Commentator

Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas — a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?

A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.

Commentator

Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?

Prime Minister

Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives — attacks against the ordinary people of this country don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.

Commentator

Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are Prime Minister Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a good thing because we shall be back to normal and a lot of people will have to look for a living within their means. They’ll have to give up a lot of windfall benefits which come from the war and create social problems. We’ve now got in this country a class of people created by the war, and I think it’s a good thing that this will stop.

Commentator

Childhood for most of the children in London has been a strange life with the American dollar, hasn’t it? The American dollar has been the way they passed their childhood. When that in the form of the GI goes, are they not going to have a lot of problems?

Prime Minister

I’m sure they will. They’ll be economic problems mainly. I think we’re all going to have to find ourselves, so to speak, a painful process whether it’s an individual or a nation. I think there’s going to be a period of readjustment, possibly of turbulence, but they must go through the process. Perhaps if they’d gone through it twenty years ago there wouldn’t be a war now.

Commentator Can the British people find themselves? Can they go through the painful process of reestablishing themselves as a single nation? With 70 per cent of the economy tied to the war, with the revenues from North Sea oil long since sold off to the Germans and Japanese, will ordinary people be able to make the adjustments necessary to living with the other side? In short, do they want the war to end at all? World in Action visited a village in the front line to see how the bulk of the population is facing up to the reality of the war.

Barbed wire, road blocks, troops and armoured cars. Gunfire in the distance.

Commentator

Here at Cookham, only twenty miles or so from the centre of London, the ‘windfall benefits’ of the war are more likely to be a sniper’s bullet or a barrage of enemy mortar shells. This is one of the so-called pacified villages. By day the British and American forces occupy the bunkers and pillboxes. In the evening they withdraw with the local administrators to a fortified enclave near the American base at Windsor. At night the Liberation Front moves in. At this moment their advance positions are no more than two hundred yards away, their sentries watching us through binoculars. None of these villagers will talk to us. All are assumed to be Liberation Front sympathizers, but in fact they are professional neutrals, living on the edge of a giant razor that could cut them down at any moment. They farm the fields, work in the garages and shops, and wait for the Americans to leave. Strangest of all here, there is no one between the ages of four and forty.

Commentator A special task force arrives, part of a self-styled Pacification Probe that will advance ten miles into country recently occupied by the Liberation Front. One tank, ten GIs of the First Cavalry Division, and thirty British soldiers are under the command of Captain Arjay Robinson. World in Action is going with them to see what happens.

CAPTAIN ROBINSON BRIEFING HIS UNIT IN THE VILLAGE HALL The GIs, heavily armed with flak jackets and radio-equipped helmets, sit at the front, the British troops with two elderly officers at the back.

Captain Robinson

The primary mission of Alpha Company is to conduct a reconnaissance and pacification. Circles indicate supply caches within the area, also known parking areas, primarily wheeled vehicles and larger trucks. There are also some small yellow dots, these indicate known positions where we have seen tanks. There are tanks in the area definitely. As I see it right now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base. We’ll play it real loose, play it by ear pretty much as to where we’re going and the times that we’ll go. We’re going down there and kill the enemy where we find him and come back. 

Commentator A

Pacification Probe prepares to set off. It’s 6.35 a.m., and the thirty British soldiers who will do the major part of the fighting — and the major part of the dying — wait quietly in the background as the American tank crew and radio specialists prepare their equipment. The American weapons and communications are now so sophisticated that the British troops can barely understand them. Many of these men will defect on this mission, many more will die. What are they up against? Last month a Swedish film crew smuggled itself through the front lines. Their brief film shows what life is like within the Liberation Front.

Mountains, tunnel entrances guarded by young soldiers and armed young women. Union Jacks flying. People working in factories. Alternative technology, windmills, small-scale smelting works, machine shops, hand-looms. Children everywhere, thin but healthy. Kibbutz atmosphere, young mothers in khaki mini-skirts with babies and rifles. Slit trenches, men with rifles move through fields around burnt-out American tank. Callisthenics in drill-hall, communal singing around flag. Indoctrination sessions, 18-year-old political commissar addressing doctors and nursing staff in hospital. Children taking part in people’s theatre, 4-year-olds dressed in parody US military uniforms miming bombing attacks on sturdy villagers. Everywhere slogans, loudspeakers, portraits of George VI.

Swedish voice-over

The mountains of Scotland and Wales are the main strongholds of the National Liberation Front. In the four-year war against the British central government hundreds of underground schools and factories have been built. From here supplies and equipment go out to the front line. By now all the agricultural areas of England are under control of the Liberation Front. The soldiers and peasants are organized in communes, the women farming and looking after the children while the men are fighting. Their leaders are young. There are few old people here. Everywhere morale is high, they are confident that they have won the war and that the Americans must soon leave. They are Scottish, Welsh, people from the northern and western provinces of England, West Indians, Asians and Africans. For four years they have been bombed but they are still fighting.