Angus Calder – The People’s War: Britain 1939 – 1945

There are many histories of the Second World War. Most of them deal with the battles and military campaigns, or the leaders of armies and nations. Angus Calder’s book though is in some ways a very narrow history, because it looks at the War through the eyes of the people of Britain.

The British were told they were fighting a war for democracy and freedom, against tyranny. However for the majority of the people of Britain the world of democracy was not one of peace and justice, it was one of poverty and unemployment, of fear of the future and old age. The belief that the world should be a better place helps explain the introduction and the enthusiasm for the welfare state at the end of this conflict. The establishment knew this, Tory MP Quentiin Hogg commentated about the Beveridge Report that  "[i]t was not that it was a bible or a panacea, but it was a flag to nail to the mast, a symbol, a rallying point for men of goodwill - above all, an opportunity to re-establish a social conscience in the Tory party"?

One of the central threads to this history is class. Rationing was supposed to be for everyone, yet those with money could always find better food.  Take one quote from a young woman travelling with some salesmen, “Tyres? As many as you want – at the right place” he tells her smiling, when she overhears their deals. At a time of rubber shortages for the war effort, those with the cash could get what they need. This was particularly true in terms of housing. The “clearest area in which the rich stayed rich and the poor got poorer as a result of wartime conditions” argues Calder. In part this was because the immense bombing raids tended to hit the poorest parts of East London, in part is was because war workers had to be accommodated in villages and towns around the country and compensation wasn’t adequate. What made things worse was the way that those with larger homes, the ”upper middle classes” often took the least burden. In one case a town was declared full, when all the working class accommodation was full, but twenty-three town councillors have between them 66 rooms to spare.

Of course many of the wealthy didn’t think that they needed to contribute anything at all. During World War Two, various councils asked citizens what public services they could do in the event of a Nazi invasion. In November 1942, from the West End of London came this response "My maid and I would be glad to help in any way from five to seven any evening except at week-ends, when we are always in the country".

The book is full of anecdotes, humour and insights that result from Calder’s reliance on the testimony of ordinary people. The unique Mass Observation system which encouraged people, through diaries, interviews and records to put down their thoughts on everything from the cost of food, to their attitudes to the Germans gives us a fascinating insight into life during wartime. Calder uses this sparingly, but often enough for us to almost understand what life was like. The pain and the suffering is always there, but so is the resistance and defiance – and not just of the enemy, but also of governments and politicians seen as being remote. This was a time of boom for authors and writers, books sold in vast quantities, despite the shortage of paper. Libraries were oversubscribed – the ones that survived the bombing.

One of the great aspects to this book is the way that Calder draws conclusions about the people’s ideas from less obvious sources. He quotes one social scientist who “undertook the ordeal of reading sedulously every book about the war published between the outbreak and the end of 1941”. The scientist is surprised and taken aback by the right-wing sympathies of the low-grade fiction, and “the prevalent anti-Semitic tone” half the books had a Jewish character and only in one case was the reference positive.

What Calder gets at here, is that whatever the war was being fought for, the image of a united, collective British people is mistaken. People had all sorts of ideas. Some wanted an end to Fascism, some wanted just to survive. Some would have worked with and helped the Nazis had they invaded. During the war, the absence of contested elections between the main parties allowed a number of more obscure parties to gain a hearing. The Communist Party vacillated all over the place, depending on the line from Moscow, even supporting Tory candidates at times, against socialists and anti-imperialists. The “Common Wealth” party gained a hearing, mixing popularist policies with demands for the immediate introduction of the Welfare State. This was early evidence for the swing away from Churchill towards Labour after 1944. Interestingly though, Labour couldn’t find it in themselves to build on this popularity. Reminding me of their activities post 1997, when expectations of actual policies were much more optimistic than Tony Blair delivered, the incoming Labour government in 1945 didn’t take the Welfare State or nationalisation program as far, or as quick as most voters expected (and hoped for).

There is so much that I found fascinating in Angus Calder’s book, that I feel that I cheat you by not including more. So I want to finish with one more quote that I think summarises why Calder was such a brilliant historian – this is the empathy with which he treats his subjects. Describing the thousands of children evacuated to the country early in the war, the trip chaotic badly planned and the ending disorganised. He tells how many of these children away from home and parents for the first time, in a countryside many had never visited with strangers looking after then, slept in strange beds, and

Because they had bottled themselves up in the train or because they were upset at being parted from their parents, or because they thought the country darkness must harbour ghosts and were afraid to move, at the beginning of September, from Aberdeenshire to Devon, countless numbers of children wet their beds.

It is a powerful image that Calder creates. Yet it was the first of many terrors for these children and their friends, family and all those who spent the war in the British Isles. Calder’s history is a monument to their courage and sacrifices, but it is a far truer account that you’ll get from those whose simplistic histories are ones were the war was won by the British stiff upper lip and a united country facing a common enemy.


Related Reviews

Angus Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Heartfield - An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Challinor - The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War

Nicholas Monsarrat - Three Corvettes

Detailing his time in the Royal Navy during World War II, Three Corvettes is actually Monsarrat's embellished diaries. The Corvettes were a small escort ship, used to bolster the limited number of destroyers as fast, offensive ships to help counter the threat from submarines. First published during the war, this is more than a war story. In fact for much of it, we feel the tedium of days at sea, long watches were nothing happens, yet crew members are constantly alert - for a change in the weather, for enemy aircraft, or the sound of something on the sonar.

There are of course moments of horror. Monsarrat details the crews they rescue from the sea after their ships are destroyed and those they cannot find. His stories are personal, emotional and powerful. They are also tragically painful. I'm fascinated that they were published during the war itself. Many of those depicted in these pages bought copies of the first volumes and read them during voyages that Monsarrat helped command. But my mind is fascinated by the reaction from those on shore who would have read them and perhaps understood for the first time what their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers were going through.

There is humour, Monsarrat has the eye for a good yarn, and in particular I enjoyed the messages flashed between ships, turning the vessels themselves into characters in a story. Describing the minesweepers looking for mines he writes that:

"you hear a 'WHOOMF!' You look round, and there is a small surprised ship scuttling away from a patch of boiling foam.... We once saw one of them almost overwhelmed by a gigantic explosion close astern of it: a huge column of water shot into the air, hiding the ship from us. When she emerged we called her up (feeling rather shaken ourselves) and said, a trifle patronizingly: 'That was a big one.' Her reply: 'What was?' put us in out place exactly."

The book tells the story of Monsarrat rise to captain his own ship. I suspect for many readers, myself included the sequence of stories and anecdotes will chiefly be of interest because it makes you realise how much of Monsarrat's most famous book, The Cruel Sea, is actually based on real experiences. In fact, some of the more horrific, or perhaps less believable parts of that work turn out to be based on the authors own time at sea. Reading this short biography makes The Cruel Sea an even more impressive novel.

Related Reviews

Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea

Richard Overy - 1939 Countdown to War

The processes that led to the start of the Second World War are ones that have been examined and debated enormously. The battle lines in this debate were set out even before the war ended - Richard Overy points out that the historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward was asked to write an "official survey of British foreign policy before the outbreak of war" later on in the conflict. Woodward seems to have been keen that the British version of events won through.

But what exactly was the British version of events was has been open to question. The Prime Minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain has gone down in recent interpretation as a weak willed politician. Desperate to avoid peace and unwilling to confront Hitler.

In this short, accessible work, Richard Overy argues that Chamberlain and a wider layer of people around him had a much clearer and more subtle analysis of the situation. Chamberlain he argues may have wanted to avoid war, but was in the end committed to a position that meant that Germany's attack on Poland would inevitably trigger war. Chamberlain didn't enter this situation blindfold, but he and those around him clearly thought Hitler would avoid conflict in the face of Britain and France's determined support for Poland.

In turn, Hitler clearly did not believe that Britain and France would honour their commitment. Overy quotes Hitler's chief press officer noting that it was "plain to see how stunned he [Hitler] was". He supports the view that Hitler really had no idea of the scale of what was being unleashed. Certainly elements of the German high-command were surprised by the declaration of war. But they also clearly thought that it meant practically nothing, and that full scale war would be avoided after a short period.

So what was the motivating force for Hitler's decision to attack Poland. This was no whim. Plans were laid in detail and a strategy involving the destruction of the Polish leadership, it's Jewish population and those forces opposed to Fascism were organised well in advance. The basis for the Race War in Eastern Europe was begun with the first shots. Overy argues that Hitler wanted a short "local" war, that would cement his position as a military leader, and "open the way for the eventual confrontation with Stalin's Soviet Union".

Overy argues against those who portray Hitler as always having a desire for world domination. His position is more plausible. It stems from some of the central ideological tenets of Nazism - the need to eradicate the "sub-human" peoples of the East, to challenge "Bolshevism" and to create "living-space" for the German people. War with the western countries would not have been on Hitler's mind. His surprise is understandable.

But this book lacks some of this analysis. In fact Overy almost has a mechanical explanation of events. So in the opening chapter he writes;

"Above all it was Poland's intransigent refusal to make any concessions to its powerful German neighbour that made war almost certain".

What concessions could Poland have realistically made that would have contained or prevented the basis for Hitler's rise to power? Events in Czechoslovakia had already shown that giving into small demands from the Nazis had only resulted in greater ones. And would it be right for Poland to given into the Imperialistic ambitions of their more "powerful German neighbour", couched in the language of racism as they were?

The author himself argues this later when he explains that Hitler's planned war "would destroy the Polish state" and had "an agenda drawn not from diplomacy or military strategy, but from the racial priorities of the regime". Giving into this sort of bully would hardly lead to peace.

Despite the major irritation I feel at the blame being laid for war and the feet of Poland, this is a useful and interesting book that clarifies a fast moving and complicated moment of history. Neville Chamberlain comes across as having a more rounded and complex analysis of events than he is usually portrayed with, and this in itself is more useful to understanding the beginnings of the war.

Related Reviews

Overy - Russia's War

Antony Beevor - D-Day; The Battle For Normandy

Antony Beevor's latest book is an excellent addition to his earlier works, particular those on the battles for Stalingrad and Berlin. In some ways for this reader, coming from Britain, it's a book that is closer to home. After all this was a battle fought by Allied soldiers who were either British or invading the continent from Britain.

The battles themselves are described in gruesome detail, as is the nature with Beevor's writing. He doesn't shirk from the horrors of battle, nor does he fall into the trap of describing a generic "bad" enemy and "good" allies. So we hear about the killing of POWs by the Germans and by the British, Canadian, American and other allied forces. Of course, Beevor is quick to point out that there was a particular brutal response from some of the German forces - the massacres of entire villages in response to resistance fighters for instance - by the SS in particular.

At the top of the story is the relationships between the various allied leaders. Here the differing styles and emphasises has the most impact. It's clear that there were real personal clashes between say the Americans and British had a lasting impact. The British General Montgomery comes across as a real barrier to the further development of the front in the crucial weeks after the invasion. Beevor does point out that Montgomery took on the hardest and most entrenched enemy forces, and the contribution of the British certainly helped the Americans elsewhere. But there is no doubt that there is a lasting anti-Montgomery prejudice from the official American military histories.

The liberation of Paris and the particular role of the insurrectionary resistance fighters in the capital forms the end of the chapter. The story of the particular factions involved in this is fascinating, as is the clear fear from the allied leaders of a Communist inspired revolutionary take over. Here Beevor is astute enough to also argue that this was a fear for Stalin, who had now moved so far from the politics of international revolution that he had no interest in such an outcome on the Western Front.

Beevor's conclusion is the invasion of Normandy was a crucial point in World War Two. Not particularly because it changed the outcome of the conflict - that had already been decided outside Stalingrad, but because it allowed the United States in particular, and to a much lesser extent Britain and France a voice in the post-war carve up of Europe. This is an important argument, challenging the more common idea that it was the West that won the war. It is because he makes such realistic appraisals, despite their likely unpopularity amongst sections of his readership, which makes Antony Beevor such an excellent military historian.

Theodor Plievier - Berlin

Despite the impression given by countless Saturday afternoon war films, the Second World War and Hitler's dictatorship was ended by the Russian army. The Soviet Union lost around 24 million people in the war - military and civilian. The war was brutal and the revenge upon the lands captured by the Soviet army was violent.

Theodor Plievier's book deserves a much wider reading. He himself was an interesting man - he was a leading figure in the uprising by German sailors in Kiel that sparked the German Revolution of 1918/9. This revolution toppled the Kaiser and brought World War I to an end. His politics seem to have been very left wing, and the rise of Hitler led him to flee to Russia, which he eventually became disillusioned with. He fled again to the West and lived out his days in Switzerland.

His book on Berlin captures the violence that was the end of the Third Reich. It is almost impossible to imagine the brutality that was imposed on the people of Germany. In the novel, many of them seem unable to comprehend what was happening, but most hadn't seen the slaughter at Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad or the concentration camps. Plievier's book is clearly based on many true stories - many of the figures are historical. So the descriptions of those raped and murdered while holding out flowers for the Russian invaders read eerily true. The story certainly fits with the descriptions of other non-fiction books such as Antony Beevor's Berlin.

For many, the most fascinating parts of the book are those that deal with Hitler and the people around him. As the Germany army retreats and collapses, the debates and arguments that take place in the bunker are fascinating. The belief even as Soviet troops entered the building that there was a relief army out there, preparing to stop the Russians was a fantasy that Hitler seemed to inspire in others.

Many other figures appear - Albert Speer's character is accurately portrayed, though Plievier has an interesting style of rarely mentioning historical people by name. There are minor errors (Speer's pilot back into Berlin as he sought absolution from Hitler was a woman, not a man as Plievier tells us).

There isn't really a central character to this novel. There are men and a few women who come and go. Their rise and fall fits with the rise and fall of the city, but some linger and as we follow various characters through the last days of the war, the post war order begins to fall into place. Germany is to be picked clean, it's industry and often its man power removed back to Russia to help rebuild the economy. The new government is put in place, men are selected and though they hold dreams of rebuilding a democracy out of the ashes of the war, they rapidly find that they are pawns in a larger game. The division of Germany in the interest of the other powers has begun.

Rather startlingly, the book ends with a historic event that few may know of. The East German workers uprising in 1953 was the first time that large numbers of working people in that outpost of Russian State Capitalism rose up against a state that claimed to rule in their name. The brutal suppression is well described. Modern Berlin's long story, that begins with the events that Plievier himself took part in in 1919 still had a long way to go - and Plievier captures the tragedy at its heart.

Related Reviews

Plievier - Stalingrad

Hans Fallada – Alone in Berlin

It's difficult to believe that this 1947 novel about life in Berlin under Nazi rule, only made it into print in English in 2009. As no less an authority than Primo Levi commented, “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis”.

Our heroes, Otto and Anna Quangel are quiet, unassuming people. At the start of the book, Anna receives a standard letter informing her that her only son has been killed at the front (we presume in the Battle of France). This inspires both of them to gradually take on a campaign of resistance against the Nazi regime in general, and Hitler in particular.

Resistance means many different things. Under a totalitarian regime, with an unprecedented network of spies and snoops, a complex and extensive security apparatus and a reputation for the utmost brutality, open resistance doesn't last long. Otta and Anna's resistance takes a quiet form, but one that nonetheless angers and terrifies the Nazi power structures. Rather simply, they take write cards with anti-war or anti-Nazi slogans. Despite how the Gestapo imagines them, these aren't the writings of Communists, but the anger fuelled rage of two people whose lives are being destroyed by the Fascist regime.

Simple but for the Thousand Year Reich, no hint of feeling against the regime must be allowed to shine through. So the game of cat and mouse begins. The Quangrels drop a postcard a week at first, gradually gaining confidence. Knowing that the state is trying desperately to identify them.

To tell much more of the plot would ruin one of the world's great novels. But what makes it particularly brilliant are the details of life under the Nazis. The way the system rests on the willingness of some to sell their friends and family. The way in which details of the wider, more horrific horrors are leaking out, gradually. The way that many people don't accept the Fascist government, who are on the Gestapo lists simply because they don't conform, or spoke out once in public.

My own family lived in Berlin at this time. My grandfather, a baker by trade refused to Sieg Heil once after a job interview. Something that almost lost him the job, but could certainly have landed him in far deeper water should someone have complained to the right person. It seems a minor gesture now, meaningless when compared to the atrocities of Treblinka, Dachau or Auschwitz. But the story was told with pride and honour by relatives who knew what it was like to be watched by men who would torture you at a moments notice.

It's this atmosphere that Fallada captures with such brilliance. The end of the novel isn't easy, but in many ways it is full of hope. Even in the darkest of hours, there are those who refuse to bow down.

Vasily Grossman - A Writer At War, with the Red Army 1941 - 1945

(Edited and Translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova).

Since reading Life and Fate, I've been waxing lyrical about it to anyone who will listen. So it was a great pleasure to be given this book which gives a much deeper back ground and understanding to the experiences that led Grossman to write Life and Fate.

The invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans in 1941 was a great shock to many. Vasily Grossman immediately tried to join the Red Army, but was deemed unfit for service. Given the life expectancy on the Eastern Front, this was lucky for us, as Grossman instead became a special correspondent for one of the leading Soviet newspapers. His experiences with the Red Army were documented in short notes, and these extensive notes form the basis for this book. Time and again I read little notes that reminded me of bits in Life and Fate (and, the editors tell us, often make it into other Grossman novels).

Grossman found himself at some of the crucial moments of military history. He retreated in the face of the seemingly unstoppable German armies as they threatened Moscow. He was in Stalingrad even before many realised how significant the battle was likely to be, and he followed the Russian armies towards Berlin, via the appalling horrors of Treblinka. At the end of the war, after documenting atrocities against the Jews, he found himself in Hitler's bunker, and helped himself to a few pieces of paper from the dictator's desk.

Having read Life and Fate first you see just how much of Grossman's experiences and interviews make it's way into the novel. In fact, for me, it underlined just what an important book the novel actually is. It's more than simply a work of fiction, it is a historical document in it's own right.

Some of what Grossman noted didn't make it into print. In fact lots of it wasn't intended to be in print. Grossman's desire to record accurately what went on, wouldn't have fitted with Soviet propaganda all the time. Records of desertions, collaborations or retreat didn't sit well with the official portrayal of the Red Army. But even these short quotes show why he became loved by many ordinary soldiers - he could describe the realities of war far better than any one else. His notes are full of soldiers honesty and humour.

"A soldier who had been a prisoner of war during the last war looks at a diving plane: 'Must be my lad bombing,' he says.

But the grim reality of war shines through.

"Pilots say: 'Our life is like a child's shirt - it's short and covered with shit all over.'"

For Grossman, the war meant personal tragedy. His mother never escaped from the German's and as a Jew, was massacred. This means that his documentation of Treblinka must have been even more heart rending for him. Though is account of that concentration camp is accurate and detailed enough to have made it important evidence at trials after the war's end.

Grossman comes across as a brilliant writer, but he was naive till the end. Despite his popularity, his writing couldn't become public. His honesty about ordinary people was too dangerous for the soviet machine. He died, never knowing that his greatest work would ever become public. That is a tragedy, but Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have done his memory a great service by bringing Vasily Grossman's notes to light.

Related Reviews

Grossman - Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate

Few countries have a history that really allows for novels on an epic scale. France is of course one, with its revolutions and Commune, dictators and dynasties. Russia is another. Partly for similar reasons, but more importantly I would argue, because it is in Russia, more than any other that the fate of entire nations was bound up in the actions of ordinary people.

Life and Fate is an truly epic novel - my edition is just over 870 pages long. I'd go so far as to say it's one of the greatest ever written. In some ways it is a simple story, dealing with the changing fortunes of war. But the battle at the heart of this story - the Siege of Stalingrad - is the most epic of engagements and history depended on its outcome.

Life and Fate has a cast of hundreds. Some come and disappear rapidly, as is the nature of war. Some mark time, and their tale illuminates some great aspect of Russian history. Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum is one. A physicist of enormous talent, his Jewish background and his enthusiasm for Einstein's science no longer plays well in the growing anti-semitism that Grossman has characterising the later years of the Second World War in Russia. Shtrum faces professional and personal destruction as he refuses to give in to his tormentors. He is saved by the intervention of Stalin. Not from any magnanimity, but from the state's growing realisation that nuclear power will determine the next stage of the world's history.

But Shtrum's part in this novel isn't simply there to show how the changing world impacts individuals. His love for a colleagues wife, despite his own wife's support and love demonstrates that in the midst of the darkest hours, what we are as individuals never disappears. At a time when millions of men and women are dying nameless deaths, Grossman creates a cast of ordinary men and women fearful for their lives, their loved ones and their future.

The darkest moments in the novel deal with the Holocaust. We are taken along on a forced march, as Jews from a Ghetto are taken to Auschwitz. Separate from the main characters paths, but inseparable, the deaths are heart rending, forming the backdrop to the war in the East. Underscoring the peculiarly viscous conflict in Russia, the chapters that deal with the Holocaust serve also to show how Fascism didn't arrive simply with the idea to gas six million Jews. But how this was the inevitable outcome of the bureaucratic state based as it was, on vicious anti-Semitism.

There's much more to the novel. The stories of the men and women trapped under siege in Stalingrad are fascinating. Here in the intense, dirty conflict, barriers break down. Ranks become less important than fighting as a cohesive unit. Old Bolsheviks clash with superiors who hate the idea of a non-hierarchical army. Tensions and rivalries led to denunciations and accusations. Perhaps this isn't surprising but the way that Soviet society is opened up and exposed is incredible.

Of course, as in any war, the suffering and pain is horrific despite the ideals that people fight for. Here the novel really comes into its own. This little brief description of the situation of some of the German troops as they starve following their encirclement by the Russians.

The talk turned to food and everyone grew more animated. First they discussed the best way of getting rid of the smell of sweat in boiled horsemeat. Some said you just needed to scoop the black scum off the top of the boiling water. Others said it was important to simmer the broth very gently; still others said you should only use the meat from the hind-quarters and put it straight into the boiling water while it was still frozen.

Here we have the extraordinary made ordinary. Soldiers who had several months previously been at the forefront of a seemingly unstoppable forward march, reduced to scrabbling around for food.

Some reviews I've read - including the awful analysis of the novel that passes for its Wikipedia page - have this as an anti-communist novel. I think it's the opposite. Certainly it does nothing to defend Stalin or the state he created. But it is a celebration of ordinary people. A celebration of people's ability to survive the worst that they can imagine and come out fighting. It is a celebration of solidarity and survival and in its description of the ideals of the Old Bolsheviks, as well as the defeat of Hitler by millions of ordinary Russians, its a reaffirmation of the ability of the nameless masses to change the world.

Heinrich Böll - And Where Were You, Adam?

Watching the average war film, playing the most popular "first person shooters" that are set in the Second World War, or even watching the History Channel, you could be forgiven for imagining that warfare was a constant piece of action.

The reality is of course, that war is more likely to be long periods of absolute boredom, punctuated by short periods of absolute terror.

This is the first of Heinrich Böll's novel that I've read. It is a incredibly short work, that took a while to get into. Partly because there isn't really a plot. The story is really about the collapse of an entire army, and how that affects various individuals. In this case, the army collapsing is the German one under the pressures of the Russian advance.

Some try to follow their orders, even when it is utterly impractical and suicidal. Perhaps they believe that the normality of life that they have experienced, occupying relative backwaters in Hungary and Romania will return. Others panic, or sit calmly waiting for the arrival of the enemy. Others desperately try to escape or find loved ones.

Heinrich Böll was in the German infantry, though he resisted joining for many years. He was in no way a supporter of Hitler, and his observations of army life would lead us to believe that many in the army weren't. The novel works as a sequence of "acts". We meet different characters who are linked by chance or accident, some survive some are killed. Some we don't know about. The Holocaust accounts for a number, a particularly horrific SS Captain, carrying out his orders to the end, finalyl kills the remaining Jews in his camp as he realises that they are really as human as he is.

There is a touching naivety to much of the stories. Many of the characters have no experience of the war, only to have it arrive out of the blue, bringing death and horror with it. The woman who runs a small guest house, who sees a army lorry once a month, does well after soldiers are billetted with her, only to see her dreams shattered in the face of the oncoming Russians.

In the end, we are left with the sheer pointlessness of many of the deaths in war. Innocents caught in the cross-fire, but a cross-fire that is the result of officers ordering shots and troops pulling triggers. Written in the aftermath of the German defeat, by a German soldier, this is nothing but an argument against future wars. How little we seem to have learnt.

Nicholas Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea

Everyone should have at least one favourite novel that they return to year after year. One of mine is Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea.

The novel deals with the terrors and horrors of the Atlantic conflict in World War II - specifically, the experiences of a group of tremendously inexperienced men sailing an escort ship in protection of the convoys bringing supplies to the UK from Canada and the US. In this sense, the novel is like many others that came out of the Second World War - written by men who had served in the armed services, had seen action and perhaps used the process of putting the stories down on paper, as a method of dealing with their memories.

What makes The Cruel Sea more than just a war novel, is the intensely detailed portraits of the men and women involved. You know these people intimately. You follow them as they stay up for hours on end, because the gales are so strong they can't sleep. You stand next to them on the bridge as they scan the horizon for U-boats. You're with them most painfully, as they rescue wounded sailors and desperately try to comfort dying men.

But, and this is what makes the novel truely brilliant, you are most with them when they die. No one can comprehend war who hasn't seen it. The suffering of the victims of conflict is usually reduced to numbers - 3 dead in Iraq, 2 wounded in Afghanistan. Monsarrat creates these fully rounded characters - hurt by cheating wives, worried about the coming baby, scared of the sexually transmitted disease they've contracted - and their sudden and painful death brings the reality of conflict to the reader like a slap in the face.

This isn't an anti-war novel like Johnnny Got His Gun. But it's a novel that is about the reality of war and as such, it should be read by everyone, particularly those who think war is a game, or those who can play so easily with other men's lives.

Related Reviews

Monsarrat - Three Corvettes

Richard Overy - Russia's War

Despite what you learn from a childhood watching British war films, or even the potted history of the war you can pick up from The History Channel, World War II wasn't won by the British and Americans invading France - despite the importance of that conflict. Hitler's German was military defeated by enormous sacrifices from the ordinary people of the Soviet Union.

Some of these sacrifices were, to be frank, unnecessary. Joseph Stalin's supreme self confidence led him to underestimate the likelihood of an attack and the country was ill prepared. More of his decisions were suicidal for the people involved - Germany's war machine was to powerful to be even hindered by small group of lightly armed militia. However the method of fighting the war changed, and it is this transformation that is so well documented in Overy's book on the Eastern Front.

Terrified of being challenged in his position, Stalin was initially reluctant to allow the freedom of movement and imagination to his generals. This led to a monolithic response to the German invasion - one that refused to adapt to changing German tactics. In later years, Stalin was prepared to devolve much more control to his generals, and these, in particular Zhukov, proved brilliant at defeating German armies in gigantic set piece battles.

This is a short book, so it is necessarily lacking in details. But it is intended to be a sweeping history of the period, so it doesn't bring out all the terrible defeats. The 900 day siege of Leningrad is dealt with in a short chapter, as is the unbelievable ferocious conflict at Stalingrad. This isn't a problem though, it is a fascinating read - those particular battles are dealt with in great detail in other excellent works.

Overy uses the recently opened Soviet Archives to illuminate his accounts, and challenge other ideas and myths. He argues for instance, that the British and US aid sent to the USSR, was far more important in victory than has hitherto been thought.

Despite the immense victory that the people of the USSR inflicted on Nazi Germany, we shouldn't let this close our eyes to the nature of the dictatorship that led the war effort. Overy documents the torture, murder, massacre and violence at the heart of Russian society. Those of us who have long argued that Russia wasn't a socialist society will not be unaware of this, but for a generation after the war, Russia's victory was further evidence of the socialist nature of its society. That said, no one, least of all the Germans expected Russia to triumph. Overy quotes the American Secretary of War as predicting that "Germany will be thoroughly occupied in beating Russia for a minimum of a month and possible maximum of three months."

The true cost of Russia's war cannot really be comprehended. The figures are almost incomprehensible - here are a few to illustrate the point. "Stalingrad cost the lives of 470,000 soldiers and airmen. The battle of Kursk was won at a cost of only 70,000 dead." Kursk was the largest tank battle of the war - 600 German tanks faced 850 Soviet ones. Half a million Soviet civilians died from bombing raids during the war - ten times the number that died in the London Blitz. In probably the worst siege of the war, that of Leningrad, Overy estimates that over a third - more than a million people - of the pre-war population died.

While this is an excellent history of the war, it is essentially a military history - the background chapters were Overy deals with the Russian Revolution and civil war are much weaker, particularly his peculiar way of examining Trotsky simply as a military hero, who simply "lost interest" in military matters once the civil war was won. This isn't surprising. Trotsky was a revolutionary leader, not a military general. His leadership of the Red Army was based on the need to defend the revolution, rather than a particular desire for military glory. These small criticisms aside, read this book to understand where the cold war came from and to try and comprehend the cost of the greatest military clash of history.

Eric Newby - Love and War in the Apennines

The aftermath of the Second World War brought a plethora of memoirs of wartime experiences. Popular amongst these where books about the experiences of Prisoner's of War, in particular those of escapees.

Eric Newby's memoir of his wartime experiences as a POW in Italy, and then as an escapee on the run waited almost three decades before making it into print. In the introduction he says that he did this, because he didn't think that his experiences were as exiciting or interesting as those of many others. He didn't for instance, even "getting through the enemy line as so many people did", nor did he join the Partisans.

Instead, Newby's story is one that shows the heroic, and forgotten resistance of ordinary people who simply refused to allow a stranger in their midst to be captured by the powers that be - whether they were Italian fascists, or German soldiers. While it is true that Newby was betrayed (twice in fact) by people in the communities that sheltered him, it is also true that those people were not representative of the Italian peasants who hid him for months and years. It is also true that one of those betrayers was never allowed to forget what she did... "lucky not to be shot by the partisans".

When Mussolini's government fell, Newby escaped his prison with hundreds of other British POWs. Before the German's took control again he had made it into an area of tiny villagers in the Apennine mountains in Northern Italy. Moving from village to village, tiny shelter to remote cottage he was looked after, fed and protected by dozens of nameless souls, who faced death if the authorities found out what they had done.

Poverty is rife in rural Italy then and now. Wartime brought many further hardships and Newby had to work hard to repay the support he was given. He spent many months removing stones from one farmers poor fields, or doing other odd jobs in the towns.

In one of the most memorable chapters, Newby is found by a German officer, butterfly hunting. This soldier doesn't try and capture Newby. Recognising him as British by his very demeanour, the German discusses the end of the war and the inevitable defeat of Germany. At the end of the encounter, the German returns to his search for butterflies, and the surrounding villagers dismiss him as a lunatic.

Newby returns to the area after the war. He fell in love with the daughter of the first people who helped him, and had kept sporadic contact with her. His return to the village that sheltered him many years later is the subject of the final chapter, and is a deeply moving account of how he brought thanks for his life - something that the villagers had done simply out of honest solidarity, with no hope, nor thought for reward.

Fitzroy Maclean – Eastern Approaches

I suspect that few boys have read the novels of Rider Haggard through the years and not dreamed that they would one day cross deserts, fight in battles and explore strange countries. The reality of escapist adventure though, is that it is the stuff of dreams, not normal life and the closest most people get to adventure is running for the bus in the morning.

Fitzroy Maclean however was a real life adventurer. His career reads like the mad out-pourings of a Victorian thriller writer, but in the early 1930s he had travels and adventures that seem almost impossible.

Clearly born to the better end of society, Maclean joined the Diplomatic Service with a view to serving the British Empire. In his early twenties, he yearned to visit the Soviet Union, and surprised many by volunteering to work at the embassy in Moscow. It wasn’t a popular destination and he was able to get posted there.

The first pages of the book are his fascinating account of his train journey from Paris to Moscow. Once there, he interspersed his diplomatic work with barely legal trips into the Russian east. He visits Kazakstan, Samarkand, Baku and many other famous (but by then almost impossible destinations). Along the way he dodges the Soviet agents sent to track him down, meets all manner of locals and uses every dodge he can come up with the see parts of the world few westerners could visit.

While in Moscow, during a break from his adventurers, he witnesses the final show trial, at which Stalin consolidated his power. The chapter describing the “Trial of the Twenty-One” is a must for anyone interested in socialist history, describing as it does the great lengths that Stalin was prepared to go to, in order to destroy his opponents, and the manner in which friend became victim. Of the twenty one on trial, Maclean devotes some time to Nikolai Bukharin, once a leading Bolshevik intellectual who capitulated to Stalinism. Maclean describes how Bukharin repeatedly runs rings around the prosecutor's invented stories, but is unable to break out, fearing, Maclean feels, to criticise the Soviet Union even though it had by then strayed far from the orginial socialist vision.

Few were brave enough to believe that Stalin had destroyed genuine socialism, like Trotsky argued. But Maclean shows that even when they had been completely crushed, the old revolutionary spirit could still show itself.

At the outbreak of World War Two Maclean is back in London and discovers he is unable to join the military due to his important foreign office role. Discovering a loop-hole that means he cannot remain in his post if he stands for electoral office, he resigns to fight a seat for the Tories and wins. Soon after becoming an MP he is called up for service and ends up in the Western Deserts of Libya with the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group.

Further “boys own” adventures occur, until he is plucked out of this hell hole and parachuted into Yugoslavia on the personal orders of Winston Churchill to aid and abet the guerilla forces sabotaging the German war effort there.

Maclean quickly becomes indespensible to Tito the Guerilla leader as a conduit for weapons and resources and spends the rest of the war fighting with the partisans against the Germans. He is even present with a British Jeep at the Russian liberation of Belgrade.

Fitzroy Maclean, SAS soldier, Tory MP, friend of Churchill and Tito lead a life full of excitement and adventurer. His book is a fascinating insight into the nuances of an amazing period of history, even if his ideas and politics aren’t something that I can share. I recommend it as a piece of history as well as adventure.

Deborah Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust (*)

When David Irving was sent to jail in February 2006, for statements he had made denying the Holocaust, there was a mass of debate in the press whether this was an appropriate punishment. I decided it was a good time to look into the whole issue of “Holocaust Denial”.

Remembering that Irving had once sued author Deborah Lipstadt for her book Denying the Holocaust which portrayed him as a denier, I thought this would be a good place to start and certainly a place that Irving would have hated.

Denying the Holocaust is a difficult book to read. Not because it is badly written or too academic, but because the material is so awful. It is very difficult imagine what drives someone to spend so much time and effort distorting and lying about the Holocaust.

In many cases they are driven by their own anti-Semitism, though not always. In the immediate aftermath of WW2 there was an attempt to play down the holocaust by those who wanted to portray the US and her allies as being the real mass murderers.

In time, these views have become accepted belief for neo-Nazi and Fascist organisations around the world. In addition to simply regurgitating lies and reprinting phamphlets, these groups often have attempted to inject Holocaust Denial into mainstream discussion.

In the strongest sections of the book, Lipstadt shows how once Holocaust Denial reaches the level of debate, it is elevated from something with no basis in reality, to something that can be discussed as a real theory.

Lipstadt domuments this particularly with the attempts by Holocaust Deniers to place adverts in US campus newspapers. Often the deniers were happy to have their adverts refused, because they had created a discourse on campus about the Holocaust that treated their views seriously. Lipstadt believes that this in part has led to a situation in the US, where many people accept that it's possible the Holocaust never happened.

In passing the author also looks at those who have tried denial in other forms – claiming that Anne Frank’s diary was a fake for instance. Lipstadt’s final word is brief documentation of why there is irrefutable evidence for the gas chambers, mass premeditated murder and the Holocaust.

This book is a service to all those who believe in historical truth and that history is a science that must be based on evidence, facts and documentation. It is also a weapon for those who want to stop the rise of fascism again, for those who argue that stopping the new Nazis also involves preventing them getting the oxygen of publicity.

Since reading is not enough to stop the far-right. I recommend those who want to fight the BNP visit this site or this campaign to get involved.

(*) Full title - Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and History

Angus Calder - The Myth of the Blitz

What springs to mind when you you hear about the Blitz? Probably, if you have lived in Britain for any length of time, you'll imagine chirpy cockneys standing together against the might of Hitler's armies. You might well think of pictures of the contrails caused by the dogfights as Spitfires battled Messerschmitts in glorious sunny skies over Kent.

Even if you don't think of these things, you'll have heard of them, and you will also have heard of the way that the whole of England pulled together and stood united, uncomplaining against the common foe.

Angus Calder's book "The Myth of the Blitz" would no doubt leave many retired colonels spluttering into their Daily Telegraphs, because he seeks to examine the story of the Blitz, as it is normally told, and unsurprisingly he finds that it is not without fault.

First and foremost he demolishes the idea of unity. Firstly the idea of class unity is taken apart - unsurprisingly the workers worked longer and harder, and suffered more (no deep bomb shelters for the East Enders, the tube stations had to be occupied, in a struggle often led by the Communist Party).

Calder examines how the "Myth" was created, even as the battles and bombings were being fought. From the moment Churchill made his speeches (hated by many in the Tory party) he was part of weaving a story, backed up by the media and filmmakers, of plucky little England.

It's interesting for instance, how even shortly after the Battle of Britain, observers describe the lovely summer, even though the weather was unusually bad. This is important, because it shows how quickly particular images and ideas took root in popular consciousness.

Calder uses many little examples to proves his sweeping points (how many fishermen refused to travel to Dunkirk, and how even the ones that did helped little - but that doesn't stop the myth of the small ships being created). He then discusses the idea of "Deep England" as the backbone to the myth, from both the left and the right.

This part is much harder to totally agree with. The theory is that a vision of England as a pastoral, classless country with thatched roofs and small villages is what was created to try and pull the English together. No doubt there is some truth in this, but I think he gives it too much importance. You can read more in the Wikipedia article here.

Either way this is an important book, pulling away as it does the lies and half-truths told about one of the most important periods in recent English history and pointing the way to a better understanding of the social and political forces that ended up shaping the later half of the last century.

Related Reviews

Angus Calder - The People's War: Britain 1939 - 1945