The War Years: A Tribute

In difficult times, spirits need cheering up and smiles put on normally frowning faces, pained at more news from far away. No clearer was this evident than between 1939 and 1945, the Second World War in full swing and each week bringing new battles and new casualties.

As the last combatants left who fought approach their 90th birthdays, the suitably-named Nostalgia Music have created a 20-track compilation of the sorts of music, before even rock’n’roll, to distract the world from the futilities of war. With all the greatest balladeers and bandleaders of the time, alongside a smattering of comedy songs and those which helped people pine for home and all they’d left behind, this set of sing-alongs will ease the most military heart.

The Sweetheart of the Forces, Vera Lynn, sings two numbers, hymning bluebirds over ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and left ‘All Alone in Vienna’ where there’s “no chance for meeting again” (with no idea where or when, naturally…). Sounding like Vera herself, Deanna Durbin’s expansive ‘Beneath The Lights of Home’ has her remembering a “sleepy town” where little happens – even that gives recourse for nostalgia to any troops who, then or now, heard words so simple and chord progressions so fluid.

Deanna’s ‘Spring in my Heart’ also features, as does another pretty voice of Gracie Fields (‘Sing as we Go’). Other songs include ‘Coming Home’ by Lou Prager and the equally nostalgic ‘Ma, I Miss Your Apple Pie’ by Ambrose.

In a more military manner, Irving Berlin’s quirky ‘This Is the Army, Mr Jones’ talks of clean barracks but no housemaids, piping bugles and the absence of a wife who “won’t worry you any more”. All has changed, and it was thanks to such army members that things could return to what there had been before. Northern Englishman George Formby’s ‘Mr Wu’s an Air Raid Warden Now’ – “doing his bit for England like the rest!” he sings as he plucks his ukulele and marvels at the old laundryman’s new uniform and responsibilities. A musical approach to the war effort is most evident in the brassy step-by-step guide to ‘Obey your Air Raid Warden’, a Tony Pastor tune (“Stop. Look. And Listen.”)

We suggest you stop and listen to this advice, even seventy years after WWII, in war-torn modern life.