Our new Wanker of the Week is author Guy Walters. Judging from his blog (no, we're not giving you a link; if you must read this tripe, you can do it without help from us) he's an argumentative, self-opinionated, pedantic, nit-picking and negative person who delights in knocking things other people believe – the blog includes headlines like “Give me Jimmy Savile over Tamara Ecclestone any day” and “Anders Breivik is not a madman”. A sample from the Anders Breivik article: “If you passionately believe you are right, and you feel you have no other method of obtaining your goal, then killing is a very logical thing to do. This is undoubtedly a normative form of human behaviour, as human beings have been killing each other for the "right reasons" for millennia.”
Nice.
Walters has published a book about the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III prison camp during WW2, a story which has stirred the hearts of thousands of schoolboys as they read Paul Brickhill's book, and brought a tear to the eyes of those who watched the successful film. But the affection and respect this brave tale has earned over the last 68 years are not good enough for Walters (born 1971). As he writes on his blog, “existing theories must be debunked, subjects turned on their heads, the house totally rebuilt ... I make no bones that I do the same thing myself”.
The Guardian newspaper is no friend to traditional values but a consistent purveyor of limp-wristed, self-righteous left-wing political correctness, with ever a sneer for the virtues of the past and always a probing finger to search the nooks and crannies of history for people to demean and cherished memories to desecrate. So naturally it loves Guy Walters' book ...
“It takes courage to demolish a cherished icon, and when that icon is the film The Great Escape, saviour of many a strained family Christmas, the iconoclast needs steel nerves worthy of the escapers themselves. But that is what Guy Walters achieves in his new study of the second world war's most famous mass breakout, which, far from being a rehash of an oft-told tale, is a clear-eyed inquiry into a myth that does not stand up to examination.”
Courage. Yep, that's it, all right. Never mind the courage it takes to dig a tunnel while men with guns and dogs patrol overhead, never mind the nerve you need to plunge through the dripping forest in skimpy, make-shift clothing while the entire countryside is on the hunt for you, never mind the guts it took to stand while the gunners behind you took their aim, no, the real courage is sitting at a desk in a warm room with a computer in front of you, searching for the best words in which to sneer. Yes, that's real bravery for you.
The Guardian goes on: “What Walters claims is missing from the film, with its jaunty theme tune and boy-scout characters,” (ah, now we approach the truth, the slimy liberal's hatred for the uncool boy-scout morality of the past, because that morality was born in the public schools, and public schools were for posh kids. Just class envy, at the root of it) ” is that this was essentially a story of mass murder. His focus is not so much on the heroic ingenuity of the PoWs tunnelling themselves out of their camp, but on their ultimate destination. Fifty of the 76 escapees were summarily shot by the Gestapo on Hitler's orders, and only three (none British) made a successful "home run" to Blighty. Was the sacrifice really worth it, Walters asks. His answer is a resounding "No".”
There. The sacrifice was not worthwhile. We bet the widows and children of those men would have been delighted to hear it, if they'd been alive still. Fortunately most of them aren't.
“The central figure in Walters's story is the escape's inspiring leader, Sqdn.Ldr. Roger Bushell (played as "Roger Bartlett" in the film by Richard Attenborough). Bushell was a driven character: charismatic, determined, stubborn, perhaps a little crazy. The son of a mining magnate in South Africa, idolised by his mother, he had an English public school and Cambridge education. He drove fast cars, dated "popsies" and excelled at skiing. Characteristically, he tended to ski over obstacles in his path rather than around them. A skiing accident gashed his face, which lent his appearance a sinister aspect.
Though neglecting his studies for sport, Bushell was no fool; he was proficient in several languages and, despite an indifferent degree, was called to the bar and got several murderers off capital charges. He learned to fly as a hobby, and when war came, found himself commanding a Spitfire squadron. After downing two enemy planes, he was himself shot down over France and captured.
Bushell made two initial escapes – on the second occasion, accompanied by a Czech fellow flier, he reached occupied Prague and spent several months hidden by a Czech family. However, in the manhunt that followed the 1942 assassination of SS overlord Reinhard Heydrich, Bushell's hiding place was betrayed. The Czechs who had sheltered him were shot, and Bushell himself was roughly handled by the Gestapo.
After this experience, he could have had no illusions about the ruthlessness of the Nazis, and his suffering seems to have sharpened his already intense hatred of his tormentors and his desire to escape them. Arriving at Stalag Luft III, the huge new camp built for allied flying officers in a gloomy Polish forest, Bushell instantly initiated his plan for a mass breakout, starting three simultaneous tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry, on the premise that if one failed and another was discovered, then the third would surely succeed. It says much for Bushell's drive and leadership skills that the vast organisation required to dig the tunnels, dispose of the conspicuous yellow sand displaced by the digging, and to manufacture an enormous array of clothes, passes and other documentation for 200 escapees remained secret.
Bushell knew he was risking death, and realised that the vast majority of the fellow escapees – most of whom spoke no German and still wore uniforms unconvincingly disguised as civilian clothes – stood no chance of getting away across thick snow. Bushell justified his grand plan, however, by arguing that hunting such a vast number of escapees would divert German resources from the war. Walters shows, though, that the escape did nothing whatever to hinder the German war effort ... underlines repeatedly that the Germans at the camp, from the commandant Von Lindeiner down, were explicit in warning of dire consequences if they were caught on the wrong side of the wire and fell into Gestapo hands. Bushell disregarded these warnings, and for this, Walters finds him culpable for his own murder and those of his comrades. The great escape, he sadly concludes, was a great folly.”
It is a colossal cheek, frankly, for this right-on apostle of his mealy-mouthed time to pass any kind of opinion about men who lived in a different world and by a different creed that he clearly can't understand. It does not occur to him, evidently, that the entire British nation had been actively fighting the war for the last five years, or that men would for a moment doubt the need to continue that fight by any means available to them, even from within the Reich itself. The thought is entirely alien to this loft-living, media-hopping denizen of the virtual world that soldiers and airmen would automatically refuse to accept captivity and servitude just because that's what you did: there was only one way to deal with bullies, and that was with a jutting chin and a stiff upper lip and due regard for the Marquis of Queensberry. Judging those men by modern risk-assessment standards is almost as silly as ... let's see ... taking “The Matrix” seriously? Shutting several brainless work-shy big-mouthed show-offs in a house together and calling it entertainment? Allowing hundreds of thousands of (no doubt deserving) foreign people to settle in close-packed communities in northern cities, telling them they don't have to change a thing about their way of life in order to fit in, and expecting that we'll all get on together swimmingly?
Even Wanker Walters has a brief flash of common sense when he writes “does there come a point in which history is needlessly revised? Is historical revisionism sometimes a product of commercialism and political fashion rather than research?” Well, yes, Wanker, it bloody is, and so are you. What you need is a damn good punch on the nose, and if only you'd had the guts and decency to write this book a few years ago there would probably have been a few old blokes around still willing to deliver a straight left.
The book is called “The Real Great Escape”. Don't buy it.
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