Hinterland

The best British war films of the 1950s still serve to remind us of what kind of people we really are

It is fashionable to deplore British war films of the 1950s because these tales of heroism, it is argued, prevent us from moving on and being realistic about the sort of people we really are. Being unfashionable, I have long thought that one of the many reasons why we should watch these films is that we are still the sort of people we really were; we just occasionally need to be reminded of what that means.

Lewis Gilbert, who died in 2018 just before his 98th birthday, directed some of the best-known films in this genre (he also made three James Bonds, Educating Rita and Alfie). His war films included Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) and, in 1954, The Sea Shall Not Have Them.

The last film (based on a novel by John Harris), borrows its title from the motto of the RAF’s Air

Sea Rescue Service. It tells the story of men in the life-raft of a Lockheed Hudson that had to ditch in the North Sea, just off the Dutch coast, in the autumn of

1944. One of those baling out of the Hudson is an Air Commodore, travelling as a passenger with a briefcase containing military secrets, concerning the Germans’ rocket project. He tells the other men in the raft that if he dies they must ensure the briefcase reaches the authorities in London; and if the Germans come close to capturing them, the briefcase is to be thrown into the sea.

They are eventually rescued, but not before a psychological drama showing how men cope in extreme adversity – and, as in so many British films about the war, questions of class and character play a part.

Air Commodore Waltby is played by Michael Redgrave, and he shares the raft with four other men. The key contrast with him is Flight Sergeant MacKay, played by Dirk Bogarde, but two other sergeants are played by Nigel Patrick (in a rare departure from the officer class, and showing just what a versatile actor he was) and, as a Canadian, Bonar Colleano.

The officer commanding the plane, played by Jack Watling, is seriously injured, which places great strain on MacKay, as the senior NCO. The film is in many ways a straightforward adventure story – with the rescue services

(led by Anthony Steel) first of all trying to find the ditched crew, and then when they learn their rough position (from the Messerschmitt pilot who brought them down, and was then brought down himself), trying to recover them before their raft drifts on to the coast of occupied Holland. However, the incapacitation of the plane’s pilot puts our focus on MacKay: a bag of nerves who tries to suppress the fact.

MacKay tells Waltby he hopes to try for a commission – and with the pilot delirious, he has a chance to show his leadership skills. But as the weather closes in on the open raft (which is taking in water) he starts to lose his cool. His behaviour is not exactly, or even remotely, officer class, and there are suggestions of his social inadequacy compared with that of the level-headed Air Commodore.

However, Waltby turns out to be the clever son of a railwayman, by which we are invited to deduce that the RAF was a meritocracy. The men talk of their hopes for the future, but first they must come through this test. It is a physical test, in the cold and the wet, but above all it is a test of character: the film, much of it shot in the sea off Felixstowe, is an exhibition and examination of the characters of the stranded men, who for all they know face capture or death.

Of course, character – which, rather than brutality, we as a nation prefer to think won us the war – is a common theme to all the great 1950s war films. It was, after all, a genre designed to lift national morale when, a decade after the end of hostilities, the British as victors watched themselves being overtaken by the countries they had helped defeat.

So we had the tortured but heroic Captain Ericson in The

Cruel Sea (1953), played by Jack Hawkins; Kenneth More as Douglas Bader, the legless fighter ace, in Reach for the Sky (1956); and of course Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo, defiant to the end in Carve Her Name With Pride (1958). From The Sea Shall Not

Have Them we learn plainly about how men come through the harshest confrontation with adversity: it deserves to be much better known – and valued.

As a nation, we prefer to think that character, rather than brutality, won us the war