Editorial

The year 2020 has been such a rollercoaster of a year that the nature of the editorial has changed according the season. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, our publication schedule has been thrown into disarray. What academic publishing relies upon is the good will of reviewers, and having been a reviewer, an author, and an editor, I am aware of the perspectives of each group. This year, we have had tremendous problems in getting all of our reviews in. We require that each paper has at least two reviewers look at it apart from the editor, and being able to maintain that has proved to be incredibly difficult. While it might seem that the pandemic would mean that everyone would have plenty of time on their hands for submitting reviews, the opposite has proved to be true. All academics have been snowed under with a blizzard of demands that cover teaching, administration, and research, and as a result, reviewing has gone to the bottom of the pile. Having the pandemic coincide in the UK with the REF cycle and the need to have publications available for REF by the end of December 2020 has created the perfect storm, along with all of the extra work that switching to blended teaching and online learning are concerned. This is by way of apologizing for the fact that an issue that should have appeared around April this year is now limping out in December.

However, having described this issue as limping out, that is utterly contradicted by the papers that form this issue and burst out like fireworks. Issue 15.1 has two WWII-themed papers on Britain and a Second Boer War/South African War paper. The latter is a first for the Journal. It looks at the Boer War of 1899–1902 in South Africa, and it does so from the perspective of Australian soldiers who fought in that conflict. While this is not the first paper the Journal has published about southern Africa (e.g. Pollard et al. 2005; Mosothwane 2017; Chipangura and Silika 2019), this is the first paper to be published about the second Boer War. This bloody conflict began as a war between the Boers and the British, and ended up with the British drawing upon their colonies to provide the manpower to overcome the Boers; the use of a scorched earth counterinsurgency policy that resulted in the use of concentration camps; and British promises to their African allies being ignored in favour of a pro-Boer settlement. This paper concentrates on the fact that the British brought in troops from across the Empire to defeat the Boers, and in this case the Australians. This will not be news to anyone who remembers Bruce Beresford’s 1980 film, Breaker Morant. Morant was an irregular soldier, executed for his part in murdering PoWs and civilians, but this paper focuses on an action fought by regular troops of the 1^st West Australian Mounted Infantry. The action was small in scale and featured a small hill or kopje being held for a day by a small unit of Australians against a force of Boers around ten times as large. As a relatively small-scale action, the site seemed to be perfect for the use of the same fieldwork strategies as at Little Bighorn. This is an excellent account of the fieldwork involved, and the multi-disciplinary approach to the project as a whole.

The two WWII papers are both located in Britain and look at aspects of the war away from the frontline. The first is a paper by Carr, Pringle, Doyle, Wisniewski & Stimpson on Scallywag bunkers. As the list of authors indicates, this is another multi-disciplinary project from Keele University and is further evidence of the excellent work that they are doing on WWII sites in Europe. The subject of their investigation was the scallywag bunkers that were a secret element of the British response to the threat of German invasion. Along with the Home Guard, who were largely better trained and less doddery than Captain Mainwaring and his men,¹ the scallywags were intended as a first response to German invasion. They were to cause havoc to the Germans for as long as possible and harass them to give the British army time to regroup and prepare to throw the invaders back. The men who were given this duty knew that the end result for them was likely to be death, either killed in action or executed by the Germans after capture. This project looks at the sort of facilities that they had available to them as boltholes from which they could launch their attacks. While these were never used in anger, they represent an under-researched topic, and one that deserves greater prominence. These scallywags were never called on to make the ultimate sacrifice, but they stood ready to do so. At the same time, we look on their German equivalents, the Werwolf, as being thugs and terrorists (Biddiscombe 2004). It really does come down to one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

The middle paper, which I have left to last, is my own work carried out at the Cultybraggan PoW Camp at Comrie in Perthshire. This is another paper about PoW camps, a topic which has been a feature of several papers published by the Journal (Demuth 2009; Cooper 2011; Rees-Hughes et al. 2016; Seitsonen et al. 2017; McNutt and Jones 2019). This paper is closest in nature to Rees-Hughes et al. (2016) in tone, because both relate to the issue of escape. The earlier paper looked at a successful breakout by German PoWs from a camp in Wales; the present paper looks at unsuccessful attempts from a camp in Scotland and considers why escaping has been such a part of the PoW narrative. The camp under study, Cultybraggan, is an incredible example of a surviving camp where much of the layout of the compounds survives with upstanding remains of huts that were used by the PoWs. While it was in use post-War as a training camp for the Territorial Army and for army cadets, the basic structure of the camp is still well preserved and allows an understanding of life in the camp. It is also a community-run project where the Ministry of Defence sold the entire camp to the local community; it features a number of small businesses now, along with some museum facilities and plans at the time of writing for turning some of the huts into holiday accommodation that would give visitors a feel of a British WWII PoW camp. This site is well worth a visit, and once the pandemic finally releases its grip on us, it is to be hoped that many more visitors will come to get the atmosphere of the camp. PoW camps are an important part of our cultural heritage because they are places were former enemies were held until the war was over. The experiences that the German PoWs had in camps like Cultybraggan went a long way towards the creation of a democratic Bundesrepublik, and it showed that enemies need not remain enemies. At the time of writing this editorial, that is a very comforting thought.

Notes

1. With no disrespect at all intended to the men of the TV series Dads Army, whose characters displayed considerable bravery whenever they were put into a situation of apparent real danger, and whose actors included many men who had fought very bravely in WWI and WWII.