'The World On Fire' Fizzles Out amid cliche and misunderstood history

What is the point of dramas such as the new BBC series ���World on Fire��� which began on Sunday night? We have plenty of soap operas in which clich��d characters are moved mechanically around a clich��d script so as to follow melodramatic plots based on fashionable ideas.

 

We have for many years had other soap operas or situation comedies set in this era, which can exploit the simple ���good versus evil��� contest which WW2 reliably provides. Or they can explore the pleasure and satisfaction to be found in adversity. Or they can exploit the supposedly sexy fashions and music of the time which, I suspect, were a good deal less glamorous and funky than what we tend to see portrayed. And there must have been other tunes apart from Glenn Miller���s��� ���In the Mood���, surely? Or was it played continuously throughout the later stages of the war, by every band?

 

And we have a number of memoirs and novels, from Evelyn Waugh to Olivia Manning, about the Second World War which could be the basis for heavyweight drama.

 

But it���s all getting a bit tired, as far as I���m concerned. I���m in my late 60s and even I am too young to remember the war, which ended 74 years ago. Is there really no other background for drama? I myself would be glad to see a serious modern attempt to dramatise the Suez affair, or the first modern outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, or the extraordinary irruption of left-wing ex-students into our culture and politics after the 1960s. Or there���s the Falklands, or the Blairite takeover of the Labour Party, or the Siege of Wapping when Rupert Murdoch broke the power of the print unions. There are books about a lot of these, fiction and non-fiction, which would provide the basis for many fascinating and illuminating dramas.

 

But back we go to 1939. And in this case, it���s not so much the World on Fire, as somebody trying to get it to light on a wet evening.

 

Where to begin? The drama is tediously woke in ways viewers will already have spotted. The BBC seems to have decided to bestow stardom on the  British Union of Fascists and its leader Sir Oswald Mosley (as a Knight Baronet,  he inherited the ���Sir��� from his father in 1928, before he became what he used to call a ���Fassist���.  It was not a personal honour). Not only is he a character in the inexplicable mad drivel known as ���Peaky Blinders���. He is important in ���World On Fire���. Too. Why is this? Mosley and the BUF never actually became politically important, never won a Parliamentary seat or made much impact in any vote anywhere. To state this is one of the biggest heresies in the modern world, and gets you attacked by Mosleyites (yes, some still exist) and by leftists alike. I suspect that left-wingers like to exaggerate him and his movement because they also like to claim to have ���defeated him��� at the ���Battle of Cable Street��� and various other events. But they too were insignificant in the 1930s. British politics in that era was remarkably free from fanaticism, despite very high levels of unemployment and the near-collapse of the Labour Party after the 1931 crisis. Mosley was very rich himself (and is persuasively alleged to have taken money from both Mussolini and Goebbels) and so was able to organize major rallies. But real political impact escaped him.

 

Anywhere, here he is again, and two of our main figures are heckling him at a rally in Manchester, as you do, if you very much want to get beaten up, I suppose.

 

She is a working class nightclub singer (yes, you have that right) and he is the son of a rich, snobbish woman who says she likes ���Mr Mosley��� (a term she would never have used of a Baronet, if she were as snobbish and ���fassist��� as portrayed). This presumably makes the point that snobbish rich people are really fascists, or ���fassists���, well, because people like that just are. Whereas working class people are left-wing or even pacifists.  The pair duly get themselves beaten up and are then somehow arrested for the more or less mad act of heckling the speaker during a large rally of people who don���t like free speech and do quite like violence. (please don���t point out the error about anachronistic Black Shirts to me. My esteemed MoS colleague Chris Hastings was the first to spot it, and I feel it has been well-aired). Quite why they are arrested for this is not clear, unless it is for stupidity, but there.  

 

Both of them are unlikely. He is a supposed toff (but absolutely without anything resembling a toff accent of the time) who is also a ���translator��� preparing to take up a post at the British Embassy in Warsaw. How, where and when (and why) he has learnt the fluent Polish which qualifies him for this post is not explained. Likewise, how the Embassy has hitherto managed without such an employee, or has not done what Embassies usually do, and hired locally,  is not explained. She, by contrast, is a nightclub singer who also works in a factory, a small demographic, I should have thought. This allows the Toff���s mother (the pro-fascist Snob) to dismiss her as a ���factory girl���.  Her father is a pacifist bus conductor (shell shocked in the Great War) and her brother is a petty criminal, presumably not a pacifist,  pursued by the police for scrap metal offences. The fact that the pacifist bus conductor is played by Sean Bean tells us that we are supposed to like this character, I think.

 

But lo, we are by now in Warsaw, where the allegedly upper-class translator keeps berating his even more upper-class superiors for not standing up for Poland (as if an Embassy in a foreign capital could declare war or mount an invasion).

 

And then we are some woods on the Polish border where a hard-drinking (we see her drinking hard) American reporter is stumping about, drawing attention to herself as German troops murder some Poles, or perhaps people in Polish uniform.

 

These events are, I think based upon the much-celebrated adventures of a British journalist, Clare Hollingworth , who observed German troops on the Polish border in September 1939; and also on the Gleiwitz incident, where concentration-camp prisoners were put into Polish uniforms and killed, to provide ���evidence��� of a faked attack by Polish troops on a German radio station, so providing a  pretext for war.

 

I���ve always thought Miss Hollingworth���s scoop a bit over-rated , as I don���t think anyone was in the slightest doubt that Germany was preparing an invasion of Poland in late August 1939.  No doubt she was an intrepid reporter. But it was one of the least surprising attacks ever made. But its portrayal in this programme is ludicrous. The idea that the German Army would have allowed a foreign witness to get so close to the murders that it shows, and then to drive away with nothing worse than a smashed rear windscreen, is nonsensical. But there, perhaps ���Peaky Blinders��� has finally destroyed the last barrier between implausibility and plausibility. Nobody cares any more.

 

Geography also seems to be a bafflement to the programme���s makers. Do they know where Danzig (now Gdansk)  is or why it mattered?  A middle-aged Pole is shown saying his friends died in 1918, freeing Danzig from Germany. Did they?  I���ve searched and can find no record of any such conflict. Poles, in the First World War, tended to end up in the German and Austrian Armies, and there was a serious attempt by the Kaiser to set up a phoney ���Kingdom of Poland��� to persuade Poles to fight against the Russian Empire.  As far as I know, Danzig - though separated from Germany by the new post-Versailles borders -  was peacefully detached from German rule in 1919 by the Versailles settlement, and classified as a ���Free City��� ruled by the League of Nations, in a customs union with Poland but not part of it.  Its German population (expelled in 1945) remained.

 

Come to that, do they know why the Polish Post Office in that city was so important?  A brief clip of presumably fake newsreel does not help much. A clue: It was almost the only Polish-controlled building in what was then an overwhelmingly (98%) German-populated city. The only other major Polish site was a small military depot in the harbour zone, in the district known as the Westerplatte. Both were attacked by German forces in the early hours of the war, not because they were militarily crucial, as Danzig was far from the front, but to demonstrate that Germany was bringing a German city back under German rule, something German governments had sought to do long before Hitler came to power.

 

One of the awkward facts about the German-Polish conflict is that Germany, especially over Danzig, had a much better case than it did over Czechoslovakia, none of which had ever belonged to Germany.   

 

And as they portray Polish men (in the family of the Polish waitress with whom the flighty young Toff-Translator has now formed an attachment) flocking to the colours on the eve of war do they really not know that (like most continental countries at the time) Poland had a highly-developed system of compulsory military service, which made volunteering pretty much unnecessary? As for Poland having no tanks, and only bicycles, a point heavy-handedly made, Poland did in fact have tanks in 1939, and the story about them fighting German tanks with cavalry is a myth.. There are pictures of Polish tanks rolling into Teschen, formerly Czech territory, in the autumn of 1938, after Poland took part in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia following the Munich surrender.  Poland had quite a large army, about 1.1 million in 1939 but it was poorly-equipped, not very well led and no match (as it turned out) for the modern German Army and its fast-moving tactics. Poland was not a free society at the time, but had been a military dictatorship since the 1920s, a dictatorship which feared that if it made a territorial deal with Germany, it might lose the support of Polish nationalists, and fall.

 

Poles fought bravely ��� about 160,000 died in the brief 1939 war. But their leaders, especially the unpleasant Foreign Minister Jozef Beck, had hugely overestimated their ability to resist the much more modern and aggressive German forces. For many years Polish troops had also trained mainly for a war against the USSR.  Britain and France may have overestimated the Poles too. There is a nasty whiff, in Anglo-French diplomatic manoeuvres at the time, of a hope that Poland might keep Germany occupied during the first winter of the war, while Paris and London prepared for a combat that they were certainly not ready for in September that year. Poland���s collapse, though they must have been pretty sure it would come, arrived too swiftly for them.

 

I shall be interested to see in future episodes, how honestly ���World on Fire��� deals with the Soviet invasion of Poland (the Polish film ���Katyn��� is worth seeing in this) or with the undoubted Anti-Semitism then prevalent in Poland (This is portrayed in Herman Wouk���s book, ���The Winds of War��� and mentioned bitterly in the brilliant and luminous post-war Polish film ���Ida��� ) . But so far it seems to me to be much more about melodrama than it is about history. There is absolutely nothing wrong with portraying great events through the eyes of small and even powerless individuals. It is often the best way to do it. But a clear understanding of those great events always helps. And cliches seldom do.