of our primary objectives is to understand the implications of these questions and be able to compare how different writers handle them. Another primary objective is to understand the connections between literary
Modernist Studies Association, 2019
1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” -- saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of homefront experience held a unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare. Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony. Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that deep past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Briggflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past. Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars. Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.