Eccentric British Heroes
Guy Ritchie’s latest WWII romp is great entertainment. But what’s the darker truth behind the real mission the film is based on, asks historian Damien Lewis
Dan Smith for Lionsgate
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There are many reasons why Rishi Sunak lost the recent general election, but one was almost certainly the public’s fury at his early departure from the 80th anniversary D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June. Is it an example, I suggest to bestselling Second World War historian Damien Lewis (not to be confused with the actor Damian Lewis, of whom more later), of how Britain is still shaped by the conflict?
“Absolutely. I was at some of the D-Day celebrations, which were very moving,” Lewis says. “And what struck me was how real it all was. There are still a few veterans with us, which helps. But I think it was actually made more real by the war in Ukraine, which I believe is a struggle for all our democratic freedoms.
“The other thing is the electoral advance of the far right in France, which is chilling. We were on the Normandy beaches as a significant proportion of the French population were preparing to vote that way. Something I try to underline in my books is that freedom and democracy – those things we take for granted – actually have to be fought for every day. The lessons of the Second World War are paramount.”
Lewis set out some of those lessons in his 2014 book The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which covered secret operations during the war. One story from the book – about Operation Postmaster, a 1942 mission to capture German and Italian boats from a Spanish colony off the coast of west Africa – has now been turned into a film of the same name by Guy Ritchie, starring Henry Cavill as secret service pioneer Gus March-Phillipps and Alex Pettyfer as his second in command, Geoffrey Appleyard.
Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Dan Smith for Lionsgate
The film swells a sub-genre of recent dramatisations of special wartime operations: most notably the movie and West End musical Operation Mincemeat, in which a stolen corpse is used to deceive Hitler, and the BBC1 series SAS: Rogue Heroes, where misfits and killers go behind enemy lines in north Africa. Strikingly, these shows present war somewhat farcically or comedically. Does that surprise or worry Lewis?
“Yes and no,” he says. “I’ve had emails from readers in America, where the film has been out for some time, saying it’s an absolute scandal the book is treated so lightheartedly. But at the other end of the spectrum, I watched it with my wife and four children, including my youngest, my 15-year-old daughter. They all loved it. So it’s some achievement to make a film that appeals to such a family, some of whom have very little interest in the Second World War.”
In defence of the screen versions, weren’t these missions often comically improbable, even unbelievable, in conception? “Absolutely. Nail on the head,” Lewis agrees. “One of the founding precepts of the SAS and the SOE was not just thinking the unthinkable, but doing it. If you had an idea –no matter how wild it might be – your idea deserved to be heard. If you could manage something completely unthinkable, then logically the enemy wouldn’t have thought of it and would be taken by surprise. Even today those units have that precept.”
Democracy still has to be fought for every day
All these sorts of adaptations have a line in them in which someone says something like “They’re completely mad!” of the likes of March-Phillipps. Is that exaggerated? “Not at all. They were all eccentric, crazy people. The more you drill down into it you come across examples of wonderful British eccentricity and daring.”
Some also see a risk that these wartime stories create a narrative of easy victory, of basic British decency and supremacy, that can be dangerous when applied to recent wars of western intervention, where our true role may be murkier. “It can lead to complacency,” Lewis suggests. “And I hope we’re not witnessing that at the moment. I worry greatly that we are not robust enough in our determination to fight for our freedoms.”
And of course, another aspect of turning the Second World War into light-hearted entertainment is the increasing awareness of the mental damage inflicted on many of those who physically survived the conflict. Lewis is strongly conscious of this issue.
“I was diagnosed with PTSD about six years ago from being a war reporter,” he says. “I don’t mind talking about it. I’m obviously very aware of it, so I had Ros Townsend, an expert on PTSD, read my trilogy on [SAS founder] Paddy Mayne. There were these people behind enemy lines, lost in the desert, not knowing if they would die of thirst or hunger, be killed or captured, having to do horrific things to the enemy in close combat. She said just one of those missions would give you PTSD, and some of these men did them for five years. After the war, a lot of them came home and essentially drank themselves to death.
Italian vessel Duchessa d’Aosta, targeted in Operation Postmaster in 1942.
“PTSD didn’t exist as a diagnosis after the war. They did identify a condition called ‘psycho-neurosis’, for which the ‘cure’ was electric shock treatment.” As a war reporter for two decades, Lewis admits he took “insane risks” and saw “horrific things”. These experiences must have helped in writing his books? “Yes. When I’m interviewing people who have been on the front line, you know that you’re both speaking the same language.”
These days, the non-fiction bestseller book lists are often dominated by books about improbable Second World War missions, written by Lewis or his fellow wartime chroniclers Ben McIntyre and Max Hastings. Apparently, this publishing boom has been aided by the documentation on these long-secret missions being declassified.
“This is obviously not a golden age for eye-witness accounts of the war, but it is for documentation,” says Lewis. “I often come across a file that has never been opened and I apply to the committee at the National Archives at Kew or the equivalents in the US or France. No one alive now remembers why a file was closed for 150 years in 1945. So, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the file is opened, sometimes slightly redacted. I’ve only ever had one file that they absolutely refused to open. They didn’t say why, but my guess is that it probably mentioned a member of the intelligence services who has living family.”
In addition to The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, author Damien Lewis has written war books Churchill’s Secret Warriors and Hunting the Nazi Bomb. Andrew Millard
His next book, SAS: Daggers Drawn, is published in October and includes the involvement of the SAS in the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp and, Lewis says, “the real reason they went there”. Most authors would insist we buy the book to find that out, but Lewis generously previews the major revelation: “They actually went there to rescue one of their own. There was an SAS guy held in Belsen. They went there not knowing what they were going to find, and discovered the horror of the camps.”
It might help book sales when readers see the name on the cover. In common with radio presenter Chris Evans, actor Brian Cox and historian Tom Holland, who have found their name shared by a Hollywood star, an astronomer and Spider-Man respectively, Lewis suffers from people thinking he’s “the other one”, despite the difference in their first names. “I get a lot of letters from young women who loved my performance in Band of Brothers and ask if I’m single,” he laughs. “I don’t know if he gets mine about the history of the SAS.”
That said, this Lewis has recently been asked by a publisher and a film company to write the story of his life as a war reporter. So could there soon be the chance of seeing Damian Lewis play Damien Lewis in Damien Lewis? He laughs. “Yes. Although the problem is that I really don’t like writing about myself. I don’t think it’s the PTSD. I just much prefer telling other people’s war stories.”
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis is published by Quercus
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