On 9 January, 1943, all places of public entertainment were closed because of the polio-encephalitis epidemic. The Merry Lads Swingers, the Gypsy Feather Orchestra, the Alaska Trio, the Rhythm Swing Orchestra, the War-Time Gang and the King’s Own Orchestra had nowhere to play. The Command Fair went dark. Pilot Officer Wilkinson RAF decided, with Sergeant Don Nithsdale, producer of the PBI Parade, to entertain the troops confined to barracks with a play-reading of Richard II on the Information Office Radio Network. The cast was announced in the Times of Malta on Monday, 18 January. Besides Wilkinson and Nithsdale, it was to feature F/O Druce, Corporal Goble, Captain James, and F/O Greer.
It was a measure of how fast I was losing faith in my father that I could only sit at my green baize covered table in the State Library of Valletta and worry that Reg Greer might have let P/O Wilkinson down. My hands shook, not only from the chill in the vast marble-paved room, lined with its carved bookshelves of chestnut wood, in which the shelving still follows the original order, and the books still wear their original calf and vellum. I went downstairs to the Café Premier, that still serves cheese pies and ravjul as it did before the War and during the Blitz, and ordered a cup of coffee to warm my hands, as my father might have done in the wet January of 1943. When I came up the great stone stairs again, the librarian had turned on a small blow-heater angled towards my chair. For some reason this act of simple kindness made my eyes fill with tears. Why had my father never a good word to say for these people?
The Maltese are special people. As I criss-crossed the island on the apple-green and sky-blue buses that roar and grind down pitted cart tracks thinly crusted with tarmac, I had to notice how good-humoured the people were, how courteous and considerate and respectful of the privacy of others. If the bus was crowded, people took each other’s children and shopping bags on their laps. Once when there was room for only one more, I saw the people waiting at the stop consult to see who was in the biggest hurry. When they pushed her on the bus she was loaded with the shopping of the women left behind so that the food would be in time to be cooked for lunch. To be sure the Maltese are short and squat, and by no means the best-looking people in the Mediterranean—especially as respectable Maltese women now think that frizzed dyed hair and garish make-up and extremely short, tight skirts are all the go—and the fields smell of night soil, but what of it? As I roamed all over Malta and Gozo, photographing wild flowers and trying to sort out my feelings about Reg Greer, I encountered a thousand examples of kindly concern without interference, of courtesy without ceremony or undue shyness. There is about Maltese people something nuggety, solid and unassuming, straight and deep, a kind of poise that comes from their own certainty of who they are, the people of the rock.
Richard II was reviewed in the Times of Malta on 26 January. I learned to my surprise that Lieutenant R. Dickinson RNVR had played Bolingbroke to Wilkinson’s Richard, and the adaptation had skipped John of Gaunt’s famous ‘sceptred isle’ speech (which would hardly have appealed to the large numbers of Commonwealth personnel serving on Malta). The supporting cast was described as ‘admirably balanced’ which I take to mean that they were all pretty terrible.
Anxiety
I’m on a lorry, with a lot of other PNs (‘psychoneurotics’)…. I was to be reception clerk, that is, I sat in a tent at the entrance of the Camp, with a lot of Army forms. As the PNs came in I took down their details and put them in a file. All day long the battle-weary soldiers filed in; I was asked the same question, ‘What are they going to do with me?’ And there was a hollow fear in each voice, some cried. God made gentle people as well as strong ones.
SPIKE MILLIGAN, MUSSOLINI: HIS PART IN MY DOWNFALL
Psychological disturbances accounted for more manpower wastage in the RAF than any other cause. Of all medical discharges, 31 per cent were on psychiatric grounds. At first it was thought that if the initial medical examination had been more searching, this costly wastage of trained men could have been avoided. The British rejected only 2 per cent of would-be recruits on grounds of instability or unsuitable temperament, while the Americans who used psychological testing rejected one in seven as ‘mentally or emotionally incapable of serving effectively in a war’. Unfortunately for the argument from inherent defect, 45 per cent of American medical discharges were on psychiatric grounds.
It did not occur to the MOs that men capable of serving effectively in war might have been a natural minority, or that in conditions other than those of total war they may have been a liability. The creation of a military caste is an intensive business, involving indoctrination and discipline over generations. All kinds of rituals, of dress, of initiation, and a system of reinforcements and rewards are needed to keep up the esprit de corps and instil unreflecting loyalty. Why professional soldiers, themselves heirs of this elaborate and self-serving system, should have imagined that they could hew good soldiers out of conscripts in a few weeks has never been explained. Most of the officers in fact did not try to, but treated their infantry as an unthinking rabble, encouraged in this belief by the fact that so many of them were uneducated, provincial, working class, colonial and black.
Medical officers are not usually so well educated that they are aware of the limitations of their field of expertise. Most of them feel no reverence when confronted by vast regions of human affairs of which they know nothing. Most do not know the difference between a diagnosis and a moral judgment. They examined the men who had lost confidence, who did not sleep, who could not eat, and certainly could not attack the enemy with any gusto, and found that 58 per cent of them had ‘some defect of personality’. Such a decision was way beyond their brief, which was simply, after all, to decide if these men could be useful to the Services at that time or foreseeably thereafter. The men they judged on such imperfect criteria had no way of doubting, let alone rejecting, the stigma they so blithely conferred.
In fact the sick men were suffering from what in an earlier war had been called ‘shell shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’. The medical services of World War II found that such expressions were unpsychological and old-fashioned; what was more, they implied that falling apart was a forgivable reaction, perhaps inevitable, and opened the way for thousands of defections when things got rough. The term ‘anxiety neurosis’ was coined in order to throw the onus back on the soldier himself. Anxiety neurosis was not something that could afflict anyone; it afflicted people who were already a screw loose, not all there, or lacking in a mystical entity known as ‘moral fibre’.
From the medicos’ point of view the logic was blindingly simple and totally ineluctable. The men who fell ill were not the ones who flew most sorties, faced most danger, or even the ones closest to the blasts or the ones on the longest tours of duty. The heroes carried on; the anxiety neurosis cases were the ones who let those fellows down, by skimping their routine jobs, by insubordination, by reporting sick every other day, by not concentrating. Many of them were in safe, tedious jobs, ground crews or bumshiners, with nothing worse to worry about than bad food, interrupted sleep, loneliness combined with lack of privacy, anxiety about what was happening at home, humiliation at the hands of their superior officers and the mockery or antagonism of their peers. Almost none of them had the satisfaction of getting a crack at the enemy; they felt that they had ruined their lives for nothing, for a stupid, pointless, drudging job in a disease-ridden hell hole on the dark side of the world. Some lost their identity behind a number and a uniform, were overwhelmed, terrified of rejection, unable to join in the verbal rough and tumble, disgusted by their comrades’ ways of speaking and thinking and banding together. The medicos learned to hobnob, crawled the bars and the brothels with the men, and shared their collective contempt for the misfits.
The medical officers did not accept that a man might look on the worst that man can do to man and sicken to the soul. There was no diagnosis for a broken heart. There was no gland that secreted faith and hope, and therefore they did not see their significance. If on Malta an airman, who s
aw poor and ignorant people living in the lee of other men’s war, surviving by shifts, by fraud and theft and capitulation to the enemy they knew, while their children sickened around them and their priests grew sleek and fat, lost his belief in the innate goodness and grandeur of human life, this was likely to be because of some mole of nature in him. The medicos’ belief in an innate defect which predisposed to anxiety neurosis was not shaken by any reflection that to be an inherent defect this invisible inadequacy ought to have been evident in peacetime as well.
Nowhere in the literature do the medical services who diagnosed anxiety neurosis describe the syndrome. They talk vaguely of mental backwardness, by which they mean presumably that the men appeared not to understand what was being said to them. This may have been passive aggression, especially if what they were failing to understand were orders. Delinquency is mentioned, or ‘military crime’, by which they seem to mean insubordination, failure to salute, or to turn out on parade or to action stations, or going AWOL.
Flying Officer Greer did none of those things. Neither did he get drunk and fight his fellows, as many did. He simply stopped eating. In a place where nobody had enough to eat, he did not eat what there was. He was not the only one. Lord Gort himself was skin and bone after three months of Malta. Reg Greer lasted from September to December, before his condition gave cause for concern. And, after they registered the fact that he was starving himself to death, he worked another four months. When the MO had asked that he be given a change of work, he had added a rider, ‘If there is no complaint about this officer’s work.’ Most people as ill as Reg Greer were not working efficiently and were thus putting others in jeopardy. The MO cannot have known what Reg Greer was doing; he was not given his time off but there seems to have been no complaint about his work either.
Montgomery had said that the morale of the soldier is the single most important factor in war. He placed great stress on officers making men feel wanted and valued, consulting them wherever possible, handling touchy issues with sensitivity. When soldiers mutinied Montgomery blamed their leaders; he would not blame the men on principle. His position was far from democratic, for it underemphasised the soldiers’ autonomy, but against a fascist enemy it worked. Most important, Montgomery thought, was keeping the fighting man in touch with family and friends.
The medical officers agreed. When they examined men exhibiting signs of serious disturbance they almost invariably found the root cause in pre-war experiences, mostly ‘domestic’. This strengthened them in their belief that the sick men were not first-grade material. Some had even had breakdowns in civil life; others, astonishingly, were homosexual. There was no way such bounders were going to be evacuated while better men faced the music. In Malta no psychiatric case was ever evacuated.
As an Australian intelligence officer in a British air force my father can have had few friends. There was probably not much badinage and bonhomie underground where everyone was either straining to unscramble the cacophony in their headphones or nutting out codes. Crammed into their damp airless shelter they were all spiritually alone. Many felt closer to the German wireless operators than they did to the people sitting next to them. They learned their idiosyncrasies, recognised their styles and voices. Some of the German fighter pilots joked with the invisible listeners to fighter traffic and some of the listeners wept when they heard them screaming in the cockpits of their burning planes. If Reg Greer made a single friend in Malta, he never mentioned him. To all intents and purposes this un-Australian Australian with the super-hush-hush job was completely alone.
I do not remember if we at home did our part to support him. Perhaps we did write, and perhaps he got our letters when he was in Egypt, but it was generally understood that mail was low on the list of priorities. I do not know that any of the letters Daddy wrote to my mother ever mentioned receiving one from her.
Letters from Australia had to cross the Indian Ocean, and then to be redistributed through rather unsteady lines of communication to the forward bases. If the Japs didn’t get them it seemed the Egyptians did. None of the food parcels we sent ever arrived. During the blockade post rarely got through to Malta, but when the merchantmen began to arrive in November and December of 1942 some letters from Britain should have got through. It is not so hard to have no letters when nobody else has them, but when other men are opening theirs and you have none, then the heart may pound and the throat seize up and the nervous cough start its scratching. I know we tried to send a parcel of food. I remember its being sewn up in calico and the name, rank and serial number being lettered on it in India ink. And I know Daddy didn’t get it.
The military proposition, that it is not war that makes men sick, but sick men that cannot fight wars, is clearly wrong, but most of the military medical corps believed it.
The experiences that make real men also reveal many who are not real men at all. Real men are a minority even among heroes. Even the flying aces occasionally flew cautious; the more sorties they had done the more cautious they flew. They began to realise that they had more in common with the men who fell past them to crash in flames than with the brass who had ordered them to stalk and kill them. As long as they could tell themselves that it was Jerry, a something not quite human, they could hunt efficiently; once they felt glad when an enemy pilot succeeded in bailing out, the end of their ruthlessness was in sight. It was as good a time to die as any.
Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes the insane.
The principal cause of anxiety neurosis, according to the military, is fear, not stress. Because they insisted on associating anxiety neurosis with fear, they consistently failed to identify the most likely sufferers, who were not those exposed to most danger. Real danger provokes a real response; the human organism goes into overdrive. Noradrenaline floods the heart, giving the frightened one a cocaine high, making him feel cool, detached, superhuman. And so the aces pulled off those legendary stunts; a Spitfire pilot coming in over Grand Harbour on a wing and a prayer, already shot up, one engine aflame, apparently unaware of serious injury, saw a floating bomb on course for a village on the periphery and, coming up under it, tipped it with his undamaged wing and sent it out to sea again. Cool was what the groundlings called this kind of thing. The pilots lost their cool when they were forced to climb down to the pace of ordinary life. Then they shuddered and wept in noradrenaline withdrawal. The MOs scratched their heads. These were brave men, no mistake, so why were they grey-faced and sweating, screaming in their dreams like the worst of the shirkers and the yellow-bellies?
Sometimes the medicos took a risk and sent the men back to flying operations. Most times it paid off. The men flew and flew effectively. Many of them were killed in the clouds, still high. The most dangerous part of any flight, especially on Malta, was landing. Not too many of the aces survived to the end of the war, and those who did had a terrible time. When the excitement ebbed, soul-deep exhaustion took its place, and then they remembered the screams of their victims, the friends they had lost, the stupid mistakes, and with all the reflection that they had had no time to do came guilt, guilt that they were still alive when so many were dead. Even Monty in the last years of his life was haunted by the thought that he had led so many to their death. When he died he said that he was going to join ‘the men he killed’ in North Africa.
RAF medical history is mostly concerned with the special health problems of the fliers; actually fliers were a small élite, served by a squad of earthbound individuals who outnumbered them five to one, not counting bods like non-flying Flying Officer Reg Greer. The fliers were the heroes of the squadrons, lionised, petted, praised. The fliers and the ack-ack gunners were the only ones who had the satisfaction of getting a crack at Jerry; everybody else had to sit tight and take it. The first bombardment caused shock and terror: when that subsided and people adapted to life under the bombardment, the health consequences wer
e more insidious. The constant stress of irregular alerts, of months of interrupted sleep, and of appalling noise levels, sometimes for many hours at a stretch, gradually wore down men and women, military and civilians, the young and the old, all at differing rates and to different degrees. If men building aircraft dispersal pens or unloading ships in the harbour, or women plotting the box barrage or fighter control, became inattentive or began to doubt their efficiency and demand constant reassurance, the cause was not fear, after all, but the fact that, on a poor diet, in crowded conditions and with little sleep, they had run out of resilience and endurance. The authorities compounded their distress by accusing them of fear. They were actually too tired and too dispirited to feel fear.
Whoever wrote the Malta section of the official history of the Army Medical Services in World War II had deep reservations about the official attitude to anxiety neurosis.
‘The official attitude in Malta during the period of the siege seems to have been based on the view that, when there is no escape from danger, there are no psychiatric casualties, or at least very few…. The medical specialist who had been appointed to act as the command psychiatrist suggested that an adequate survey should be made in an attempt to assess the health of the troops and that a rest centre should be established where the overstrained might rest and recuperate. These suggestions were not accepted. Later he reported that as the strain of the siege increased, mental backwardness came to be more in evidence among the outpatients who were seeking escape from the intolerable in sickness and in military crime. Indeed, he came to recognise that approximately 50 per cent of all these outpatients showed evidence of some major psychiatric disorder. In his opinion at least 25 per cent of the garrison displayed a response to aerial attack in March 1942 that bordered on the pathological. By the end of April the proportion, in his considered opinion, had increased….