War history with a twist

The Traitors Josh Ireland Hodder & Stoughton

Josh Ireland’s subject matter — four men who betrayed Britain during the Second World War — gives a good flavour of the personality defects that caused men to betray their country.

The son of a minister in Churchill’s war cabinet, John Amery, by 21, had stolen and lied while developing a hatred of Jews that made him a natural convert to Nazism.He served the Reich by trying (unsuccessfully) to recruit British internees and prisoners of war to fight for Hitler.

William Joyce is the most notorious of the book’s subjects, another Hitler-worshipper. He went to Germany on the eve of war and spent much of the war leading the propaganda assault on Britain.

The traitors despised each other. Yet, neither Joyce nor Amery shifted the direction of the war.

Harold Cole nearly did. He betrayed an estimated 150 British and French operatives in occupied France.

Ireland’s final subject is Eric Pleasants, son of a gamekeeper. Pleasants went to the island of Jersey in the spring of 1940 with a right-wing peace group, soon finding himself under Nazi occupation. He eventually joined the British Free Corps, the foreign legion of the Waffen SS. Pleasants evaded capture for a year after the war ended, before being arrested by the Russians and sent to the gulag. He was repatriated after seven years and returned to live in Norfolk, England. British authorities decided he had suffered enough and didn’t prosecute him for treason. He died in 1998.

Amery and Joyce were hanged for treason.

Cole was shot dead resisting arrest in France.

Ireland tells their stories entertainingly, and the nature of these men comes across clearly. It just isn’t clear that what Ireland has written is history.