Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob

'Jerry doesn't know we're here, because he can't see beyond the burning tanks.  And anyway he's not going to be watching the battlefield now, he's going to be getting what kip he can before morning.  There's a badly wounded bloke over there and we might save his life--you'd expect him to try to fetch you in, wouldn't you?  Come on, now--you're not windy, are you, Geordie?'

One of my interests is British military history, and I have read a few war-related novels by British veterans of the World Wars and written about them here at MPorcius Fiction Log:

No Man's Land by Sapper

The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat

Take These Men by Cyril Joly

H.M.S. Ulysses by Alistair MacLean

Patrol by Fred Majdalany

A Soldier Erect by Brian Aldiss

So, when I saw a hardcover edition of Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob at an antique mall in Emmitsburg, MD back in July, I was intrigued.  The seller wanted fifty bucks for the thing, which of course I had no interest in paying.  What am I, rich?  I couldn't find the novel at the internet archive or at Wonder Book, so I ordered a brand new trade paperback copy online, printed in 2020 as part of the Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics series for less than $20.00.  The hardcover I had seen in Emmitsburg had a somewhat impressionistic cover depicting a tank (a Grant tank with an extra super huge gun?) that would look more appropriate on a Warhammer 40,000 novel than a realistic World War II book, but my 2020 copy has a recognizable representation of one of the Shermans the British soldiers who make up most of the book's characters operate in the first two thirds or so of the narrative (though the artist seems to have neglected to include the hull machine gun, which is used extensively in the text.)

Elstob seems to have had an interesting life, being born in England, then growing up in America, learning to fly, serving as a pilot in the Spanish Civil War, serving in the British Army as a tank commander during the Second World War, then becoming a successful businessman and writer.  Warriors for the Working Day first appeared in 1960.

The World War novels by British veterans I have blogged about have displayed a diversity of viewpoints, some being patriotic or hopeful or celebratory, others bitter about supposed shortcomings of the British government or the high command, or British civilians, and it will be interesting to see what Elstob has to say.  The Wikipedia article on Elstob indicates that he wanted to serve in the RAF in the 1939-45 war, but was rejected, and that he suspected this was because the powers that be believed him to have communist sympathies.  So as we read we can also scour the text for evidence Elstob believed in the labor theory of value or wanted to abolish private property or admired Stalin's mustache or whatever.

Warriors for the Working Day is a series of episodes in the lives of a bunch of British Army tank crewmen during the 1944-5 campaign in northwest Europe.  (The unit depicted doesn't participate in the initial landings, but drives up the Normandy beaches five or six days after the famous D-Day.)  They fight through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and into Germany.  There are many characters, and for a while I thought the main character was going to be Donovan, a veteran of the North African campaigns, but a third of the way through the novel he is injured severely enough to be sent back to England and is succeeded as commander of the tank by radio operator ("wireless operator") Michael Brook.  The overarching plot of the novel is Brook's evolution as he learns to be a good commander and eventually is exhausted and finally cracks; parallel to Brook's evolution is that of George Brunch, whom all his comrades call "Geordie;" a poor boy with a difficult family life, Geordie benefits from Army life physically and grows as a person over the course of his war service, finally dying in an act of self-sacrifice.

My main interest in reading this book was learning about the experience of fighting in this campaign as a tank crewman, and Elstob delivers--though of course this is a work of fiction and everything we "learn" must be taken with a grain of salt.  There is plenty of stuff about tactics and the management of the troops and squadrons and the whole regiment, about life on campaign (eating and sleeping, for example) and about the vehicles, weapons.  Elstob brings up a bunch of stuff I had never heard before or perhaps just forgot.  For example, the characters can set the fuses on the HE shells fired by the Sherman's 75mm gun so the rounds do not explode on impact, but two seconds after impact.  I had heard many times that the bombs dropped by aircraft had such time fuses, so that they could be set to explode after penetrating a warship, for example, but somehow I had never thought that the shells fired from a tank's gun would be similar.

Another thing: the Shermans and the Comets (which the men crew late in the narrative, when they roll into Germany) in the book mount a Bren gun on the turret--I had assumed the Shermans in British service would mount the American .50 caliber heavy machine gun, or no MG up there at all.  This Bren is officially provided for defense against aircraft, but the characters consider this use fanciful, and, instead, the commander will have the Bren dismounted and wield it himself in both hands when the tank is on the move, firing it at German infantry, and when on defense when the tank is immobilized (the tank is immobilized quite often) will assign the Bren to a crewman and instruct him to set up a position some distance from the tank, so enemy attackers can be caught in a crossfire.

(As I read this stuff about the Bren on the Sherman I sometimes wondered if the characters were using "Bren" as a catch-all colloquial term for "machine gun," the way they were using "bazooka" for the German panzerfausts and panzershrecks, if maybe the "Bren" they were referring to was actually a U.S.-made .50 or .30 caliber machine gun.  I flipped through the books on World War II tanks I own and didn't find any references to a Sherman with a Bren gun mounted on its turret, and I am not sure what to think.)  

Something else that struck me in reading this book was the different way tank vs tank combat was depicted than it had been in the novels and memoirs (like Robert Crisp's Brazen Chariots) I had read that are set in the North African desert; in those books the British and Axis tanks would often have firefights of long duration at long range, with many misses and many non-penetrating hits.  In Warriors of the Working Day, in contrast, fights between armored vehicles tend to be quite brief, only a few shots being exchanged and tanks being knocked out tout suite after a single hit from an armor-piercing round.  If this is a reflection of reality and not different authors' artistic choices, maybe the difference has to do with the shorter ranges involved in NW Europe, where hills, trees and buildings limit line-of-sight.

If I merely wanted to learn about military stuff I could read a technical manual or a work of history, but in reading a novel one also hopes to find literary merit and human drama.  Elstob's style, and the way he structures the narrative, are not bad, but they are nothing special, either; straightforward, with a minimum of artistic or poetic passages--one of the minor characters is penning a diary, and in the excerpt Elstob provides us, Elstob seems to be making fun of writers who go on and on about the color of the sky behind silhouetted trees and all that.  Elstob does a good job on the relationships of the men with each other, and on giving the men little personalities--this guy is reckless, this guy is pessimistic, this guy is close to cracking, this guy is always searching for loot, etc.  It is normal in these kinds of books to have the private soldiers griping about officers who are incompetent or cowardly, and working-class men bitching about the middle-class or aristocratic officers, and there is some of that, but Elstob doesn't take sides in any kind of class war business, showing sympathy for all the characters; if some of the officers shirk, there are also officers who display courage, as well as enlisted men who shirk, and instead of condemning the shirkers as cowards or traitors, Elstob portrays them as men suffering from perfectly understandable stress who have reached their limits, found themselves in a situation they are no longer (or in some cases were perhaps never) psychologically equipped to handle.

Besides all the stuff about actual fighting and living in the field, there are plenty of scenes about the men going on leave and having sex with accommodating civilians or with prostitutes, and going back to Britain on leave and seeing their families.  This stuff is generally alright, but one of the men's background and home life is particularly interesting, and Elstob's handling of this soldier's scenes in England are a high point of the novel.  Geordie is the working-class son of a single mother and seems to have been mostly raised by his grandmother, and his poverty and difficult home life are the subject of the novel's most effective human drama (as distinct from the shocking scenes of horror in the battle zone--the corpses bloated by gas and the dismembered limbs and the burning bodies and all that--which I don't think of as "drama.")  For example, Geordie was mortified to change into his uniform on his first day of service because he didn't want "the toffs" to see that under his street clothes he had rags and old newspapers wrapped around his legs to keep warm when sleeping on the floor of his grandmother's unheated flat.  When Geordie is on leave back in England we meet his mother, who is a slut ("I've always been bad--ever since I was eleven years old I've liked getting men worked up") and who since her youth has had a series of relationships with abusive men.  Poor Geordie, who has been exaggerating his exploits, presenting himself as having been a hero on the Continent, ends up being humiliated in a fist fight with his mother's latest brute of a beau.  

If Elstob really was a commie, the character of Geordie would be his opportunity to rail against capitalism or the bourgeoisie or whatever, but he doesn't really go there: the "toffs" and the NCOs and officers are generally supportive of Geordie and treat him fairly, Army life has been a benefit to the poor young man, and his poverty and challenging family life are not presented as the fault of some system but just the way things are, or, perhaps, the fruit of his mother's failings (though, as with the stressed out soldiers who shirk or crack, Elstob doesn't roundly condemn Geordie's mother, just presents her as a person in a tough situation she isn't quite able to handle.)

So, I didn't detect any signs of Bolshevism in the text, nor attacks on British civilians like those in The Cruel Sea, and attacks on the brass were pretty light.  Elstob depicts some Britons expressing the apparently then-common contempt for the French and resentment of the Americans, but Elstob has the more admirable of his characters pointedly defend the frogs and the Yanks from such criticisms.  He also portrays the controversial Field-Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery as a compelling speaker admired by rank and file soldiers.  While not at all pollyannaish (British soldiers make plenty of mistakes, often misbehave or crack under pressure, and very many get killed and maimed) the book offers a pretty positive portrayal of British society and the Allied war effort.         

The vagaries of fate, rather than the evils of individuals or systems, are sort of a theme of the novel, and many scenes provide examples of how careful planning and diligent effort can be futile in the face of what we might call luck or chance.  Brook and Geordie go on a dangerous mission to rescue an injured soldier, and succeed in bringing this guy back to the doctor, and receive accolades, but later learn the guy died despite their endeavor.  One longish scene has Brook given the task of defending a position that the Germans might approach, and Elstob spends quite a bit of time describing Brook's planning and prep, including his need to overcome resistance to his schemes from Geordie, but, anticlimactically, the Germans never actually advance on Brook's position.  Donovan manages to narrowly survive his service without cracking, but his life is ruined anyway when his family back home is wiped out by a buzz bomb.  In the final scene Brook, on the point of cracking himself, is sent to a village to find a Tiger that bad intelligence has convinced his superiors is hiding there.  Certain the German heavy tank is going to ambush his Comet and kill him, he blasts the entire village to bits, but there is no Tiger and some French civilians hiding in a cellar (bringing the novel full circle, as one of Brook's first adventures on the Continent was finding some dead French civilians in a Norman cellar) ask why he destroyed the place needlessly, which triggers his total mental collapse.

Thumbs up for Warriors of the Working Day; the battle scenes and the horror scenes are good, I liked the portrayal of Geordie, and there is plenty of interesting military history stuff.  Worth a look if this material is of interest to you.