Thomas Firbank - I Bought a Star

I Bought a Star is the follow up to Thomas Firbank's much better known book I bought a Mountain. In that book Firbank told the story of how he bought a sheep farm in mid-Wales in the early 1930s and turned it into a thriving concern just in time for the start of World War Two. This book begins with Firbank hiding in France after his marriage fell apart and he'd left the farm. There are few mentions as to this sudden turnaround - readers of the first book will be left surprised at the sudden end to what seemed a successful marriage and joint-management of the farm. His former wife, Esme Cummin's remained at the farm and became a significant conservationist figure for Wales.

The German invasion of France leads to Firbank leaving his self imposed exile with a nearly unbelievable drive back to the channel ports, along with the young daughter of an acquaintance who wants her to reach England. Firbanks seems to revel in proving his chilvarous qualities, and safely escorts the woman to England where he travels around London trying to join the army. Eventually he joins the Guards regiment (though knowing an acquaintance and being the author of that book) which ends up with him guarding Buckingham Palace on a night it was bombed. Eventually because of his experiences mountaineering, Firbanks ends up in the 1st Airborne and sees action in Italy, followed by a slightly more sedate service on the fringes of Arnhem. The book ends with Firbank leaving the parachute training school that he ends up running.

Sadly despite all this action, it's a much less interesting book than I Bought a Mountain. Part of the problem is that this is just the story of someone's experience during the War which isn't that exceptional. The action scenes are limited and Firbank's general musings are less interesting than when applied to the landscape and labour of a Welsh hill-farm. More importantly Firbank's somewhat pompous attitude to those he disagrees really begins to grate.

I was annoyed, for instance, at the section when he encounters a group of "socialists" whom he disagrees with greatly. While I'd disagree with the version of socialism these individuals espouse, the dismissal of them (and socialism in general) by Firbank is patronising to the extreme - and mirrors his attitude to those he disagrees with elsewhere.

All in all this is a disappointing book, probably only of interest to those who enjoyed the first part of his autobiography and want some continuity and closure.

Related Review

Firbank - I Bought a Mountain

Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam – Trawlers Go to War

At the outset of World War Two Britain lacked ships capable of meeting the needs of its defence. That the navy lacked aircraft carriers and destroyers is one thing, but it also desperately needed smaller craft that could be used to escort convoys, sweep for mines or hunt submarines. In short order the admiralty took control of many existing fishing vessels – trawlers in particular, but also whalers and smaller craft like herring drifters – both old and ones on the production line. These ships were equipped with outdated, inadequate and in some cases antique weapons and sent out to face a formidable foe.

The new Royal Naval Patrol Service, based out of the “Sparrow’s Nest” in Lowestoft, was undermanned, undergunned and extremely brave. Many of the men who crewed the craft were not full time naval ratings, but former fishers and other crew who were commissioned into the force. Rules and regulations were not quite the same as the navy, and the RNPS soon developed a reputation for brashness and bravery. The men, and ships, acquitted themselves well in all areas of the war at sea from 1939 – 1945.

This excellent social history is based on many deeply personal accounts by participants, one of whom, Paul Lund, is co-author. The stories range from the humourous (there’s lots of black humour) to the shocking. They cover the conditions at sea, the inadequate food and the heavy drinking that crews did to cope as well as the long, dangerous and difficult voyages in appalling sea conditions. But all these are the backdrop to the violence of the conflict.

Under-equipped and often years out of date the ships did an amazing job looking for mines or in an escort role. More amazingly they tackled appalling conditions as part of convoys to Iceland or Murmansk in the Soviet Union and they were at Dunkirk, D-Day and Malta.

But because this is oral history the reader never forgets that these ships were crewed by ordinary men in extraordinary times. While reading the accounts of the RNPS during the invasion of Norway it occurred to me how many of the unlikely WW2 films that proliferated in the 1960s were actually remarkably accurate when it came to individual bravery (and some of the accounts in this book rival films like The Guns of Navarone for daring do). The infamous story of the “small ships” at Dunkirk may well have grown in the telling as a propaganda story, but that does not negate the fact that many small-ships brought off hundreds of men from the Dunkirk beaches. One trawler carrying around 1000 troops back to Britain in what must have been shocking circumstances.

For those interested in the experience of ordinary people during World War Two this is a highly recommended, readable account of a forgetting part of the conflict. There are occasional hints that this was not just an experience of the British – at least one trawler is captured from Germany towards the end of the war. But given Britain’s maritime history it is quite unique to the country for which the sea was both saviour and barrier to its participation in the conflict.

Over 400 ships of the RNPS were lost in the conflict – 2,385 men were lost at sea and have their names on the Lowestoft memorial dedicated to them. This little history puts their stories, and those of the survivors, at the heart of the history of the RNPS and reminds us that wars are always fought by ordinary people.

Related Reviews

Lund & Ludlam - PQ17: Convoy to Hell
Monsarrat - Three Corvettes
Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea
Terkel - The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two

Julia Boyd - Travellers in the Third Reich

It is a cliche to say it but "hindsight is a wonderful thing". It's a phrase that repeatedly came to mind as I read Julia Boyd's highly interesting and critically lauded book that looks at Hitler's Germany through the eyes of visitors in the 1930s. It is with only a slight amount of tongue in cheek that she can write in an opening line to one of the final chapters that the "year 1939 was not a good one for Germany's tourist trade" because for much of the 1930s the opposite was true. With Hitler's grabbing of power in 1933 the regime was keen to promote itself was positively as possible around the globe and expanded its promotional work enormously. Thousands of people travelled to the country, encouraged by posters from travel agents like Thomas Cook who urged people to see the country for themselves. In particular many tourists came from England - Germany had been a popular pre-WW1 destination and the 1920s saw a resurgence of this.

The 1930s bought a variety of people. From political activists and diplomats trying to understand, change or negotiate with the Nazi regime to tourists, musicians, academics and fascists who each had their own reasons for travelling to the country. As Boyd explains many of them were bemused, but then caught up into the sights and spectacles of the Nazi state. The regime was adapt at linking propaganda with the tourist experience, and many travellers, not just politicians or diplomats received a heavy dosage of Antisemitism and anti-Communism with their operatic performances or encounters with Nazis. Even people from the left seemed unable to clearly understand what was taking place, and while they rarely feel under Hitler's spell, they often found their experiences jarred with their expectations. More often than not though, many visitors simply found their latent anti-Semitism confirmed:

John Mynard Keynes... who readily sang the praises of Jewish friends... wrote, 'Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semitic fr the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kin of Jews, the ones who not imps but serving devil, with small horns, pitch forks and oily tails'. He added how unpleasant it was to see a civilisation 'so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jew who has all the money and the power and the brain'.

Boyd has an eye for anecdote and plenty of ironic humour. But beneath much of these accounts is a real sense of dread. Not everyone was blind the regime. The Summer Olympics of 1936 allowed many to get an understanding of what was taking place, even though the experience was heavily choreographed and sanitised of Antisemitism. One athlete remained behind after the games and went swimming to suddenly see signs forbidding Jews to enter, he was told that this was because the Olympics were finished. Others used the opportunity to tell the world what they thought of Hitler. Halet Çambel was the first female Muslim to take part in the Olympic games and "was astonished by her fellow athletes' apathy to National Socialism". She loathed the Nazis and would have preferred not to be in Berlin at all. When asked if she would like to meet Hitler, she famously said, 'No.' Others noticed the hypocrisy of their own countries. Archie Williams, a black 400 meteres gold medalist from the USA returned home and was asked in a newspaper "How did those dirty Nazis treat you?" He replied that he had not met any, "just a lot of nice German people. And I didn't have to ride in the back of the bus."

Nonetheless the over-riding theme of Boyd's book is that very few travellers actually did hate the regime and many came away after expecting to hate it, finding much to celebrate. In the case of some, like academics, Boyd argues that they

chose to travel int he Third Reich because Germany's cultural heritage was simply too precious to renounce for politics... They allowed their reverence for the past to warp their judgement of the present. As a result they wilfully ignored the realities of a dictatorship that by 1936 - despite the Olympic mirage - was unashamedly parading itself in all its unspeakable colours.

While this is no doubt true, I also think that one of the other factors is that the material Boyd works from tends to come from the higher class end of the spectrum who tended to have right-wing inclinations. This is not to say the lower classes did not travel to Germany in the period, on the contrary I was fascinated to find that 1000s did go on package tours. But the material that survives, letters, articles, diaries tends to come from the middle and upper classes, and their prejudices were more inclined towards the regime. Some of these were extremely anti-Semitic, and many of them approved of the key political line of the regime which was that Germany was a bulwark against Communism.

But it is also true that the Nazis were adapt at hiding their true faces. I was quite shocked by how many people visited Dachau concentration camp. It was a veritable tourist destination, yet few of these visitors realised that they weren't meeting real inmates, well fed and looked after. Instead they were meeting SS men in costume. The reality dawned for many, far to late, with Kristallnacht in November 1938 which Boyd sees as a moment of profound realisation for many of the naive visitors.

Boyd points out that even a serious a left-wing black thinker as W.E. Du Bois was confused by his time in Germany. That said, on his return to the US, he noted that he detested the antiSemitism, but enjoyed his time in the country, but realised that "It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the US without some, if not frequent, cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.... It was not at all deceived by attitudes of Germans towards me and the very few Negroes who happened to be visiting them... Theoretically their attitude towards Negroes is just as bad as towards Jews, and if there were any number of Negroes in Germany, would be expressed in the same way." He did conclude though, that "ordinary Germans were not naturally colour prejudiced".

With hindsight, many of the accounts in Boyd's book are shocking in their naivety (or for their latent racism). Hindsight gives us a much clearer picture, but it is still surprising that so many people accepted without question the demands of the regime when they visited - joining in the with Hitler salute, adorning their caravans with Swastikas, or even, for one highly respected conductor acceding to demands that he remove music by the Jewish composer Mendelssohn from his programme. It is easy to say "I would have behaved differently" and perhaps many readers of this blog would have. The question is why didn't more people behave differently then?

Today, as we witness a new growth in fascist and far-right movements in Europe and beyond, we should read Julia Boyd's book for its insight into how fascists organise and can conceal their horrific plans with more acceptable politics. But I also was struck by the similarities with a generalised acceptance of antisemitism in the 1930s by large numbers of people, and the way that a general Islamophobic mentality has been created by governments and the media today. We will do well to learn the lessons from Julia Boyd's book which uses a previously ignored set of materials to illuminate the darkest period of European history. An excellent, if frightening read.

Related Reviews

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Moorhouse - Berlin at War
Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949
Mazower - Hitler's Europe

Marek Edelman - The Ghetto Fights

This month saw the 75th anniversary of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. This prompted me to re-read this extraordinary account of the rising by Marek Edelman. Edelman was a socialist, a member of the Bund, an organisation of Jewish socialists, who, along with other groups, including radical left-wing Zionist organisations decided to resist Nazi attempts to deport Jews from the Ghetto to the concentration camps.

Hindsight makes it very difficult to read. We know what was to happen to those who were sent to Treblinka and other camps, but those in the Ghettos did not. Edelman's organisations began to get news from brave individuals about what was taking place, and they produced news sheets to explain to the thousands in the Ghettos what was happening. But it seemed to fantastic - as Edelman writes, "people who clung to their lives with superhuman determination were unable to believe that they could be killed in such a manner". When the decision to "liquidate" the Ghetto was made, the Nazis made the Jewish Council announce that all "non productive" Jews were to be deported, and ensured that the "Jewish police was designated as the agency to execute the deportation order". As Edelman explains this mean that the Germans "made the Jewish Council itself condemn over 300,000 Ghetto inhabitants to death".

It is hard to comprehend the callousness of the Nazis. But this deportation order came on the back of their systematic violence against Jews in the Ghetto - arbitrary killing and torture. The sections of the book that describe life in the Ghetto, with the constant threat from the Nazis, as well as the desperation of hunger and poverty of the inhabitants, are terrible to read. As are the accounts of the conditions in the areas were the Jews were gathered to face deportation:

The sick, adults as well as children, previously brought here from the hospital lie deserted in the cold halls. They relieve themselves right where they lie, and remain in the stinking slime of excrement and urine. Nurses search the crowd for their fathers and mothers and, having found them, inject longed for deathly morphine into their veins, their own eyes gleaming wildly. One doctor compassionately pours a cyanide solution into the feverish mouths of strange, sick children. To offer one's cyanide to somebody else is now the most precious, the most irreplaceable thing. It brings a quiet, peaceful death, it saves from the horror of the cars.

When the decision to liquidate all the Jews in the Ghetto is finally made, the groups of organisations that have come together to form fighting units eventually resist. With a handful of weapons, including a single semi-automatic machine gun, and homemade grenades they stop the Germans dead, killing dozens. Edelman rights that once the Nazis plan is clear, every house "becomes a fortress". In the midst of the horror, the resistance is inspirational, despite the fact that most of those fighting back are doomed by the German's overwhelming firepower.

At the same time heavy fighting raged at Muranowski Square. Here the Germans attacked from all directions. The cornered partisans defended themselves bitterly and succeeded, by truly superhuman efforts, in repulsing the attacks. Two German machine guns as well as a quantity of other weapons were captured. A German tank was burned, the second tank of the day. At 2pm, not a single live German remained int he Ghetto area.

Some of the fighters did eventually escape, some joining Polish resistance fighters, and their story did reach the world. After the war Marek Edelman wrote this book and it was published in Warsaw in 1945, then in English in 1946. It is an inspiration story, and demonstrates that contrary to many myths, Jewish people did not walk passively into the Concentration camps, but many fought back. Today we see the growth of the far-right across Europe, with a rise in racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. In Eastern Europe we see fascists and the far-right beginning to gain real traction. The Ghetto Fights is an inspirational story to help us build resistance today.

Related Reviews

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Mazower - Hitler's Empire
Gluckstein - Fighting on all Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War

Randall Hansen - Fire & Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-1945

In the excitement of the release of a book called Fire and Fury about Donald Trump's Whitehouse tenure, Randall Hansen's 2009 book of the same title became a surprise bestseller again as confused readers clicked the wrong online ordering button and purchased a book about the firebombing of Germany cities in World War Two. I wasn't confused like this, but having read a newspaper article about the book I hunted it down out of interest for the subject.

It was a worthwhile, if occasionally haunting, exercise. The reality of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was not pleasant and Hansen uses eyewitness accounts to recount the reality of the mass bombing raids on cities like Hamburg and Dresden. He also tells the story of the smaller towns and cities that were systematically flattened by British Bomber Command, often long after any strategic justification had disappeared.

Hansen contrasts the approaches of Britain's Bomber Command with the US's Eighth Air-force. He argues that the approach of the latter was a strategic success, hampering Germany's ability to wage war and undermining her industry. His authorities for this are many, but include Albert Speer who was clear that repeated attacks on key industries such as ball bearing manufacture and oil, significantly undermined Nazi Germany. Bomber Command on the other hand had a strategy of blanket bombing and destroying whole cities. This arose out of a pre-war doctrinal belief that such bombings would utterly demoralise the population, kill civilian workers and stop Germany's ability to wage war. It also came out of a practical problem - Bomber Command was the only force capable of striking Germany after Dunkirk, and at repeatedly proved itself, in the early years of the war, inept at striking precision targets.

However what becomes clear is that despite mounting evidence that this strategy was having no impact upon Germany's war aims, Bomber Command's Arthur Harris pursued this strategy in the face of mounting criticism from his own military superiors. At times it seems that Harris misled the public and his commanders and liberally interpreted his orders to continue with his strategy of mass murder.

Harris may not have had all the hard facts to hand, but intelligence was available that proved his strategy a failure. Despite this, supporters of Harris continue to argue that his bombing of civilian cities was a success and a necessity. Let's quote Hansen on this.

On by one, the cities of the Ruhr were turned into ash and rubble The effects of these raids on production were minimal. Although two hundred thousand tons of bombs would fall on Germany in 1943... its wartime production increased dramatically... During the Battle of the Ruhr, the country faced nothing approaching a labour shortage. There were 1.4 million workers still employed in household service... By the end of 1943, the Reich still had six million Germans employed in consumer industries. The result was the overproduction of consumer goods. From October 1942 to October 1943, Germany produced 120,000 typewriters, 200,000 domestic radios, 150,000 electric blankets, 3600 refrigerators, ...512,000 pairs of riding boots...According to the official British historians... the Battle of the Ruhr - during which fifty-eight thousand tons of bombs had been poured on Germany - cost the area between one and one and a half months' loss of output. The price for Bomber Command in men and matériel was enormous.

In fact Speer made it clear that when Bomber Command did hit industrially crucial targets, such as oil depots or the famous dams, they failed to follow up on their attacks and cripple the targets. The result was, we should be utterly clear, a militarily failure that could have shortened the war, and the loss of thousands of servicemen and the deaths and injury of tens of thousands of civilians.

By contrast, despite limitations imposed on them by weather, and enemy action, the US strategy of targeting key parts of the German war machines had a considerable impact. What is unbelievable to me, from reading Hansen's book, is that Harris was allowed to get away with minimal criticism. His superior officers failed to challenge him in any meaningful way, particularly when he clearly interpreted orders in such a way as to continue to hit cities at a time when official strategy was to prioritise the final destruction of the oil industry. Hansen concludes, "After flattening dozens of cities and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians Harris should be held to account and not simply be forgive for making a 'bad call'... Churchill could have stopped area bombing and he did not; indeed, near the ed of the war, he urged it on.

Hansen is no bleeding heart liberal. He sees Harris' failure not as a war crime, but as a strategic error that was continued because Harris was unable to break from a strategy that was a "moral and strategic failure" and his high-command did not want to challenge him.  He concludes:

We cannot shy away from this conclusion out of fear of giving succour to the far right or of offending the Royal Air Force or Royal Canadian Air Force aircrew. On the contrary the freedom to write and speak the truth is what the aircrew were fighting for.

While I disagree with this exact conclusion - I think the war was fought for the imperial interests of Britain and the US, one can agree that those who celebrate the defeat of Fascism cannot hide the fact that Britain pursued strategies that failed to limit civilian deaths nor speed the end of the war.

Two further things need to be added. One is that Hansen notes in detail the failure of both the US and the British to use their air-power to limit the Holocaust. There's a heart-rending account from an Auschwitz survivor who saw Allied bombers flying over and prayed for them to bomb the camp to stop the mass murder. Hansen notes how much the Allies knew about the mass murder and concludes that while they may not have stopped the majority of the Holocaust, they could have in the latter years made a real difference. They ignored the targets in favour of area and precision bombing of military targets. That they did not try is a stain on the memory of the Allied forces.

Finally, one missing part is in Hansen's conclusion. If the US strategy of precision bombing was so effective, why did they do the opposite in Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo and the atom bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were precisely what they condemned Bomber Command for in Europe. I suspect that some of the difference in approach reflects a racist view of the Japanese, something that Ian W. Toll has shown was prevalent among US military strategy in the Pacific Arena.

Randall Hansen's book is an important contribution to discussions of military history and World War Two. It is impossible to read it, in my view, and believe that Arthur Harris was not a war criminal, though others may disagree. However everyone who reads this can only conclude that the strategy of mass bombing of cities was an utter failure that probably prolonged the war.

Related Reviews

Taylor - Dresden
Moorhouse - Berlin at War
Gluckstein - Fighting on All Fronts
Heartfield - An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Kershaw - The End
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

Paul Lund & Harry Ludlam - PQ17: Convoy to Hell

The bravery of merchant seamen is often overlooked, and despite the horrific realities of the Arctic convoys during World War Two the experiences of those sailors was often discussed only through accounts of the naval escorts.

In 1942 PQ17 sailed from Iceland to the Soviet Union carrying vital supplies intended to alleviate the Russian military crisis during the siege of Stalingrad. What took place afterwards was a disaster of the highest magnitude but was the subject of silence and cover-up by the British government and military.

It was only after the war, and partly because German accounts of the convoy turned out to be more truthful than allied ones, that questions were asked. In the late 1940s and 1950s it became a major issue for the British media who demanded to know why the convoy had been decimated.

Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam's account from the 1970s draws heavily on the accounts of those involved. Paul Lund himself was on board the ASW trawler Lord Austin a small escort ship that was part of the convoy. The book is fascinating in part because it is more than a military history.

PQ17 was a heavily escorted convoy, though it lacked an aircraft carrier. At that time, the greatest naval threat was the Tirpitz and her associated naval ships. Much of PQ17's route was within reach of German air attack, but the Tirpitz was seen as a particular threat because it could easily outgun the escorting warships. Misinformation at the admiralty led to the convoy being ordered the scatter hundreds of miles south-east of Spitzbergen. The escorts were ordered to break off eastwards to engage the surface threat, though this was non-existent. For days afterwards the merchant craft came under sustained air and u-boat attack. Thousands of tonnes of shipping were destroyed and hundreds of men and women lost their lives. Despite the bravery of the armed merchant craft, little could be done to protect the individual ships or small groups and they were easy pickings.

Later analysis would lay the blame squarely at the desk of the First Sea Lord. That would be little comfort to those that were killed or frozen in the cold waters. And while this book finishes with the story of how the truth came out, most of it is an account of those harrowing experiences. I was struck by a number of things reading this. One was the way that the u-boats often surfaced and assisted (sometimes in a minimal way) survivors of life boats and rafts. The other was how many people did survive, picked up by other ships or making extraordinary journeys to land. But perhaps most fascinating are the little bits of social history that come through the personal accounts. Take this description of conditions on Austin after she had picked up dozens of survivors.

On Austin we turned to looking after out guests... They were men of mixed nationalities, Americans from both north and south, and Argentines, Poles, English and Chinese... All were given a double tot of run and then began the problem of feeding and finding sleeping room for eighty-nine extra bodies. The Chinese were very helpful, offering to give a hand in the mess and the galley, and refusing to sleep anywhere but under the whaleback on deck. The survivors as a whole were quite cool. cheerful and fatalistic... We had to improvise nine sittings for meals.. and there was a desperate shortage of cutlery. The white Americans did not like eating or even mixing with the coloured seamen and in the confined space quarrels sprang up between them.

PQ17 forming up off Iceland

Once again we are reminded that World War Two was won by the sacrifices by men of many different backgrounds and nationalities, but that racism was a real experience too.

The other fascinating aspect to this book is the experiences of the survivors when arriving in the Soviet Union - both in terms of the different way of life, but also the social structures. Without pretending that the USSR in the 1940s was a socialist paradise it is interesting to see how the allied men found it surprising to see women playing a leading role in production. All the Russian ships on the convoy had female sailors for instance.

PQ17 remains shorthand for an immense naval disaster. Future convoys certainly learnt from events, but one can't help but feel that this should never have happened. Certainly that is the conclusion of many of those who took part. Lund and Ludlam's book is likely dated and more information is available, but in its accounts from survivors of life on a merchant ship in World War Two and their visit to the Soviet Union it remains extremely fascinating.

Related Reviews

Monsarrat - Three Corvettes
Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea
Turkel - The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two

Robert Leckie - Helmet for my Pillow

Having recently read Ian W. Toll's excellent histories of World War Two in the Pacific, I decided to seek out some of the personal accounts that he uses as material for his accounts. One of these is this classic book by Robert Leckie, which forms some of the source material for the TV series Pacific.

Viewers of that will recognise many of the scenes from the Leckie's account. Leckie begins with his training for the Marine Corp and then their deployment on Guadalcanal. Understanding exactly what was taking place is difficult without the wider military context, because Leckie writes from his position as an individual soldier, and rarely gives any wider context.

As a result this, like I imagine the conflict itself, is a claustrophobic experience, focusing on individuals. Leckies' comrades come and go, the action is limited to particular foxholes and patrols. Unusually the author is not afraid of describing personal weaknesses, fear and cowardice by him or others. His first "kill" involves shooting someone in the back and he describes the way that his comrades have to kill the injured enemy in cold-blood for fear of bobby traps and suicide bombs. One comrade, Souvenirs, removes gold teeth from the Japanese dead, until his own death on Peleliu. Leckie is forthright about how the war, and the stress of waiting for battle to begin preyed on the mental health of him and his comrades.

I was also struck by Leckies' insubordination - he, along with others, go AWOL during their recuperation period in Melbourne, an event that is as riotous and drunken as described in Toll's The Conquering Tide. Drink plays a big part of this escape following Guadalcanal, but not as much as sex does, and Leckie's descriptions of his own encounters with women in Melbourne are very different to those portrayed in the TV dramatisation. Not least because it proves that women were as forward as men in the 1940s. Sex clearly didn't begin in the 1960s.

The book after Leckie's experiences during the Battle of Peleliu. This was a brutal experience that involved heavy casualties and brutal sustained conflict between soldiers low on water, food and ammunition. Unsurprisingly Leckie is transformed by his experiences. Indeed his final meditation on the nuclear attacks on Japan poignantly makes it clear how he feels about war. This is certainly not a John Wayne's film full of heroism and clean deaths, but dirty, brutal, real and tremendously sad.

Related Reviews

Toll - Pacific Crucible
Toll - Conquering Tide
Jones - Thin Red Line
Turkel - The Good War

Ian W. Toll - The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands 1942-1944

Volume two of Ian W. Toll's history of World War Two in the Pacific begins almost were the first volume finishes. With a decisive victory at the Battle of Midway, American forces could begin the task of taking the war gradually towards the Japanese homeland. In between stood tens of thousands of square miles of ocean and dozens of heavily defended islands.

As I noted in my own review the first part of this trilogy put the first year of the Pacific War in the context of both American and Japanese history and military doctrine. Volume two plunges straight into the action and the author clearly assumes that most readers will not start with this book. I'd encourage that view - a great strength of Pacific Crucible was the background, and it will help with this volume as well. That said The Conquering Tide deals with a somewhat different conflict. This part of the war begins the "island hopping" that characterises the latter years of World War two. As such the role of the American naval forces becomes much more one of supporting and defending the troops in their amphibious assaults on islands like Guam, Saipan and Guadalcanal.

The book begins with the battle for Guadalcanal, though the importance of this victory for the United States is only really underscored towards the end of the book as the scale of their advance becomes clear. Without the victory at Guadalcanal, US forces would have been delayed and hampered as they drove north and then west towards Japan. Yet the victory was a close run thing - descriptions of the US military machine at the end of the period covered often emphasise the enormous amount of men, materials, ships, aircraft and weaponry. This could be deployed with great skill and on a scale that meant the US war machine could move with great speed.

For instance, the capture of Guam in the Summer of 1944 by the US was on such a scale, that "even before" the island was declared secure, thousands of US men were engaged in rebuilding its infrastructure to make it a base for the further assault on Japan. The rebuilding was on an enormous scale - 103 miles of new paved roads were completed in a year, two massive 8,500 feet long runways were hacked out of the jungle to provide launch pads for B-29 bombing raids on the Japanese mainland.

This can be dramatically contrasted to the invasion of Guadalcanal where US soldiers were short of food, water and ammunition. Reading the breathless accounts of their defence it seems miraculous that the Japanese did not manage to push the US marines back into the sea. Nonetheless they failed, less through the overwhelming US military might and more through the enormous bravery of US soldiers and sailors. Exceptional military leadership managed on more than one occasion to turn successful defence into offensives that further isolated the Japanese forces.

The US learnt a lot from its campaigns. One gets the impression of a military machine capable of rapidly learning from mistakes and adapting to best utilise men and resources. At times though, the errors were nearly disastrous, as during the naval campaign around Guadalcanal, and the failure to spot a Japanese retreat. Nonetheless, the most far-seeing Japanese commander, Admiral Yamamoto, was able, as early as 1942/1943 to foresee Japan's defeat.

The gradual erosion of the Japanese military machine is one of the key themes of Toll's book. The systematic sinking of Japanese shipping which starved the population of food, and deprived the military of resources such as oil was a massive part of this. Linked to this, however, was the limitations of Japanese military doctrine which saw death in battle as a glorious end, and thus failed utterly to try and rescue downed pilots. Those Japanese men left to drown in the sea from crashed aircraft, or sunken ships, often preferred death to capture. But they were very rarely going to be rescued and the consequences was that expensively trained and experienced men were lost to the military. As the war carried on, the inexperience of the Japanese aircrew became obvious and Toll's accounts of the heavily one-sided dog-fights are harrowing.

One point that is worth noting is that the Pacific War was very much a total war. And total war makes brutes out of everyone. The shocking accounts of Japanese war crimes, pointless charges and mass suicides are, at least on occasion, matched by violence from the American side. The account of the commander of the US submarine Wahoo, ordering the systematic machine-gunning hundreds of Japanese survivors as they swam in the sea, is a particularly harrowing one. Sadly it isn't unique.

Toll pays sympathetic attention to the war's impact on the Japanese people. They were victims of a heavily authoritarian regime that kept much of the reality of war from its people. Newspapers were heavily censored (though in the best capitalist spirit those prepared to go along with the regimes lies, were able to prosper). Over time people began to build up a picture that helped them see through the lies about fighting defenses and tactical retreats. Discontent was bubbling and repression was heavy. The government feared revolution at home, though the pre-war destruction of the Japanese left would have made that less likely.

Toll's ability to link the military story to the social history of the era is what really makes these books such wonderful pieces of writing. Whether its Japanese families mourning their loved ones, or black Americans experiencing relatively desegregated life in Hawaii in contrast to the prevailing racism at home, there are countless memorable accounts in this book. In passing it is worth noting the excellent chapter on the shock that Australia received when thousands of US servicemen arrived in its cities, loaded with cash and eager for fun after the violence of Guadalcanal.

The US was able, through economic resources and military might (as well as a good amount of luck) to utterly undermine the Japanese military machine. That didn't make victory automatic, but it made it more likely. The transformation of the US economy in the interest of winning World War Two in Europe and the Pacific helped of course set it on a road towards its post-war superpower role. But before that took place, there were further islands to capture, the firebombing of Tokyo and the use of nuclear weapons. It is to be expected that when Ian W. Toll's third volume covers these subjects, it will do so with the excellent history and writing that characterises the first two books.

Related Reviews

Toll - Pacific Crucible
Jones - The Thin Red Line

Christopher R. Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

Reading and reviewing books about the Holocaust is no easy matter. Christopher Browning's book is no exception. The material is horrific less because of gruesome detail and more because of the sheer scale of murder that takes place. Page after page, paragraph after paragraph mentions the deaths of thousands of people - Jews, Gypsies the mentally and physically disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, enemies of Hitlers' regime.

Browning seeks to understand precisely how this could take place. How could a single state reach the stage where six million Jews were killed, and perhaps four million other in a mechanised, bureaucratic way way? The answer is not easy, and has many lessons for today.

Browning argues early on in the book that Hitler and the Nazis did not begin with the concept of genocide - though its important to understand that they did not fear or oppose murder of their enemies on any scale. The Holocaust has its origins in both the fanatical anti-Semitism of the fascists and their belief in conquering and rebuilding Europe in the interests of the Nazi state. (This is something that has been also explored by Mark Mazower in his Hitlers' Empire, reviewed by me here).

Hitler's belief in the need for German Lebensraum implied that the Nazis would construct an empire in Easter Europe analogous to what other European imperial powers had constructed overseas... this also meant that the Nazi regime stood ready to impose on conquered populations in Europe... the methods of rule and policies of population decimation that Europeans had hitherto inflicted only on conquered populations overseas.

However the particular nature of Nazi colonialism, coloured by its violent anti-Semitism and racism meant this would inevitably lead to mass murder. The execution of Jews, prisoners and undesirables that accompanied the German army's entry in Poland and the German Wehrmacht's "feeble resistance to even the earliest manifestations of mass murder" permitted this.

Browning takes us through the different stages of the development of the Holocaust. The early attempts to relocate Jews to the East. Latter plans, that reached a surprisingly level of organisation, to turn Madagascar into a Jewish state run by the Nazis, and finally the way all of this was shaped by the invasion of Russia. None of this can be separated from the particular nature of Hitler's regime or those who managed it. Their appalling racism drove the mass murder forward, to the extent that it became the only answer to the problem of where to put the Jews being forced out of their homes in Germany, Austria and the conquered territory of western Europe. Browning details how the different stages followed each other, even in the way that the gassing of victims began as a way of dealing with the mass killing of the disabled, but then became a way of coping with the realities of mass-shootings - soldiers were unable to cope with the death. Once each decision was made it led to other follow up decisions that made further mass murder more likely. As Browning concludes:

The extermination camp was not an accident. It did not result from some mysterious process of spontaneous generation. It was a horrific monument to the perpetrators' problem-solving abilities, but they needed lead time to invent and construct it.

One aspect to this that I felt could have been developed further was an attempt to understand what led people to do this. Browning does explain the way that the particular nature of the Nazi state and its ideology helped legitimise murder, through its demonisation of Jews and others. But I think this is only part of the question - other aspects have to include the particularly brutal nature of the genocidal war on the Eastern Front, and, most importantly, that Hitler rose to power on the back of a mass movement aimed at destroying his enemies through a rhetoric of blaming Jewish-Bolshevism for Germany's economic problems. This created an mass layer in German society, won to the idea that Jews were the enemy, filled with racism and loyal to the regime. (I read this piece by Alex Callinicos at the same time and felt it helped fill in the gaps). It helps explain why Germany continued to fight for so longer after defeat was obvious, and it also makes us understand the particular nature of Nazi Germany that meant the Holocaust could take place.

This isn't a pleasant book to read. But it is an important and carefully researched one. Every argument made by the author is backed by examples and reference. It will fill the reader with sadness and horror. But it will also make them keen to fight racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism today and to organise against the fresh appearance of fascist movements in the 21st century that would seek to emulate Hitler.

Related Reviews

Mazower - Hitler's Empire
Moorhouse - Berlin at War
Black - IBM and the Holocaust
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Sereny - Into that Darkness

Ian W. Toll - Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-1942

The Pacific theatre in World War Two was in every sense an imperialist conflict. Two emerging powers were vying for the region's resources and markets. An older colonial power, Britain, hung on with a self-confidence that belayed its complete lack of military preparedness.  Pacific Crucible is the story of the first year of that conflict. From Japan's brilliant and devastating attack on Pearl Harbor which sent shock-waves through the United States, to their defeat at the Battle of Midway - a victory that relied on a strong dose of luck and superb work by cryptographers, as well as enormous bravery.

Toll begins with an over-view of naval strategy. He notes that both the United States and Japan were stuck with a set of tactics that had been handed down to them from 19th century military doctrine. The concentration of naval power in large fleets that could knock out enemy forces in one huge battle. But by the 1930s this doctrine no longer fitted the situation. The role of aircraft and particularly carrier based aircraft was to transform the situation. Japan's victory at Pearl Harbor was the first indication of this, but it seems that even with this victory, Japan failed to learn the lessons and, as Midway showed, still focused on the role of their battleships.

In one revealing paragraph, Toll shows how the nature of the victory at Pearl Harbor actually encouraged this thinking for the United States, leaving the US with a smaller, faster fleet and more reliant on its carriers than ever before.

But where Toll really excels in is his understanding of how Japanese and American history shaped the conflict and how each country's leaderships' perception of each other affected their military actions. For instance, despite the rapid and deep deterioration in relationships in the run up to Pearl Harbor, the United States was completely unprepared for war. As the Japanese military machine rapidly rolled over US and British bases in a matter of weeks, it was clear that no-one expected this to happen. The Japanese were considered to be under-prepared militarily, with outdated equipment and small air-forces. Particularly for the US and the British, racist attitudes played a central role in this. Apologies for the racism quoted in the following paragraph but it's worth repeating to see how little the US understood about what was about to hit them.

In the years before the war, the Americans and British had taken comfort in a widely held conviction that Japanese air-power was not to be viewed seriously. That impression was nourished by quackish, pseudo-scientific theories proposed by 'experts' of various fields. The Japanese would always make bundling pilots, the authorities patiently explained, because they suffered from innate physiological defects. They were cross-eyed and nearsighted, possible a symptom of their 'slanted' eyes. As infants, they had been carried on the backs of their mothers, causing their heads to wobble in a way that thew off the balance in the inner ear. Japanese cultural norms emphasized conformity and obedience; therefore their young men must lack the aviator's traits of individualism and self-reliance.

This sort of racist nonsense led to the US and Britain being "hoist by their own petard", as far superior Japanese pilots, flying the wonderful Zero fighter repeatedly blew their opponents out of the sky. By contrast, the US was badly prepared. Its pilots inexperienced, it's gunners inaccurate and its technology laughable. I was struck by how often US torpedoes simply didn't work and while Toll doesn't tell the story, the failure is rooted in bureaucratic ineptitude and lack of preparedness for war.

Toll doesn't neglect the history of Japan, telling the story of the rise to power of a powerful, centralised military clique, that clearly bordered on fascism in terms of its nationalistic and expansionist tendencies. Mein Kampf edited to remove Hitlers' racism directed at Asians was a best-seller and the regime destroyed all opposition, left and liberal, shaping and preparing the population for war. The swift victories after Pearl Harbor strengthened the regime which was able to keep the vast majority of the population (and even the military) in the dark following defeats.

One thing that seems apparent is that Japan couldn't win an all out war. It probably came close to winning a negotiated settlement where they relinquished some territory in exchange for keeping other parts - a victory that would almost certainly have meant Britain, Holland and other European powers lost their Asian colonies. Had Japan won at Midway this may well have been a likely outcome.

While much of the book focuses on the war and its battles, Toll tells the story through detailed portraits of the principle leaders. This works well and we can see how the conflict is shaped by economic and political forces, but also how the attitudes of the individuals make a real difference. Admiral Yamamoto's decisions in the immediate aftermath of his loss of four carriers at Midway might have still changed the course of things in Japans favour. The competition and conflict between the US's two code-breaking teams nearly derailed their leadership in the run up to Midway.

Ian W. Toll's book is an excellent over-view.  Its also full of tiny detail that really illuminates the wider war. The word "Hawaii", for instance, was overprinted on all US bank notes on the island so that it could be declared invalid if Japan took the islands. A tiny detail that shows the US government really did think it might lose the islands completely. There are some strange omissions. Nothing is mentioned about the US men who were captured and then executed by the Japanese after Midway, and Ensign Gay one of the US pilots who was shot down and spent hours floating in the sea watching the Japanese defeat is left swimming there, without his rescue being mentioned.

Surprisingly, for a book that covers the US's political establishments response to the war, there is nothing here about the internment of Japanese-Americans and their appalling treatment during and after the war. Given Toll's evenhanded coverage of both sides of the war, this is an omission that is strange, but will perhaps be rectified in later volumes.

This is volume one of a three part history of the Pacific War, which the publishers say is the first in many decades. If the others are as insightful as this clear, detailed history, which avoids jingoism and doesn't fail to highlight the mistakes of military leaders and politicians, they will be well worth reading. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - Fighting on All Fronts
Jones - Thin Red Line
Beevor - The Second World War
Turkel - The Good War
Gluckstein - A Peoples' History of the Second World War

Ian Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

Part one of Ian Kershaw's two volume history of Europe in the twentieth century covers some of the most violent and barbaric periods in humanity's history. In particular Kershaw looks at why the First World War led to the Second World War - arguing that there are three key factors in the period after the end of of World War One. These are the rise of nationalistic movements across Europe, the crisis of capitalism (which he notes many contemporaries, not just those on the left, saw as the final crisis of the system) and the class struggle, particularly in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

Kershaw's task then, is to argue why it was that in some countries fascist, or anti-democratic forces rose and in others they didn't. While Kershaw's history is readable and comprehensive (he never neglects events in countries that are not normally part of mainstream histories of Europe) he tends to deal with generalities that mean sometimes his analysis can seem shallow. One major problem I had was that Kershaw tends to lump the revolutionary left together with the anti-democratic practises of the far-right and fascist movements. This is because he argues they were both revolutionary movements dedicated to the over-through of the existing order and the creation of a new one. The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that the revolutionary organisation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, and other movements across Europe were opposed to bourgeois democracy without having a democratic alternative - neglecting the revolutionary democracy of workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants councils and Soviets.

Kershaw is too good a historian to argue that Lenin led inevitably to Stalin, or that Stalin's view of socialism was the same as those of thousands of ordinary revolutionaries. But this weakness means that his only alternative to the totalitarian states that rose in Germany, Italy and Spain (and he includes Russia as well) was parliamentary democracy. Parliamentary democracy was of course something worth defending in the face of fascism (notably something the Bolsheviks did at the time of Kornilov in the summer of 1917) but it was also a system that filed millions of people - as Kershaw shows in his careful studies of the reality of life in the 1920s and 1930s for millions of people across Europe.

At specific points in the period Kershaw is discussing, there was the potential for the left to break out and build a revolutionary alternative, or at the least the beginnings of one. Kershaw notes that the best moments for this were when the revolutionary left (essentially the various Communist Parties) and the social democrats united against a common foe. He bemoans the failure to do that in German and notes how important it was to stopping the growth of fascism in France. But his lack of clarity on the limitations of Stalin's politics means that he sees this unity inevitably failing as the left cannot find common ground other than opposition to fascism.

These important criticisms aside, Kershaw never pretends to be writing a revolutionary socialist history of Europe. What he has written is however very useful as he covers enormous ground, from the changing role of women, to the growth of trade unionism, the repeated failure of capitalism to escape economic crisis as well as fascinating summaries of popular music and the importance of the growth of radio and so on. Readers who have a detailed knowledge of particular periods, or aspects of European history will no doubt find omissions, but in as a general introduction this book is very useful. It's worth noting that while painting a general picture across Europe, Kershaw never forgets the role of the individual, nor the impact of these events on ordinary people. There are many anecdotes, funny, inspiring or painful that illuminate the big changes taking place.

There are of courses places we will disgree. I think Kershaw is probably too soft on the failure of senior members of the Catholic Church, particularly the Pope, to condemn the Holocaust. I think he gives to much credit to the Pope and underestimates the importance that him speaking out would have had. That said, no reader will be able to read Kershaw's detailed discussion of the two world wars, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, or the impact of ongoing economic crisis on ordinary people without drawing parallels with Europe today. As we once again see the rise of the far-right in many countries and ongoing economic crisis I would argue that we need to build a stronger revolutionary left capable of working with much wider forces to build the struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism. Ian Kershaw wouldn't necessarily agree with me on that, but his book is one full of insights that will encourage the reader to think more widely on how we can defeat racism and fascism today.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - The End
Beevor - The Second World War

Mark Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

This is an exceptionally detailed and informative study, well written and compelling. Despite its scope, Mark Mazower manages to make sure the human context is not forgotten in analyzing the death and destruction caused by war, occupation and genocidal policies.

Central to Mazower's analysis of what he calls "Hitler's Empire", the countries that were occupied both during World War Two and the areas that were taken under German authority before the war began, is the way that the Nazi state's racialised politics shaped their approach. As he explains, this was very different to how "normal" war progressed:

In short, wartime Germanization constituted the single most forceful and ambitious attempt at nationalizing people and terrority in Europe's history. It explains why the Nazi conception of occupation involved something far more permanent, wrenching and destructive than the temporary abeyance of sovereignty mandated by liberal international law, and it contributed more than any other single factor to the increasingly violent transformation of life in the Reich itself and to the rise of the SS - the motor of Germanization - as its major political and military institution. [184]

Things, as Mazower says, "might have been different". In several places, such as the invasion of the Western areas of the USSR, the German army was welcomed. But the Nazi leadership never saw the occupied terroritories as places of allies. Almost immediately they became places which were to be reshaped according to Nazi fantasies of greater Germany. Poles and Ukrainians were moved, deported and killed to make way for German settlers, settlers that could never arrive in the numbers required. The mass and systematic killing of the Jewish population began as an attempt to deal with the Germanization of entire regions by the export of Jewish populations from areas destined to be settled by Aryans from Germany.

This also shaped the way that "ordinary" German soldiers viewed their enemies. As Mazower explains, the "[German] soldier's image of the Red Army was hopelessly, and confusingly, racialized. Sometimes it was the Jews whose pernicious influence was held responsible, but often... it was also 'Mopngols', 'Tatars' or other representatives of the 'Asiatic' hordes from whom the Nazis believed they were saving Europe." [159] This helps understand the brutal nature of war on the Eastern front and the response of the Red Army in turn. The fact that millions of Russian POWs died in horrific conditions has its roots in the perception of the soldiers as sub-human and the complete lack of preparation by Germany to deal with the captured men.

While the war devastated the European economy, in the short term, the German occupation of Europe did much to assist the Reich's war effort, at least in the short term. One key aspect to this was in the way that workers were brought in from both the East and the West to free up men for fighting. Foreign workers, Mazower says, went from three to 19 percent of the German labour force. In some parts of the occupied areas, despite wealth and resources flowing back to Germany, the economies did remarkably well (in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia unemployment vanished and wages kept pace with inflation). Other countries did less well out of the unequal relationship. By 1943 for instance, half the French workforce was working for the German war effort and a third of national income went to Germany.

But the experience of "capitalist cooperation" in the west, was very different to the "colonial extraction" demanded in the East. There mass murder and plunder were the order of the day. Hitler's dream of the East as a breadbasket for Germany was a dismal failure, despite harsh attempts to extract everything that the regime could from countries like the UKraine and Poland. The food shortages were offset in part by imports from France and the West, but the ultimate reality was food queues in the Reich. Though Mazower notes [262] that food supplies in Germany were probably not as bad as in World War One, at least until the final year of the war.

The mass killing of workers and farmers in systematically undermined Hitler's ability to fight. As Mazowyer concludes [318] "Germany could have racial purity or imperial domination, but it could not have both."

There is much else in this detailed book. The author analyses the origins and nature of the various resistance movements, and the differing experience of Nazi occupation in countries as diverse as France, Belgium, Norway and Greece, Romania and Poland". It's worth noting that resistance was not always automatic, developing over time and sometimes vanishing in the face of repression. In Poland for instance, following the defeat of the rear-guard resistance against German invasion, resistance vanished, to reappear later. Part of the motivation for this, as one Polish General explained was an awareness that what had been done to the Jews and groups like Gypsies, would soon happen to them as Hitler's vision of a cleansed Eastern Europe free was recolonised by German settlers. The Poles "saw 'an atrocious picture of their own destiny' in what had been done to the Jews. Warsaw's sanitary officer, Wilhelm Hagen, actually lost his job when he sent Hitler a letter protesting at plans to treat 70,000 of the 200,000 Poles facing resettlement - old people and children - 'in the same manner as the Jews'."

Mazower also discusses the nature of Italian fascism, considered to be "humanitarian" by some, but he argues that this was in the context of a fascist regime aware that the war was ending and keen not to dirty themselves with allegations of genocide in the future. "[T]here can be little doubt that Italy's diplomats and generals saw perfectly strong and self-interested political reasons for doing what they could to chart their own course on Europe's Jewish Question."

Mazower's book is not one that simply concentrates on one aspect of World War Two in Europe. He draws out the way that Nazi ideology shaped the experience of war and occupation in a completely unique way. This provoked all sorts of responses, from resistance to collaboration, responses that were in turn shaped by the historic experience of different countries and peoples. As Mazower's final chapter shows, that experience continues to have an impact around the world. As a result I highly recommend this book to those trying to comprehend the origins of the contemporary world.

Related Reviews

Cobb - The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Neitzel & Welzer - Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying
Moorhouse - Berlin at War

Donny Gluckstein (ed) - Fighting on all Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War

This review of Fighting on all Fronts was first published in Socialist Review #404, July/August 2015

Next month is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. There will be official events, which combine just the right amount of somberness with a celebration of the victory of “democracy” and “freedom” over fascism and tyranny.

But for the rulers of the Allied nations the war was never about democracy or freedom.

In his previous book, A People’s History of the Second World War, Donny Gluckstein argued that what actually took place was two parallel wars: a clash of imperialisms as well as a “People’s War”, fought by ordinary people, mobilised by anti-fascist, democratic sentiments.

Fighting on all Fronts brings together further examples from around the globe. The result is an illuminating book in which different authors highlight forgotten history.

Tomáš Tengely-Evans’s excellent chapter on the Slovak National Uprising describes how 78,000 partisans and soldiers fought fascist Slovakian forces and 48,000 Wehrmacht and SS troops.

We are normally told that the population of Japan blindly followed their leaders. But as the war progressed increasing numbers felt differently.

Sometimes this was on an individual level, like the kamikaze pilot who read Lenin’s State and Revolution secretly in the toilet, and just before his death concluded the war was imperialist. But it was also collective. Thousands of Japanese workers took part in strikes and protests during the war and workers’ mass absenteeism reached the staggering levels of 49 percent after the 1942 bombing of Tokyo.

This forgotten history is important because it challenges contemporary ideology.

Perhaps the most important example of this is Janey Stone’s moving chapter on Jewish resistance. Stone demonstrates that Jews did not just meekly go to their deaths in the gas chambers, but often fought back. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 will be familiar to many readers of Socialist Review from Marek Edelman’s book The Ghetto Fights.

Stone describes other examples such as the Minsk underground resistance, which united Jewish and non-Jewish resistance under Communist leadership. From 1941 it “ran a clandestine press and smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto... Jews and non-Jews both engaged in sabotage within Nazi factories.” Some 10,000 Jews were saved as a result.

Colonial history also affected how the war played out. In South East Asia, European powers had dominated, but other countries wanted to expand their influence. So, for the Chinese, the Second World War began many years before Hitler invaded Poland when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931.

Tens of millions of Chinese died, and resistance was on an enormous scale. In 1943 the Chinese Communist Red Army was supported by a militia of 7 million with another 12 million in “anti-Japanese associations”.

According to Mao Tse-tung, China’s official leadership the Kuomintang had a “line of oppressing the Chinese people and carrying on a passive resistance”, compared to the “Chinese people’s line of becoming awakened and united to wage a people’s war”.

Every chapter in this book illuminates further the central contradiction of the Second World War, but I am not convinced that this all fits neatly into the idea of “parallel wars”. Frequently the struggles influenced each other — Churchill and Roosevelt needed to talk about “freedom” to motivate the masses to fight.

Yet this rhetoric encouraged their soldiers (and the partisans listening on radios around the world) to believe that a different world was possible. As Gluckstein himself notes, “In two broad arcs stretching from Beijing through Hanoi to Jakarta and Delhi and then from Athens through Belgrade to northern Italy and Paris the masses, many of them armed, were challenging for control.”

But at times the war was even more complex. The struggle in Burma was simultaneously a battle for liberation from Japanese occupation and from pre-war British rule. This meant that the Burmese freedom fighters fought with both the British and the Japanese at different times.

But there was also a conflict within the Burmese ruling class with some wanting to return to the old colonial arrangement, others to fight for independence in which they would benefit.

Gluckstein summarises “The People’s War” as amounting to “a rejection of capitalist imperialism and imperialist capitalism”. I think the processes are more complex than this.

I was struck, for instance, by the story of the Australian troops who cheered Stalin every time he appeared in newsreels, not out of ideological conviction, but simply because it annoyed their officers.

In some parts of the world the war did lead to revolutionary moments. Elsewhere resistance movements failed to reach such heights, took the road of anti-colonial nationalism, or were suppressed by the Allies.

I don’t have to space to highlight other excellent chapters such as that on neutral Ireland, the Netherlands, or the mass struggle in the Philippines. I can only encourage readers to get hold of this book and read it.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Heartfield - An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Challinor - The Struggle for Hearts on Minds

Other reviews of books by Donny Gluckstein

Gluckstein - Tragedy of Bukharin
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle
Gluckstein - The Paris Commune

Frederick Taylor - Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945

After reading this detailed, balanced and incredibly well written account of the destruction of Dresden in 1945, I am left with no doubt in my mind that those who ordered the attack committed a war crime. Taylor's eyewitness accounts and his historical research bring home the full horror of the firestorm that engulfed the hitherto untouched city, leaving tens of thousands dead, thousands more injured and homeless, with relatively little military impact. I don't think I will ever forget reading about the hundreds of civilians who died after climbing into a reservoir of water to escape the flames. The hastily built tank had been made to supply water for potential firefighter operations, and didn't include any steps to leave. After treading water for hours these people must have drowned horribly in the most appalling of circumstances.

Because of stories like these, and rumors of other atrocities by the Allies during the attack on Dresden it has always been a political hot potato. Figures of casualties, sometimes as high as 450,000 have been given, which has ultimately meant that February 13 1945 came to symbolize the very worst of the Allies. Two groups seem to have been most responsible for this. The first is the far-right and the neo-Nazis. Unsurprisingly Hitler's regime made huge propaganda out of the Dresden raid. But since the end of the Second World War the far-right has used Dresden to suggest that the Allies were as bad as, if not worse than the Nazi dictatorship. The attack on Dresden was Germany's own Holocaust they suggest.

As the Cold War continued, the Eastern Bloc too encouraged a view of the attack as symbolizing the viciousness of the US and British, prepared to murder thousands of civilians in a pointless attack.

As a result, Taylor's book has to tread through much myth and falsehood. As with the debate about whether or not US planes strafed civilians shows, memory is often little help to understanding what took place. A number of eyewitnesses say that US planes committed these war-crimes, but Taylor makes it clear, drawing on several detailed studies, that this didn't take place. This is an unpopular position in Germany today, and historians have drawn tremendous fire for even suggesting that such recollections are inaccurate.

Taylor puts the Dresden attack into historical context. Firstly he gives us Dresden's fascinating history, though I am not sure he needed to go as far back as the Roman era. In part this is to show just what was lost historically and culturally in the attack. But also it is to challenge those who argue that Dresden was not a military city. By the Second World War the city was an important transport hub (even more so when the Russian's broke through Poland and were closer to Germany) and a center for the manufacture of important components for weapons (such as optics).

The author also traces the history of air-bombing. Again this helps to put the attack in context. In particular Taylor examines the strategies of Britain's Bomber Command during the war. Here the key issue is the Chief of the Air Staff, Arthur Harris' insistence that Germany could be defeated through massive destruction of towns to undermine the country's ability to wage war. As a strategy this was clearly failing, and Taylor makes it clear the limits to the bombing (in particular inaccuracy, and the ease at which industry and transport recovered). Harris doggedly held onto his strategy as the war progressed. But by the time of Dresden, it is clear that massive destruction of cities could no longer be justified as a valid way of waging the air war, if it ever was. Of far more importance was destroying Germany's dwindling oil stocks, something that was widely accepted by the military hierarchy but dismissed by Harris.

That said Harris is not the only one responsible. Others helped selected targets, and Taylor makes it clear that Churchill himself approved a renewed offensive against urban targets, even though the Prime Minister rapidly distanced himself from the attack on Dresden.

But Taylor makes it clear that Dresden was not unique. For many of us, it feels unique, precisely because it has been such a political football. Taylor's comprehensive analysis suggests are far lower casualty figure than other headline numbers, he concludes

The fairest estimate seems, therefore, to lie between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand. This makes the loss of life in the city less than the total for Hamburg (although Hamburg possessed at least twice Dresden's population), and as a proportion of the total population, less than that for towns such as Pforzheim or Darmstadt.

This is not to downplay what took place in Dresden, but to show that it was part of a much larger, and more systematic destruction of German cities that targeted the civilian population. We remember Dresden because of the firestorm, but Taylor makes the point repeatedly that this was a particular set of circumstances, and barely a few weeks later the Allies might well have done the same to Berlin, as they did in Hamburg. In fact their bombing strategy was deliberately designed to create destruction and slaughter through firestorms. In Dresden the fascist authorities are also to blame. Their lack of shelters, lack of experience and their deliberate attempts to suggest that Dresden would not be attacked resulted in thousands of deaths. The bravery of ordinary German's in the circumstances reflected everything positive about humanity, in complete contrast to the barbarity of the city's government.

There is much more in this excellent book including a history of the Jewish community in Dresden, and accounts by those who survived. Taylor also demolishes the inaccuracies of writers such as the right-winger David Irving who has written extensively on the Dresden attack.

In clarifying what actually took place on February 13 1945, and why, Frederick Taylor has in no way diminished the suffering of Dresdeners. What he has done is to put it into context of the "total war" of both the Allies and the Axis powers. The lessons are there for all of us.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - The End
Moorhouse - Berlin at War

Robin Cross - The Battle of Kursk: Operation Citadel 1943

Stalingrad was the turning point of the World War Two on the Eastern Front. The destruction of the German Sixth Army marked a major change for the fight against Hitler. But the subsequent battle for Kursk, that developed out of the relative positions of the German and Russian armies at the end of 1942 was the beginning of the end for Hitler.

The German debacle at Stalingrad gave the Russians the opportunity to strike rapidly westwards, which they seized. But, as the German army recovered, the Russians lines were left with an enormous bulge, the Kursk salient, which stretched deep into German territory. This was a weak point for the Russian army, and the high-command were sure that German armies would be unable to resist attacking from the north and south in an attempt to behead the Red Army's troops within the salient.

Robin Cross details the extraordinary battle that followed. Firstly he shows how reluctant many of the German leaders were to engage in battle. After Stalingrad they had developed a healthy respect for their enemy's capabilities. Hitler too prevaricated, initially enthusiastic for Operations Citadel, he then began delaying it for weeks. In part this helped sow the seeds of defeat, for the Russians were able to pour enormous quantities of troops and material into the Salient, building up what is likely to have been histories greatest defence in depth. Millions of mines, thousands of guns and tanks, and above all millions of men.

Cross' descriptions of the build up to the battle are surprisingly readable, combining military history with the story of the various contrasting leadership styles. Hitler is increasingly unable to relinquish the reins of power, his inflexibility and in particular his terror at the idea of retreat, even tactically, condemns many men to death and armies to defeat. But by 1943 German industry was also problematic. The powerful Tiger tank could not, despite Hitler's fantasies, be produced fast enough to win the battle. But these weren't the only factors. The German army was also failing to learn lessons, and was preparing its Blitzkrieg for Kursk. Tactics that worked well in 1941 with the wide open spaces available during the opening assault on Russia, were inappropriate the what would be a close in style of warfare.

Nonetheless when the battle came, the Germans came close. The Russian airforce was initially driven from the skies and Cross relates terrifying eyewitness accounts of how, one after another, Russian T34 tanks were destroyed by the heavier German armour. But defence  in depth, and enormous Russian sacrifice, as well as brilliant commanding meant the Red Army could hold the attack. And then, unleash the counter-attack which the Germans had no expectation off. This counter-attack was to destroy German ability to engage in offensive attacks in the East and transform the situation post Kursk. German manpower and resources were reduced to nothing, a situation summarized by a leaflet dropped on the German defenders of Kharkov by the Russian airforce,

"Comrades of the 3rd Panzer Division, we know that you are brave soldiers. Every other man in your division has the Iron Cross. But every other man on our side has a mortar. Surrender!"

The German commander, General Manstein, met with Hitler and his subordinate, Hollidt presented the Fuhrer with figures that underlined the seriousness of the situation.

"My XXIX Corps has 8706 men left. Facing it are 69,000 Russians. My XVII corps has 9284 men; facing it are 49,500 Russians. My IV Corps is relatively best off - it has 13,143 men, faced by 18,000 Russians."

Hitler dodged the situation. More obsessed with Allied landings in Sicily and Italy he prevaricated and made impossible promises. The Red Army followed up the attack out of Kursk by driving the Germans across the Dnieper river. As one German German reflected "There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative."

The story of this crucial battle of World War Two is brilliantly told in this classic book. Robin Cross never fails to remind us though, that the battle which is inevitably described as history's greatest tank battle, was in reality a battle that involved millions of men. It is perhaps this approach that makes this such a readable work. But it is the scale of the battle itself that makes it so shocking, among all the troops movements described in achingly accurate detail, we are never able to forget that these are real men, fighting and dying.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - The End

James Heartfield - Unpatriotic History of the Second World War

2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. It is also the 75th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. Unlike the First World War the Second seems to have produced a constant stream of books. Much of this has discussed the war in the context of the "Good Fight" against Fascism, and for Democracy. But in recent years there have been a number of excellent histories that re-examine the war in a more critical light.

James Heartfield's Unpatriotic History is good example of this, and should be read alongside Donny Gluckstein's People's History of the Second World War. Together they comprehensibly demolish the mainstream, "victor's history".

Heartfield begins by noting that the question of labour is central to the war. The winners were those "who best mobilised their domestic workers and so best equipped their armies". The impact on the working class of this "was that more of them worked much harder, and got paid less." Consequently the war transformed the industrial landscape. "Plant created in Detroit and Dagenham, the Urals and Silesia... would lay the basis for the post war boom".

The working class was also transformed. "Between 1942 and 1945 the number of black Americans in work tripled....  One million six hundred thousand, black and white moved north." Similarly, as in the First World War, the position of women was transformed. Two million more British women were put to work. Doing this meant a transformation of the economies. State capitalism became the norm, "the free market was abandoned in order to achieve maximum efficiency in reorganizing trade".

What was the cause of the war though? It certainly wasn't a struggle for democracy, or a fight to end fascism. This was an imperialist conflict, whatever cause the politicians expounded. Churchill and Roosevelt talked of democracy, but their interests were much more base. As an American slogan put it in the pre-war period, "If goods can't cross borders, soldier's will". Indeed, western economic policies helped push Germany into conflict. Heartfield quotes economic historian Adam Tooze, "Given the isolation imposed on the European continent by the Britsh blockade only the Ukraine could provide Western Europe with the millions of tons of grain it needed to sustain its animal population".

This is not to let German Imperialism off the hook. Hitler had come to power with the backing of big business - it needed access to raw materials, markets and the rest of the world. Japan too was heavily dependent on imports and was looking for expansion. It was the British Empire and US interests that this threatened and thus war became increasingly likely. As Heartfield puts it, "the struggle over Empire was the cause of the Second World War. Those countries that tried to enlarge their empires clashed with those who were trying to defend their own."

The economic interests of big business meant that initially, some of Hitler's policies were considered fairly acceptable. As The Economist wrote in 1941;

"The extent...to which the Nazi's have found willing collaborators is not altogether surprising. Industrialists have, of course, been driven into collaboration by the need for raw materials, but there is no doubt that many of them would have been ready for it without this compulsion."

Those who governed in the West of course frequently flirted with Nazis. Churchill for instance, noted the ability of the Fascist regimes to be a bulwark against Communism. Heartfield argues that it was only when his government's imperialist interest was threatened that Churchill was prepared to go to war. The British government was also frequently unmoved by the plight of the Jews


"The whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and we should move cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that then all the Jews of the world will want us to take up similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler will take us up on such an offer...", worried Anthony Eden in March 1943 at a meeting of the British Foreign Office discussing the threat of extermination of Bulgarian Jews by the Nazis.

Sometimes I feel Heartfield overstates the case. For instance he suggests that the Second Front in Europe was only launched because Churchill and Roosevelt became worried about the potential for workers uprisings against a crumbling Nazi occupation. I'm not sure this is strictly true. By 1944 I think they were more worried about their position in a post war Europe dominated by the Red Army. Nonetheless, the resistance was significant. But it wasn't always against the Fascists. Heartfield rescues the forgotten histories of those, particularly in South East Asia, who had to fight British and US armies of occupation before, during and after the War.

Some of the most fascinating chapters (as in Gluckstein's book) are those that deal with these forgotten aspects to World War Two. History books focus our minds on Europe and Japan. Less often do we hear about Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and India. Nor do we hear about the brutalities of the Allies. Victor's justice means we known about the Rape of Nanking, or the Holocaust. We don't get to hear why it was that the US army rarely took Japanese POWs. (They had a no-prisoners policy) or discuss the mass bombing of German civilians.


While the book is very good, it is not without fault. I feel bound to mention that the publishers have failed in their duty to ensure the book was properly proofread... it is littered with typos, and inconsistencies in style. In addition there are a number of glaring errors; B52s were certainly not used to bomb Tokyo - that particular war-crime was committed with B29s. More surprisingly for an author in command of a wide range of sources, the author of The Tin Drum was Gunter Grass, not Heinrich Böll. This is a shame, because the editorial failings detract from an excellent book that challenges many of the most cherished myths of the Second World War.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Calder - A People's War
Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Challinor - The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War
Newsinger - Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire