John Munro’s War: Part 7 – 1946

In May John’s name again appears in the farm diary being paid the same rate as Roy, now on 76 shillings per week. He was finally released from military service in July. He was described on his army testimonial as a reliable type, a good driver who carried out his duties in a hard working manner. The tank commander who went on to spend 3 years in enemy labour camps never drove again, except the farm’s tractors. The enthusiastic, rebellious teenager who enlisted without his parents knowledge in May 1939 returned home a thoughtful, fairly reserved man. Always affable and sociable when required he never pursued much of a social life outside the family, unlike his young brother, Roy. Never dated. Never married. He was a voracious reader and his extended knowledge and intelligence meant he was always engaging to talk with. Quick to laugh and anger in equal measure he could be insensitive at times but was considerate and kindly for all that. While his mind remained sharp his body was crippled by arthritis and he suffered greatly but a friendly vet was on hand to prescribe painkillers for John as well as for the animals on the farm.

There was symmetry to John Munro’s war. He enlisted as an 18-year-old on 9 May 1939 and was freed from his prison camp around 9 May 1945. In May 2011 with his health deteriorating John one day decided he’d endured enough, went upstairs, climbed into bed, turned his face to the wall, refused food and drink and waited for death which came on the 12 May, at the age of ninety.  

John Munro’s War: Part 2 – 1941

By February 1941 Germany’s Afrika Korps commander, Major General Rommel, had landed a force at the Libyan capital of Tripoli in support of the Italians who were struggling to contain the British. Rommel’s tank companies proved a formidable enemy and within a matter of weeks British forces had retreated to the Egyptian border. 

Far from the heat of war in the Western Desert Scotland was suffering severe winter weather during which many of the farm’s lambs died of exposure to the extreme conditions. Grass sickness stopped the breeding of horses on the farm and the numbers of their working horse fell with some of the tasks previously undertaken by horses transferred to a paraffin-fuelled tractor.

John’s uncle, Duncan MacRae, awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the First World War, and grieve (foreman) on the farm during the Second lived with his family in one of the farm cottages close to the steading. In addition to firewood and farm produced food such as oats and potatoes, eggs etc he was paid £11. 10s a month in 1941. The farm employed five other men – for example cattleman Frank McLeod who received £105 a year and others whose wages ranged between 48 shillings and 54 shillings per week. John’s young brother, Roy, was paid between £7 and £13 per month, dependent on hours. John’s sister, Margaret, when not away working as a nanny earned the occasional £7 or £8 at busy times.

John’s father’s farm diaries rarely include any references to family events but on 3^rd December 1941 he noted –

“John sailed. Cable sent from Glasgow – 2^nd Feb about 9 weeks at sea.”

John had been transferred from the Seaforths to the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps, a tank corps that replaced the old horse cavalry regiments. In April 1939 the Royal Tank Corps had been  renamed the Royal Tank Regiment, part of the RAC.  John was recruited into the Reconnaissance Corps which was setup in January 1941, to carry out reconnaissance – scouting ahead of infantry divisions before they advanced – and disbanded in 1946. Recruits into this corps were selected through an intelligence test before being trained as drivers, wireless operators, mechanics and assault infantrymen. Many failed the test and were sent back to their own units. During World War 2 the Reconnaissance Corps served in the Middle East, East Africa, North Africa and the Far East.

During 1941 B battalion 3 RTR were in Greece fighting Italians but I have no evidence John was stationed there although some family members believe he was in Crete where fighting had spread from mainland Greece. Both were terrible bloody encounters and defeats for the Allies despite Britain’s determination to hold Crete which was regarded as essential to British interests as a vital refuelling base in the eastern Mediterranean since 1940. (The first reference John makes to being with the RTR is the following February).

The 3^rd December 1941 is the date on the first of John’s letters I have.

Dear Mam,

We are safely aboard at last. I’m afraid the paper you was sending on is a bit late now. Well it will be sent on later I suppose. We had a sing-song last night and we had a fairly early reveille this morning. Has Roy got busy pushing the pram yet. He can hitch it behind the motor bike he was to get. They will all be settled down for the winter now at home at the neeps. This letter may take some time on arriving as it will be censored and perhaps kept back for a while. Well I am afraid I cannot say much more.

I am your loving son John.

I don’t associate John with sing-songs as the John who returned from war was quite reserved but at twenty and surrounded by comrades he comes across as carefree and with a keen sense of humour. Roy was his young brother and the pram reference is to their sister Chris’ recent baby. Neeps are swedes and it’s clear John is thinking about the life he left at home on the farm.  

Just over two weeks later John writes home again, he’s contemplating the turn into the new year of 1942 but otherwise has little to say partly because of the army’s strict censorship rules, though he does hint at where he currently is –

“I can’t say where I am but it’s hot enough anyway. I have hardly anything on but I am sweating like a pig. We may not be here long and I think it may be a lot hotter yet.”

John Munro’s War: Part 1 1939-1940

This is a partial record of one man’s war divided into seven parts.

Part 1

Thursday 10 May 1945. A postcard written in pencil.

“Rested here overnight when making our way back to the American lines from near Dresden.”

Here being Lederan in Gasten Chemnitz in eastern Germany. The picture postcard was written by 24-year-old John Munro and it appears he was accompanied by several others: Tom and John Whitehead, Chris Simmons, Norrie Thompson, Bill McKay. C. Simmons, Tom S Whitehead who have added their signatures to the reverse of the card – all survivors of the Nazi work camp, Stalag IV-A. On the defeat of Germany that May the camp guards simply abandoned their posts and left the gates open as they hurried away. 

Eastern Germany around Chemnitz was a centre of war-time industries producing military hardware so became a focus of allied bombing aimed at disrupting production and destroying German lines of communication in the east of the country. Some forty miles away was the famously beautiful and culturally important city of Dresden which had escaped direct attack while bombs targeted the region’s manufacturing sector but on the night of 13^th/14^th February Operation Thunderclap changed that when Dresden became the prime target for one of the most controversial Allies’ decisions of the war. The Soviet army approaching from the east and their allies, the British and Americans, were keen to create confusion to prevent German concentration of power in the region and possible resurgence of strength. Punishing the German people was also somewhere in the mix and a curiosity over the effectiveness of firestorm in conflict. As well as Dresden’s own citizens thousands of refugees were also passing through the city (fleeing from approaching Soviet troops), and prisoners of war (POWs) – one of them the American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, later wrote about the terrible scenes he witnessed in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. He was one of a number of POWs put to work recovering the tens of thousands of bodies of people who had been burned to death or suffocated in the firestorm that engulfed Dresden when Allied aircraft dropped tons of incendiary bombs on its civilian population. The following night Chemnitz was the target.

Prisoners at Stalag IV-A camp would have been well aware of the increasing assaults on the cities of eastern Germany from the flames that leapt into the sky and, presumably, been given hope that the end of the war was close. At the same time allied bombardments created interruptions to food supplies and Red Cross parcels were stolen more than was usual. Camp guards as well as prisoners were near starving and by early May with the Red Army progressing across country guards abandoned their posts and left the camp gates open. By 8^th May 1945 Chemnitz was occupied by Soviet troops.

C. Simmons and Tom S. Whitehead jotted down their names on a scrap of map of the Freiberg region that John Munro took home with him. Did they use maps to find their way across country after liberation? Possibly.

*

John Munro came from Ross and Cromarty in Scotland where his parents were farmers just north of Inverness. As a farmer John would have been exempted from military service at the beginning of the war but he was barely 18 and headstrong so he enlisted as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders at Strathpeffer without telling his parents four months before conscription was introduced in 1939.

1939

There must have been a lot of talk about war around the Munro kitchen table that May. While to some the country north of Inverness might suggest an idyll of out-of-the-way peace it was far from it – nearby Strathpeffer, Jamestown, Achterneed, the Heights, Blairninich became centres of military activity throughout the war and were restricted areas which meant travel passes were required for everyone, locals included. Private homes as well as hotels and public buildings were commandeered by the military – officers setting themselves up in the smartest of houses – other ranks were accommodated as available and the overflow put up in camps of wooden huts and tents. Land was allocated for military training – rifle and shelling ranges. People came in from across the UK and the world: Newfoundlander and Honduran foresters brought to Scotland to boost the country’s forestry workers (lumberjacks and lumberjills), to provide essential timber supplies for building, aircraft, shipping, mining, telegraph poles and so on. Immediately west of the Munro’s farm practice trenches were dug out on either side of the Black Water, the river that ran through their land. To assist the professionals, locals either too old or in reserve occupations, were able to provide back-up and feel they were contributing to the defence of the country through participation in the Home Guard. John’s father signed up with them and was issued with a pair of boots of different sizes. I expect another volunteer had a similar pair.

On the eve of a war that would transform so much of British life resonances of the past endured. Horses were important means of working muscle. On John’s family’s farm there were 5 working horses plus 2 young ones and a foal that summer of ’39, along with a Shetland pony that was taken as a mascot by one of the military units, likely the Lovat Scouts or Seaforth Highlanders. Horse numbers were decreasing with the advent of the tractor. Just a year or two earlier no fewer than 11 horses were being worked on the family farm. The horses all had names and some of the cattle (mainly Highland and Galloway) on this mixed farm – big cow, broken horned cow, teen, Bonnie, Captain Smith’s, old red cow, old blue cow, roan dairy cow, little red cow. Flocks of sheep were predominantly Cheviots and Leicesters. There were also 140 hens, 30 ducks and 25 turkeys – for people used to eat turkey eggs back then. And crops that included oats, barley, swedes and potatoes.

At just 18, John was surely regarded by his father as a permanent member of the farm’s workforce which he hadn’t expected to lose. As a farmhand John was paid the average wage for a male farm servant of £4 per week (housing and perks were provided on top of basic pay) and £3 for women. That May he received £15 for three weeks work before he left for military service. John’s father, always very involved in local affairs, assisted in assessing damage to Strathpeffer’s Kinettas grass parks and Kinnellan Avenue by Lovat Scouts – broken verges, fences, abandoned water troughs for their horses and general rubbish from their camp.

1940

North Africa became a main theatre of war between Allied and Axis powers over that essential trade route, the Suez Canal. At the outbreak of war the canal was controlled by the British who depended upon it for oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and it became a target for the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. In June 1940 Italy declared war on Britian and France and in September Italian troops invaded Egypt from Libya which had been colonised by Italy in 1911. 

John had swapped working as a farmer for working as a soldier. He earned a soldier’s pay now and paid income tax the same as he would have at home. He would be liable for income tax throughout his time at war, as a prisoner of war. Had he been wealthy or an officer he could have claimed tax relief on investments held outside the UK curiously enough.

BBC: Myth or Magic part 2 – In Wonderland they Lie

Second part of a sideways glance at the BBC prompted by Tom Mills’ book The BBC: Myth of a Public Service.

In a Wonderland they lie

In part one I mentioned how proactive the BBC was in attacking striking workers during the 1926 General Strike so it is not surprising it provided the government with a vehicle for propaganda during the Second World War. Now there is nothing unexpected about that for no country would allow any publicly financed medium become something of a fifth column – issuing news and briefings critical of the constitutional authority. Mind you before that war the BBC could be found in the camp of appeasers along with major British newspapers such as the Daily Mail, Sunday Dispatch and London Evening News owned by Lord Rothermere and The Times and The Observer owned by Lord Astor all of which were relaxed over developments in Germany during the 1930s when many from Britain’s upper middle class and aristocracy were sympathetic to Hitler’s Nazis – the very classes at the helm at the BBC. According to Mills, ‘speakers hostile to fascism were barred from broadcasting’ on the BBC which drew a rebuke from Churchill that he,  an anti-appeaser, was one.  

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing

 The BBC’s own interpretation of its conduct in the war on its website is a polished piece of guarded-speak which emphasises the integrity of BBC management and reaffirms the BBC as ‘a trusted news source’ and how the BBC resisted becoming simply a tool of government. It would, it insisted at the time, broadcast ‘the truth’ but omit anything that might ‘endanger the civilian population or jeopardise operations.’ To this end it admits heavily censoring news to omit mentions of high casualties among the Allies. There was not a single reference in the BBC website I consulted to its propaganda operations later made famous by George Orwell.

BBC chooses whose opinions may be heard in 1933

Orwell was one of many recruited by the government to work within its vast Ministry of Information, as Talks Producer at the BBC. You can see how smudged that line is between both institutions. For the Ministry of Information you could read Ministry of Misinformation. Other famous writers similarly employed included J. B Priestly and Graham Greene (whose brother Hugh Greene worked for the BBC’s German service and later he became Director General of the BBC)

The brilliant cartoonist David Low refused to be used as a propagandist for the government/BBC and the writer C. S. Lewis also refused to participate in disseminating lies.

Even the once enthusiastic Orwell later changed his mind on the integrity of outright propaganda, ‘all propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.’ His prescient novel, 1984, was written while his experience of working for the government/BBC was fresh in his mind and the novel’s Ministry of Information became the terrifying Ministry of Truth.

 The acknowledged importance of the BBC’s output during WW2 both for home and overseas audiences demonstrates the potency of its influence over the public’s perceptions of truth.

The Party’s go-to tactic for maintaining power is to shift blame to a designated scapegoat, toward which all of its constituents’ hatred and violence may be directed

Broadcasters enjoy a privileged role in life able to construct narratives in tune with their own opinions aimed at persuading their audience of the legitimacy of their interpretation of events. The BBC is not a place to hear radically divergent views instead it promotes that small c conservatism that is in tune with all of the major institutions in the UK. Like some well-oiled machine of state government, the City of London, the courts, military, royalty and the BBC reinforce one another and operate to maintain the status quo where the top brass in all of these institutions remain in charge.

The power of the BBC to censor its airwaves

We have seen how the BBC sought to sway opinion against workers during the General Strike how it was in tune with the reactionary press during the 1930s in relation to Germany and its willingness to broadcast a catalogue of myths and lies during the war and that aspect of its character was no less slanted post-war.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

During the Suez crisis of 1956 Britain found itself divided between those who defended the Empire and Britain’s military presence at the Suez canal and its control over this vital trade route and supporters of Egypt, a nation desperate to shake off its shackles as a colony and assert its independence. Britain’s rightwing were seething with racist venom against uppity and ungrateful Egyptians their xenophobia evident in many references to ‘our boys’ versus ‘wogs’ and ‘gyppos’ .

The Director General of the BBC dined at Number 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister on the evening of 26 July 1956 when news broke of Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company.  As Tony Shaw in his book, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis, explains the chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors, and a former under-security at the Foreign Office (and share holder in the Suez Canal Company) nipped down to Downing street to discuss how the BBC should handle the crisis. A nervous government was said to have threatened to take over the BBC entirely but that appears was an exaggerated claim however it was made clear to the broadcaster that its handling of Suez should be on a war footing with all that involved including censorship. And, as Shaw points out, the DG of the BBC and his chief assistant were trusted with highly secret information in the run-up to military action.

The chairman of the Independent Television Authority, Sir Kenneth Clark, was also approached and asked to ‘slant the news about Suez’ but he refused to co-operate with the government on grounds of the need to retain impartiality.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Despite much hand wringing at the BBC the corporation complied with the government and broadcast carefully constructed reports and interviews or simply relayed official statements. It repulsed any attempt for outright government control over its output but did undertake close liaison with the Ministry of Defence and departments of the military.

Meanwhile in Cyprus an ostensibly independent radio station known as Sharqal-Adna but run by British Intelligence and ‘known’ to BBC management transmitted pro-British propaganda as did the BBC’s Arabic Service. Reminiscent of the Iraq wars enemy casualties were not counted or reported realistically and there were no first hand reports of bombings or the impact of British actions on civilians. Shaw noted  that BBC

‘bulletins on the whole bore such a close resemblance to so much of the officially released information on the invasion [it] suggests that the government’s machinery of liaison paid dividends.’

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started…

Big events such as the General Strike, WW2 and Suez highlight the hugely influential function of the BBC. One that is more memorable for readers will be Hillsborough. It wasn’t only The Sun that chose to become a mouthpiece for the official police version of events.  

BBC Radio 2 reported: “Unconfirmed reports that a door was broken down at the end that was holding Liverpool supporters.”

Mills tells us that Graham Kelly, Chief Executive of the English Football Association, who was interviewed on Radio 2 implied that the police had not ordered the gates to be opened. This was as was later became apparent not true but repeated by another reporter

“…at ten to three there was a surge of fans at the Leppings lane end of the ground… the surge composed of about 500 Liverpool fans and the police say that a gate was forced and that led to a crush in the terracing area – well under capacity I’m told, there was still plenty of room inside that area…”

Such shameful distortions of the truth continued to be broadcast on the BBC – Radio 4 news at 6pm still insisted that fans without tickets pushed their way into the football ground causing the disaster –

“It’s clear that many hundreds of Liverpool fans travelled to Hillsborough even though they didn’t have tickets for the game. Shortly before the match started it appears that these fans were able to get into the ground through a gate at the Leppings Lane end.”

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing

The BBC went further in its reporting of the so-called Battle of Orgreave in June 1984 when striking miners were battered by police. The corporation went out of its way to edit film in such a way it altered the sequence of events and broadcast film that was deliberately constructed to lie to viewers in something straight out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.  

Mills: the BBC was ‘blatantly biased in their output to the extent it ‘chopped up and re-sequenced’ film of the picket attack to ‘make it appear miners provoked the police.’

With no hint of impartiality BBC reporters referred to miners as ‘law-breakers’. When confronted by their biased reporting the BBC immediately issued denials – as it invariably does when caught out.

“no evidence of any deliberate attempt to mislead viewers”

“marginal imbalance”

not “wholly impartial”

What did happen at Orgreave, and unreported on the BBC, was that the police launched an unprovoked attack on striking men who retaliated with missiles.

It took the BBC 7 years to own up to this deliberate manipulation of events

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/orgreave-truth-police-miners-strike

The BBC is almost unique in this country in its ability to mould public opinion. We found out in part 1 that the ‘impartial’ BBC is not keen on CND and peace campaigners in general but allows itself to be used as a bugle boy for British military campaigns. At the time of the Iraq war it was so openly jingoistic it allocated only 2% output to the views of people opposed to this war.  

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/mehdi-hasan-bbc-wing-bias-corporation

The BBC is very good at lots of things including marginalising groups it disapproves of such as the peace movement. At the same time it is supremely capable of enhancing organisations and views that fit in with the ethos of the men and women who wield influence at the BBC.

Banking and big business command great respect within the organisation, including the rural business of farming. We know this because the BBC has rather a lot of business slots as stand-alone programmes –

BBC In Business; Business Daily, The Bottom Line, Global Business, The World of Business, World Business Report, Talking Business, BBC Business Live, Business Matters, Dragon’s Den, Wake Up to Money, Inside Business with more of a similar hue dished up in Scotland, hourly on the lamentable Good Morning Scotland

– and teams of employees who feed economic and business data into news and current affairs programmes. By contrast it has no designated slots to reflect on green issues, or anti-business views or workers’ issues that might be at the heart of trades unions or indeed peace campaigning. The only perspective that interests the BBC are those of employers and a peek at the make-up of who’s who in the BBC which will be covered in a separate blog shows this is only to be expected. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours is surely carved over the front door at the BBC. This preoccupation the BBC has for finance and business is explored by Mills.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely

The Business and  Economics Unit at the BBC was set up in 1989 and I checked the BBC Website to see what this unit had to say for itself. The underlining emphasis is mine.

“The Business and Economics Unit is at the heart of BBC News. We produce output for all BBC platforms and offer editorial guidance to the full range of BBC programmes. We have a truly global presence including teams based in Singapore, New York, Johannesburg and Mumbai.

The Economics Editor holds one of the most senior roles in BBC News, leading the BBC’s coverage across all platforms, domestic and international…Reporting to the Editor, Business and Economics Unit, the Economics Editor will be a regular contributor to the main TV and radio news bulletins and programmes, as well as to BBC News Online. Much of the role will focus on providing material for the Six and Ten O’clock News, the 1800 Radio 4 news bulletin and the Today Programme…  a primary contact for senior figures in Government and the Business/Economics community.”

We can take from this that the BBC regards the promotion of trade and commerce as one of its prime functions.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons

According to Mills the BBC fell for the charms of the economic and business sectors with the flourishing of New Labour that neo-liberal progeny of Thatcherism. As a consequence obscene amounts of money were spent on creating a more pro-business BBC but in the end much of what is reported is little more than recitation of press statements issued by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Bank of England, City analysts, CBI, Office of Economic Development, IMF and their ilk who are also given air time to express their ‘expert’ opinions live.

Just who are the Institute for Fiscal Studies and why does the BBC assign them so much air time? I’ll look at think-tanks and pressure groups and the people who influence our opinions in the next part.

Quotes from:

Tom Mills: The BBC: Myth of a Public Service

Lewis Carroll; Alice in Wonderland

George Orwell; 1984

Tony Shaw; Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis