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 saw 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 were 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….
'There was at this time in Malta, as elsewhere, a difference of opinion concerning the best methods of dealing with the progressive demoralisation that comes to an individual taxed beyond his endurance… the "tough" school holds that the expression of fear in any form is a display of cowardice and should be treated as such….'
In March 1942 a sign was put up in every gun position in Malta. It said:
Fear is the weapon which the enemy employs to sabotage morale.
Anxiety neurosis is the term used by the medical profession to commercialise fear.
Anxiety neurosis is a misnomer which makes 'cold feet' appear respectable.
To give way to fear is to surrender to the enemy attack on your morale.
To admit an anxiety neurosis is to admit a state of fear which is either unreasonable or has no origin in your conception of your duty as a soldier.
If you are a man you will not permit your self-respect to admit an anxiety neurosis or to show fear.
Do not confuse fear with prudence or impulsive action with bravery.
Safety first is the worst of principles.
In civil life 'anxiety neurosis' will put you 'on the club'. In battle it brings you a bayonet in the bottom and a billet in a prisoner-of-war camp.
In Malta anxiety neurosis remained a dirty expression. The MO at SSQAHQ Malta who sent Reg Greer over to Imtarfa Hospital thought he might have a serious lung infection, 'NYD chest C/O pain in the left side of chest anteriorly—1/52—more marked after exercise. Increasing dyspnoea past 6/12. Morning cough with expectoration and anorexia past 3/12. Loss of weight—1 and a half in 3/13 and general malaise.' This time Reg Greer's bout of pleurisy had moved up from 1927–8 to 'nine years ago', or 1933.
In April, Reg Greer came before the RAF medical officers at AHQ Malta; their diagnosis was that he was suffering from bronchial catarrh, not contracted in service, and 'a well-developed anxiety neurosis', which was; the date and place of origin of the second was given as Malta, December 1942. The anxiety neurosis was moreover 'aggravated by service in Malta under siege conditions and by unsatisfactory accommodation in which he was required to work'. This time the pleurisy had retreated to seventeen years before, 1926, but the treatment had taken five months in hospital. Again they noted that he had arrived in Malta during the siege and that he had lost two stone and four pounds, his weight being nine stone and five pounds. (His enlisting weight was in fact ten stone and seven pounds.) For eight months he had been working underground. His temperature and pulse were normal. He could produce no sputum for examination. He could produce very few symptoms at all. Wing-Commander Knight and Flight-Lieutenant Dowd decided that 'this Officer should be invalided from Malta and returned to Australia'.
It was a month before F/O Greer got as far on his way home as Cairo. Mr Admans came across him in the Kiwi Club. 'You look terrible,' he said. Reg Greer tore him off a strip.
'Been in Malta, jumping out of the signals truck into the slitty every time the bombers came over,' said Mr Admans, which was odd, because it was quite wrong. Mr Admans felt quite sorry for Reg Greer, as everybody felt sorry for anyone who had endured the siege of Malta, which they mostly confused with the blitz. If civilians thought that he had endured the worst that the Luftwaffe could unleash, he let them think it.
How F/O Greer got from Cairo to Bombay and then to Devlali, I cannot say. In the crowded tent city of Devlali Reg Greer probably had to endure more uncomfortable conditions than he had encountered in Malta; inadequate sanitary arrangements were made worse by the mixing of men from all theatres of the war. Disease was rife, and boredom is no relief from stress. On 22 July he was admitted to No. 1 New Zealand Hospital Ship at Bombay, 'in debilitated condition and showing signs of general exhaustion'. After sixteen days he had 'improved greatly in appearance and his general nervous stability' was 'much better'. The NZ Medical Corps Officer noted further that 'his improvement during the last two weeks is such that the prognosis appears good and with an adequate spell should be suitable for duties in Australia in accordance with his training and ability'.
At Fremantle they took another look at him and, finding him unusually fit in that he had been subjected neither to malaria nor bilharziasis nor amoebiasis, they granted him three weeks' leave and packed him off to Melbourne.
And there we met him on Spencer Street Station. My aunt asked me, 'Do you know where you spent the night before you went to meet your father?'
'No,' I answered, a little puzzled as to why she should ask.
'With me,' she said, and waited for it to sink in.
'All night?'
'Your mother picked you up in the morning.'
'I see.'
When F/O Greer's three weeks were up, he was admitted to No. 6 RAAF Hospital at Heidelberg, and he stayed there for more than three weeks. There he was interviewed by Squadron-Leader Forgan, to whom he told the story of his life, in more detail than his wife and children had ever been given. Sick though he may have been Reg Greer remembered himself well enough to distort the truth, as I could see from his description of his newspaper career, which culminated in the impressive word 'manager'. Reg Greer was not a manager, but a rep. He continued the exaggeration of his weight loss, adding seven pounds to his enlistment weight and claiming that when he was evacuated his weight had fallen to 125 pounds. And he still allowed people to think that he had lived on Malta through the blitz.
These small lies might all be construed as permissible ploys in a bid for compassionate leave. Besides, Reg Greer was being loyal to his wife: 'He had a lot of dreams last night, dreamt someone had tried to sell his wife frocks without coupons and when he got home he was very annoyed about it. His wife has always been very dependant on him and devoted to him. Suggest relationship between dream contest and actual return from overseas with slightly modified home relationship.' Squadron-Leader Forgan was doing well but not well enough. When Reg Greer enlisted his wife was a sheltered twenty-four; she had grown up a lot in three years and had come to some of her own conclusions about life, helped by the flattery of her dancing partners. Reg Greer's home-life was not slightly modified but completely transformed. If his marriage was to survive he was going to have to work on it. Now I know that in his description of his childhood and education there was not one word of truth, now I know that his wife and child were the only kin Reg Greer could ever call his own. I know that he was lying for me.
Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them. Looking at the record of my father's desperate lying to Squadron-Leader Forgan, I am troubled by a nagging suspicion that the anxiety neurosis was a calculated performance. Reg Greer was not just a salesman, but a crack salesman. A salesman's chief asset is his trustability. He had learnt to use the techniques of manipulation in the desperate struggle for survival during the depression; S/L Forgan was putty in his hands. 'Patient very keen to remain in RAAF,' he noted. Actually the patient was very good at conveying the impression that he was keen to remain in the RAAF at the same time that he marshalled symptoms to ensure his discharge. At Heidelberg Hospital the professionals examined his urine, his faeces, his sputum, auscultated his heart, lungs and abdomen, much the way that I have ferreted away in the archives for verification of his autobiography. ND. Nothing detected. No acid-fast facts to be found. Except that after three weeks of my mother's loving care and attention Reg Greer was losing the weight he had gained on the hospital ship.
On 11 October, 1943, the Central Medical Board agreed that F/O Greer should return to work, the kind of work that would allow him to live at home and sleep at nights in his own bed, but nine days later the patient was complaining that he could not carry on. 'He has been at work for only three days and all his anxiety symptoms have returned,' wrote S/L Forgan. 'He feels that he cannot take the responsibility or stand the long hours of work. I now consider that he is unlikely to be able to carry on in the service, and recommend his discharge on medical grounds.'
Reg Greer's war had lasted not quite two years. He joined the Returned Services League so that he could wear the badge and not be asked embarrassing questions about what he was doing in civvy street while Australians were dying in the Pacific. Everybody knew he had been on Malta during the siege, and that no more could be asked of any man. His marriage survived. On 5 February, 1945, my little sister was born. Seven months later the Japanese surrendered.
I do not know why a certain little girl mis-remembered that her father went to war early and stayed late, when he went late and left early. I do not know why the time he was gone seemed to me so long, when in fact it was so short, except that I must have missed him very much. There is a sliver of memory that snags my mind every so often: I am wheeling my little sister in her pram and the war is still on. I am aware of it, afraid of it, just there beyond the housetops. I remember that, you see, but I do not remember that when my sister was born my father was home to look after us. There were fireworks over Port Philip Bay to celebrate the armistice; I remember being allowed to stay up and watch through the long window of the 'lounge'. When the explosions began and light fell from the sky like tracer, I began to scream, certain that the invasion had begun. There were shadowy people in the dark room with me, one of whom must have been my father. But I did not recognise him.
That is the truth of it, you see. I did not recognise him.
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