The Real Heroes of Telemark - Ray Mears

 

The heroes of Telemark first entered my life with the US film (The real heroes were not impressed with Hollywood).  I was young, no doubt it was Christmas and it wasn't as exciting as The Great Escape.

Leap forward in time and Steve McQueen and that baseball is really getting on my nerves, the motorbike was written in for the twinkly eyed Yank and a stuntman did the barbwire jump (Steve blew his own cover on this fact, the studio was not impressed.  Top Marks for integrity Steve).  As they say in newsreels now in terms of the real Great Escape, “no Americans were involved” a fact bad for box-office, as has so often been the case with Hollywood tinkering (did I say tinkering) with history lusting for the dollar.

I digress (not for the last time, might as well get used to it), Ray Mears does a 3 part series about the REAL heroes of Telemark for TV.

This is the stuff.  A re-creation of what the chaps went through in WW2 along with a good dose of history lesson and reminding us it wasn't just the John Wayne that won WW2.  It is all too easy to fall into the trap that "your" country is the only one that actually makes the world turn round.  That attitude means you miss out on a lot of what is actually happening.

Ray Mears is simply a great brit and to date his body of TV work has been pretty close to flawless (slightly worrying moments when to promote some BBC series he had to make an appearance on Ready Steady Cook or some such crud).

A while later I got the spoken word book out of the library, but these are never successful.  I pretend it means the book has been read, but reality is, it goes in one ear and out of the other.  Often times it never reaches the first ear.

So finally I set about reading the book, and I am glad I did.

First the TV series barely gets a mention, there is no talk of the recreation of events.  This is all about the events of the Second World War team.

I got lost a times with a blizzard of foreign names and codenames, but that is me, not the book.

What did I get out of it?

Beyond all the boy’s own stuff, the sheer courage, bravery, guile and patience of these people living in improbable conditions.

Well, the sheer waste of people's talents the world accepts.
These young men had opportunity to be really pushed and they raised their game accordingly.  We can do more than shove fries into bags.  The world would be infinitely better if potential of the population was released.  Perhaps it is only possible in war.

That’s not a good enough reason to have a war of course, but we rarely get a choice in the matter.  Whomever we vote in is hellbent on keeping us safe, which usually means a foreign war and more surveillance at home.  Imagine if we lost our freedoms and were spied on 24/7 and asked to report on each others misdeeds. 1984 has been and gone, we were not told how we would cheer each time our liberties were taken from us.

Also there are lessons to be learnt in maintaining harmony in small groups under intense pressure.  You don’t have to sit in a hut, starving and under threat of capture/torture/death while the temp. dips to below -30C to try and apply those lessons.

In one instance, desperately hungry and with no clear evidence food was coming their way anytime soon, one of the party shot a reindeer, having stalked till the hunter was near incapacitated with cold.

Getting this meal to the hut took all his reserves and the team were looking forward to a cracking feed.

As the steaming pot of stew was carried over to the table, the handle slipped from the cooks hand, the whole lot went on the filthy cabin floor.

The team spooned it up from there and into their hungry stomachs.

70 odd years none of the men would say who it was that dropped the food, they were a team.

It does give you pause for thought when that idiot in the office is annoying you.  It's not their fault, they are not annoying themselves.  They are annoying YOU, adjust your attitude as much as possible to avoid it happening again.  Or show a lack of imagination/brains and let it get under your skin.  It will not make you feel any better, and the idiot is not changing.

It is too glib to make such comparison, but that is what the modern world is for most of us.  It is not stopping Hitler’s nuclear programme for us, its trying to remain cool while the fat mouth breather in the next cubicle bores on about the report deadline.

Remember the stew on the floor.