There is considerable consensus among historians about the impact of the Second World War on British attitudes to continental Europe: one that identifies 1940 as a defining moment. The fall of France and the retreat from Dunkirk figure strongly in the view that the Second World War reinforced the story of Britain as an island nation. Richard Weight's comment that the Second World War “honed the island identity of the British” is echoed by Timothy Garton Ash, who uses a David Low cartoon to illustrate his argument that an island identity “acquired a huge boost during the second world war, and particularly in the formative moment of 1940.”Footnote 1 The Low cartoon, captioned “very well alone!” Ash notes, shows a British soldier standing defiantly on a shore nearly engulfed by waves and shaking his fist at a sky full of Nazi planes. According to Kenneth Morgan, “Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the image of ‘standing alone’ and subsequently saving a stricken continent from itself went deep into British folk memories.” Morgan argues that “the triumphant record of the Second World War strengthened amongst the British people a powerful sense of detachment from continental Europe.”Footnote 2 Malcolm Smith similarly notes that “France's defeat, and Britain's subsequent survival, not only worked to confirm Britain's sense of innate national superiority but also helped to cement a more general distrust of European entanglements for generations.”Footnote 3
“Europe against the Germans”—the slogan of the V for Victory campaign begun in 1941—suggests a rather different version of British-European relations from the island story. From 1941, at a time when mass murder and genocide were under way on a vast scale, the Continent was increasingly portrayed in the British media through a narrative of resistance that told of civilized, decent, and gallant nations united against Nazi Germany. Repeated tributes were paid to the courage and heroism of resisters, often showing resistance movements working autonomously, but also showing unity between British and continental Europeans in common resistance to Germany. Such images, I argue, meant that in 1942–44 the British media came close to identifying Britons as European—perhaps closer than at any other moment in the twentieth century. Indeed, in 1942–44 the connection made between Europe and civilization was so emphatic, and the definition of “good Europeans” so routinely constructed against Germany, that the narrative of a Continent united in resistance meant that it was Germans who were sometimes explicitly, and always implicitly, shown as “not-European.”
The V for Victory campaign of 1941 was initiated by Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian refugee in Britain: one of a number of European exiles in Britain who contributed to the development of the resistance narrative through their work in the British media. De Laveleye, who worked for BBC radio, chose the letter V as a rallying sign in a broadcast on Radio Belgique because it stood for “victoire” in French and “vrijheid” in Flemish.Footnote 4 His idea was quickly taken up in propaganda radio broadcasts targeted at occupied European nations. Like other British wartime propaganda aimed at recruitment to the war effort—women to war industries in Britain; Indians to the armed forces; and, before December 1941, America to the Allied cause—the V campaign aimed to recruit resisters to the war effort, creating “the frame of mind in which our listeners will feel themselves part of a great army.” It encouraged them to identify their resistance particularly through the V sign—chalked on a wall, signed with the fingers, or made with sound through the Morse code rhythm for V. This was the same rhythm as the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which became the identification signal of the BBC European service.Footnote 5
The resistance story was also produced for domestic consumption. As Michael Stenton observes, “Resistance was a story, a meaning, which Radio London could transmit to others because the British told it to themselves.”Footnote 6 The V for Victory campaign may have been targeted at occupied Europe, but it was also widely reported for domestic audiences, while a range of cartoons about the campaign in the British press in 1941 assumed a considerable level of knowledge from their audiences.Footnote 7 A similar assumption that British audiences were familiar with the idea of clandestine listening to BBC radio is evident in a cartoon in Punch captioned “The Secret Hope,” which depicts a group of three men and one woman listening intently to the radio in a cellar, but makes no reference to the BBC, suggesting the extent to which the audience was assumed to recognize the identity of the broadcaster that brought Europeans hope.Footnote 8 After 1941 the V campaign was often featured in resistance films, as in The Day Will Dawn (1942), where Norwegians defy a compulsory German entertainment by noisily asserting the rhythm of V, tapping it on tabletops and stamping it with their feet until the band takes it up in a musical rendition.Footnote 9 The extent to which a wider narrative of the resistance became quickly established is also suggested by complaints about its overfamiliarity by film critics. Despite the novelty of resistance films, as early as September 1942, The Times, reviewing The Secret Mission set in France, urged producers to ask themselves “whether, if they are determined to set their scenes in one of the occupied countries, they have anything fresh to say or any fresh way of saying what has become distressingly familiar.”Footnote 10 The Monthly Film Bulletin's review of Undercover (1943), set in Yugoslavia, complained less than a year later: “The incidents are all too familiar to war audiences who, for years, have been made aware of hostages, torture, raids and death.”Footnote 11
Commenting on the emergence of a range of stories about resistance in postwar continental Europe, Tony Judt suggests that, in the Netherlands, “accounts of heroic farmers rescuing downed British airmen became part of national mythology.”Footnote 12 But such an account was first given in a British wartime film, set in the Netherlands, which enjoyed considerable popularity: One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).Footnote 13 The British wartime resistance narrative in many ways foreshadowed those produced so rapidly in continental Europe once the war was over. Like them, it showed nations united against the German oppressor and obscured genocide against Jews, the extent of collaboration, and divisions within resistance movements. In countries occupied by Germany, where resisters were subject to arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death, no public narrative of resistance could be produced in wartime outside the underground press. For the same reason, with occasional exceptions, it was not possible in wartime to disseminate British visual imagery to occupied countries. Although two French-language films about the French resistance directed by Alfred Hitchcock were made for screening in France, they had very limited distribution there.Footnote 14 The British resistance narrative was thus the first to be produced and disseminated publicly in Europe, largely to British audiences.
The public resistance narrative produced in continental Europe once the war was over has attracted considerable attention from scholars.Footnote 15 This literature points up its importance to unity, stability, and the development of postwar identity in nations that were formerly occupied by Germany. It also pays considerable attention to the idea of a wider Continent united in resistance as one of the foundational myths that supported ideas of European integration, providing heroes that Pieter Lagrou calls “a very convenient, noble and consensual set of founding fathers” for the nation-building project of European federalists.Footnote 16 However, the onset of the Cold War meant that—unlike the British wartime narrative of a Continent united in resistance—ideals of European integration encompassed only Western Europe.
By comparison with the postwar resistance narrative on the Continent, the British resistance narrative has received little attention. Although critics have written interesting work on the wartime cycle of British resistance films, they do not situate these films within any wider investigation of the impact of war on British attitudes to Europe.Footnote 17 By tracing the development of stories of the resistance and focusing on those that the British told themselves, this article argues that they suggest considerable British engagement with the Continent. The image of “Europe against the Germans” emerged slowly, and early narratives were confined to celebrating the resistance of brave individuals. Even so, they denied the insularity that had been used to justify appeasement. From 1942 there was an increasing development of an image that I have called a “people's resistance,” which corresponded in many ways to the vision projected of the British war effort in imagery of the “people's war”—unity across differences of gender, class, and age in a common endeavor fighting for common values.
The British media gave more attention to wartime European resistance movements than to Britain's other allies—the empire, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Although an image of a “people's empire” was produced in empire propaganda, especially after 1942, it was never as strongly developed as the “people's resistance.”Footnote 18 In contrast to a prolific cycle of feature films showing resistance in continental Europe, empire propaganda was mainly confined to documentaries. Moreover, once the war was over, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the imperial war effort were generally expelled from imagery, but the resistance narrative proved enduring. Indeed, it became pervasive in British culture and a significant element in memories of war. Widely disseminated on television, it continued to be told throughout the twentieth century and into the new millennium.Footnote 19
The resistance narrative, however, not only demonstrates British engagement with Europe in wartime and in memories of war but also different versions of British-European relations in play at different moments in wartime and its aftermath. This article explores the resistance narrative as it developed in the mainstream British media in wartime and was reworked in the context of victory in 1945 and looks at the shifting meanings it assigned to the Continent, to British relations with the Continent, and its significance in British memories of the Second World War.
Early Beginnings of the Resistance Story
It would be hard to dispute that in 1940, the Dunkirk myth of merciful redemption, quickly developed and celebrating what the Daily Express called “the amateur sailors of England” and their “ragged armada,” emphasized the island nation.Footnote 20 An atmosphere of suspicion and hostility to foreigners also characterized Britain in 1940. A policy of mass internment of enemy aliens was introduced in May, and the entry of Italy into the war in June not only swelled the numbers interned but also prompted anti-Italian riots in a number of British cities.Footnote 21 In May, Mass Observation reported that stories of aliens acting as Fifth Columnists in Holland meant that “the enemy in our midst is easily visualised. The always latent antagonism to the alien and foreigner began to flare up. Nearly everyone, as previous research has shown, is latently somewhat anti-Semitic and somewhat anti-alien. But ordinarily it is not the done thing to express such sentiments publicly. The news from Holland made it the done thing all of a sudden.”Footnote 22
The resistance narrative did not emerge strongly in British cinema until 1942, but four early films countered aspects of such antialienism. As in later stories of resistance, attention was divided between continental Europeans—in these early films, Germans and Austrians shown acting against the Nazi regime after Hitler's rise to power—and British anti-Nazi action set in continental Europe. All four films are notable for their setting in the past, before Britain declared war on Germany. Those that showed the British in Europe read back anti-Nazi action into a period when official government policy was appeasement, and they deny the insularity used to justify that policy.
Before September 1939, the policy of appeasement meant that films that were openly critical of Nazi Germany were not passed for production. However, The Lady Vanishes, which criticized not only Nazi Germany but also British appeasement of Germany, was released in 1938.Footnote 23 Since the British Board of Film Censors would sometimes pass films where countries were not identifiable or were given fictitious names, much of the action in The Lady Vanishes is set on a train crossing the fictional mid-European country of Bandrika, so that its anti-Nazi themes are disguised, if thinly, and its criticism of appeasement necessarily oblique.Footnote 24 It shows a highly sinister group of Europeans, intent on murdering a British governess, who is later revealed as a British agent. Appeasement is most obviously critiqued through the character of Eric Todhunter (Cecil Parker), who continues to believe that the sinister group is acting in good faith even when they besiege the train. He steps outside the carriage to negotiate with them, waving a white handkerchief, only to be immediately shot, and dies muttering “you don’t understand.” Other British passengers all redeem themselves by putting up determined and resourceful opposition to the sinister group but only after they have been shown as slow to recognize danger and reluctant to get involved.
The Lady Vanishes was a comedy thriller that introduced the characters of Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Norton Wayne). Much of its comedy derived from their determined insularity in a European setting where they encounter continental Europeans who, unaccountably, cannot speak English. They are constantly balked in their quest to keep abreast with the cricket test score and get back to England in time to see the end of the match. Early wartime films and radio programs reprised these themes. Night Train to Munich (1940) and Crook's Tour (1941)—a radio series of six adventures as well as a film—were all comedy thrillers in which Charters and Caldicott were once again caught up inadvertently in European adventures.Footnote 25 In Crook's Tour, as in The Lady Vanishes, they finally arrive back in England only to find the test match canceled. The contrast between the dangers they face and overcome in continental Europe and their arrival home to a place of safety became a characteristic theme of resistance narratives that showed continental Europe as a highly dangerous place. The idea of Britain as a haven for continental Europeans was a recurrent wartime theme. In the same week that Night Train to Munich was released, a range of stories appeared in the press about Europeans seeking to escape to England from the Nazis and of the Albanian and Dutch royal families finding refuge in England.Footnote 26
Addressing the nation by radio just before flying to meet Hitler in 1938, Neville Chamberlain used insularity to legitimize the Munich agreement he signed three days later. Speaking of Czechoslovakia, he said, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”Footnote 27 It is perhaps significant that Night Train to Munich foregrounded Czechoslovakia, opening with shots of its invasion and ending with sequences where a British agent, masquerading as a Nazi officer, helps a Czechoslovakian scientist and his daughter to escape from Germany. These sequences are set on the night that Britain declared war on Germany and involve a Nazi-British struggle that, as in The Lady Vanishes, takes place on a train. In showing Britons protecting and aiding Czechoslovakians the film obscures the prewar history of British-Czechoslovakian relations, particularly the Munich agreement, which conceded Hitler's demand for the annexation of Czechoslovakia's border regions by the Third Reich. Night Train to Munich ends with a shoot-out in which the Czechoslovakian scientist and his daughter rely on the British to beat off Nazi assailants. Charters and Caldicott acquit themselves well in this gun battle, as they do in the shoot-out in The Lady Vanishes, suggesting that the insularity they represent is easily compatible with determined and resourceful resistance. In reading opposition to Nazi Germany back into the prewar period, and showing the British as protectors of Czechoslovakians, Night Train to Munich denies the insularity used to justify the Munich agreement, showing British engagement with oppressed Czechoslovakians.
The credentials of prewar anti-Nazi action are also established in Pimpernel Smith (1941), which, like Night Train to Munich, is set in the period leading up to the British declaration of war on Germany and shows Britons saving Europeans from the Nazis.Footnote 28 Its hero, Professor Horatio Smith (Leslie Howard), aided by a team of Cambridge undergraduates, ostensibly goes on an archaeological dig to Germany but is actually on a mission to get artists, intellectuals, and scientists across the German border. According to the Kinematograph Weekly, Leslie Howard, who not only starred in the film but also directed and produced it, was British audiences’ most popular film star in 1941. Antonia Lant writes, “He could invoke, through his mere presence, the idea of a unified nation, despite the diversity of accent, class, and character that comprised it.”Footnote 29
Like Night Train to Munich and many post-1941 resistance films, Pimpernel Smith represents continental Europeans chiefly through a father-daughter pair, a device that offers scope for a romantic plot between the daughters and British men. The heroes of Night Train to Munich and Pimpernel Smith duly fall in love. By depicting the British heroes who save the day as male, and the main continental European characters as female, these films position Britishness as masculine and paternalist in relation to the Continent. British heroism, offering a very different version of masculinity from the jackbooted hypermasculinity of brutal Nazis, conforms closely to what Sonya Rose has identified as “temperate heroism.”Footnote 30 But these early films do not conform to imagery of a British “people's war” or a European “people's resistance.” Their British heroes are both Oxbridge men, while the Europeans that they rescue are described in Pimpernel Smith as “scientists, men of letters, artists, doctors.”
Like Night Train to Munich and Pimpernel Smith, early films that showed Germans and Austrians acting against the Nazi regime—Pastor Hall (1940) and Freedom Radio (1941)—are set in the period before war was declared and show temperate heroes, in this case Germans and Austrians.Footnote 31 Indeed, their heroes, played by British actors, are domesticated for a British audience, as English-speaking exemplars of temperate masculinity. They are stoical, calm, kindly, and, like Professor Horatio in Pimpernel Smith, committed to nonviolence, offering no armed resistance. The British Board of Film Censors rejected the initial proposal for Pastor Hall as late as July 1939, judging that “even with the nationality disguised, it must be evident that the story is anti-Nazi propaganda.”Footnote 32 But once war was declared, it was made quickly, drawing on the story of the German Pastor Martin Niemoller, and showing Pastor Hall (Wilfred Lawson) speaking out openly against Nazi ideology and practices. The censors had no problems about passing the scenario for Liberty Radio (retitled Freedom Radio for release) in October 1939.Footnote 33 The film had a similar focus on a brave individual, showing Doctor Karl Roder (Clive Brook) setting up a clandestine radio station through which he exposes Nazi lies.
Pastor Hall and Freedom Radio are particularly interesting in relation to two historically important strands in British antialienism: anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. They show Germany and Austria as Christian countries now assailed by a new barbarism: anti-Christian Nazis. This is a major theme of Pastor Hall; it is also apparent in Freedom Radio, which shows the Nazis murdering a priest—Father Landbach (Morland Graham)—in view of his congregation because he publicly names friends who have disappeared. This murder is important to the film as a turning point for Karl Roder—an old friend of Landbach's who witnesses his death. It is from this point that Roder begins to dedicate himself to truth telling, setting up the radio station. Landbach is a Roman Catholic priest, while Pastor Hall is Protestant, but such distinctions are irrelevant within the portrayal of anti-Christian Nazis.
Pastor Hall was highly unusual in showing Nazi persecution of the Jews. This theme was not taken up or developed in subsequent resistance films, which generally excluded Jews both as resisters and as victims of Nazi atrocities. Freedom Radio offers a very brief glimpse of stones thrown at windows that bear the graffiti “Jude” as its only reference to Nazi anti-Semitism. There is no explicit reference in Pimpernel Smith to those who escape from Germany as Jews: the opening titles refer only to “people of many nationalities who are being persecuted and exterminated by the Nazis.” Even in Pastor Hall the persecution of Jews is a minor theme, subordinate not only to the story about a Christian pastor but also to the story of the rape of a young woman by a Nazi officer. In showing the murder of priests in Christian countries, both Pastor Hall and Freedom Radio suggest a wider sense of Europe as Christendom now under threat in which Jewishness has little place. Nevertheless, Jewish European exiles, migrants, and their descendants made a considerable contribution to these productions.Footnote 34Pastor Hall was based on a play by Ernst Toller—a German Jew living in exile who committed suicide shortly before the film went into production. Mutz Greenbaum, also a German Jew, was the cinematographer for Pimpernel Smith, while Leslie Howard, who directed and produced it, was born to Jewish Hungarian parents soon after they arrived in Britain.
Early resistance narratives began to define “good Europeans” by their anti-Nazi action and thus countered the antialienism of the Fifth Column scare. Their theme of British anti-Nazi action in the prewar period meant that they denied appeasement and the insularity used to justify this policy. However, by focusing on the past, they did not begin to develop any narrative of wartime resistance. Such a narrative became quickly established beginning in 1941, in stories that moved away from the period before the British declaration of war on Germany by celebrating the courage of resistance movements in countries occupied by Germany. The “good German” portrayed in Pastor Hall and the distinction between Nazis and Germans increasingly faded from view and, after 1940, the possibility that Germans could be “good Europeans” was seldom entertained.Footnote 35 But good Europeans, as defined by their resistance to Nazi Germany, multiplied in narratives that increasingly suggested an entire Continent engaged in resistance.
Europe against the Germans
In late 1941, Jiri Weiss, a Czechoslovakian Jewish filmmaker who had fled from Prague in 1938, advocated enlarging the ideological scope of British documentary film. He suggested that British film propaganda should make clear that “Britain stands for much more than just the British Empire” and tell “true stories of the multitude of nations which have forgotten the enmities of yesterday, and now stand side by side.” He urged his colleagues to show not only the face of Britain but also “the face of Poland, of Holland, of Czechoslovakia.” But he also urged particular types of faces—not those of the “notables” like Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and King George of Greece but those of the ordinary people “over there, at home, facing the terror of the enemy.”Footnote 36
In 1942–44 resistance films—feature as well as documentary—began to focus on the faces of ordinary people, producing an image of a “people's resistance” on the Continent corresponding to imagery of a “people's war” in Britain. Tributes to brave individuals like Pastor Hall and Doctor Roder were succeeded by emphasis on an organized collective. In One of Our Aircraft Is Missing—the first of a number of resistance films released in 1942—this collective consists of all the Dutch portrayed—diverse by class, gender, and age—with the exception of one collaborator. In The Day Will Dawn, also released in 1942, it encompasses the entire Norwegian village portrayed, again with the exception of one collaborator. A core resistance group is identified through a schoolmaster, postman, and baker, and a characteristic father-daughter pair who are a seaman and sea woman. The film preserves a gentlemanly British hero in Colin Metcalfe (Hugh Williams), who encounters resisters in Norway first as a journalist and then as a British agent.
The good European in resistance imagery was above all else a good patriot, and resistance was usually shown in specific national contexts, but there was a constant pull toward the idea of an entire Continent united in resistance, as in the slogan of the V campaign of 1941—“Europe against the Germans.” In a preliminary plan for the campaign, Douglas Ritchie of the BBC European News, suggested that “the first weeks might be devoted to establishing a feeling of solidarity between oppressed peoples. In fact a European consciousness.”Footnote 37 The cumulative effect of narratives contributed to the idea of such a consciousness and is particularly evident in BBC radio series. They Shall Rise Again, broadcast in 1942, had a title that united ideas about resistance across the Continent, paying tribute to famous cities now under Nazi rule including Athens, Belgrade, Paris, Prague, Louvain, Rotterdam, and Warsaw.Footnote 38The Silent Battle—a six-part series broadcast in 1944—celebrated a wide range of resistance activities in Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Its episode on the underground press, named French, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, and Danish newspapers and made them a symbol of European unity: “When each occupied country stirs to the grind of secret presses it talks to all Europe under the noses of the conquerors.”Footnote 39 In an episode set in Poland, where radio ownership was banned, it made similar claims for secret radio: “It might symbolise resistance all over Europe; it might be the voice of the Underground itself in any enslaved country until … God speed the day … the nations rise again and the silent battle is won.”Footnote 40
Within imagery of a “people's resistance” Jews rarely featured either as resisters or victims of atrocities, while divisions within resistance movements and the prominence of Communists were obscured. The absence of collaborators was also notable. Sometimes, as in early examples like One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and The Day Will Dawn, there is one collaborator—an isolated individual, easily outwitted by the collective organization and unity of resisters. In these ways the story told in wartime Britain foreshadowed stories told on the Continent once the war was over.
In many films in the resistance cycle, continental Europeans who are ostensibly collaborating—and earning the hatred of local communities for doing so—are in fact using collaboration as a cover for their resistance activities. Both the hatred they earn and their true identity as resisters mark out the idea of widespread support for the resistance. The theme was taken up in radio programs. In the episode of The Silent Battle about secret radio, set in Poland, a woman mistakes a resistance leader—Jankowski—for a collaborator and informs on him to the Gestapo. The program celebrates the way in which, despite this information, Jankowski successfully evades discovery. But when he tells the woman of his true identity, he comments that “the worst of the case is being despised by your own compatriots.”Footnote 41
Resisters who masquerade as collaborators are often father-daughter pairs—a pairing already apparent in early resistance stories. In Uncensored (1942), set in Belgium, and The Secret Mission (1942) and Tomorrow We Live (1942), both set in France, father and daughter work closely together, entertaining and flattering Nazis but also constantly outwitting them.Footnote 42 This family theme means that encounters between Nazis and continental Europeans sometimes take place in domestic interiors. But German civilians like Pastor Hall largely disappear from view after 1941, and virtually all Germans shown in feature films—with the exception of spies—wear military uniforms. Encounters between Germans and other Europeans are thus invariably between military men and civilians, including women. The “hypermasculinity” of the Nazis noted by Sonya Rose was much in evidence in resistance imagery often contrasting with the familial virtues of the father-daughter pair, although the figure of the stupid, blundering officer provided some reassurance that not all Germans posed a serious threat. Such officers were frequently fat and always easily outwitted.Footnote 43
A BBC European Intelligence Report in 1941, commenting on the V campaign, stated that “our aim is to produce resistance without revolution.”Footnote 44 Much of the imagery of Europe in resistance narratives presented a conservative Continent, with emphasis on freedoms enjoyed before Nazi occupation, and the awaited liberation as an event that would restore such freedoms rather than produce any new order. This was the theme of the BBC They Shall Rise Again series and a further radio series broadcast in 1942 entitled Salute To—that included Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and the people of France, Holland, Greece, Luxembourg, and Poland among those it saluted. Both rehearsed historical details of the cities and nations they celebrated, emphasizing their love of freedom as well as patriotism as the basis of their resistance.Footnote 45La Libre Belgique attracted more publicity in wartime Britain than any other underground newspaper, perhaps because it bore the same title as its First World War counterpart.Footnote 46Uncensored (1942)—a film devoted to honoring the resisters who produced this newspaper—makes much of this connection. The film celebrates Belgian heritage when, after Nazis discover the printing press, resisters continue to produce the paper on a seventeenth-century press in the Musée Des Beaux Arts, which, miraculously, still works. Perhaps the most conservative of all films was The Flemish Farm (1943), which shows a Belgian airman's return to occupied Belgium to bring back the regimental colors that are buried there.Footnote 47 A former commander aids the airman on this mission—a resistance leader who is labeled a “Jew Communist” by Nazis before they shoot him. This is of course a lie. Celebration of Communist or Jewish involvement in the resistance is very far from the film's purpose.
Despite their prominence in resistance movements once the Soviet Union entered the war, Communists were generally excluded from British resistance narratives. After 1941, British propaganda on the Soviet Union offered praise for the virtues of the Russian people while managing to avoid references to Communism, and resistance narratives followed the same model.Footnote 48Undercover (1943), set in Yugoslavia, was originally intended to celebrate the activities of Chetniks as guerrilla fighters and was entitled Chetnik. When the British government decided to support the Chetniks’ rivals—Communist partisans led by Josip Tito—the filmmakers changed this title. Even so, Undercover obscured both the Communism of the resisters and divisions within the Yugoslavian resistance movement.Footnote 49
Conservative imagery did not preclude unprecedented support for clandestine organizations using terrorist methods—sabotage and murder. The commitment to nonviolence that characterized early resistance stories, expressed through characters like Pastor Hall, Doctor Roder, and Horatio Smith, receded. Saboteurs featured in cartoons. In one Daily Mail example in 1942, a man carrying boxes labeled “dynamite” taps a Nazi on the shoulder asking for a match.Footnote 50 On occasions there is an attempt to soften the image of saboteurs—Uncensored shows a resister's anxiety to prevent a woman wheeling a pram into an area where he knows an explosion is imminent. But there was also considerable support for violent revenge against Nazis. The hero of Uncensored finds that Nazi troops invading Belgium have used flamethrowers to burn alive women and children. He later encounters one of the perpetrators of this massacre and bayonets him to death, then confesses to a Roman Catholic priest that he has “killed a man in cold blood.” In the radio program “They Saw Him Die” (1944), a Polish wedding party is massacred by Germans and avenged by the bridegroom's brother who works in the resistance.Footnote 51 Support for violent revenge in Europe coincided with condemnation of nonviolent resistance against British rule in India. In 1942, Winston Churchill and much of the British media condemned demonstrations by the Quit India Movement as the work of “hooligans and agitators.”Footnote 52 Good patriots were European, not Indian.
In September 1942, the Director of Talks at the BBC commented, “It is not easy to make the British public realise what is happening in the Continent since we find that there is a distinct ‘sales resistance’ to horror stories.”Footnote 53 This cautious approach was based on the fear that audiences’ identification of “horror” as propaganda would undermine British claims to truth telling. Even so, Nazi atrocities were a pervasive theme of resistance narratives, and some made such atrocities their major focus. The Silent Village (1943) shows the Nazi massacre of the inhabitants of the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice, which took place on 10 June 1942. It ends with a sequence where the women and children of the village are marched off to detention camps and all the men are backed up against a wall, then shot.Footnote 54 However, genocide against Jews in Europe was only given sporadic attention in the media because of fears that publicity would stimulate anti-Semitism at home, while the idea of the good patriot and the good European was not generally extended to Jews. Nor were Jews incorporated into a common idea that resisters were particularly determined to act against Nazi Germany because they had been persecuted.
In 1942 British media, including the BBC, gave Nazi genocide against Jews substantial publicity; they reported a speech in Parliament by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, where he stated that the German authorities were now carrying out “Hitler's oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” His statement was followed by a one-minute silence in Parliament for the victims.Footnote 55 But there was increasing concern about the impact of such publicity on anti-Semitism at home. A Ministry of Information Home Intelligence Weekly Report in January 1943 commented that while such atrocities “continue to be regarded with horror,” one result of publicity for them was that “people are more conscious of the Jews they do not like here.”Footnote 56 From 1943, the BBC, following the advice of a deputation from the British Board of Jewish Deputies, decided to limit coverage of Jews to “occasional favourable notices” in news bulletins.Footnote 57 In April 1943 the final word was delivered by the director general after discussion with the chairman: “The present time is not opportune for dealing with the Jewish problem in our programmes.”Footnote 58
In its exclusions—collaborators, Communists, Jews—the British wartime narrative not only foreshadowed postwar imagery produced in continental Europe but also corresponded to the wartime narrative of a “people's war.” Despite extensive efforts to produce inclusive imagery, Jews were generally missing from the “people's war” and Communists entirely absent. British collaborators were sometimes shown, but it is significant that Went the Day Well? (1942), imagining the invasion of Britain, makes the Fifth Columnist the local squire, while the ordinary people of the village are united in resistance.Footnote 59 The narrative of a “people's war” and a European “people's resistance” were generally separate, and the latter often showed autonomous movements on the Continent engaged in a wide range of underground activities, with no reference to Britain. But “people's war” and “people's resistance” could sometimes merge.
Britain and Europe, 1942–44
The first resistance film released in 1942 merged imagery of the “people's war” and the European “people's resistance.” It showed a group of downed British airmen who are diverse by class, age, and region, encountering Dutch resisters who are diverse by class, age, and gender. One of Our Aircraft Is Missing reversed the roles played in early resistance films where Britons helped continental Europeans to escape from Germany. It showed Dutch resisters helping the British airmen to escape from occupied Holland with great resourcefulness and courage, and at considerable risk to their own lives. The Dutch provide for the airmen a route to the sea, shelter, hiding places, food, and friendship on the way.
In the early stages of the war, the theme of British leadership of the European resistance had been much more prominent than any “we” of cooperation and unity between British and resisters. Although the V campaign was initiated by Victor de Laveleye, leadership was quickly taken over by the British. A BBC European Intelligence Report urged the need for “radio leadership” in order to “to gain and keep the power of commanding action from disarmed and hungry peoples and to use that power exactly as and when it can most help the High Command.” The report suggested that Winston Churchill should proclaim himself commander-in-chief of the campaign.Footnote 60 Douglas Ritchie in his preliminary report made frequent reference to what the V army in Europe would be prepared to do “at a word from London” and was immensely optimistic about the possibilities of broadcasting as a weapon of war. He stated, “We shall tell them what to do when the time comes. In the meantime they must listen to us.” The language of “them” and “us” was extended in his view that “they must deserve our victory.”Footnote 61
Reporting on the V campaign in 1941, a BBC European Intelligence Paper also deployed the language of “them” and “us,” suggesting that “these people (of oppressed Europe) still need from us symbols, songs, slogans, jokes, rolls of honour, names of traitors.”Footnote 62 The language of “them” and “us” is also apparent in different versions of a slogan that was used a good deal in 1942, expressing confidence that Europe would rise again. As “We Shall Rise Again,” it appeared at the end of Uncensored printed on the bottom of La Libre Belgique, clutched by a Belgian who has just been shot by Germans. As “The Netherlands Will Rise Again!” it was the final intertitle of One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, shown first in Dutch—“Nederland Zal Herrijzen!”—and then duly translated. But in the BBC series, broadcast in 1942, it became They Shall Rise Again—a title that identified the difference between British and continental European wartime experience. The “we” of “we shall rise again” is continental Europe only. Britain, having escaped invasion, occupation, and oppression by Germany, had no need to “rise again.”
The “we” of British and Europeans united in resistance, however, was at least as prominent in resistance narratives in 1942–44 as a “we” encompassing only continental Europe. Many documentaries showed continental European exiles continuing the anti-Nazi struggle and fighting alongside the British.Footnote 63 Feature films set in continental Europe showed British and resisters working together. In most narratives in this period, British leadership was much less apparent than close cooperation between British and continental Europeans in a common endeavor. Feature films often showed initial suspicion and mistrust on both sides. The theme of masquerade appears at the outset of One of Our Aircraft Is Missing when the Dutch suspect the British are Nazi agents disguised in RAF uniform, and in their turn the British suspect the Dutch are masquerading as resisters. But they quickly establish a relationship of trust, friendship, and mutual respect. Films about British agents on missions to continental Europe also show such cooperation—in organizing a commando raid on a German submarine base in a Norwegian fjord (The Day Will Dawn), in locating a German installation in France that must be destroyed (Secret Mission), and in blowing up a secret weapons factory in Czechoslovakia (The Adventures of Tartu).Footnote 64 All these films emphasize the dependence of British agents on their contacts in Europe and show Europeans helping Britons by providing local knowledge and equipment as well as food and hiding places. Through their involvement in these missions, Europeans risk their lives and often die as a result.
Solidarity in resistance even extended to support for British bombing raids on occupied countries—at least in media images. In fact, there was a good deal of anxiety about the impact of such raids on public opinion in continental Europe. A BBC European Intelligence Paper, drawing on letters received by the BBC and others, interviews with travelers, reports from neutral observers, and admissions made by Paris and Vichy press and radio, charted reactions ranging from acceptance and even welcome, through the view that Britain should focus on bombing Germany, to sharply anti-British opinion.Footnote 65 But in resistance narratives RAF raids cement British-European unity rather than disrupt it. In The Flemish Farm, the Belgian airman's mother tells him that although she is afraid when the RAF come over, she is disappointed when they do not. The radio program Salute to Greece begins with a dialogue between two Greek women who hear the drone of planes:
Penelope: God is good Lina. That is the RAF.
Lina: Come on in friends, come and drop your bombs on us. We don’t mind, do we Penelope?
Penelope: Not if they kill some of our enemies. … Drop your bombs friends and may they be big ones.Footnote 66
In One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Jo de Vries tells downed airmen “that's what you’re doing for us,” as a raid over Holland begins; she describes the RAF's “steady hum, night after night” as “that noise which is oil for the burning fire in our hearts.”
Female resisters are often foregrounded in resistance narratives, while the British, like Germans, are male. Gender is thus important in the construction of British-European relations as it is in the construction of German-European relations, but with entirely different meanings. German men's romantic attachments with women in occupied countries are never shown, and there are no references to what the French called “horizontal collaboration,” between German men and European women, or to any heterosexual or homosexual relationships between Germans and nationals of occupied countries. Several films, however, do show German men forcing their attentions on female resisters who refuse them.Footnote 67 In contrast, many films feature cross-national romantic plots between British men and female resisters.Footnote 68 Through such romantic plots and their construction of national relations through gender relations, early resistance films had reinforced an image of British benevolent paternalism, but in films made in 1942–44 the image is frequently one of British men's strong admiration for the courage of female resisters as well as their dependence on them for safety and survival.
One reviewer of Undercover noted that in its portrayal of Yugoslavian resistance, “the fierce patriots are lost under a calm English exterior.”Footnote 69 To some extent continental European heroes, like their British counterparts, continued to be given the qualities of temperate masculinity that had characterized Pastor Hall and Doctor Roder in early resistance films. In The New Lot—a British Army training film made in 1943—a group of five British conscripts, disparate by class and age and bound for their first experience of army life on a train, encounter a Czech soldier (Albert Lieven). While the conscripts are worried about leaving their families, the Czech soldier does not know whether his wife and two children are still alive. While they are reluctant to join the army to fight Hitler, he tells them that “if England collapses, then the whole of Europe will be a washout … everything will be lost.” The film explicitly juxtaposes the British conscripts’ grumbling against the Czech soldier's stoicism. His quiet and serious speech and his pipe smoking make this Czech into a version of the exemplary Englishman that the conscripts—at this stage in the film at any rate—conspicuously fail to match.Footnote 70
Continental masculinity, however, was often distinguished from British masculinity through the particular determination attributed to resisters who desire revenge for atrocities experienced at first hand. British wartime productions endorsed violent revenge—as in the bayoneting of a German soldier by the hero of Uncensored. The documentary Diary of a Polish Airman (1942) traces the airman's wartime life before he is killed in action, through his diary entries, showing how, as the Germans surround Warsaw, he continues the fight initially from France and then from Britain.Footnote 71 One entry declares, “The murderers of Warsaw women and children WILL be punished.” The film suggests a shared martial masculinity between Britons and Poles of mutual respect, sacrifice, and effort, but one in which Polish desire for revenge is prominent. Documentary Newsletter commented that many would find it difficult to appreciate “a type of person who carries on a vendetta sort of fight from one country to another” but thought that the film succeeded in “making their [Poles’] hate of Hitler very real.”Footnote 72 A survey of thirty-six British viewers found that nineteen of them “strongly approved” of the film, which was thought to show not only “the courage and patriotism of Poles” but also their “hatred for the Germans and desire for revenge.”Footnote 73
Despite this distinction between continental and British masculinity, casting and linguistic practices domesticated the continental Europeans whom resistance films portrayed. Jo Fox's work has demonstrated the pervasive role of linguistic methods—dialect, accent, and scripting—in developing the idea of a “people's war” where a united effort against the enemy crosses differences of class.Footnote 74 In early resistance films like Pastor Hall and Freedom Radio, those Europeans resisting Hitler speak English, and accent signifies class difference, as it did in “people's war” films. But in later films accent increasingly becomes a national identifier rather than a social identifier. While the roles offered to Europeans in exile in Britain were restricted by their accents, and they usually played foreigners, no such restrictions applied to British actors who were cast in resistance films in roles representing a range of continental European nationalities.Footnote 75 Accent as national identifier therefore involves British actors in attempts to mimic French, Dutch, or Belgian pronunciations of English, producing a type of broken English. Unusually in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing a good deal of Dutch is spoken, so that British actors in the film not only speak in English with an attempted Dutch accent but also in Dutch which they mispronounce.Footnote 76 The effect—especially when the British actors performing as continental Europeans are well known to British audiences—is to suggest national identity as performance.
National difference as performance was also suggested by a prominent theme in many resistance films: masquerade. Resisters masquerade as collaborators; British agents travel under false identity papers and masquerade as German officers to enter German bases. In One of Our Aircraft Is Missing the Dutch resisters assist the British airmen in such masquerade, providing them with Dutch names and addresses for their passes, as well as clothes that will disguise them as Dutch civilians on their journey to the coast. A prominent Dutch female resister who hides them—Jo de Vries (Googie Withers)—is masquerading as a collaborator who hates the British. The theme of performance receives particular emphasis through the dialogue given to Frank Shelley (Hugh Williams), one of the airmen who in prewar life had been an actor. Shelley is disguised as a Dutch woman and relishes the part. “Perfect little character sketches, real little cameos,” he comments. Later he tells Jo de Vries, “The way you handled those Germans taught me something about acting.”
Hugh Williams was a British actor who served in the army in the Second World War, as well as taking occasional film roles, and is playing a British actor turned airman who masquerades as a Dutch woman. He is complimenting Googie Withers, a British actress whose mother was Dutch, who also plays the part of a Dutch woman and one who, in the film, masquerades as a collaborator who hates the British. In describing the British airmen disguised as Dutch civilians as “perfect little character sketches,” Frank Shelley/Hugh Williams implicitly praises his own performance in the film. In many ways One of Our Aircraft Is Missing shows national difference as performance, but one dominated by the British.
Michael Powell, reflecting on the production of One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, recorded that “One of Emeric [Pressburger]'s very best ideas was to hear Germans everywhere, but only to see them in the distance, if at all. We picked all the dozens of voices carefully, whether they were making jokes as they signed civilian passes, or barking orders. The audience saw military vehicles packed with soldiers careering along with their klaxons blaring, but we never got close to a German in the whole film except in the sequence in the church.”Footnote 77 Powell's comment suggests the extent to which, while there was comparatively little interest in dramatizing differences between British and resisters, attention was focused on dramatizing national difference between Germans and other Europeans—in this film Britons and Dutch. It also suggests the significance of sound tracks in establishing such differences. The first image of Germany in Pimpernel Smith, as Professor Horatio Smith and his student party arrive at the border, is a tourist sign—“Come to Romantic Germany”—and against this the sound track plays a ranting speech by Hitler followed by the sound of marching and machine-gun fire. In The Secret Mission Nazis raid a French farm suspecting a French woman of hiding British agents and, failing to discover them, attempt to incriminate her by switching on her radio. The audience knows that it is tuned to the BBC, but fortuitously, at the moment when they turn on the radio, the BBC, preparing to analyze a speech by Hitler, is broadcasting his ranting voice. The Nazis leave saluting the woman.
Voices barking orders in German and Klaxons blaring were common to many resistance films. They contrast with the stealth and whisperings that—in films that show the British in continental Europe—are common to resisters and Britons. In One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, the first stage of the journey to the coast, in which downed British airman are disguised as Dutch civilians, is shown as a long line of cyclists. The only noise on the sound track is the gentle tinkle of bicycle bells. Arriving at a crossroads, the need to halt for the German military is announced by the aggressive clamor of their Klaxons. In The Silent Village, as in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, the presence of Germans is registered on the sound track rather than visually, and Germans shown very fleetingly, and only from behind. A great deal of German is spoken in the film: orders, warnings, and threats broadcast by radio and loudspeakers in aggressive and highly oppressive sound. British actors and actresses usually play resisters, but exiled Europeans—including many Jews—are sometimes cast as Germans so that German is spoken in a wide range of voices.Footnote 78 Even so, German is mainly reserved for shouted orders and threats, often followed by the sound of machine-gun fire. Speaking German becomes a sign of brutality that is “not European.”
The British resistance narrative in 1942–44 came close to producing the idea of a common European identity that incorporated the British. It suggested that European national difference was performance through the theme of masquerade and showed a united endeavor by British and resisters, characterized by relationships of cooperation, mutuality, and trust. This was always defined against Germans. The resistance narrative also domesticated imagery of the Continent, translating its peoples and languages into English.
Postwar Resistance Narratives
In the context of debates about the rearmament of West Germany in 1954, the British government considered censoring an episode of the BBC's first television series on the Second World War—War in the Air—which showed Germany as a militaristic power. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister in 1954, minuting that he had watched the “offending film,” stated that “compared to the harm done by Lord Russell of Liverpool's book it is trivial.”Footnote 79 On the same day, apparently having difficulty in bringing himself to name the title of the book, Churchill informed the Foreign Office that “Lord Russell of Liverpool's book has already sold 60,000 copies and is being reprinted as fast as possible as the demand is very great.”Footnote 80 The title of the book was The Scourge of the Swastika and, according to the preface, was “intended to provide the ordinary reader with a truthful and accurate account of many … German war crimes.”Footnote 81 The book was deemed “offensive” by officials because “there is no doubt that many Germans would now be frightfully hurt by this book” and because “it does little good to rake over the ashes of the past.”Footnote 82
The Daily Express reported the attempt to ban The Scourge of the Swastika under the headline “Monstrous Act of Censorship” and proceeded to serialize the book.Footnote 83 The Cold War shift in official attitudes to West Germany was not always replicated in the media where the question of West Germany's reentry into a European family of nations remained contentious. The complex politics surrounding memories of the Second World War are apparent in the tension between Cold War imperatives and official concerns in the 1950s that the memory of wartime resistance in Europe neglected the British contribution. Christopher Murphy's work demonstrates that officials particularly worried that Britain's former wartime allies took credit: the United States through publicity for the Office of Strategic Services and its role in organizing resistance but also the Soviet Union through spreading the impression that “the Communists alone amongst the allies had given real support to indigenous resistance movements.”Footnote 84 In line with Cold War imperatives, public memories of the Second World War in Britain, evoked most obviously through the prolific cycle of Second World War films, celebrated the national wartime record largely as a masculine military conflict with Germany, neglecting Nazi war crimes. The postwar resistance narrative, continuing to make audiences aware of what the Monthly Film Bulletin had thought “all too familiar” in 1943—“hostages, torture, raids and death”—was, by the 1950s, an important exception to such neglect.
In wartime there had been considerable optimism about getting British propaganda into continental Europe when occupied countries were liberated. As early as 1943, the Ministry of Information reorganized the European section of its films division to plan for such propaganda, anticipating that, since “the continent has been starved of everything except Nazi controlled films and very old French ones,” liberation would mean “a thirsty market for both entertainment and propaganda films.”Footnote 85 By September 1945 it had produced a lengthy catalog of films for distribution in liberated European territories.Footnote 86 Most of those listed were films made in wartime, including many from the cycle of resistance films made in 1942–43. But there were some still in the process of completion, including two made specially for distribution in France. Jail Breakers (1945) was described in the catalog as a film that “told the story of how resistance men, under sentence of death in February 1944 in Amiens jail, were saved by the brilliant pin-point bombing attack of RAF Mosquitoes.”Footnote 87Presence au Combat (1945) paid tribute to the Fighting French Movement.
Presence au Combat was never shown in France, where the speedy reconstruction of French cinema after liberation led to the production of a French resistance narrative.Footnote 88 Indeed, a documentary on the Paris insurrection of August 1944—La Liberation de Paris (1944)—was made during the liberation, with careful advance planning “to ensure that there were enough crews to cover the whole city, with enough equipment and films stock to complete the job.”Footnote 89 It was screened in Paris just five days after the city was finally freed. A cycle of French resistance films followed, peaking in 1946. As in General de Gaulle's speech in August 1944, on the day before his triumphal march in Paris, which referred to “our beloved friends and admirable allies” only at the end, the Allies in French resistance films were often, at best, an afterthought.Footnote 90 Suzanne Langlois observes that the editing of La Liberation de Paris “reinforces the notion that the internal insurrection had accomplished the essential fighting before the arrival of the Allied armed forces.”Footnote 91 Pierre Sorlin, discussing La Bataille du Rail (1946), which shows a group of railway workers blowing up a German convoy on the eve of Liberation, notes that “the plot is reduced to a confrontation between the occupiers and the resistants. Although the film ends with the Liberation, it is portrayed as though it is a consequence of the successful sabotage of the German train convoy by the Resistance and there is no reference to the landings of US and British troops.”Footnote 92
There was little concern in Britain about the neglect of the Allied role in liberation in French films: they had relatively limited distribution in Britain. But some U.S. productions with much wider distribution prompted considerable protests that the United States gave little credit to the British contribution to the war—indeed, claimed credit itself for British achievements. Objections to Objective Burma (1945) focused on its portrayal of the Burma campaign as led by Americans, not the British, and led to its withdrawal from British cinemas.Footnote 93 When a U.S. documentary series—Victory at Sea—was shown on BBC television in 1952, there were demands for a British series, and the eventual production of such a series by the BBC—War in the Air, shown in 1954—was widely welcomed by reviewers as a challenge to the earlier U.S. production.Footnote 94 Reviewing the first episode, Reynolds News hailed it as “Britain's answer to … Victory at Sea with its ‘alone-we-did-it’ message to the world. War in the Air will tell British televiewers a different story to the narrative whose one-sidedness stirred up some resentment this side of the Atlantic.”Footnote 95
British cinema was no different from French and U.S. cinema in focusing on national heroes and national victory and dispensing with attention to its wartime Allies once the war was over. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) was the last film to celebrate the British-American alliance.Footnote 96 The Soviet Union—only sketchily shown in any case in wartime films—was also neglected and, with the onset of the Cold War, increasingly portrayed as enemy, not former ally.Footnote 97 White Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders—always the main focus of wartime imagery of empire—continued to be shown from time to time, but the part played by Africans, Caribbeans, Indians, and Maori was generally forgotten.Footnote 98 The enduring nature of the resistance narrative makes it a notable exception to these developments. Produced for domestic consumption on film and radio, and taken up by television, it remained a story that the British told themselves.Footnote 99
In a postwar context, the resistance narrative, the story of “Europe against the Germans” became a story of how Britain led Europe in ridding the Continent of Nazis. These developments were signaled by the first British postwar resistance film—a documentary made by the RAF Film Unit. Given the prolific production of resistance narratives in wartime, its title—Now It Can Be Told—might seem a strange choice for any resistance story made as late as 1946, but it was also highly significant to the way in which resistance narratives were reworked once the war was over.Footnote 100 What could be told after 1945 was the story of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—a British organization set up in 1940 that had remained such a closely guarded secret in wartime that its existence was not even acknowledged.
Now It Can Be Told rehearses the story of the SOE in considerable detail, beginning with a careful account of its organization of resistance activities from Britain—the interview process through which agents are recruited; their training, including practice in parachuting and withstanding interrogation; the issue of equipment, including suicide pills; their journey to the aircraft that will take them on their mission to France; the parachute drop and reception after the drop. Harry Ree and Jacqueline Nearne, the agents recruited in the opening sequence, had both worked as wartime agents in the SOE, and in Now It Can Be Told, they act out their wartime roles in France for the camera. This sequence of events, beginning with SOE recruitment and training in Britain and moving on to the parachute drop into occupied Europe, was taken up in a number of feature films that drew on documentary techniques. Against the Wind (1947) incorporates semidocumentary training sequences.Footnote 101 In Odette (1950) the commanding officer—Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who was the head of the French section of the SOE—not only acts out his own role within the film but also appears at the outset to offer what he calls a “foreword,” his authority serving to authenticate the film's realism as he assures the audience that “I know … that this story is a true one.”Footnote 102
The increasing prominence given to the British role in European resistance movements through the focus on the SOE sometimes extended to a tendency to claim continental European heroism for the British, exemplified in the reception of Odette. The premiere of the film, attended by the king and queen, was something of a national event. Odette Marie-Celine Sansom, whose story was told in the film, was a French woman living in Britain at the time of her recruitment to the SOE. In August 1946 she became the first woman to be awarded the George Cross and, like the award, the film paid tribute to her “courage, endurance and self sacrifice.”Footnote 103 A British actress, Anna Neagle, who was associated with prewar roles that included Queen Victoria and the First World War British heroine Edith Cavell—played Odette. She spoke English in the film with an attempt at a French accent. The People applauded the film as “one of our greatest stories.”Footnote 104Reynolds News commented that “Anna Neagle with a French accent was still unmistakably British.”Footnote 105 When the Sunday Graphic, in reviewing the film, acclaimed Odette's “extraordinary heroism as a British agent” that “earned her the George Cross” and commented that “if we did not know that it was a true story, it would seem too incredible … that a woman could endure so much suffering for her country,” it was not clear whether they meant France or Britain.Footnote 106
The persistence of women in the foreground of resistance imagery in British postwar films is notable and not always confined to continental European women, however their nationality was understood. The BBC television play Madeleine (1955) celebrated a woman of American-Indian parentage—Noor Inayat Khan—who was recruited by the SOE to work in France and given the code name Madeleine.Footnote 107 The French resistance narrative generally neglected women's part in the resistance, crediting French masculinity with the honorable wartime roles portrayed in French postwar resistance films and other media.Footnote 108 At a time when women were increasingly expelled from British film imagery of the Second World War, and especially from active involvement in it, the continued portrayal of continental European women is notable.Footnote 109 The portrayal of female resisters may have contributed to the possibility of claiming continental European heroism for the British; the idea of transnational white femininity could subsume differences of nationality. However, resistance films also developed a distinctive image of European femininity—in a narrative that told of their suffering as well as their strength and courage.
Christine Geraghty has demonstrated the extent to which, in 1950s British cinema, the figure of the European woman presented a particular configuration of sexuality and politics, combining sexual experience with a tragic knowledge of the war.Footnote 110 As Geraghty notes, Simone Signoret's performance as Michelle in Against the Wind was among the first of such depictions. It was also a rare piece of casting: one where a heroine playing a Belgian SOE agent spoke English with an effortless French accent.Footnote 111 Michelle suffers for her past love for a man who has turned collaborator. In Odette, the sufferings of the heroine are a key theme of the film, which shows her undercover work in France and subsequent capture, interrogation, and torture by the Gestapo; her death sentence, which is never carried out; and her incarceration in Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she is deported. In a wider narrative of a suffering and chaotic Continent, British films about the Nazi legacy in Europe focusing on displaced persons camps—Portrait from Life (1948) and The Lost People (1949)—also developed themes about the sufferings of Europe through female figures.Footnote 112
Nazi racial victims had little place within this narrative of female suffering, despite extensive newspaper, magazine, and newsreel coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. With some exceptions, like the Manchester Guardian, there had been few references in any case in such coverage to the Nazi racial ideology that informed practices in concentration camps or to the victims of this ideology. Thus, genocide against the Jews continued to be obscured in a narrative that focused on the sufferings of resisters, and especially female resisters. However, the postwar narrative gave much more attention to collaborators, as in Michelle's personal tragedy in Against the Wind, and in a recurrent theme of resisters’ awareness of the risk of betrayal by their own compatriots.
British involvement in wartime continental Europe is at the heart of the postwar resistance narrative with its focus on the SOE, but the British are also set apart from the Continental struggle. Britain, resistance films make clear, had furnished leadership to continental Europe, its moral authority enhanced by its wartime role. No questions arise about British wartime records: they are assumed to be honorable. Moreover, British leadership—organizing resistance from London or working alongside continental Europeans as SOE agents—is masculine, setting Britain apart from the narrative of Continental female strength and suffering. The construction of national relations through gender relations positions Britain as masculine in relation to other European nationalities and as paternalistic—the leader, champion, and protector of Nazi-occupied European nations and a place of stability in contrast to war torn Europe.
Conclusion
The enduring nature of the resistance narrative suggests that the historiographical consensus about the impact of the Second World War on British-European relations needs some complication and revision. In wartime it told a stirring story of continental Europe as a place of danger but also a place of immense courage and very determined resistance. Early stories showed brave Europeans, including Germans, championing freedom. In the development of imagery of a “people's resistance” in 1942–44, Europe was shown as united against Germany and defined against Germany.
The resistance narrative produced a range of ideas about British-European relations. Early stories denied the insularity used to justify appeasement, producing an image of benevolent paternalism in which British men rescued Europeans from oppression. From 1941, Britain had considerable investment in the idea of a Continent united in resistance to Germany—decent, civilized, and valiant. Initially British leadership was a prominent feature of the idea of a united Continent, but in 1942–44, despite a strong tendency to domesticate continental European characters for the consumption of a British audience, imagery increasingly shifted to cooperation, mutuality, trust, and partnership. In these years the media came close to identifying Britons as part of a united Continent—Europe against the Germans.
Tony Judt has written of the years 1945–48 as “the moment not only of the division of Europe and the first stages of its postwar reconstruction but also, and in an intimately related manner, the period during which Europe's postwar memory was moulded.”Footnote 113 Across much of continental Europe, as Judt demonstrates, such postwar memory produced prolific resistance narratives. Focusing on nations as united collectives that had spent the war valiantly resisting Germany, many of the stories produced in continental Europe when the war was over closely corresponded to those told in the British media in 1942–44. However, British postwar stories, with their focus on the SOE, provided a story of British moral authority: one in which Britain had led Europe against the Germans, ridding the Continent of Nazi oppression. Reverting to early wartime imagery of British leadership and benevolent paternalism, they ended the brief wartime moment when the British media came close to identifying Britons as Europeans.
In the 1950s, as other Allies and the imperial war effort were expelled from film imagery and the Second World War was increasingly portrayed as a masculine military conflict between Britain and Germany, the resistance narrative persisted, foregrounding the strength and suffering of female resisters. Britain was set apart from such suffering—a place of stability in contrast to the Continent. Even so, the persistence of the resistance narrative meant that British wartime involvement in continental Europe, German war crimes, and the courage of European resisters continued to resonate in British memories of the Second World War.
