Legendary Daily Express cartoonist Carl Giles refined his craft during the biggest conflict in modern history, the Second World War. His wartime experiences were rendered into his daily cartoons, helping to raise a chuckle or two both at home and among those fighting overseas. As the comedian Spike Milligan recalled: "During the war, Giles's cartoons played no little part in boosting my morale." He mocked the Nazis as a bunch of harmless fools, whilst undermining Hitler by portraying him as a comic devil, rather than as a wicked or frightening monster. This proved so effective that Giles was later told that his name had been put on a Nazi hit list, for those to be rounded up by the Gestapo and shot after a successful German invasion of Britain.
In March 1940, Giles, being of conscription age, received his call-up papers, but was found to be unfit for military service due to a motorbike accident in his youth which, as a result, had left him without sight in one eye and hearing in one ear. Instead, he volunteered for his local Home Guard unit. His experiences with them provided plenty of material for his cartoons during the war. On March 14, 1942, Giles married his first cousin Joan Clarke. His Home Guard colleagues lined up outside the church using their bayonets to give him a guard of honour. Apart from his duties as a cartoonist, he had taken up animation work for the Ministry of Information from his small Ipswich studio, with six animators to assist him.
One of the commissions was a three-minute animated cartoon designed to increase grenade production. The grenade, known then as a Mills bomb, is the hero of the film. It is at first cocky, then overawed by the far grander weapons of war, but finally does its job by devastating the German eagle. Ministry of Information officials were so impressed they began to refer to Giles as the 'Cockney Disney' and asked him to make another film on how to instruct prospective mothers in prenatal care.
Unfortunately, British mothers never got to find out, as the film was never made. Giles’s storyboard was declared highly unsuitable. His central character was an unborn child who loafed around inside his mother smoking a cigar and giving out prenatal advice in a voice highly reminiscent of the American comedian W.C. Fields.
Giles’s home in Suffolk was close to an American air base. Stationed there were members of an engineering battalion, the vast majority being African-Americans. Their task was to build runways so that American bombers could take off from there. Because of Giles’s love of jazz, he soon became their friend and local champion. He was proud of the warm relationship that he helped to foster between the African-Americans and the locals. On Saturday evenings the Black engineers would cycle into the local pub, The Fountain Inn.
They would arrive balancing “bass fiddles, drums, trumpets, trombones and saxophones and their other instruments on the handlebars. The bass player would lean his instrument at a 60-degree angle to keep clear of the low ceiling, with its Scotch thistles, Tudor roses, and fleurs-de-lis impressed there by Elizabethan workmen. “The Suffolk farmers would crowd into the back room with their pints of mild and bitter as Giles struck up the opening bars on the piano and the 16 piece hot band went into Big Fat Mama With the Meat Shakin' on Her Bones”.
In April 1944, the renowned US photographer Lee Miller visited Giles for a story that featured in Vogue, capturing that exact scene. Giles was horrified by the racist attitudes of white GIs, who refused to socialise with their Black compatriots. After the success of D-Day in June 1944, Giles was keen to experience life at the front first hand. It was initially considered too dangerous. However, by September Giles was given his war correspondent's licence alongside the rank of captain, with orders to proceed by military aircraft to Brussels to represent the Daily Express with the 2nd Army.
Just before he said his goodbyes to Joan, he witnessed what he thought was the "most glorious sight" of the war, that of the Allied air armada going out over East Anglia towards Arnhem as part of Operation Market Garden. Giles flew to Belgium in a Dakota, his first ever flight. Once there, he noticed British soldiers grumbling more about the awful weather than the enemy. What he found most disconcerting was not his itchy woollen battledress but having to wear ‘WC’, for ‘war correspondent’, in white letters on his helmet. "Can you imagine anything so daft?" he remarked.
Giles complained after others joked the letters stood for ‘water closet’. Eventually, orders came back from London that they could be removed. “After that,” recalled Giles, “I was required to go round just wearing the letter ‘C’. Daft buggers!” Within days of arriving, Giles was driven to the front line near Eindhoven.
There he witnessed the fighting for the first time. “The noise was unbelievable," he recalled. “Shattering. At first all you wanted to do was dodge in and out of doorways, like in the Blitz but a bloody sight worse… Bullets seemed to be coming from every direction, which I suppose they were. The last thing that came naturally to mind was to set up an easel, get out the pencils and start drawing amusing cartoons.”
He did so anyway. When the deposed Italian dictator Mussolini was executed in April 1945, Giles was one of the few people who felt a sense of loss, admitting: “I sure hated to see old Musso go. He was half my bloody stock in trade.”
A few days later, Giles did not feel such loss when the other half of his "stock in trade", Adolf Hitler, killed himself in his Berlin bunker. He had just witnessed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by British forces. The sights and sounds he encountered that day never left him.
“You could actually hear the screams and the shouting, from what I suppose you would call the depot, where a train full of prisoners had just drawn in. All you could do was look and just try to absorb what you were seeing,” he said.
Initially, Giles did not want to enter the camp at all, but a colleague from the Daily Express told him: “You have to go in, Carl. We both have to. It is important that we see it so that we can pass it on. We have a duty… When you see this in the papers back home you won't want to believe it, any more than will the readers. We have to confirm to them that this place existed.”
Don't miss Part Two of our 11-part Second World War series in the Sunday Express tomorrow
The Daily Express asked Giles to draw the full ghastly horror and tragedy he witnessed there, but he could not bring himself to do so, choosing instead to just draw the various rooms and cells, rather than the thousands of dead bodies that littered the ground. He later noted: “It was the most dreadful, terrible thing in my life. Not a day or night goes by even now when I don't think of Belsen.”
Giles met the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, and was greatly disconcerted when Kramer admitted to being an admirer of his work. As a mark of respect for the cartoonist, Kramer gave Giles his Walther P38 pistol and holster, a ceremonial dagger and his Nazi swastika armband. In return he asked for a signed original cartoon.
Later Giles wrote: “I have to say that I quite liked the man. I am ashamed to say such a thing. Had I not been able to see what was happening outside the window I would have said he was very civilised. Odd, isn't it? But I have always found it difficult to dislike someone who was an admirer of my work. And strangely, Kramer was. I never sent him an original. What was the point? He had been hanged.”
At the end of the war, Giles realised that all his favourite wartime characters were dead and new ones would be needed. So he developed the Giles Family with the curmudgeon-like Grandma at its head. Giles loved drawing her because she allowed him to say things through his cartoons he was too polite to say himself. Yes, Grandma, the old battle-axe, was in essence Giles himself.
