Television
Fighting talk
James Delingpole
I'm on holiday in the Seychelles. No, of course I'm not really. Otherwise it would say 'James Delingpole is on holiday' at the bottom of this piece, wouldn't it? What I'm doing now is fantasising
I'm on holiday in the Seychelles, I'm gor- geously bronzed, I've done lots of exciting things such as eat fruit-bat and swim with sharks, and I'm about to board the flight home when, suddenly, I hear the 'tell-tale crump' of mortar shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire. I dive for cover just as the plane explodes. Above me, the air is alive with tracer; my nostrils flared at 'the acrid smell of cordite; and I realise that my luck's really in. I'm the only British journal- ist within a thousand miles and I've just landed myself the summer's hottest scoop: my very own coup.
Yes, as you've probably guessed by now, I'm one of those sad, pathetic creatures who thinks meanly of himself for not hav- ing been a soldier; who has never had the gumption to find a decent war zone of his own; and who must therefore resort to con- cocting ludicrous scenarios in which fate does the job for him.
And since fate has yet to oblige, I tend to spend rather more time than is healthy fighting my battles vicariously, either by reading books of military history (I've just finished August 1914 and Six Armies in Nor- mandy), or war novels (gosh, isn't Birdsong a cracker?) or watching anything vaguely martial that crops up on television.
In the last respect, it's been a bumper week. I pigged out on two videoed episodes of the splendid War Walks (BBC 2, Friday), in which the engagingly moustachioed Pro- fessor Richard Holmes escorted us round the site of two of the British army's most horrendous Pyrrhic victories — the Somme and Operation Goodwood; I gorged myself on the marvellous fly-boy episode of Defence of the Realm (BBC 1 Wednesday); and finished off with the comically bathetic, Short Stories: Firing Line (Channel 4, Wednesday).
The latter, about the Combined Cadet Force in Alleyn's School, Dulwich, remind- ed me all too vividly of my own disastrous adventures in schoolboy soldiering. Idioti- cally, I volunteered for the despised RAF section, thus condemning myself to spend every Wednesday afternoon for two years in a hideous pale blue uniform, having kiss- es blown at me by members of the more macho army section. And all because I wanted to have a go on the school glider a stupid, winged stick, propelled by a huge rubber band.
If 'Corps' hadn't been compulsory, none of us would have done it — apart from the crop-haired automatons whose talents for polishing boots and barking incomprehen- sible orders marked them out as good NCO material. Since those thickoes were bound to join the army anyway, I've never understood why the MOD persists in see- ing the CCF as a valuable recruiting tool.
Short Stories confirmed my worst suspi- cions, especially in the hilarious scene when a platoon of soldier-boys and -girls were 'wiped out' on exercise by what appeared to be a single professional sol- dier. Their CO (a geography teacher) blushingly protested that they hadn't been prepared for an ambush. Well, of course they hadn't. It wouldn't be an ambush, oth- erwise, would it?
The programme's main drawback was that it took its subject too seriously. It mixed the portentous ('For "B" section, the next exercise will prove the biggest test of all ... ', as if any of us gave a damn — it was only children playing games) with the Islington-earnest. Much horror was expressed, for example, at the discovery that most of the boys had joined the CCF solely so that they could play with SA-80 rifles. Astonishing! And there was I think- ing they were in it for the drill and the boot-polishing.
A similar worthy tone infected the com- mentary to this week's superb Defence of the Realm. 'You want to drop a real bomb on a real target?' a Harrier pilot was asked. 'Yes,' he replied. 'Any qualms about that?' asked the aghast interviewer. 'No,' came the reply. And I ran round the room whooping, 'Yes, YES! Way to go! Kill them! Kill them all!' for I had decided that, despite their worryingly classless accents and the dodgy red bow-ties (clip-ons?), they were every bit as magnificent as The Few.
Sadly, the squadron we saw never did get to take out a few nasties with their bombs in Bosnia. And you began to wonder whether £23 million per plane wasn't rather a lot for the taxpayer to fork out for pilots who spent most of their time playing sophisticated video games. Fortunately, the closing footage of a crashed harrier (and the pilot, who had ejected safely) brought home the terrible risks these brave men must endure amid all that fun; £23 million? A trifle.
Equally sobering was the edition of War Walks (next week's episode), in which a former tank gunner recalled what it was like to be stuck inside a Sherman during that near-suicidal armoured break-out from the Normandy beaches, Operation Goodwood. The guns on the German Tigers had a range of about a mile; the Sherman's guns were ineffective beyond 300 yards. I now think even more meanly of myself than before.
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