Characteristic Decency or Dangerous Sentimentality? British Treatment of German POWs, 1939–43

Abstract

Recollection of the destruction witnessed during the Great War combined with the advancement of military technologies during the interwar period produced the feeling that the ‘next war’ would be something approximating a prophetic end of times. Reviewing the August and early September submissions of their voluntary panel of diarists, a Mass-Observation report noted that ‘one is deeply aware of the sense of doom that lay over the country’ as the likelihood of another conflict increased. There was a ‘feeling that the end of all things is at hand’. With the upheaval of ‘total war’ having already been experienced, the British public in 1939 had, Robert Mackay explains, a ‘fairly clear idea of what a major war would be like’. Zeppelin and Gotha bomber raids on London during the 1914–18 conflict blurred the fighting and home fronts, demonstrating the vulnerability of British civilians in a future conflict. Cinemagoers could envisage the destruction wrought on British cities in a future war as they watched the razing of Madrid and Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 newsreels. The ‘next war’ was imagined in literature and film, most notably the 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells. The 1936 film adaptation opened with the levelling of ‘Everytown’, an obvious parody of London, in 1940. The protagonists in George Orwell’s 1930s novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air daydreamed about the imminent arrival of enemy squadrons overhead.