Alex Bowlby
May 28, 1924 - July 1, 2005
Writer who told the earthy story of the ordinary soldier
 
ALEX BOWLBY will be remembered for a book that gave one of the most honest and vivid accounts of the ordinary British soldier’s experience during the Second World War.
He struggled to find a publisher for Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby, but in the end it was reprinted several times and much praised. The Times Literary Supplement described the book as having “a touch of the Somme and more than a hint of Wilfred Owen”.
What made Bowlby’s account stand out amid the mass of war memoirs was its earthy humour and direct speech, engaging honesty about the frequent incompetence of military management and the reality of fear and desertion (Bowlby had originally wanted to entitle it All Soldiers Run Away) and compassion for soldiers from all sides caught up in the bloody battle for Italy in the later years of the war.
He initially tried to write his memoirs just after the war ended, but decided it was “no good”. Then, after suffering a nervous breakdown in the mid-1950s, during which, he said, “I heard shells screaming past my earhole”, he tried writing again, and found the dialogue which so enriched the book flooding back into his mind. He intended the book primarily as a tribute to colleagues who had been killed — “I was writing the book for them, for those who were there, and for those who wanted to know what it was like — in that order.”
Alexander Nicol Anthony Bowlby was born in 1924. He was a great-grandson of Thomas William Bowlby, the correspondent of The Times who was killed in Chinese captivity in September 1860, when the imperial summer palace in Peking was sacked by British and French troops.
Alex Bowlby attended Radley school and was called up when he turned 18. His Recollections begins with him joining his unit of the Green Jackets as they arrived in Italy after a punishing time in North Africa.
The unit, previously motorised, was promptly deprived of most of its vehicles and had to slog its way through the treacherous hills and valleys of Italy, faced by high-quality German troops sent by Hitler to try to shore up the Italian front as Mussolini’s regime collapsed.
Bowlby was impressed by his new colleagues’ quick wit and general lack of deference. He called them “Cockney Arabs” because they laced their observations with Arabic slang picked up during desert warfare. Bowlby, fresh out of public school, was fascinated by experienced soldiers who “moved with the relaxed assurance of successful poachers”.
They, in turn, clearly developed an affection for this social outsider who relished their raucous songs, smoked an eccentrically large pipe (“Its size and shape had drawn comparisons with a two-inch mortar, a saxophone and a lavatory bowl”) and seemed to share their taste in officers, alternating between fierce loyalty towards some and contempt for others who made idiotic tactical decisions or ordered wounded men to “lie to attention” in their hospital beds.
Despite several applications for a commission, Bowlby never really saw himself as officer material. At one selection board he told an army psychiatrist that his main love was poetry and his ambition was to help others. The psychiatrist cautioned that such ideals would make him mad within 18 months.
What was really to disturb him, however, was confrontation with war at its bloodiest, and here his writing was at its most memorable. He recalled first seeing enemy dead: “A row of black crosses, topped with coal scuttle helmets, snatched our pity. The smell — the sour sweet smell of rotting flesh — cut it short. Instinctively I realised I was smelling my own kind, not animals. I understood what they must feel in the slaughterhouse.”
Bowlby sympathised too with those who deserted, suggesting that his own courage was simply “fear of disgrace”. And he confessed to the blood lust that accompanied artillery counter-attacks against the Germans who had been bombarding him. “Go on, kill them, I snarled. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the thought of men being blown to bits.”Bowlby felt hugely guilty that illness, a bout of jaundice, caused him to miss his unit’s toughest fight, at Tossignano, during which many of his colleagues were killed or wounded, “a battle in which I could have once and for all found out how much courage I really had”.
And that guilt made adjustment to life after the war very difficult. He worked in advertising and taught English, and joined the 21st SAS (Territorials). He also took up painting, which proved therapeutic as he grappled with the demons of his wartime memories.
As he wrote later: “I discovered that peace can be a much more disturbing business than war and that the near-loss of one’s own sense of self under pressure is more terrifying than fear of death in battle. I began retreating to memories of the war, and the happiness and security it had brought me.”
Visits to former battlefields and war cemeteries in Italy helped to banish some of the demons, as did his writing. Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby was finally published by Leo Cooper in 1969, after 17 other publishers had rejected it. As well as the Recollections, Bowlby wrote a short novel, Order of the Day, about an officer court-martialled for trying to prevent further destruction during the war in Italy, and Countdown to Cassino, a more conventional account of the battle for Mignano Gap, which opened the way for the better-known Cassino struggle.
Bowlby’s marriage to Miriana Censi, in 1951, was dissolved; there were no children.

Alex Bowlby, writer, was born on May 28, 1924. He died on July 1, 2005, aged 81.