Wartime Wednesday: British Stars Who Served

Wartime Wednesday: 

British Stars Who Served

More than 3.5 million men and women serviced in Britain’s armed forces during World War II. As in America, some of those individuals were film or stage stars and put their careers on hold to enlist. Others were young enough their careers hadn’t yet begun.

Alec Guiness, perhaps most well-known by current generations as the original Obi Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars films, was twenty-seven years old and a successful stage actor when he decided to take a sabbatical and join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in 1941. His initial assignment was that as seaman, but he quickly rose in ranks, first as a sub-lieutenant, then as lieutenant. He eventually commanded a landing craft of 200 soldiers during Operation Husky, which was the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The campaign lasted until August 17, 1943, and drove the Axis powers from the island opening up sea lanes in the Mediterranean for Allied merchant ships.

Guiness also participated in other amphibious operations as well as transported troops and supplies

across the English Channel in the months leading up to D-Day, then later helped deliver arms and agents to partisans fighting in Yugoslavia. At one point during the war, he was granted a leave to appear as the lead role in the Broadway production of Flare Path, a play about RAF Bomber Command and loosely based on playwright Terence Rattigan’s wartime experiences in 1941. A couple of sources claim that a Royal Navy commander told Guiness that, as an actor, he would be unsuited to naval work, and Guiness is said to have replied, “And if you will allow me to point out, Sir, as an actor, that in the West End of London, if the curtain is advertised as going up at 8 PM, it goes up at 8 PM, and not an hour later, something that the Royal Navy might learn from.”

Our second British star who served is Peter Ustinov, actor, director, and writer. Born on April 16, 1921, he was eighteen years old when England declare war on Germany in September 1939. I was unable to determine when Ustinov joined the British Army – he was an age to be immediately drafted.

Intriguingly, his father Jona (or Iona) von Ustinov worked for a press officer at the German embassy in London during the 1930s and was a reporter for a German news agency. In 1935, Jona became a British subject and began to work for MI5. One of his responsibilities was to “handle” spy Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz. In his autobiography Peter Ustinov comments that his father hosted secret meetings in their home with senior British and German officials.

Peter served as a private during the war spending most of his service in the Army Cinema Unit where he made recruitment films, wrote plays, and appeared in three films as an actor, including the propaganda film One of Our Aircraft is Missing. At one point he was writing the David Niven film The Way Ahead, but the difference in their ranks (Niven was a Lt. Colonel) didn’t allow for “regular military association,” so Ustinov was appointed as Niven’s batman, basically his personal servant. In 1944, under the Entertainments National Service Association, he performed the role of Sir Anthony Absolute in the play The Rivals at the Larkhill Camp, a military garrison in Wiltshire. He later spoke about his service in an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S60wU7Y19EA

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A Lesson in Love

He thinks he’s too old. She thinks she’s too young. Can these teachers learn that love defies all boundaries?

Born and raised in London, Isobel Turvine knows nothing about farming, but after most of the students in her school evacuate during Operation Pied Piper, she’s left with little to do. Then her friend Margery talks her into joining the Women’s Land Army, and she finds herself working the land at a manor home in Yorkshire that’s been converted to a boys’ school. A teacher at heart, she is drawn to the lads, but the handsome yet stiff-necked headmaster wants her to stick to farming.

Left with an arm that barely works from the last “war to end all wars,” Gavin Emerson agrees to take on the job of headmaster when his school moves from London to Yorkshire, but he’s saddled with the quirky manor owner, bickering among his teachers, and a gaggle of Land Army girls who have turned the grounds into a farm. When the group’s blue-eyed, raven-haired leader nearly runs him down in a car, he admonishes her to stay in the fields, but they are thrown together at every turn. Can he trust her not to break his heart?

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Photo credit: 

Alec Guiness: Getty Images

Normandy: By Chief Photographer's Mate (CPHoM) Robert F. Sargent - Public Domain, 

Peter Ustinov: Public Domain