Line of least resistance
Robert Skidelsky
Resistance: European Resistance to Nazism 1940-45 M D. Foot (Eyre Methuen E6.95) The Russian Version of the Second World War edited by Graham Lyons (Leo Cooper 0.95) The Home Front: The British and the Second World War Arthur Marwick (Thames and Hudson E6.00) The spate of books about the Second World War continues. But the historical results are not especially impressive, since few of them are actually written for historical reasons. A large number are written and mainly read by those who want to justify and relive, not understand, the past. War books and films offer simplified emotions to mass audiences; there is also the continued pornographic interest in the Nazis, of which the insignia of punk rock provide the latest example. This use of the past for nostalgia, profit, or sexual titillation, does not make for good history. The ratio of propaganda to truth is too high. Too many assumptions are unargued. Statements are made on the basis of poor, or non-existent, evidence, because they fit popular stereotypes.
Take an example from M. R. D. Foot's Resistance. On page fifty Foot writes of the 'ghastly atrocity of Kharkov---about a hundred thousand people massacred in an afternoon.' The source is given at the bottom of the page as 'conversation with a survivor, I953.' Now it may be that the Germans did massacre that many civilians at Kharkov in one afternoon, though I have not heard it. But Foot must know that his conversation provides no kind of evidence for that statement, because a mere survivor could not possibly have known how many died.
As a British Army officer who served with the French resistance in Brittany, Foot is a notable survivor himself. Much of his book is about resistance work in its various aspects—intelligence, deception, escape, sabotage, attack and politics. He describes the techniques used, and provides a fascinating compendium of resistance lore. He gives potted histories of resistance movements and intelligence operations in all the main theatres of war. In fact, the book is partially misnamed since, although intelligence gathering was the main function of the resistance from the allied staffs' point of view, it took place quite independently of it. The breaking of the German military cipher, the most important intelligence achievement of the war, had nothing to do with the resistance, and was based on information supplied before the war had even started.
Foot's assertion that resistance was based on character, not class, contains an important, but not sufficient, truth. As he himself admits, Communists played a leading role in the resistance almost everywhere. They were uniquely equipped for it by ideology (after the attack on Russia), organisation, and long experience of subversive politics. They performed it with great heroism. By overemphasising Conservative and Liberal involvement in the resistance. Foot minimises the extent of collaboration, active and passive--particularly the extent to which Nazi propaganda succeeded in converting the German war of conquest into an ideological war against Communism. Geoffrey Barraclough was not the first to notice that 'resistance to Hitler from within Furope was incomparably weaker in 1939 than resistance to Germany had been in 1914.' In practice, most resistance movements gathered momentum only when a German defeat had become certain.
Again, the whole thrust of the book,
though not the sober final conclusion, is to exaggerate the effect of the resistance on the outcome of the war. The breaking of the German code was, as we have seen, done independently of the resistance. With the exception or the Rjukan raid which destroyed the German supply of heavy water, and thus aborted their not very advanced attempt to develop an atom bomb, the results of sabotage were negligible. The resistance movements caused German garrisons in occupied territories to be larger than they would otherwise have been, but garrisons of some kind were in any case required for the Nazi policy of exploiting the occupied territories. The fact was that in the moment of their greatest territorial expansion, in the summer of 1942, the Germans had lost the war, and Hitler knew it. The reason is that the German war potential, even after Speer's belated attempt to mobilise it, was much less than that of the Allies. We don't need the resistance to explain either the fact or the timing of the German defeat.
People are reluctant to accept this. There is a very understandable feeling that heroism ought to get its reward; the idea that the sacrifices of the resistance were useless goes against the grain. And, of course, they were not useless; but their use lay elsewhere. It was, first of all, in restoring the self-esteem of nations beaten in battle. Secondly, it was in shaping the politics of postwar Europe: postwar 'consensus' dates from alliances formed in the resistance movements. Even the Communists found, through resistance, a place in their national communities which they had not had before the war. And it was in resistance to a fascist dominated Europe that the democratic European movement was born. But somehow this larger significance of resistance gets lost in Foot's crabbed and over-technical account.
The Russian perspective on the war, clearly put together by Graham Lyons from Soviet school textbooks, is not more distorted than the standard Western offerings. The Russians believe, quite rightly, that it was they who bore the brunt of the fighting and the horror. They also claim, in my view rightly, that it was they who defeated the Germans, with rather minimal help from the Western Allies. We read of the Normandy landings that 'the AngloFrench forces met with practically no resistance from the Hitlerites, and advanced into the heart of France.' The Russians were painfully aware that German resistance was much stronger on the eastern than on the much-delayed western front ; and this feeds the underlying theme of Soviet war historiography: that the deepest longing of the Western leaders was to get together with the Nazis in attacking the Soviet Union, a longing only frustrated by imperialist rivalry, arising out of the contradictions of capitalism. Given the basic historical model of class conflict, the case is reasonably argued and by no means absurd. The main fault in the text lies elsewhere: in not properly understanding the domestic context of other countries' foreign policy, and therefore assigning the wrong weights to people's reputations and remarks. But this is a fault of parochial history, not Soviet history as such.
The main problem facing the writers of Russian war textbooks is to explain the catastrophic defeats sustained by the Russian armies in the summer of 1941. The result is a classic diversionary tactic. 'Up to the moment of its attack on the Soviet Union,' we read, 'the economy of Fascist Germany had been fully directed towards war-production.' This explanation (which is anyway untrue) of initial German military superiority is intended to hide the appalling effect on the Russian military machine of Stalin's purges, his suspicions, and his initial mistakes.
Compared with the Russians, the British had a light war. Of Arthur Marwick's The Home Front, published by Thames and Hudson, the best that can be said is that the 167 illustrations are more enjoyable than the text, though not much more. Marwick has written so much better on this subject before that one can only suppose he dashed if off in unseemly haste. At one point he describes Mrs Churchill as a 'truly charming and gracious lady.' This just about registerS the level of the book's historical and literary inspiration.
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