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...if the main show was a war between Hitler and Stalin, [Davies] wonders, wasn’t World War II a clash of nearly equivalent evils? “Anyone genuinely committed to freedom, justice and democracy is duty-bound to condemn both of the great totalitarian systems without fear or favor,” he concludes. As a historian of Poland, Davies is especially aware of what few Americans remember: that World War II began with a joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of that country. For the first two years of the war, Hitler and Stalin were allies; the fact that they then turned against each other, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, doesn’t change the moral equation. “If one finds two gangsters fighting each other, it is no valid approach at all to round on one and to lay off the other. The only valid test is whether or not they deserve the label of gangsters.”
And with that line of reasoning, Kirsch also says that
[Snyder] spotlights Eastern Europe — in particular the region comprising the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, Western Russia and Poland that Snyder calls “the bloodlands,” because they were the greatest killing field of the Second World War. This was the site of the titanic battles between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army: it was also the scene of 14 million noncombatant deaths between 1933 and 1945. This figure encompasses 10 million civilians and prisoners of war killed by the Nazis — including six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust—and four million civilians and P.O.W.’s killed by the Soviets.
By grouping German and Soviet casualties together, Snyder is making an implicit point. The Soviet Union was America’s ally, Germany our enemy; but both regimes were guilty of killing millions of people for ideological reasons. Weren’t the three million Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 deliberate victims of state aggression and ideological terror, no less than the three million Soviet P.O.W.’s starved by Hitler in 1941-42? “Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences,” Snyder maintains.
But just when an objective reader might think that Kirsch has found some sort of rough equivalence between Hitler and Stalin and thus assumed the mantle of Clio, Kirsch reverts a bit to his New Republic agitprop commissar genome.
Churchill is the target, perhaps because this leonine hero was the single Brit with backbone at the end of W.H.Auden's "lpw dishonest decade," proclaiming like Cato did about Carthage that Hitler must be opposed and crushed---all the while the appeasers thought that just one or two more slices might slake the insane juvenile delinquent's apparent hunger for territory.
But Hitler was out for revenge. He had spent four years in the trenches, won two or three Iron Crosses and then seen his generation betrayed by the successors to the Kaiser dressed in morning coats at Versailles. Churchill, the only other ex-soldier among the "statesmen" of the twenties and thirties [albeit in his frenzied youth in colonial South Africa and the Punjab] and sensed this while the limp-wristed striped-pants starched shirts in Whitehall and 10 Downing St. Or the Quai d'Orsay and Elysee Palace, for that matter.
If Stalin stands in our memory as a tyrant equal to Hitler, Winston Churchill is possibly the foreign statesman most beloved by Americans. For this very reason, however, Churchill has been the subject of some of the most impassioned attempts to revise our understanding of the Second World War. The subtext of this debate, and perhaps the main reason for its vehemence, has to do with the outsize symbolic role Churchill came to play in American foreign-policy debates after Sept. 11. When President Bush alluded to Churchill’s wartime rhetoric in his address to Congress after the attacks, Norman Podhoretz wrote in “World War IV” (2007) that he “unmistakably and unambiguously placed the war against the ‘global terrorist network’ in the direct succession to World War II.” It was widely reported that Bush kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office — and that Obama had it removed.
It is not surprising, then, that historians would start to view Churchill, for good or ill, through the prism of current politics. The conservative historian Paul Johnson, to take one example, wrote a short biography, “Churchill” (2009), whose premise is that “of all the towering figures of the 20th century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity.” At the same time, highly critical accounts of Churchill have proliferated: “Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq”(2004), “Blood, Sweat and Arrogance: And the Myths of Churchill’s War” (2006). Nonhistorians with political agendas also piled on. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a revisionist account of World War II, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” (2008), in which Churchill comes across as rather more responsible for the war than Hitler. Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan wrote “Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World” (2008), blaming Churchill for taking Britain to war against Germany in the first place. This isolationist lesson was directed, Buchanan explicitly said, at “the Churchill cult” that convinced Bush, “an untutored president,” that liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein was akin to liberating Europe from Hitler.
Of course, Buchanan's own copybook has been stained with anti-Semitic comments in the past and he was probably clueless about GWB's autodidactic readings on history during his White House sojourn, guided by Yale's eminent William Lewis Gaddis and whose "book reports" to Gaddis each month were presented to Gaddis's students as a mystery docent. And Obama's abrupt return of the Churchill bust to the UK without a thank you symbolized the American left's disdain for the great hero of the twentieth century as well as his own bad manners. And it seemed in synch with his ghosted "autobiographies" that critiqued the colonial past of Britain in Kenya, the homeland of his hit-and-run daddy.
In a period that saw historians like Niall Ferguson recommend the British Empire as a model for the exercise of American power abroad, the connection between Churchill’s imperialism and his racial prejudice became another major problem. It was most thoroughly addressed by Richard Toye in “Churchill’s Empire” (2010), which fair-mindedly explored the reasons Churchill’s “humanitarianism did not imply a belief in racial equality.” Toye often writes admiringly of Churchill, but does not shy away from the ugliness of some of his views — like his confession that “I hate people with slit-eyes and pig-tails,” or his nostalgia for the empire’s “jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.” [ed's note: these might be the product of Sir Winston's epicene battles with the bottle chronicled frequently by the Cliveden Set, who ratted out his unPC nasties unmercifully].
More serious than racist remarks is the charge leveled at Churchill in a book by Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (Basic Books, $28.95). Mukerjee lays responsibility for the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in the deaths of some three million people, right at Churchill’s doorstep. She sharpens her point by drawing provocative analogies between the English and the Nazis. At the height of the famine, she writes, some relief kitchens in Bengal were offering the dying just 400 calories’ worth of rice a day, “at the low end of the scale on which, at much the same time, inmates at Buchenwald were being fed.”
Critics have challenged Mukerjee’s conclusions about the relative shares of culpability for the famine borne by the British, the threat of Japanese invasion, bad weather in Bengal, and hoarding. But “Churchill’s Secret War” is convincing on one fundamental point. Churchill refused to divert resources from feeding Britain to feeding India because, true to the logic of imperialism, he placed a far higher value on British lives than on Indian ones. The number of Bengalis who died in 1943 rivals the number of Ukrainians who, as Timothy Snyder shows, were deliberately starved by Stalin in 1932-33. Does this mean that a comparable atrocity must be placed against the moral account of Britain and its Allies in World War II?
Of course, an amateur in history could tell the difference between the "destruction of the kulaks as a class" and the Holodomor, both deliberately directed from the Kremlin to force rapid political and social change by ukases more drastic than any czars, with the contingencies of weather, supply disruptions, and other accidental causes of the Bengal famine, even if Ms. Mukerjee cannot. Stalin directed the mass murders in the Ukraine and in Russia and Byelorussia deliberately; Churchill never ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of Bengalis or anyone else like the brutal savage Stalin did in his purges durng the thirties. Or Hitler with his "Endlosung" directions during the course of World War II. Also, it should be noted inferentially that in Tim Snyder's book, the number of Soviet citizens whose deaths were caused by Stalin's direct orders or indirect incompetence were in multiples of ten compared to Hitler's murder or incompetence causing German deaths. Almost 50 million Soviet citizens died from the mid-twenties until Stalin's demise in 1953 [as he was preparing another purge of Russian Jews in his paranoid world populated by his personal enemies]. Hitler may have caused between six and ten million deaths of Germans one way or another, but rarely for policy reasons, except for his Jewish German citizens [until Krystallnacht in 1938 deprived Jews of their German citizenship].
And the Americans more than anyone else led the way with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and John Hershey in questioning aspects of the allied guilt in bombing civilians, it must be remembered. I can remember in the '70s in the National Portrait Gallery listening to a bunch of brownsshoe docents lecturing the hoi polloi visiting an exhibition on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on just how unconscionable dropping these bombs on "innocent" civilians was. These girly-men in bow ties evidently did not have relatives serving in the South Pacific who may have been lost in a conventional attack on Kyushu as planned had the Emperor not ordered the surrender after the two bombs. It appeared that these prettyboys had a much better aesthetic appreciation for the world about than any political or moral sense of its intricate and intractable contradictions.
What makes new writing about the bombing of Germany especially significant is that it has been driven by the memories of those on the receiving end. In a landmark essay, “Air War and Literature” (published in English in 2003 as a part of “On the Natural History of Destruction”), the German novelist W. G. Sebald wondered why the Allied bombing — which killed half a million civilians and devastated most German cities — “seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness.” A few years later, as if in response, the German historian Jörg Friedrich published “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945” (2006). Friedrich describes the kinds of scenes that took place on German streets in the aftermath of bombing raids: for instance, “a man dragging a sack with five or six bulges in it as if he were carrying heads of cabbage. It was the heads of his family, a whole family, that he had found in the cellar.”
Friedrich was accused, in Germany and abroad, of using language that implicitly equated Allied bombing with Nazi war crimes. But his conclusion about the lesson of the Second World War — “civilians do not show mercy to civilians. . . . Total war consumes the people totally, and their sense of humanity is the first thing to go” — challenges the Anglo-American memory of the war in ways that are impossible to ignore. In “Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan” (2006), the English philosopher A. C. Grayling extends that challenge, asking: “What should we, the descendants of the Allies who won the victory in the Second World War, reply to the moral challenge of the descendants of those whose cities were targeted by Allied bombers?”
Grayling is clear that he, like almost everyone in England and America (and in today’s Germany, too), regards World War II as “a just war against morally criminal enemies.” Still, he concludes that the practice of area bombing — in which the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, in particular, indiscriminately bombed urban areas, in the hope of inflicting damage on Germany’s economy and morale — was “a moral crime”: “What is the moral difference between bombing women and children and shooting them with a pistol? . . . The anonymity of the act of killing from 20,000 feet?” In the end, Grayling is carried by the force of his own argument to an outrageous verdict: “There comes to seem very little difference in principle between the R.A.F.’s Operation Gomorrah, or the U.S.A.A.F.’s atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists. . . . All these terrorist attacks are atrocities.”
The Allies as Al Qaeda: is this the conclusion to which a re-evaluation of the Second World War must lead us? If so, it’s no wonder that some historians are growing impatient with the whole project. The title of the English historian Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99), which was published last month, summarizes its response to the doubters: yes, this really was a moral combat. In his introduction, Burleigh is at least willing to grant that there were moral ambiguities involved, even saying that he does not “seek to excuse Allied war crimes.” Yet when he discusses Allied bombing, it is under the chapter heading “The King’s Thunderbolts Are Righteous” — the motto of the R.A.F.’s 44th Bomber Squadron. And while Burleigh acknowledges that Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, was “obsessed with wrecking German cities,” he is far more angered by those who would second-guess Harris after the fact. With an eye on Grayling, perhaps, Burleigh fulminates, “Wars are not conducted according to the desiccated deliberations of a philosophy seminar full of purse-lipped old maids.”
Friedrich reminds me of my colleague at Amoco whose mother lived in Germany during World War II and could never understand why no one upbraided the British for their ruthless bombing of German cities. She was simply unaware of the terror-bombing of Warsaw in September, 1939, fully as gruesome as that of Dresden and totally unprovoked by comparison [Tim Snyder says it was the single worst terror-bombing in the war.] Subsequent to Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London and other examples of Schrecklichkeit that Hitler and his colleagues took into the Second War as if it were okay for Germany to ride roughshod over the normal customs and laws of warfare.
And while the comment by Burleigh about Grayling's "purse-lipped old maids" is a bit harsh, Grayling and Friedrich do have valid points as far as they go, especially on how civilians can be as bloodyminded as military men and sometimes more so.
After all, the present is always lived in ambiguity. To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a “good war,” and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat.
The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past. Indeed, its most important lesson may be that the awareness of ambiguity must not lead to detachment and paralysis — or to pacifism and isolationism, as Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan would have it. On the contrary, the more we learn about the history of World War II, the stronger the case becomes that it was the irresolution and military weakness of the democracies that allowed Nazi Germany to provoke a world war, with all the ensuing horrors and moral compromises that these recent books expose. The fact that we can still be instructed by the war, that we are still proud of our forefathers’ virtues and pained by their sufferings and sins, is the best proof that World War II is still living history — just as the Civil War is still alive, long after the last veteran was laid to rest.
I will always pick Churchill over Stalin [yes, Sir Winston was fighting to preserve an empire while Stalin was fighting to procure one---moral equivalent to an extent] and FDR over Hirohito. Blood and language and common history are awesome bonds cementing the victors together, even if Obama is an outlier in this particular comparison.
During my early youth, I read everything I could abouut the Second World War and much about the First, which was the overture and preamble to the Second in every historical way possible. It's clear that I was a child of the Cold War, a young dude preparing himself in the fifties to fight for his country and values against the Communist menace. When my politics changed in grad school in the late sixties, my values remained bedrock underneath and my strong sense that America still is the world's "last best hope" survived the last thirty yearsof the 20th and first decade of the 21st.
But the moral enigmas of the collapse of Europe in the twentieth century into a pile of historical rubble compared to its earlier glory continue to fascinate me, and the capture last week of Gen. Ratko Mladevic reminds me that the wounds of both the First and Second World Wars continue to underlie almost every country in europe.
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