There's nothing funny about armed conflict, but sometimes Brits use humor as a weapon

War isn't a laughing matter, as I can personally testify after covering firsthand the brutal Vietnam War in my youth.

Certainly China can't forget the horrors of the Japanese occupation, including the notorious Nanjing Massacre. Russia can't forget the horrors of Stalingrad and, in Europe, the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish population has left an ineradicable scar.

But somehow the Brits found a way to use humor as a weapon against Nazi Germany.

Bear in mind that in the 1940s there was little or no knowledge of Hitler's determination to physically eradicate Jews, left-wing elements and members of underground movements in the European countries his forces had occupied.

The death a few days ago of a successful British television writer at 93 got me thinking about how the British, famed for being self-deprecating and gently sarcastic, turned the national love of humor into a weapon, at a time when the country had little else.

I have to set the scene:

Britain's professional army, which had gone to France to help its allies repulse the German invasion, had been sent packing by the German blitzkrieg and were lucky to escape across the English Channel with the clothes they wore and very little of their equipment.

Hitler had listened to his corpulent, bombastic Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering, who said his air force would smash the British Royal Air Force out of the skies, allowing the German army to invade across the 21 short miles between the Pas de Calais and Dover.

Enter Britain's Home Guard, a ragtag collection of army rejects, Boer war veterans and spotty teenagers armed with a variety of weapons, including pitchforks, shotguns and wooden rifles, and organized along military lines.

As the RAF's pilots - dubbed The Few by Prime Minister Winston Churchill - fought against overwhelming odds to blunt Hitler's invasion plans, on the ground below the Home Guard stood ready.

And that's where the humor comes in. Playwright Jimmy Perry, himself a veteran of the Home Guard, caught the moment brilliantly in his 1970s hit television series Dad's Army, about a fictitious group based in the equally fictitious town of Warminster-on-Sea.

The characters, Perry said, were all based on people he had served with in the Home Guard - the officious and bossy bank manager given the role of captain, his absent-minded sergeant, a teenager routinely described as the "stupid boy" and, my favorite, a Boer War veteran who carried his bayonet from that era and brandished it, while uttering the phrase, "They don't like it up them, you know."

My late parents, who both served in the Royal Air Force during the war, adored the series, maintaining it perfectly captured the black humor that Britons tend to resort to when faced with impossible odds.

The Home Guard, initially known as the LDV, or Local Defence Volunteers, was, after all, only following an old tradition. In World War I British infantrymen, with typical British humor, described themselves deprecatingly as "Fred Karno's Army" after a well-known circus owner at the time.

And it was Churchill himself who insisted on calling the German dictator by his family name of Adolph Schicklgruber, a name that sounds far more demeaning in English than the aggressive-sounding Hitler.

Sometimes humor makes a dire situation seem bearable, although I doubt those fleeing the bloody conflicts in the Middle East would agree.

Chris Peterson is managing editor, Europe for China Daily. Contact him on chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com

(China Daily European Weekly 10/28/2016 page11)