War is not cool, repeat, war is not cool

The 49^th Parallel is a 1941 propaganda film, one of the first made by cinema’s greatest behind the camera partnership, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s not perfect. As a group of Nazi submariners try to escape from Canada, the episodic structure pits them against a variety of Canadian “types”. Raymond Massey is fine as the drafted tough, undisciplined but always ready to give a Nazi a good kicking. However Lawrence Olivier exhibits the most extraordinary French-Canadian accent which is part Pepe Le Pew, part onion and Leslie Howard’s foppish Brit leaves one cheering for the Nazis – not a sign that the film’s propaganda purpose is working effectively. The outstanding performance is from the incomparable Anton Walbrook, playing the first of his Good German roles with the Archers.  He’s the leader of a pacifist German religious settlement where the Nazis think they’ve found kindred spirits but the good Christians are horrified by the dastardly philosophy of the U-Boat crew.  Walbrook then gives a wonderful speech condemning the military indoctrination of children. Earlier today the news that an F15 crashed while operating over Libya genuinely pleased me. Not the crash itself, or what implications this may or may not have in the increasingly risky looking Libyan intervention. I was happy to hear the crew had been rescued, but neither was this what excited me about the story. No, when I heard an F15 went down over Libya, all I could think was “the American Air Force still flies F15s?! Cool!”. I didn’t grow up under the Nazis but I did grow up with a love of war; guns, tanks, heroics and especially airplanes. Military hardware excites many young boys and when I was a kid in the Seventies and Eighties the Second World War for some reason wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now; it was the setting for action movies and comic books rather documentaries and grim memorials. Of course history and the news teaches us as we get older how war really is. Genocide and murder is not the by-product of war but its standard stock in trade, there was no cool hardware on show when the Hutus murdered the Tutsi , just machetes and a ferocious combination of hatred and routine. And while much of the conflict around the world centres on primitively armed people killing unarmed people, on the other hand the technological dominance of the US has also served to remove the childish glamour of war. Instead of the Chuck Yeagars and Pappy Boyingtons of the past, US air power now is asserted by computer programmers using aircraft like the un-airplane like and boring Stealth bomber, an iPad with wings. I haven’t made my mind up about the RAF’s Typhoon or the French Rafale just yet but for a moment I was thrilled to see a good old-fashioned fourth generation F15 in the hands of the USAF, a real plane, flown by real men. And then it’s back to the guilt that all war, regardless of the arguments for or against, is horrible. An F15 dropping bombs is horrible, an F15 having to drop bombs is horrible. Thankfully my cultural horizons have broadened since my war-obsessed childhood to the point where I can list someone as sophisticated as Anton Walbrook as one of my favourite actors. He gave so many great performances.  Especially in war films.