Annual Booklist 2020 : Dr Frances Houghton
Dr Frances Houghton is a researcher at the University of Manchester, where she is currently working on a project about medical care and masculine culture in the Royal Navy between 1939-45. Frances is interested in histories of combat, gender, sexuality, captivity, medicine, emotions, race, and memory in relation to the Second World War. Her first monograph, The Veterans' Tale: British Military Memoirs of the Second World War (CUP, 2019) won the SAHR Templer First Book Prize in 2020.
First on my list is John Ellis’s The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War II (1980). An ‘oldie but goodie’, Ellis’s book provides a comprehensive and highly readable ‘worm’s eye view’ of the experience of combat in the British army during the Second World War. Things I particularly value about this book are the meticulous detail in its analysis of the soldier’s life at the ‘sharp end’ and the sheer range of terrain Ellis covers, from morale and discipline, artillery and armour, to methods of relaxation among the troops.
Second, I thoroughly recommend Jeremy Crang’s The British Army and the People’s War 1939-1945 (2000), which proffers a fascinating and thought-provoking discussion of how the wartime British army existed as a social institution in a time of mass citizen conscription. Military institutions do not exist in a social and political vacuum, and as this book establishes, during the ‘People’s War’, an important process of osmosis occurred between the military’s absorption of civilian methods and expertise and the service’s return of initiatives surrounding education, legal aid, and personnel selection to the civilian realm. As Crang establishes, during the Second World War, the British army increasingly became more of a ‘part’ of the nation.
Third and fourth, I offer two of the many military memoirs written by veterans of the Second World War. Having recently finished my book on veterans’ war memoirs, it seemed fitting to award some of ‘my’ old trusties a place on this list but making a shortlist has proved quite agonising! To paraphrase the late Sir Bruce Forsyth, they’re all my favourite. Strong contenders included Sydney Jary’s 18 Platoon (1987), Ray Ward, The Mirror of Monte Cavallara: An Eighth Army Story (2006), Robert Woollcombe, Lion Rampant (1955), and Peter Cochrane, Charlie Company: In Service with C Company, 2nd Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders 1940-44 (1977). These books have moved me to tears and laughter on many occasions, and I feel they deserve a mention in despatches at the very least.
Probably my absolute favourite, though, is Alex Bowlby’s Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby (1969). As a very young Kipling-esque ‘gentleman ranker’, Bowlby found himself battling up through Italy in appalling conditions with a battalion of riflemen to whom he became devoted and most of whom were wiped out in heavy fighting on the Gothic Line in 1944. An elegiac memoir, in many ways this account echoes the canon of First World War military life-writing, but Bowlby’s black humour, earthiness, and intense vulnerability speak with a unique voice. Recollections also provides a brilliant insight into the strange alchemy that characterised the inner workings of the British army’s regimental system during the Second World War. In the same vein, George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here (1993) pays tribute to the wit, warmth, and courage of northern soldiers fighting in the Far East. With his acute eye for the ridiculous, MacDonald Fraser offers an endearing and poignant portrait of the travails of a Cumbrian regiment at the ‘sharp end’ of the Burma campaign. His views on ‘military history’ and Paul Fussell’s not-entirely-well-received-in-the-field Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (1989) are also very entertaining.
My fifth, and possibly slightly odd, choice is Leo Cooper’s All My Friends Will Buy It: A Bottlefield Tour (2005). This is a book about creating books about the British army, and provides a highly original insight into the world of a specialist publisher of British military history. Having performed his National Service as a subaltern in the 70th East African Brigade in Kenya during the 1950s (recounted here as a distinctly inglorious episode), Leo’s personal knowledge of the inner structures and workings of the British Army guided his ability to work with military veterans and authors to turn their narratives of lived experiences in, and historical exploits of, the army into publishable accounts. This is a perceptive, touching, and tremendously funny history of the birth of some of the great personal testimonies and scholarly histories of the British army, and very much deserves to be read widely.
In terms of a book I’d like to see written, one of the things which intrigues me about the British army during the Second World War (but also going much further back) was its connectivity with the many peoples and environments with which it came into contact around the empire. There is often a tendency to treat the army as innately detached from the colonial settings in which it so frequently operated, but in terms of appropriating language, food, medicine, etc., this separateness wasn’t always the case and regiments effectively became travelling archives of historical experiences in far flung corners of the globe. Someone may well have worked/be working on this, but I’d love to see a cultural-military history which examines how English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh regiments were infused with the languages and traditions of the peoples they encountered and the places to which they travelled.