Fight the Good Fight: Voices of Faith from the Second World War

By John Broom

The Second World War challenged many of the concepts that had provided stability and unity in the world. As totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia attempted to impose their world view on their neighbours, a struggle for what Winston Churchill described as `Christian civilisation took place on many fronts. On the home front, on land, on sea and in the air, as well as in the horrific concentration camps of Europe and prisoner of war camps in the Far East, people of a Christian faith found their beliefs challenged. However, for many this challenge provided an affirmation of that faith, as it provided a rock amidst the ever shifting sands of circumstance. This book contains the accounts of twenty such individuals, many drawn from previously unpublished sources. Their testimonies provide evidence that during a time of discord, disruption, dislocation and death, the Christian faith remained a key force in sustaining morale and a willingness to fight the good fight.Interesting Facts King George VI called National Days of Prayer during Britains darkest days in 1940Had Michael Benn survived the war, he would have become the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, meaning his brother, Tony, would not have had to fight to renounce his peerageBill Frankland avoided near certain death at the Alexandra Hospital Massacre by the toss of a coinStanley Warren only found out about the rediscovery of his Changi Murals during a chance work conversation in the 1950sAs a boy, Ken Tout was told by his parents to cross the street to avoid walking past the Catholic church. As a man he was invited to a private audience with Pope John Paul II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473862418

John Broom

After graduating in History from the University of Sheffield in the early 1990s, John Broom pursued a career in teaching, firstly in his chosen subject and latterly with children with Autism.A chance inheritance of family papers eleven years ago prompted his interest in the spiritual and ethical issues of the twentieth-century world wars. John is currently completing a PhD on Christianity in the British Armed Services at the University of Durham.

Book preview

The lives of common men are soon forgot,

Their deeds lie buried in obscurity.

’Twas musing thus I seized the slumb’rous pen

Which sprang to life, and so this book was born.

John W.N. Broom, Sunshine and Shadow, 1938

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Pen & Sword Military

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Copyright © John Broom 2016

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

The families of many of the people featured in this book have astounded me with the generosity of their time, enthusiasm and support. I wish to thank Louise Reynolds, for permission to quote from her beautiful books on her father, Eric Cordingly, and for her advice and encouragement; Irene Beckett, for entrusting me valuable documents, and for permission to quote from the papers of her father, James Driscoll; James Benn, for allowing me access to his own research on his great-uncle, Michael Benn, and for his hospitality and kindness at Stansgate House; to my cousin Helen Barrull, for her dedication in recording the story of her part of the family, including that of her grandfather, Tommy Tomkins; David Mash, for his account of the life of his father, Edgar Mash, and his close reading of that chapter; Margaret Bradley, for her enthusiasm in sharing the papers of her father, Dick Stokes; and Helen Wheeler, for sharing her precious papers of her uncle, John Short.

David Blake, archivist at the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department at Amport House, is an inexhaustible mine of information on his subject. Michael Snape is a constant source of erudition, support and positivity. Elizabeth and John Sherrill kindly gave permission to quote from The Hiding Place. Ken Hewitt provided valuable insights into the 1st Leicestershire Battalion’s actions in Malaya in 1941–42. Anne Wickes at the Second World War Experience Centre in Yorkshire pointed me in the direction of the story of John Bishop and provided space at that wonderful archive to study his papers. Dr Mark Bailey is a dear old friend from undergraduate days who cast his scholarly eye over the script. Linne Matthews has made my transition from enthusiastic amateur to published writer a less rocky path.

Changi Museum kindly granted permission to use the image of the Changi Cross, featured on the dust jacket. Peter Stubbs gave permission to quote from his book on Stanley Warren and the Changi Murals; Jerome Lim gave permission to reproduce his photographs of the Changi Murals from his website http://jeromelimphotography.viewbook.com/. Thanks also to William Warren, for comments regarding his father, Stanley; to Nigel Perrin, for permission to quote from his Special Operations Executive website page on Hugh Dormer; and to the University of Hawaii Press for permission to quote from the work of Israel Yost.

Above all, it has been an immense privilege and delight to meet in person, speak with on the telephone, and exchange letters and emails with many of the remarkable people in this book. I wish to thank John Bishop, Audrey Forster, Bill Frankland, Ruth Hargreaves, Celia Hewerdine and Ken Tout for sharing their memories with me and for providing a very personal link to the history I study with such interest.

Any copyright omissions or inaccuracies are entirely down to the author, and I would welcome the opportunity to correct them in future printings.

Finally, I am thankful to my wife, Dawn, for her forbearance of the fact that my head has been lost in the 1940s for a significant part of the past year!

Introduction

The Second World War has probably generated a larger number of books than any other epoch in history. However, it is only since the 1980s that the testimonies of ordinary people who lived in extraordinary times have emerged from the shadows. Due either to their own modesty or a desire not to dwell too much on terrible events they had experienced, the voice of the ordinary person living through extraordinary times was neglected. To some extent there was a retrospectively lamentable oversight on the part of the succeeding generations to ask very many questions at all of the men and women who lived through the 1940s.

Today, anyone with any direct memory of the war is a septuagenarian, octogenarian, nonagenarian or even a centenarian. Each year, families are uncovering and making public sets of letters, diaries and reminiscences from the period. These provide valuable and fresh insights into many aspects of the war, including the cultural angle, but the longer these are left, the less direct and immediate is the link with the person who wrote them.

Furthermore, in the testimonies of many people who did experience the war, religion (which for most people in Britain and Europe meant some form of Christianity), although a central part of their experience, has become in too many cases an incidental footnote amongst the bombs, tanks, prison camps, ships, aircraft, rationing, evacuation and general culture of the period. It is individual people who experienced this history; those people had beliefs – beliefs informed by their family background, education, social circle and, for many of the wartime generation, their exposure to Christianity at Sunday schools, in the home and in the wider social discourse of British life. As Professor Michael Snape, a leading academic in the field of war and religion, has noted, ‘The lack of detailed research into popular religious life during the war years remains a major lacuna in the extensive historiography of British society in the First and Second World Wars.’¹

This book therefore seeks to highlight, through the stories of twenty people – sixteen of them British, two from Germany and one each from Holland and the US – of differing denominations, the central part Christianity played in their own experiences of the Second World War. They provide just a tiny snapshot of the millions of people who adhered to some form of Christianity worldwide in the 1940s.

However, it is not just in the testimonies of such people that evidence of the importance of Christianity during the Second World War can be found. Winston Churchill, in his ‘Finest Hour’ speech of June 1940, referred to the Battle of Britain as the battle for ‘Christian civilisation’. King George VI called a National Day of Prayer for 26 May 1940, as the British Army stood poised on the brink of disaster at Dunkirk. Thousands responded to this call by going to pray at their local church. Crowds snaked round Westminster Abbey, queuing up to offer their prayer for national deliverance. This event was followed by a storm over Dunkirk, grounding the Luftwaffe, and a calm over the Channel, enabling the ships, both big and small, to launch a rescue operation that saw more than 330,000 men brought back to Britain.

Many of the leading British generals displayed an active Christian faith that was closely allied to their methods of command. Bernard Montgomery, the son of the Bishop of Tasmania, rose during the war to become Field Marshal Montgomery (see plate 1), commander of Eighth Army in North Africa and of British forces during the North West Europe Campaign of 1944–45. He wrote in his memoirs:

I do not believe that today a commander can inspire great armies, or single units, or even individual men, and lead them to achieve great victories, unless he has a proper sense of religious truth; he must be prepared to acknowledge it, and to lead his troops in the light of that truth. He must always keep his finger on the spiritual pulse of his armies; he must be sure that the spiritual purpose which inspires them is right and true, and is clearly expounded to one and all. Unless he does this, he can expect no lasting success. For all leadership, I believe, is based on the spiritual quality, the power to inspire others to follow.²

On the eve of the decisive Battle of El Alamein, in which two characters featured in this book – John Broom and James Driscoll – both took part, Montgomery’s message that was to be read out to all the troops concluded thus:

Therefore, let every officer and man enter the battle with a stout heart, and the determination to do his duty so long as he has breath in his body.

AND LET NO MAN SURRENDER SO LONG AS HE IS UNWOUNDED AND CAN FIGHT.

Let us all pray that the ‘Lord mighty in battle’ will give us the victory.³

At the conclusion of the war in Europe, Montgomery reflected in biblical terms on the sacrifices the Allied victory had entailed:

I would ask you all to remember those of our comrades who fell in the struggle. They gave their lives that others might have freedom, and no man can do more than that. I believe that He would say to each and every one of them: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ [Matthew 25:21]⁴

Montgomery’s Christian military ethos impressed itself on one young man in his Eighth Army:

Montgomery does enjoy the utmost loyalty and confidence of the Eighth Army … in his ability and character. … In England he had the reputation of recommending Bible reading to his officers … his popularity is tremendous, like that of some great legendary Knight or Lionheart.⁵

Montgomery was not the only prominent military leader whose Christian faith was at the forefront of his philosophy and actions. Orde Wingate, brought up in a Plymouth Brethren household, led the Chindit expeditions in Burma in 1943 and 1944, and infused his orders of the day with many references to the Old Testament. William Dobbie, the Governor of Malta from April 1940 to May 1942, ascribed the island’s deliverance from siege as being due to divine intervention.⁶

Many of the people featured in this book experienced the interplay between the military and spiritual spheres in a variety of ways. Michael Benn was a young RAF pilot officer who formed strong opinions about the place of Christianity in society. Tommy Tomkins experienced the hell of the evacuation from France in 1940 and the challenge of working for military intelligence. Hugh Dormer undertook hugely daring and dangerous missions under the Special Operations Executive. Edgar Mash found Dunkirk a spiritually renewing experience. Ken Tout found himself commanding a tank during the Normandy Campaign, aged just twenty. John Broom saw action from El Alamein to Tunis, and from Normandy to Germany, with the 7th Armoured Division (Desert Rats). Ronald Studd found himself recalled to the Royal Navy in his fifties to undertake important organisational and training work. Dick Stokes was stationed at an RAF training base in South Africa. These case studies provide a range of perspectives on what it was like to have an active Christian faith in the armed forces from 1939 to 1945.

From the heights of military command, through to people meeting for informal study groups and prayer meetings, Christian culture was to be found at every level of the British armed forces. Often at the fulcrum of this experience was the military chaplain, or padre. A good chaplain was seen as important in raising and maintaining the morale of a unit. Coming from all main Christian denominations, as well as a handful of Jewish ones, they conducted church parades, provided pastoral care, assisted medical staff, conducted burial services and kept meticulous records of these burials so that graves could be identified after the war.

Around 120 of these chaplains were taken as prisoners of war.⁷ For the thirty-one taken by the Germans at Dunkirk, the initial separation of officers (which included all chaplains as they operated at the rank of captain or above) from the other ranks, meant that their work was severely constrained. However, after lobbying from the chaplains themselves and from the Red Cross, most were dispersed around the soldiers’ camps. Two of the more prominent accounts written by chaplains in German prisoner of war camps come from the Methodist Jock Ellison Platt,⁸ and the Anglican David Wild.⁹

For the thirty-six taken by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, the situation offered a stark contrast. In general, ‘The shared humanitarian values and Christian concern which underpinned the German respect for British chaplains … did not apply in Japan, where chaplains found conditions much harder.’¹⁰

Chaplains in Far East prisoner of war camps had to minister to men deprived of food, dignity and any humanitarian respect from their captors. In this book we meet two men who, in 1939, could not have been serving more contrasting parishes. Eric Cordingly was a rector in the picturesque Cotswolds in the heart of England, whilst John Short was ministering to a vast rural parish in Australia. Within three years, both of them were being held in Changi camp, and continued to keep the flame of faith burning in the most testing of conditions.

The position of Christianity on the home front in Britain was examined in a number of surveys conducted by Gallup and Mass Observation during the war. In a 1943 Gallup survey, only 4 per cent did not identify with a Christian denomination, with 47 per cent claiming allegiance to the Church of England, 25 per cent to the Free Churches, 10 per cent to Roman Catholicism and 14 per cent to other denominations. Those who translated this into church membership accounted for a third of the population aged over fifteen. As many as 68 per cent of Britons claimed to be regular or occasional churchgoers. Although the war saw a decline in church attendance due to the dislocation of many men and women from their home towns, the blackout and the demands of war work, for many the radio broadcasts of church services became an acceptable substitute, with about 30 per cent of people listening to them in the war.¹¹

Mass Observation surveys found that half of people prayed regularly or occasionally, and two-thirds owned Bibles, although just one-quarter said they read the Bible regularly. However, in 1942, Mass Observation concluded that only about one-fifth of people considered that the war was being fought for Christian ideals.

Stephen Parker, in a study of Christianity on the home front in Birmingham, argued that ‘Christianity remained a valid referent in the construction of individual identity and a source of meaning-making throughout wartime.’ He even spoke of ‘the temporary strengthening of the populace’s commitment to Christian protocols during the Second World War’.¹² One example of this use of Christianity as a common reference point was in the writing of popular historian Arthur Mee, who wrote in 1941 of it as:

the supreme source of our strength, that calls to every man. … Leave the clamour of the world outside. Go to the quiet place you love – the little wood, the country lane, the garden path, the fireside – and listen. The Creator of the World will speak to you, He who will overthrow all evil powers.¹³

Some 15,000 places of worship were destroyed, with the destruction of Coventry Cathedral becoming a symbol of Nazi evil and the survival of St Paul’s Cathedral an icon of Britain’s endurance. Churches continued to function, in many cases their congregations being swelled by a transient military population. They provided a reference point of continuity and stability amidst the personal and community upheavals of the war years. Sunday schools continued to operate, and one lady we meet later, Audrey Forster, taught in one of those schools while she was just a teenager herself. Celia Hewerdine was brought up to pray and to thank God for his love and protection.

One group of people who found life difficult both on the home front and in the armed forces were conscientious objectors. During the Second World War, 60,000 men and about 1,000 women registered some degree of conscientious objection against war service.¹⁴ This number of men amounted to 1.2 per cent of those called up. These objections fell within four broad categories: political, moral, personal and religious. Objectors would be required to attend a regional tribunal for their case to be heard in front of local legal experts (although these included no military representative as had been the case in the First World War) and they would be able to take a witness to verify the credibility of their objection. The tribunal had the power to grant an absolute exemption from all kinds of service, a very rare occurrence; to grant an exemption conditional on performing work on the land or in the non-combatant army forces; or to reject the application totally. In general, objections of a religious nature were more sympathetically considered than those of other natures, although there were still challenges from tribunal members based on their own interpretation of biblical texts.

Compared to the First World War, conscientious objectors in Britain during the Second World War received a greater degree of tolerance from the government but found it psychologically more challenging to refute the case of a just war against Hitler as opposed to Kaiser Wilhelm. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister responsible for overseeing the implementation of the regulations pertaining to the conscience clause in the Military Service Act, had served on a conscientious objector tribunal in Birmingham during the First World War and had seen the futility in trying to implement, by legal means, a stipulation that was completely at odds with the beliefs of the individual. This understanding of individual conscience permeated through most of the nation, with even Peace News, the magazine of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union (PPU) admitting an absence of the scorn that had been visited on those rejecting conscription from 1916 onwards.¹⁵

However, despite this relative absence of scorn and derision, many conscientious objectors were dismissed from jobs when their employer no longer considered it appropriate they remain in the post. In the case of John Bishop, featured in this book, he left his own employment in an aircraft factory as it moved towards the production of military rather than civilian aeroplanes. Overall, fewer objectors were granted absolute exemption, as the range of available work had been expanded, thus enabling the tribunal members to place people into a situation that was seen to involve some form of personal sacrifice. Indeed, most objectors themselves had no problem with inconvenience and disruption to their own lives and careers; rather with the concept of bearing arms and taking the life of a fellow human. In the case of James Driscoll, he accepted the same hardships and privations as the regular army through service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) during the campaigns in North Africa and North West Europe.

During the war, hundreds of thousands of British servicemen were taken prisoner of war by German, Italian and Japanese forces. As Midge Gillies argued, ‘In Far Eastern PoW camps religion was put to the test in a way that was missing from Europe. … In the most brutal camps … it was easy [for men] to feel they had been abandoned in a type of hell.’¹⁶ Twenty-seven per cent of Japanese prisoners of war died compared to 4 per cent of those held by Germany.¹⁷

For those held captive by the Japanese, the impromptu chapels built in the prison camps became a focus for hope, as well as worship. ‘The most uplifting moments of captivity, often even for those without faith, were the services conducted by the padres … when they were given added resonance by their setting in the jungle and by the men’s search for solace in their suffering.’¹⁸

In this book we meet two servicemen who survived the camps of the Far East. Bill Frankland joined the army to serve as a doctor, and would find his ‘hospital’ one without proper beds and with minimal access to medicines. He would be ordered to remove dangerously ill men from the sick parade to provide slave labour for the Japanese. Bill endured hunger and beatings but emerged from his experience with his faith intact and with decades of public service in the field of immunology in front of him.

Stanley Warren’s artistic skills had been put to use as an observation post assistant. After his imprisonment he created a series of murals beautiful in their humanity of the message. These murals survive to this day, due in no small part to Stanley’s renovation of them decades after the suffering that had produced them.

Although the majority of case studies are of Britons, the four examples of Christians from other nations vividly demonstrate the extremities of horror and heroism shown by many in this period. Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom have achieved worldwide recognition for their outstanding contributions to Christianity in the twentieth century; the former for his high level of theological erudition and willingness to live by his beliefs in the face of the brutality of Nazism, the latter for her family’s utter devotion to their faith and for reaching out to God’s chosen people at the peril of their own lives. Their inclusion here may guide yet more people to find out more about their remarkable lives. Israel Yost found himself in the remarkable position of being an American Lutheran of German ancestry, serving as chaplain to a unit of men of Japanese ancestry, the majority of whom were Buddhists. His strength of character through demanding campaigns in Italy and France won many hearts, minds and souls. Ruth Hargreaves (née Schrank) saw, as a child, her family torn between her Christian parents and Nazi uncle.

The twenty people featured in this book are drawn from varied social backgrounds. They include a bright Oxford University undergraduate and son of a Cabinet minister, an accounts clerk, a furniture salesman, a rural parson, a doctor, a dentist, a priest ministering in Australia, a commercial artist, a glassmaker, a travel agent, a theologian, and a watch repairer, as well as a regular soldier and schoolchildren; all of their lives were turned upside down by the war. Despite their diverse backgrounds and widely differing experiences of war, they were united by the fact that the Christian faith was, like with so many millions of others in Britain and around the world, central to the way they saw the war, and informed their own reactions to it.

They represent a broad spectrum of denominational faith, from conventional Anglicans to devout Roman Catholics, from Nonconformist Methodists and Baptists and Salvationists, to those whose faith was more individualistic and complex. The subtitle of this book, Voices of Faith from the Second World War, is chosen quite deliberately. It is the author’s intention to amplify the voices of those who experienced the war, and to allow them to explain their war as they perceived it.

Some accounts benefit from the immediacy of the experience, being drawn from contemporary letters and diaries, whilst others benefit from the wisdom of reflection and hindsight gained during the intervening decades. Taken as a whole, they offer a fresh perspective on a generation of people who lived through terrible yet noble times; times when the ravages of war and captivity threatened the very core of people’s beliefs and humanity; yet times during which people were able to draw from the foundations of their faith and, for those who managed to survive, to emerge stronger from the challenges they had faced.

Chapter 1

Michael Wedgwood Benn

‘It was my dearest wish to settle down to do what I could to prevent the suffering of another war from descending on the lives of our children. How I longed to see a world when people could be as free and happy as we were in our family.’

The surname Benn commanded great respect within the political circles of Britain in the twentieth century, and this continues into the twenty-first. No fewer than five generations of the family have entered politics, with four serving as members of Parliament, and three of them serving as Cabinet ministers. In addition to politics, a strong strain of Christianity has run through the family. Margaret Benn, mother of Michael, the subject of this chapter, served as President of the Congregational Federation and was a leading light in the campaign for the ordination of women. In the constitutional