Resistance in the Second World War was picking up a gun or blowing up railways, but it was also listening to… — Margaret MacMillan
Resistance in the Second World War was picking up a gun or blowing up railways, but it was also listening to the nightly news bulletins on the BBC, as thousands did all over Europe even though that was punishable by death. Resistance was also printing and distributing information about the occupations and the state of the war. In Belgium around 12,000 people were engaged in putting out and distributing some 300 underground papers. In occupied France audiences clapped British soldiers when they appeared in newsreels and moved if a German sat next to them. In Poland a German officer complained that Polish children were always rude to him. In occupied Denmark citizens gathered in large numbers in the open air to sing Danish folksongs. The Dutch planted flowerbeds in their national colours. The streets in Prague were empty on the anniversaries of the Munich Agreement, which had destroyed Czechoslovakia. Such gestures may have seemed futile but they helped to keep hope alive.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
The Persians were to learn in the most costly manner just what that Greek way of war could do to an enemy. ... Centuries later knights on horseback were to learn a similar lesson in fighting from the massed infantry of Swiss soldiers who, like the Greek hoplites before them, fought with and for each other as equals. We now think of the Swiss Guards who stand on duty at the Vatican in their multicoloured Renaissance uniforms as a charming detail and Switzerland as peaceful and bucolic, home to good chocolate, discreet banks and, as the character Harry Lime in The Third Man unkindly says, the cuckoo clock. For 200 years, until a square was finally broken in 1515, the Swiss formations, bristling with pikes and sheltering archers with their deadly crossbows, were the terror of Europe and the key to victory, at least for anyone who could afford to hire them. ‘Pas d’argent, pas de Suisse,’ as the saying went.
Religion, and it can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life. The crusaders did not leave their homes all over Europe and make the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land just to acquire loot and land. There was more and better to be had much closer to home. They were driven by what they thought was a divine mission, to retrieve the land where Christ had once lived for Christendom. Many crusaders – kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates – left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah ‘Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses. ‘None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,’ said a contemporary account.
How groups of humans contemplate and plan for wars is also affected by their culture, including geography. Island nations or those with long coasts have understood and invested heavily in sea power. In the case of Britain, its navy – tellingly called the Senior Service – has absorbed more resources and had much greater prestige over the centuries than its army. While paintings, poems, films and histories memorialise the great naval battles – Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway – when one navy destroyed another, the main strategic purpose of navies is to control the seas, and the highways that criss-cross them, and prevent their enemies from doing so. Even today land communications are vulnerable to disruption, either man-made or natural; how much more so in the past before surfaced roads and railways?
