Night Waves - Desertion in the armed forces
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2013
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet asks historian Charles Glass, author of a new book on deserters in World War Two, whether desertion is an act of sanity, and not - as some armed forces have tended to believe - a symptom of mental illness. He also talks to Ben Griffin of the organisation Veterans for Peace, who represents soldiers in current conflicts who seek a way out. Hermione Lee discusses the letters novelist Willa Cather didn't want you to read, and Sandra Hebron and Mary Wild review Pasolini's controversial film Theorem.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three. |
| 0:40.7 | Tonight we review a new 3D opera, but you won't need the special glasses to hear our critic Andrew Dixon's views coming at you out of your radio. |
| 0:49.3 | We'll examine the secret formula of Pasolini's The, the once-band Art House classic, in which |
| 0:55.7 | Terran Stamp seduces an entire family to destruction. And we bring you the secret letters that |
| 1:01.8 | Willa Cather didn't want you to see. Hermione Lee has read them, and she'll tell us what the |
| 1:06.5 | great American writer had to hide. First, though, another story that remained untold for decades |
| 1:12.2 | about men who went to war and then left it. |
| 1:16.1 | And suddenly I was sick of the whole thing, just turned around and walked away. |
| 1:20.6 | And nobody stopped me. |
| 1:21.7 | I seem to become invisible. |
| 1:23.6 | I seem to float away. |
| 1:25.7 | And I even got a lift in a jeep. The poet Vernon Scannell, speaking on Desert Island Discs in 1987, his first public utterance about deserting from the battlefield in the Second World War. |
| 1:38.2 | 150,000 British and American servicemen did the same thing during the same conflict. Despite these huge numbers, |
| 1:45.5 | desertions from the Great War, which were fewer, have received more attention from historians. |
| 1:50.4 | The subject remains something of a taboo today. Thousands have deserted from Iraq and Afghanistan, |
| 1:56.0 | though the media and Parliament seem to have little appetite to discuss the matter. |
| 1:59.9 | In a moment, we'll be talking to Ben Griffin, a former soldier with the SAS, |
| 2:03.9 | whose refusal to return to duty in Iraq led him to found the anti-war campaign group, |
| 2:09.1 | Veterans for Peace UK. |
... |
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