Anne Perkins’ joshing about the British public’s admiration of Dad’s Army (A Dad’s Army Brexit looms. ‘Don’t panic!’ 8 October) is myopic. Berating the TV audience for supposedly accepting “the idea that it was the Dunkirk spirit and British genius rather than the mighty US war machine that had won the war” sounds like Trumpian rhetoric. No single nation won the second world war. It was the allies who did so. If she seeks a heroic “winner”, she might like to consider Russia or, more accurately, the USSR. The number of Russian lives lost in Leningrad alone was higher than the combined British and American war fatalities.
Martin Smith
(Director of Red Star, episode 11 of The World at War), Bristol
In his book The Long Hangover, your Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker details how Vladimir Putin encourages the cult of the “Great Patriotic War”. In one city, children are drilled for weeks to march, sing and wave flags at a ceremony that includes a re-enactment of the storming of the Reichstag. By comparison, our affection for Dad’s Army seems rather sweet.
Dr Mark Ellis
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
Anne Perkins describes the EU as the “guarantor of Europe’s peace for half a century”. Didn’t the Balkan wars from 1991 to 2001 involving Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo take place in Europe?
Luke Sorba
London
I think Anne Perkins misses the point about the continuing appeal of Dad’s Army. It is primarily about human nature; the war simply provides the backdrop. It is surely the failure of politicians to understand how people think and feel that has led to us being so poorly governed in this century.
Jane Moth
Snettisham, Norfolk
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