I would like to thank Andrew Muldoon for his generous and thoughtful review of my book. I have very little comment to make. I suspect that I have always been inclined to over-emphasise the individual story at the expense of the statistical, though I would contend that I have made a reasonable deployment of such statistics as are available. A few of the Military Police SIB units listed their monthly tally of ‘crimes investigated’ in their War Diaries, but most of the military crime statistics relate to the numbers of courts martial, and few criminologists would attempt to base civilian crime rates on the statistics of trials. Moreover, many of the crimes of service personnel went before civilian courts – particularly those relating to theft and assault in Britain. There is no way to separate these cases from those involving civilians without going through the records of individual courts (where such records have survived) or newspaper accounts.
I freely acknowledge my omissions regarding the British Army in Asia; this, I am sure, would make a book in itself and I look forward to Dr Muldoon’s forthcoming work on the experiences of British soldiers in India and Burma during the Second World War. George Macdonald Fraser left a wonderful vignette of his section as they successfully ‘kliftied’ all kinds of foodstuff while unloading an air drop on an isolated, advanced position, supposedly under the eyes of a grizzled warrant officer of the Service Corps who ‘knew’ these Cumberland infantrymen: ‘All I’m asking is, keep your hands off the bloody stuff’.(1) No doubt Fraser’s Harry Flashman would have had them all flogged. I suspect that, in general, the behaviour of soldiers, sailors and airmen in the Far East was not greatly different from that in the European theatre on which I concentrated, though possibly there were fewer opportunities for looting and for black market barter. There are, however, one or two areas where there could have been significant differences. It would be interesting to delve further into the impact of the different treatment meted out to colonial troops found guilty by British courts martial. This is something that I felt I could not encompass in the book, but harsher punishment for such troops was not confined to the Second World War as is evidenced by the high proportion of executions among those Indian and Afro-Caribbean soldiers convicted of capital crimes between 1914 and 1918 in contrast to the executions of white soldiers.(2) Second, I have argued in the book that the incidence of rape appears relatively low in the British Army during the two world wars. Again this is based on the fragmentary evidence from the western theatres, but clearly there was nothing like the mass rape committed by Soviet troops in Germany which appears often to have occurred with the sanction, if not encouragement, of their officers. Excluding the recent horrors of the former Yugoslavia, there seems to be an implication that rape might be more prevalent when the victims are seen as being of a different ethnic group; and this may be one, partial explanation for the reported behaviour of the Moroccan Goumiers in Italy in 1943–4.(3)
1. George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, (London, 2000) pp. 142–53.
2. Gerard Oram, Worthless Men: Race, Eugenics and the Death Penalty in the British Army During the First World War, (London, 1998), pp. 104–8.
3. See, in general, Rape in Wartime, ed. Raphaelle Branche and Fabrice Virgile (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2012); and for the Goumiers, Isobel Williams, Allies and Italians: Sicily and Southern Italy 1943–45, (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 45–57.