Boys and their fighting toys

Harry Pearson
ACHTUNG SCHWEINEHUND
A boy's own story of imaginary combat
246pp. Little, Brown. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 316 86136 6

In 1996, the Daily Mirror chose to preview an England-versus-Germany football match with the headline “Achtung Surrender!” and a picture of English players in tin hats. Amid the predictable outrage and discussions of Britain’s “continuing obsession” with the Second World War, the very specific origins of the phrase tended to be ignored. As almost any English schoolboy growing up between the 1960s and (nearly) the present day would be able to confirm, the reference was to the language of those small-format comics, Commando, War Picture Library, or Conflict, in which square-jawed, grim-faced Tommies refought the Battle of Anzio or Tobruk, and dispatched coal-scuttle-helmeted foes with a terse “Eat lead, Fritz!”. (The Sun’s headline for the same game, which for some reason never became as notorious, was “Let’s Blitz Fritz”.) Harry Pearson’s book, the title of which nods to the shock of that front page while recalling a more genuine catchphrase of the genre, is a memoir of “imaginary combat” as experienced by one of a generation who was spared the real thing.

Pearson’s love affair begins with Commando comics, and moves via Action Man, Airfix toy soldiers, and various military board games, to wargaming, that very serious pastime of re-enacting great battles with toy soldiers, played by grown men. As Pearson cheerfully admits, “even amongst the inadequate milieu of hobbies, wargaming ranked very low”. Occasionally, this memoir becomes a book about wargaming, but at its best it is a (slightly shamefaced) disquisition on the wider theme of boys and their fighting toys.

The memoir of personal obsession is almost as popular a pastime as the one Pearson is describing, and Achtung Schweinehund has most of the better qualities of the genre. Chief among these is specificity in the cultural references. It is no good for the writer to remark that he remembers having lots of toy soldiers. We need to know how many, exactly what make and model, where he bought them, and preferably how much they cost. Pearson is adept at all this, and wallows in the details of total recall, as when reminiscing almost parodically about the experience of refashioning a battalion of Airfix First World War German soldiers into British ones in the Zulu War, a process that called for a lot of banana oil and coincided with a Bob Dylan phase: “To this day, I can’t smell an overripe plantain without thinking of the Battle of Isandhlwana and singing the opening verse of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’”.

For Pearson, brought up in the 1960s and early 70s, the Second World War was a constant feature of grown-up conversation and entertainment as well as of childhood play. His generation, when playing at war, could still expect passing adults to offer advice on how to throw a grenade: “Don’t throw them, lob them – like bowling a cricket ball!”. In fact, those born during and just after the war were probably less saturated with it. As Pearson writes, children’s comics, during austerity, tended to hark back to Imperial glories, with strips such as “The Wolf of Kabul”, set in Kiplingesque territory. But in 1958, with the publication of Commando, it was as if the war had “restarted”. This version still hasn’t really finished. Commando comic is still published, selling “over a million copies” of its eight issues a year according to Pearson, though one wonders if its readership’s average age has increased a little. (He tells us that it is popular in Scandinavia, where titles like Slaget vid Midway are snapped up. He also notes that toy guns were banned in Sweden, though he doesn’t pursue the connection.)

Ranging more widely, Pearson shows that it was not ever thus. In the eighteenth century, toy soldiers began to be manufactured across Europe, principally in Germany, but also in France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Denmark, but not in Britain. As Pearson explains, “the reason for the lack of toy soldier manufacturers in Britain was simple: British men had not, by and large, been soldiers and British boys did not, generally, play with soldiers”. In the late nineteenth century, an advertisement in a boys’ paper for model steam engines relied on the distinction: “Just as military playthings are sold in France to bring up soldiers, these beautiful models serve in England to train young engineers”. Toy soldiers were imported, but were beyond the pocket of most Victorian families. Winston Churchill, one of the few toy soldier enthusiasts not called in evidence by Pearson, is likely to have acquired his collection of 1,500 troops – “all British, and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade”, as he explains in My Early Life – from Germany, but as his memoir predates the fashion for nostalgic minutiae, he doesn’t confirm that irony. Pearson tells us that the first British toy-soldier manufacturer, Britain’s, could only persuade a single department store, Gamage’s in Holborn, to stock their product in 1893, though the toys’ popularity soon brought rivals into the market.

For Pearson, it is the unfamiliarity of conscription in the two world wars of the following century that is the key to Britain’s strangely attenuated passion for imaginary fighting. Britain was a nation under arms far less often and in smaller numbers than its counterparts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the difference has endured. He doesn’t engage with the more immediate argument that Britain’s direct experience of the Second World War, while hardly a good one, could be cast in a self-affirming light, in a way that the experiences of defeat, Occupation, the Holocaust or the massive losses of the Eastern Front never could be. The proportionately worse British experience of the First World War didn’t produce a similar comic afterlife in Britain, though the enemy was far less sinister.

Harry Pearson’s own obsession has migrated entirely into the realm of the wargamer, one which, for all his invocation of literary and cultural fellow players (the Brontës, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Louis Stevenson and, apparently, Martin Scorsese), he never pretends is something to be proud of. But wargaming has its uses. Before the invasion of Iraq, the United States Armed Forces commissioned a wargame from a retired general. The Iraqis won. Officially, the US claimed to have “learn[ed] from the experiment”, but in fact they cheated, refloating sunken warships and reanimating troops lost to suicide attacks. As Wells put it, “You only have to play at Little Wars a few times to realize what a blundering thing Great Wars must be”.

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David Horspool's Why Alfred Burned the Cakes: A king and his 1,100 year afterlife was published last year.