British fighters in Ukraine are brave but misguided

The first British volunteers have arrived in Ukraine to ‘do their bit’ in thwarting the Russian invasion. According to reports in this morning’s newspapers, four serving soldiers are among them. Liz Truss must be heartened. The Foreign Secretary recently declared her support for any idealistic Briton wishing to head east to fight ‘for democracy’.

Others were less enthusiastic at the prospect of Britons joining the war, notably Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, himself a former soldier. Also unenthused was Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, who cautioned: ‘This isn't really something that you want to rush to in terms of the sound of gunfire. This is about sensible support based in the UK.’

None of the estimated 60 British volunteers who have entered Ukraine will have experienced the firepower at Russia’s disposal. That includes former British soldiers. Some may have experienced Iraq or Afghanistan, or those longer in the tooth may have served in South Armagh, but none will have been strafed by a MiG fighter jet or targeted by a Grad multiple rocket launcher, capable of firing 40 projectiles in 20 seconds.

Twenty years ago I wrote an article for Esquire magazine about another generation of idealistic young Britons, men who had fought for Croatia in the early 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia. One told me that he volunteered to fight the Serbs more out of curiosity than conviction. His grandfather had fought in the second world war and he wanted to discover ‘how I would cope in a war’.

He had no military experience and when he arrived in Croatia he was given uniform cast-offs from the defunct East German army, a bolt-action rifle and 15 rounds of ammunition. He spent the next few weeks in a trench cowering from Serbian 155mm shells. ‘You’re standing there, holding a bolt-action rifle, and the fear comes from the disparity in firepower,’ he told me. ‘The Croats didn’t have any shells to fire back at the Serbs, so we were helpless, utterly helpless. It eats away at your nerves.’

One of his comrades, a Dutchman nicknamed ‘Van the Man’, lost his nerve early on and deserted. He’d claimed on arriving in the trenches that he had served in the French Foreign Legion. He may have, or more likely he was what are known in military circles as a ‘Walter Mitty’: a fantasist who inhabits a make-believe world of heroism and glamour.

A number of Walter Mittys made their way to Croatia three decades ago. Many boasted that they were battle-hardened former legionnaires or British paratroopers. A barrage of airburst shells had a way of revealing the truth. Charles Wilson, a medical officer in world war one (and Churchill’s personal physician in world war two) wrote of his time on the Western Front: ‘The acid test of a man in the trenches was high explosive; it told each one of us things about ourselves we had not known till then.’

It will be the same in Ukraine. Some of these men have gone there imagining it will be like the movies where pluck and initiative will win the day. It will not. Furthermore, the Russian Defence Ministry has stated that what it describes as captured mercenaries will not be treated as combatants under the rules of war and can ‘at best... expect to be prosecuted as criminals’. At worst they could receive the same punishment as those foreign fighters who fell into Serb hands 30 years ago. They were tortured in their trenches, at times only half a mile distant from their enemy’s. ‘I didn’t know what a blood-curdling scream sounded like until I heard my first prisoner being tortured,’ a British volunteer told me. ‘They didn’t stop screaming until they died, and some of them took a long time to die.’

Once the war in Croatia ended in early 1992 with the arrival of the United Nations Protection Force, many of the foreign fighters crossed into Bosnia to renew their fight with the Serbs. They were incorporated into the 108th Brigade: Irishmen, Frenchmen, Canadians, Czechs, Germans and, by far the largest contingent, Britons.

A lot were former soldiers. Several had served tours to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles and a few may have fought in the Falklands War. The volunteers were better armed in Bosnia, swapping their bolt-action rifles for Kalashnikovs and Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers. The volunteers with no military experience had to learn how to handle their weapons on the job. ‘One thing I learned pretty quickly is that high explosives and slightly foolish people don’t mix,’ recalled a British volunteer. On one occasion a comrade lobbed a grenade at the open front door of a house from two metres away. A gust of wind slammed shut the door just as he released the grenade, which rebounded and exploded under his legs.

The Serbs were even more brutal to those foreign volunteers they caught in Bosnia. One Austrian was beheaded and his corpse nailed to the door of a house.

None of the British volunteers I interviewed – brave men all – regretted fighting the Serbs. Indeed, they were justifiably proud of having fought for a worthwhile cause even if their contribution to the war effort was minimal. But even a decade later several still carried the wounds – physical or psychological – of their experience. Above all, it had shattered their idealism about war. Much of their time had been spent at the bottom of a trench, ‘curled up like a hedgehog’, praying that the next Serbian shell would not land on them.

‘We're all ex-military so I think we're all very well trained’, one British volunteer in Ukraine told the Daily Telegraph this week. But no amount of training will prepare them for the first salvo from a Russian multiple rocket launcher. And most probably don’t know a word of Ukrainian and may be more of a hindrance rather than a help. If they want to do something for Ukraine, they should join an aid agency and assist in the evacuation of the civilians fleeing the fighting.

Modern war is no place for Walter Mittys, no matter how well intentioned.