Denis Healey was on Desert Island Discs last Sunday, speaking about his wartime experiences in the Italian campaign and mentioning the song D-Day Dodgers. The tune is Lilli Marlene, and he said he couldn’t remember who wrote the words.
A description of the Italian and Mediterranean Campaigns of World War II:-
Napoleon once said that the only way to invade Italy was from the top. The Allies did not heed his warning and paid dearly for every inch of ground. Battles compared in their sheer intensity and horror with those of World War One. At Anzio alone the Allies suffered 135,000 casualties and Monte Cassino, over 54,000. In Tunisia, another 45,000 casualties. 20 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the Italy Campaign - 5 at Cassino alone!
So the legend goes, veterans of the Italian campaigns were called “D-Day Dodgers” by Lady Nancy Astor MP in a speech, after she received a letter from a disgruntled British soldier who signed it “D-Day Dodger”.
The words of the song D-Day Dodgers were written as a response to Nancy Astor’s insult by Hamish Henderson, who also fought in that campaign.
The first few verses are sarcastic about the jolly time the soldiers were supposed to be having:-
We landed in Salerno, a holiday with pay,
The Jerries brought the bands out to greet us on the way,
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free,
To welcome D-Day Dodgers to sunny Italy,
The last verse ends as most war poems must:-
Look around the mountains in the mud and rain,
You’ll find the scattered crosses,
the sum that have no name,
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on,
They are the D-Day Dodgers who stay in Italy,
This is the best version I could find on YouTube, with the swearing that you would expect from disgruntled soldiers though those words are not in the official lyrics.
(Link to video as I can’t add it to the post).
Hamish Henderson was a collector of folk music, poet and lyricist, and played a big part in the Scottish folk revival. Someone else who fought in the Italian campaign was E P Thompson, left wing historian and later one of the leaders of the peace movement during the chilliest days of the Cold War.
He describes the campaign thus:-
In one of his less happy flourishes Sir Winston Churchill described Italy as “the soft underbelly of the Axis beast”. Soft it was not. Italy has a singularly rugged spine and the successive mountains and rivers provided barriers behind which the German armies could execute an orderly withdrawal while their well-disciplined rearguard inflicted, day after day, sharp casualties on the advancing Allied armis. It was a preposterous error to plant large motorised armies in the toe of Italy and then to fight, mile by mile, up the boot. It may be because the whole campaign was so misconceived that it is rarely mentioned.
(from the essay The Liberation of Perugia.)
Thompson was an officer and recalls three dead troopers who were killed in the tank advance:-
They had shared in the resigned complicity of military life and had joined in the repartee of ironies as we camped in the evenings beside our tanks in the beautiful countryside of May and June.
The “repartee of ironies” is the exact spirit of D-Day Dodgers.