I maintain that the Second World War brought up lots of crazy people of every nationality. I offer these in evidence for my position.
Scotland.
When Lord Lovat waded
ashore on D-Day, he brought along his personal piper, Bill Millin, and
instructed him to play. Virtually unarmed, and in the front of his entire group
he played his pipes. Intelligence interviews with captured German soldiers
after the battle revealed that they didn’t shoot him because they thought the
poor fellow was insane. He survived the War and donated the pipes to a war
museum in Scotland.
England
Major-General Orde
Charles Wingate was a pioneer in Jungle warfare, He dropped into the Jungles of
Burma with his men on the first deep penetration raids against the Japanese who
were then trying to force a passage to India. The Japanese had the idea that
India was just waiting for liberation from the British.
He regularly greeted visitors to his tent completely naked, wore garlic and
onions around his neck (often snacking on them) and instead of a watch wore an
alarm clock on a string.
He was about to board a plane on a jungle airstrip, when two journalists asked
for a ride. Overruling the pilot, who thought the plane would be too heavy he
invited them on board.
The plane was too heavy and crashed on take-off, killing everyone.
France
General de Gaulle was
the leader of the Free French basically because Churchill supported him, to a
point. His position was made more tenuous as the French were in danger of
regarding him as a puppet of the Allies. He thought the best way to counter
this (according to Churchill) was to be rude and stubborn to his hosts.
Churchill said he managed this extremely well. There was a point before D-Day
where Churchill needed him to come to London (from North Africa) yet he
refused. Churchill threatened to have him brought there in chains. He
came. When he got there he spent most of his time arguing with his Allies
about whose head should appear on the “invasion money” issued to the
troops.
As a courtesy from his Allies he received a lot of classified and decoded
messages. In contravention of all security protocol he then re encoded them
verbatim in the French code. The Allied code was quite good, but the French one
could be cracked by a schoolchild. The danger here was until this was
discovered the Germans could have both the plain text and the allied coded
message side by side, the Nazis could then decode all of the allied traffic and
this resulted in the death of many, many people, French included.
America
General Mark Clark
gets a mention because he was obsessed with his public image and desperately
wanted to be the hero liberating Rome. His drive on Rome was not single handed
as the British, New Zealanders, Poles and even Indian troops were fighting in
Italy at the time. When he thought that his big moment would be spoiled by non
Americans getting to Rome first, he threatened to OPEN FIRE on his allies.
He got his moment of glory, riding in his jeep through the crowds in Rome, but
in a piece of exquisite just desserts, the D-Day invasion went ahead the next
day and pushed him off the front page of every paper in the Allied world.
Germany
As 1943 drew to a
close, the Germans were on the defensive almost everywhere and the German spy
service, the Abwehr, was reorganising its priorities. One of the Abwehr’s
leading lights was SS Oberleutnant Walter Praetorious, a committed Anglophile
and a rabid Nazi as well. Walter was not a happy man. He saw others covered in
glory and craved the medals for himself.
Before the war he lived in England and became particularly enamoured with
English folk dancing. He somehow determined that this dancing was the
progenitor of all dancing and he needed to bring it to Germany. He lobbied hard
for a transfer that would best make use of his perceived talents and eventually
got his wish. So, with the Nazi dream crumbling, allied bombers overhead every
night, Nazi troops retreating or stalled he was appointed the official dancing
instructor for the German army.
(c) 2019 Paul Hannah
