Last December, Dominic at work handed me a book to read on my sabbatical called ‘Operation Suicide’ by Robert Lyman.
He warned me that the first half of the book was the author showing how much research they’d done, and the second half was extraordinary.
It’s the story of the Cockleshell heroes which was made into a film many years ago and is quite famous, I think, in military terms.
The long and the short of it is that in 1942, 12 commandos in the British Army left a submarine in canoes and canoed from the sea, up the river to Bordeaux to put mines on blockade runner ships to disrupt the Nazi war effort.
It’s a truly extraordinary story, not just in terms of the mission itself, but in the preparation, the planning, the training and the sacrifices that were made.
One of the parts that struck me most about the story was that on leaving the submarine (HMS Tuna) one of the canoes was ripped as it exited the hatch and therefore two of the Commandos / Royal Marines were not allowed to go because their canoe was ripped.
Most of them were in tears and begging to be part of the mission where ultimately only two of the ten that went survived.
I don’t think there was any doubt in the mind of the people that were involved that the likelihood of coming back alive wasn’t high. There are letters that they wrote to their next of kin and loved ones that were to be opened should they not return. It’s clear from those letters that they understood entirely what they had been put forward for. What they had volunteered for. What their responsibility was.
What struck me most about this though, was that sacrifice was multiplied millions of times because of the principles, the priorities and the vision the people had of the world they wanted to create.
When I look now at people of the same age in our generation, I wonder how many would be prepared to make a sacrifice such as that.
We worry about a lot now, don’t we?
We are completely risk averse to everything.
We seem unable to cope with even the slightest bump in the road.
I am not sure how we fix this, and I am not sure how we get back closer to how we were then.
A world where everybody had less but seemed happier.
A world where life seemed cheaper but was much more vivid.
A world where society meant something significant to the vast majority of people instead of the quest for individual gratification and collection of objects.
To speak like this now is to be an outlier – someone sat outside of societal norms.
It seems like it didn’t take us very long to forget what it took to be free and to waste our freedom worrying about things which are really of very little consequence.
Blog Post Number - 4277