Monday 27 January 2020

Book Review - A Socialist at War (2007)

A Socialist at War
Written By: David Renton
Date: September 2007
Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 29: Autumn 2007 

A Socialist at War: With the Pioneer Corps Harry Ratner London, Socialist Platform, 2007 118pp + iv ISBN 0-9551127-96 

Harry Ratner is already the author of one volume of autobiography, Reluctant Revolutionary, in which he tells the story of his 24 years of political activity as a Trotskyist, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1960. One charm of that book lies in Ratner's account of becoming a socialist. A sixteen year old Jewish boy, the product of a definite lower middle-class upbringing, he came to Marxism via a loose, ethical socialism and membership of the Labour Party. He might have become a Stalinist, save that the Trotskyists met him first. To imagine this happening in 1970 or 1980 would be to make the story seem more commonplace than it was. Ratner joined the Militant Group in London at a time when it had just a few dozen members. Within four years he would be carrying out clandestine activities in wartime Paris. Following the German occupation of Belgium, Ratner was instructed to return to England in order to shelter a prominent Trotskyist fugitive Pierre Frank.

In England, Ratner determined to volunteer for the army. He, like his comrades, knew that the previous 1914-1918 war had ended with Europe in a revolutionary ferment. If the same result was to occur a second time, that could only happen as a result of people joining the army and attempting to convince rank and file troops of the need for insurrection. The next five years of Ratner's attempts to contribute towards that goal are the subject of A Socialist At War.

Much of Ratner's story is a familiar narrative: of parade grounds and time on leave, of long marches and of grumbles about officers or food. As well as telling of his own experiences, however, Ratner also takes care to put the events of his service in the context of the regiment in which he served. The Pioneer Corps were uniformed soldiers tasked with the labouring activities necessary to keep an army in the field: dock construction, the laying of railways, building ammunition and storage depots and hutted camps. Pioneers were recruited from the British colonial territories of Africa, from Palestine, from Jewish emigrants living in wartime in Britain and from the defeated armies of Czechoslovakia and Republican Spain. While the soldiers were regarded by High Command very much as inferior troops, for Ratner, they appear to have provided an easy home.

One episode from 1941 conveys something of the disdain of the officers for their men. Under attack by German land forces at Kalamata in Greece the commanding officer, a Brigadier Parrington, informed his German counterpart of his intention to surrender the following day. Other officers, perhaps realising that a Pioneer force largely composed of sundry anti-fascists would suffer worse than Brigadier Parrington in the Nazi camps, staged a covert rebellion, encouraging their troops to disperse rather than acquiesce in their own capture. Many thousands did escape in this fashion. (It is a pleasure to mention that the Colonel Renton praised by Ratner for this small act of insubordination was recorded in the stories of my childhood as my roguish Great Uncle Fritz).

A consensus among historians holds that the army was radicalised. A Socialist At War shares this perspective, discussing initiatives such as soldiers' newspapers and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, the army's plan to boost morale by offering lectures as to the likely shape of the post-fascist world. The increasing self-confidence of men who had served under fire culminated ultimately in the proto-mutinies of 1944-1948. There was a growing audience for Ratner’s leaflets and newspapers. After the Normandy landings, for example, he was able to find a group of co-thinkers in his regiment, who met to plan what they would do if they were ordered by Churchill to disarm the Resistance. "Whether anything would have come of this effort", Ratner writes, "if it had come to the crunch is hard to say."

Ratner's memoir adds to a story told elsewhere, by Al Richardson, Andrew Davies and Richard Croucher among others: of how the 1939-45 war did enough to persuade thousands of people of the necessity of a different economic order, but ended with that ambition unachieved.

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