History with a twist
The Traitors Josh Ireland Hodder & Stoughton
In this golden age of history, some authors experiment to give their work extra appeal. Josh Ireland’s subject matter should have been alluring enough — the lives of four men who betrayed Britain during the Second World War.
But he gives it the peculiar twist of telling most of the story in the present tense: “To the surprise of his audience, the small, slight man who has just swept in waving a pistol ’round like a Chicago gangster is British. He introduces himself as John Amery, and tells them he is recruiting for a military unit called the Legion of St. George.”
The effect is disconcerting, and does not necessarily enrich credibility. Nor does Ireland inspire confidence by his statement in his prologue that “I have not always used inverted commas to indicate when I am quoting these men’s thoughts and opinions.”
It’s often unclear whether an assertion is the author’s or that of one of his subjects. Those reservations aside, Ireland’s book 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, Amery ran away from school to work as a mechanic and managed 74 driving convictions before his 21st birthday. He stole, lied, drank and prostituted himself to men, while developing a deranged hatred of Jews that made him a natural convert to Nazism. As the quote illustrates, Amery 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 fanatical Hitler-worshipper and loner. When he took his wife to Germany on the eve of war, a porter who saw “Berlin” on their luggage remarked, “That’s a rum place to be going right now.” Joyce was throwing in his lot with Hitler, and spent much of the war leading the propaganda assault on Britain.
It was an unpleasant life: The traitors despised each other. Yet, as Ireland correctly points out in his conclusion, neither Joyce nor Amery shifted the direction of the war.
Harold Cole, his third subject, nearly did. A con man and coward, in his time in occupied France and betrayed an estimated 150 British and French operatives, many of whom were tortured and died in prisons or concentration camps.
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. Attempting to escape, he was caught and jailed in France. He escaped, was recaptured and 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.