THE WORD AT WAR
World War Two in 100 Phrases
Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis
Bloomsbury
238 pages; Rs 450
Celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II have acquired a particular poignancy in the West because of the growing realisation that the generation who fought or lived through it is passing and with it the living histories of a global catastrophe that claimed over 60 million lives. This is not to say that World War II suffers a dearth of histories. With new archival material regularly being declassified in combatant countries, a cottage industry flourishes in World War histories that purport to be new but are, in truth, incrementally revisionist - sometimes tiresomely so. Few are likely to attract younger generations of generalist readers.
From that perspective, the lexical approach of The Word at War is an imaginative way of offering not just a basic history of the war in bite-sized packages but providing an idea of its cultural heritage as well. It is a reminder of the startlingly high contribution of the war to the contemporary lexicon: Holocaust, the Dunkirk spirit, Pearl Harbour (a symbol of the surprise attack until 9/11 happened), Hitlerian politics, Molotov Cocktails and so on.
The Word at War unfolds chronologically in 15 chapters and contains the expected, the unexpected and a trove of fascinating trivia. It has the additional virtue of being relatively free of bias (though the authors patently and understandably struggle a bit when it comes to describing things Italian or related to Mussolini). The first item in the first chapter, for instance, is "concentration camp", the institution that came to symbolise the most compellingly evil aspect of Nazi Germany. It may surprise many readers to know that the concentration camp was not a Germanic invention at all but a British one. Concentration camps were the creation of Lord Kitchener, Commander in Chief of the British Army, during the Boer War and were used to intern Boer (the Dutch settlers in South Africa) and black African civilians.
"The link with the Nazi camps or Konzentrationslager is more than nominal," the authors write, "and lies not merely in the indifference or brutality with which its inmates were treated but in the targeting of a specific ethnic group in clearing whole regions." The term "ethnic cleansing" they add, may have been coined at the end of the 20th century but the British were practising it with impunity fully a century before.
The bulk of the book focuses on the war in Europe, partly because World War II's overt cultural legacies are preserved in countless museums, memorials, plays and novels and TV shows. In the India, China, Japan and the Asian theatres the history of the war remains so contested and contentious that the preservation of its legacy in these regions is tragically patchy. Still, the authors have the odd reference to these Asian theatres.
In the chapter on Service Slang, they describe "Blood Chits" (the American term) and the "Goolie Chits" (British). These were brief notes that American pilots in the China theatre (the famous Flying Tigers of Claire Chennault) and British pilots in the China-Burma-India theatre carried on their person to protect them in the event that they were shot down. "This foreign person (American) has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect and provide him with medical care," read the one that Chennault's Tigers carried.
The word chit, the authors tell us, was adapted from the Anglo-Indian word of "late 18th century origin": chitty. Any Indian could tell them the word derives from the Hindi word chitthee. As for goolie, the authors tell us it is another Indian loan-word denoting testicles. Once regularly used in England it has fallen into disuse, they say. In India, it is still used in eastern parts of the country but only as the most vulgar of slang words.
The history of the Swastika has some interesting additions. We know the Nazis adopted this "crooked cross" as part of their ideological bump about an Aryan "race". We know it represents well-being in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy but became so reviled in post-war Europe that flaunting it in public was (and in some countries still is) a crime. Yet despite its sinister connotations in Europe, a highly successful laundry service called Swastika Laundry flourished in Dublin till the late eighties (presumably the Irish understood the Sanskrit meaning of the term).
The biggest surprise comes in the section on wartime slogans. It turns out that the hugely popular slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On", which is said to represent the phlegmatic British attitude to the war, never saw the light of day. It was one of a series of morale-boosting posters designed by the ministry of information and some 2.5 million copies were printed. But by then, public disaffection was so high that the government decided against circulating the posters. They were only discovered in 2000 when a bookshop owner found an original copy at the bottom of a box. He hung it in his shop where it attracted so much attention that he ran off copies for sale.
The Word at War is written with a light touch that masks the serious hard work that Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis have done to put it together. It may never make it to the "classics" section of World War II histories but it will more than make up for that with its utility as a highly entertaining and informative ready reckoner.
