Flak Magazine: Review of The Enemy Within, 1.16.04

In both British and American popular culture, World War II was the "Good War." Legions of sub-Hemingway male writers fill pages with their regret that their generation has, a professional volunteer army aside, been spared the pleasure of killing fellow men in a foreign land.

When "The Enemy Within" was published in the United Kingdom, it carried the secondary title of "Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War." The "spiv" of Donald Thomas's title ("huckster" is a pretty good equivalent) is a familiar figure in British popular culture. The long-running sitcom "Dad's Army" — chronicling the misadventures of the Home Guard, largely elderly reservists who would resist the Nazi hordes — featured a spiv as a leading character. Jack Higgins' "The Eagle Has Landed" features Birmingham racketeers — racketeers combine criminal activity with a deep hatred of traitors — who play a key role in the plot. But as living memory of the second World War diminishes, the war is remembered with increasing reverence, and the figure of the spiv recedes from view. World War II has become a sequence of glorious tropes, the war in which right and wrong were clearly defined. The story of the spivs, and the other grimy, inglorious figures of that time, needs to told.

Thomas discusses the pre-war criminal scene in Britain, which was sporadically violent but generally small-scale, well-represented in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock." Criminals would take advantage of new regulations to extend their activities, as black market (a term dating from WWII) dealing in even the most banal foodstuffs became hugely profitable. The blackout was "a present from Hitler" to these established "villains," to use the almost endearing English vernacular.

The bulk of wartime criminals, however, were "civilians" — ordinary citizens who would not dream of breaking the law in peacetime, and who often did not even know they had broken the law. The war brought about a surge in criminality simply because there were far more laws to break; regulations with varying degrees of clarity sprang up to govern all areas of wartime life. Shopkeepers were expected to abide by regulations that lawyers did not fully understand. Noel Coward was found guilty of not declaring American investments.

Thomas describes the introduction of the Emergency Powers Bill in late August 1939 as "the greatest transfer of power to government since 1689." Many offenses were classed as strict liability offenses — no mitigating plea or leniency in sentencing could be considered. A Naval Reserve Officer was fined for striking matches in a phone booth to see the numbers, and a woman was prosecuted for running into the room where her baby was having a fit and turning on the light before securing the blackout curtains. After the entry of the United States seemed to assure ultimate victory, such zeal was increasingly seen as absurd.

The activities of Ministry of Food agents acting as agents provocateurs strike a particularly ignoble note, as they picked on elderly female Jewish shopkeepers by posing as shoppers with hard luck stories, in hopes of provoking a breach of regulations. The atmosphere of universal snooping and informing would inform Orwell's "1984," written only a few years after the war (while wartime rationing persisted); in the closing chapter Thomas describes how the persistence of wartime regulation after 1945 contributed to the exhausted, depressed mood in Britain.

The US military brought its own criminals — ready-made and newly minted — when it entered the war. One of Thomas' most entertaining chapters is that on the lurid adventures of the less than All-American servicemen. Race riots in small Cornish towns, a dizzying cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the dreams of the ration book, prophylactics strewn in fields near US bases — the impact of the US servicemen was electrifying. With their exotic consumer goods and apparent lack of a class structure to rival Britain's, they served as a dose of Hollywood glamour for wartime England. Thomas is strong on the complex issues of jurisdiction in cases where US personnel behaved badly and retells the case of "Chicago Joe and the Showgirl," in which a US army deserter and a London showgirl embarked on a brief Bonnie and Clyde-like rampage — his punishment was to be hanged and later incarnated by Kiefer Sutherland.

Most of the references are to the proceedings of magistrates' courts and contemporary newspaper reports, and have the infuriating brevity of such sources. Three members of a bomb squad who had just defused an unexploded bomb threatening St. Paul's Cathedral were imprisoned, despite the sentencing magistrate's reluctance, for taking shaving brushes from a bomb damaged shop during the operation. One would love to know more. Did the Home Secretary advise the king to order their release, as the magistrate recommended? Were they embittered or philosophical after their experience?

Thomas is always at pains to point out that nothing in these pages obviates the tremendous courage of the majority of British people during the war. The low, grubby criminality Thomas details throws the British people's heroism into relief. While at the time flogging and hanging were generally touted in opinion polls as suitable penalties for looters, the figure of the spiv later became a charming ne'er-do-well. "Dad's Army" and "The Eagle has Landed," and the more recent sitcoms "Minder" and "Only Fools and Horses," featuring modern spiv-like figures, show the British nostalgia for criminality. There is a healthy genre of "villain memoirs" — "Mad" Frankie Fraser, the Kray Twins, and other figures from the 1960s London underworld have become near-iconic figures in the mass media. The loveable gangster of yesteryear is invariably contrasted with the vicious thugs of today.

Thomas, with his sober, factual approach, never falls into that sentimental trap, restoring some of the grime and grit to an increasingly sepia-toned history. Reading Patrick Hamilton's "The Slaves of Solitude," or the wartime novels of Anthony Powell, one gets a real sense of the utilitarian blandness of wartime life, the "constantly hectoring and nagging" tone of omnipresent official propaganda and a sense of immense weariness. Thomas details the immense, exhausting weight of the regulations and restrictions that made up the machinery of total war. It is a real achievement in cataloging what the war was like to actually live through.

— Seamus Sweeney (seamus.sweeney@campus.ie)