The World at War (1973–1974): Season 1, Episode 26 - Remember - full transcript

Down this road,
on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived
for a thousand years... was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came,

the people were gathered together.

The men were taken
to garages and barns.

The women and children
were led down this road...



and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing
as their men were shot.

Then they were killed too.

A few weeks later,

many of those who had done
the killing were themselves dead -

in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour.

Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand
upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War, Britain
and her Commonwealth lost 480,000 dead.



120,000 of them
were from the Commonwealth.

60,000 were civilians -
men, women and children -

killed in air raids on Britain.

Compared to the slaughter of the
First World War, the total is not great.

But remember the dead,

each one a son, father, husband,

lover... brother.

We had a telegram to say
that he was missing on operations.

And it reads:

"Regret to inform
you that your husband,

Squadron Leader
Thomas Henry Desmond Drinkwater

is missing as the result
of air operations

on Thursday the 18th of May, 1944."

"Letter follows.
Any further information received

will be immediately
communicated to you."

"Pending receipt of written
notification from the Air Ministry,

no information should be given
to the press.?

It's very funny, a battlefield.
The other day I watched a duck shoot.

The actual area extended
to about four square miles,

of which a fifth was in action.

All the rest was waiting.
And a battlefield is like that.

It's extraordinary
how inanimate the whole thing seems.

There's a bit of an action
going on in the right-hand corner.

For the rest,
there are people lying about, smoking.

And waiting, and sleeping...

and waiting,

and waiting.

It's one of the things
that films and books don't bring out -

Tolstoy, perhaps, is the exception -

a battlefield
where nothing seems to be happening.

The action is always over a hedge
somewhere else,

and it's the decisive thing.

And then they ask you if you
were there. Well, you weren't.

Paris. June, 1940.

They were there all right.

But for these soldiers,
no parade, no triumph.

Not the way we're used to seeing it
on the newsreels.

All rather quiet, really.

Nothing much to write home about.

Or perhaps this actually was
the scene that would stay with them,

the moment the soldiers
would always remember.

Looking back, you know,
it's even 28 years now.

I can hear it and I can see it,

I can smell it.

And I think anybody who was there
must have exactly the same impression,

that, you know, it is something
that they will always remember.

There's much soldiers
don't want to forget.

At Mainz in West Germany, veterans
of the Deutsches Afrikakorps meet,

as they do every couple of years,
to relive the past.

There are wives and camp followers

and guests from Australia,
from Britain, from Italy.

Old comrades, old enemies,

old memories,

and plenty of beer.

It's a funny thing about marines,

or maybe a funny thing
about fighting men of all kinds,

their minds have a tendency
to cloud out all of the unhappy things

and you think only of the happy things.

When I'm with other marines
and we talk about the war,

we talk about some of the funny things.

We never really dwell
on the unhappy ones.

And I think that would be true
of fighting men all over the world.

One of the things
about being in a tank battalion

was that you lived completely
with the crew of your tank

and completely with your troop.

And so, at night, for example,
when one came in to laager,

one would dig a hole
and drive the tank over it

and you ate, slept
and did everything with your crew,

so that one got enormously fond of them

and one got to know each other
extremely well.

You knew they were making the right
decisions and you just drove on.

Apart from the fact you were young and
daft and would have gone anywhere.

We didn't really find time to, um,

well, have the sort of conversation
that we might have now sitting here.

I certainly never remember discussing,
well, the outcome of the war,

or whether the Germans were right
or we were right or anything like that.

It was just day to day,
honest-to-goodness living together,

and very pleasant it was.

We had a chap who was an
experienced butcher as the co-driver,

and he always arranged that there
should be two jerry cans of water

behind where the exhaust pipes
came out.

They'd be constantly
more or less on the boil.

And if, it seemed to me,
in the middle of a battle,

whatever was happening,
and he spied a pig,

he would leap out, unscrew the great
hammer you have for breaking tracks,

and rush off,
bash this pig on the head,

drag it back, bring it in through
the side pannier door, um,

and get hold of these two cans of water
and light up the stove,

and boil the water and scrape the pig.

We'd have delicious pork chops any
time day or night and lived very well.

And it was partly the sort of...
the sort of scavenging of the crews

and the finding of the wine and the jam
and the eggs and all the other things,

which helped make the comradeship
one of the things that made it such fun.

Fun. And fear.

I don't think I was frightened.
I was scared.

You know, when you're scared,
you're more alert.

It's like you're playing a game
with somebody through the woods.

You've got a gun, he's got a gun. Who's
gonna shoot first? It's like a duel.

Who's gonna turn
and pull the trigger first?

Fear and fun.

Moments, even, of beauty.

Well, I speak of the
"lust of the eye", a biblical phrase,

because much of the appeal of battle

is simply this attraction of the, uh,

outlandish, the strange.

But there is, of course,
an element of beauty in this,

and I must say that this is surely,
from ancient times,

one of the most enduring
appeals of battle.

One could be drawn into,
absorbed, by the spectacle.

I think especially of southern France,
the terrific bombardment of our planes

coming over the southern coast
of France.

I literally expected the coast
to detach itself

and... and go into the ocean.

But, uh, to watch this
was to forget that you had to...

When it stopped,
you had to get into landing boats

and make off for the shore.

It was, uh, just at dawn,

and a terrific spectacle
in which I think everybody,

including, of course, myself,
was drawn into it,

so that we forgot all about ourselves.

A city falls.

In an hour, a soldier,
senses quickened, time speeded up,

might kill and make love
and face death again.

One room had a piano and I was sitting
at the piano playing with one finger.

This British soldier, a real, uh...

You couldn't have made a better cartoon
of a typical British infantryman.

He was grimy, he was dirty,
he had his helmet on,

he had his Enfield rifle,

he had grenades festooned on him,

and he had this young
15-year-old Italian chick with him,

a very buxom young lass who did not
look inexperienced in spite of her age.

And he nodded very politely to me
and then ignored me totally

and went to a cupboard over
in the corner and found some, uh,

nice, uh...

lace, uh,

table napery or nappery. Whatever.

He found a, uh, doily,
which he placed on the floor.

He was very delicate, because
the room was full of plaster dust

and proceeded to cohabit with this girl
on the doily.

It was very delicate of him, you know.

And I'm sitting there picking out
a tune on the piano watching...

The whole thing was a weird scene.

And I felt,
"Would it be better if I left?"

Then [ felt, "It would be too..."
I was trying to do the polite thing.

I was trying to, uh...

They never, in a sense,
gave me a chance to leave, really.

And so, they left.

The girl smiled over her shoulder at me
and the soldier said, "So long, Yank,"

or something like that,
went back out and back to battle.

It was a weird sort of a...
Probably, in many ways,

probably the weirdest and strangest
and most sort of dreamlike thing

ll can remember out of the whole war,

this little episode
which lasted about five minutes.

Good to remember the good days.

The soldiers were welcome.
Everyone was happy.

The wine was red.

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas

remembers the liberation
of the Burgundy vineyards.

The French army paused.

The Americans couldn't understand it.

They were in the mountains.
I remember General Patch saying,

"You know about the French.
Why aren't they advancing?"?

"They're at this place, Chalons."
I looked at the map.

There's a Chalons sur Sad?ne

at the beginning
of the Burgundy vineyard country.

I go across and there was
de Lattre de Tassigny,

Monsalbert and their staff
looking at the problem.

They had Larmat'sAtlas Vinicole
de la Francein front of them.

And they were studying it
because it would be tragic

if they fought through
Beaune and Nuits St George

and the great vineyards of Burgundy.

France would never forgive them.
And they were paused.

A young sous-lieutenant said:

"Courage, my generals, I've found
the weak spot of the German defences."

"Every one is on a vineyard
of inferior quality."

De Lattre made his decision,
"J'attaque.?

And for three days,
we fought our way through the cellars.

And on the third day I emerged
bewildered, looking towards Dijon

and I realised we'd liberated Burgundy.

The poets saw beneath the skin.

Vergissmeinnicht- Forget me not.

"Three weeks gone
and the combatants gone

returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again,

and found the soldier
sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing.

As we came on that day,
he hit my tank with one

like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the
dishonoured picture of his girl

SteffLVergissmeinnicht.
In a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content, abased,
and seeming to have paid and mocked at

by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are
mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Remember the war poet, Keith Douglas,

killed in Normandy in 1944.

Away from the front, beyond the battle,

the soldiers came and went as strangers.

After a few weeks in the line,

I got away one afternoon
and climbed up into the Apennines

and met the old hermit.

We sat down and began to talk,

and of course the artillery
in the valley below opened up

and he began to ask me questions
about the war.

And I gradually became aware
that he didn't know what was going on.

My attempts to explain
what was going on faltered,

not only because of my...
rather poor Italian,

but because I suddenly realised that
I couldn't possibly explain to him...

why Americans, Britishers,
were fighting in Italy against Germans

with Italians on both sides.

It seemed an impossible task.

Even had he been speaking
my own language,

I wouldn't have been able to tell him
what the war was about,

because I didn't really know myself,

in any deeper sense,
what the war was about.

In a sense, the people I fought with
in the war were, in my view, all heroes,

in the sense that they were...

tremendous believers
in what we were trying to do.

There was an amazing spirit
of dedication to the task in hand.

This was very moving,
and a tremendous inspiration.

Whose idea it was, of course,
you can never trace,

but it was a sort of infection.

This applied to people
from all over the world,

and Bomber Command was an
extraordinarily cosmopolitan command.

I think, by the time I was in it,

about 40% of it came from overseas,

mostly from New Zealand,
Australia, Canada,

but also from many other countries
and not all, by any means, British.

I mean, there were lots of Czechs
and Poles serving in Bomber Command.

And the spirit of dedication was,
as I say, moving.

But where it really came from
is something I've never understood.

The task in hand inspired the idea.

In that sense,
I think this was a heroic idea.

It's just now and again
the nightmare in the night,

where you just remember somebody who...

You turn around
on the deck of a destroyer

and next minute he wasn't there.

You know, he'd gone, swept away.

Casualties were bad at any time,

but particularly in the last two months
of the war.

There were men you'd been with for five
years. They were not just colleagues.

You were close.
You knew all about them,

and you saw them getting knocked off
in the last few days, particularly sad.

" Am commanded by the Air Council to
state that in view of the lapse of time

and the absence of any further news
regarding your husband,

Acting Squadron Leader
THD Drinkwater DFC,

since the date on which
he was reported missing,

they must regretfully conclude
that he has lost his life

and his death had now been presumed
for official purposes

to have occurred
on the 18th of May, 1944."

I don't think any of us were, you know,

patriotic men in the sense

that we would stand rigidly
to attention and wave flags.

We were just glad to be alive
and, in some way, you know,

we were rather proud that this kind
of army we'd been in for so long,

which had done so many daft things and
where we'd been bellowed and shouted at

and, uh, generally mucked around

and spent thousands of hours
on exercises

and standing about in the rain
and the mud and the snow,

had finally managed to bring off what,

when you look at it in fairly cold
light, was a pretty big adventure.

I couldn't understand
why people went to Cenotaph ceremonies.

I go now, and I'm proud to go, because I
remember the people who didn't come back

and out of it comes
this terrible feeling in my mind

of waste and yet of proud comradeship.

You're lying in a trench
and the shells come down.

You're frightened to death.
The chap next to you says:

"Have a cigarette, mate.
It'll go. It's like rain.?

You realise he's a better man than you.

He's given you the strength to go on,

and that is what you remember
out of the war.

It's the comradeship.

Remember the comradeship,

and remember the suffering.

Another road, another village -

same orders.

Soldiers.

Some seeing, not feeling,

others enjoying their work.

It's one of the
melancholy aspects of human nature.

You notice it with boys who love to
break windows to hear the glass tinkle,

but there are a great many soldiers

who take a great pleasure

in destroying people,

wasting things.

I find this aspect of human nature
not discussed enough,

but it is surely one
of the causes of warfare.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War she started,
Germany lost nearly five million dead.

Two and a half million
were killed in action,

one and a half million
died in Russian prison camps.

Half a million German civilians
died in Allied bombing raids,

another half million at the war's end.

Remember the dead
and the scarred survivors.

The effect of war
on people who take part in it

is, of course, extremely various.

Lots of people are maimed, completely,
either mentally or physically.

But I suppose the majority of those
who survive, survive apparently intact.

But there must be marked effects,

and in some ways the effects
are very good on people,

because they feel that
they've been able to fulfil themselves.

A lot of people go through life without
ever feeling a sense of fulfilment,

but those who take part
in hectic war operations

usually get a sense of fulfiiment,

to some extent, especially if they
believe in what they're trying to do,

which I think in war
people tend to do very readily.

On the other hand, I think there are
very bad effects, obvious bad effects.

Perhaps one of the less obvious ones

is that people who undertake
these operations

I think have a tendency
to feel afterwards

that society owes them
something very special.

And when the war is over, they tend to
go home or back to where they came from

and expect people to look up to them
and to look after them,

which is not what people are going to
do at all, nor what people ought to do.

Remember the mud.

You get used to it, of course.

You get used to anything...

easily hardened to other suffering.

It's a curious thing.
You could equate it to television

and what it's done to us, in many ways.

The realities of the situation

people are still wanting
to sweep under the carpet.

I turned round to my kids during the
napalm bombing in Vietnam and I said:

"Just don't sit there.

"That is a real child, that burning
torch running across a field."

But it means nothing to them.

That is a real man scrambling
for a potato, soon to starve to death.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War,
two and half million Japanese died.

Among them, half a million civilians.

Japanese fighting men
fought to the death.

Nearly 20 Japanese soldiers were killed
for every one wounded or maimed.

We had this orthopod,
or orthopaedic surgeon, from Baltimore,

and, uh... he gave me the definition
that I've used all these many years

of sympathy for the disability.

He said, "Son, you know
where you find sympathy?"

He said, "You find it in the dictionary
between 'Shit' and 'Syphilis"."

And I've remembered that
all these many years.

Remember the civilians
who got in the way.

You could miss seeing them
from a bomber,

but on the ground the soldiers knew.

One of the things that seemed to
me to cause most guilt in World War ll

was this failure to discriminate between
combatants and non-combatants.

I felt, even then,
as many other soldiers did,

that we were guilty of
indiscriminate terroristic bombing.

Many soldiers had to kill innocent
women and children, non-combatants.

In this sense, there is such a thing
as collective guilt

insofar as this decision
was made at the highest levels

and approved by many people,

both soldiers and... and civilians.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War, America
was not invaded or even bombed,

but the United States
lost 300,000 fighting men,

killed in action far from home.

Well, what I found when I came home,

and I've been rather disgusted
with myself ever since,

was that, uh...

the readjustment to their kind of life,

the life that I led before myself,

was virtually impossible,

because however much you hate
being in a war,

the things that you come back to
seem very, very trivial.

Reporting the council talking about
a new gents' lavatory, things like this,

don't seem to matter at all.

And, of course, these things matter
to the people around you.

And I shut up, I shut myself in,
for about a year.

I must have behaved extremely badly,
I'm well aware of it.

And I've never forgotten it, and
I've never ceased to feel sorry for it,

because it must have made life pretty
intolerable for the people around me.

But it was just that I couldn't...
l couldn't... communicate.

I had lost my sense of communication

with the people that I had known
for all those years,

because I had begun to understand
an entirely new breed of people

who were all thrown together, um...

in a common thing. I think that was it.

More roads to more villages.

More orders to obey.

"Corporal, take two men
and clear the village."

"Leave the men behind for now."

"Move the women and children."

"Corporal, hurry the goodbyes up,
will you?"

I think it has taught me,
all the rest of my life,

that there is a line
which a man dare not cross,

a line which separates
the reasonably just and human

from the mere functionary.

The corporal and the soldiers
have wives and children too.

Remember the Russian dead.

In the Second World War, the
Soviet Union, already bled by Stalin,

lost... 20 million dead.

Millions in action on Russian soil -

the bloody defeats of '41 and '42,

the bloody victories of '43 and '45.

And millions of prisoners of war
died in German hands,

deprived of food, clothing, shelter.

For these prisoners, no escape.

About a million were shot.

And millions of Russian civilians
died from shooting, bombing, shelling,

forced winter marches,
engineered starvation.

20th-century total war.

Remember the Russian dead...

the 20 million.

Soldiers, remember the dead.

Remember all the others.

15 million Chinese died in the
Second World War, most from starvation.

And in occupied Europe, more than
a million and a half Yugoslavs died

for a country
that never stopped fighting.

And three million Poles
and more than five million Jews.

And over half a million Frenchmen
and women, many in the Resistance.

And brave men and women in Norway
and Holland and Denmark and Belgium.

And hundreds of thousands
in Czechoslovakia,

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary.

And over 300,000 Greeks.

And half a million Italians

in a country that was fought over
and fought on both sides.

And Spaniards in Russia
and Indians in Burma.

Remember them all.

55 million dead.

"I did not know death
had undone so many."

Mothers and daughters,

fathers and sons.

The young are too young to remember,

perhaps too young to understand.

One of the great effects
of war upon people who take part in it

is the extent to which it tends
to cut them off

from both their elders
and their own children.

And, um, the same thing applies,
in a different way,

as between a father and a son.

I mean, I feel this myself
in my own relationship with my parents

at the time of the war
and with my children today,

that, in a sense,
they neither can nor wish to envisage

the circumstances
in which we lived in the war.

And we have a rather arrogant feeling
that they ought to wish to understand

these dreadful things that happened,
but they don't.

And this cuts one off both from
the older and the younger generation.

People are, in any case,
cut off from these generations.

There is a generation gap
under any circumstances,

but I think war,
as in so many other aspects of life,

tends to emphasise
those sort of considerations,

and very much so in creating
and nourishing a generation gap.

Nuremberg.

Here on this ground, Adolf Hitler
spoke to the National Socialist Party

and to the German nation, 40 years ago.

40 years on, West Germany's chancellor,

twice elected by popular vote,
is Willy Brandt.

Brandt was a traitor
to Hitler's Germany.

He fought in the Norwegian Resistance.

In Warsaw, as in Jerusalem,

he remembers the dead.

Of all Germans alive today,

half were not born
when the Second World War began.

We have things to remember him by.

We've got one here
from Buckingham Palace.

"The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt
sympathy in your great sorrow."

"We pray that your country's gratitude
for a life so nobly given

in its service may bring you
some measure of consolation."

1939-45.

E Bickerstone, J Curtis,

E Fraser, I Humphrey,

G Nixon, A Schofield,

I Chandler, A Flower,

S Horan, C Nixon...

They were very young.

They did not ask to die as heroes.

They would rather have lived
for those that loved them,

those they loved.

And this was the last
letter he ever wrote to his wife...

"Darling, let me tell you again
I love you."

"This past weekend has made me
so pleased that you are my wife

because I am so in love with you

and I know I shall love you
for the rest of my life."

"And darling, thank you for loving me."

"My sweet, I am sure you have
got something belonging to me

because I am always so happy
when I am with you,

but as soon as we are apart,
I just go as flat as can be."

" am like a man with no brain,
but only a memory for you.?

"Oh, darling, it is terrible."

"Please don't think
I am sloppy or stupid,

though I may be,
but I just can't get over it."

"Perhaps I am a bit tired tonight,

and after a night's rest
I shall be better

and able to write you a nice letter."

"Anyway, I'll see."

"I'm afraid, darling, my operational
flying days are nearly over."

"The wing commander
has told me twice already this evening

that I can't go on so many shows
in future,

and he is very concerned about it."

"He said, 'Out of fairness
to you and your wife,

I don't intend for you to stay on ops
much longer, even if you want to.(Trademark)

"You see, there was something
in what I said."

"But, hell,
I am going to miss this life."

"I have had over three years of it

and the trouble is now
that I know nothing else "

"My sweet, I must off to bed now."

"I can hardly see what I'm writing."

"I love you, my own precious darling,

more than anything else in this world."

"Yours forever, Tom."

At the village of Oradour-sur-Glane,

the day the soldiers came,

They killed more than
600 men, women and children.

Remember.