‘Every Rebel is Our Ally’
Chris Bambery, The Second World War: A Marxist History
Pluto Press, 295pp, £18.00, ISBN 9780745333014
reviewed by John Newsinger
It seems almost perverse that at a time when the British Establishment is determined to celebrate the mass slaughter of the First World War, Pluto Press should publish a Marxist history of the Second. So widespread is the popular awareness of the murderous futility of the Western Front that the Establishment has had a hard job re-branding the 1914-18 conflict for centenary purposes; by contrast, the Second World War is still seen as a heroic struggle against Nazi tyranny. It was a war in which the British people all pulled together in the fight for freedom. When you write a critical account of the Second World War you are most definitely cutting against the grain.
Chris Bambery’s The Second World War is well-written, in places positively brilliant, covering a lot of ground, laying bare the real motives of the great powers. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a definitive account. First of all, the book is too short. Bambery has just not got the space to do justice to the sheer scale of the conflict in a mere 248 pages of text. There is too much that he has had to rush and even leave out. A definitive history would have had to have been at least twice as long, probably more.
The first hundred or so pages, which cover the road to war and the early years of the fighting, are superb. Many readers brought up on the patriotic version of the war will be shocked by Bambery's account of appeasement and its persistence. There was, as he points out, no objection to fascism as such on the part of the British ruling class, merely a concern regarding the potential threat a resurgent Germany might pose to the British Empire. As late as 1937 even Churchill could remark that: ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country was defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.'
Churchill, of course, opposed the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasement and was only returned to office once war had broken out. When he finally replaced Chamberlain, he was still regarded with hostility bordering on loathing by most Tory MPs. When he took office on 10 May 1940, as Bambery points out, ‘Chips Channon wrote that it was “perhaps the darkest day in English history” and in the evening joined Lord Dunglass, Jock Colville and Rab Butler in toasting the “king over the water”, Neville Chamberlain.’ Butler considered Churchill’s speeches as ‘beyond words vulgar’ and thought that ‘the good clean tradition of English politics … had been sold to the greatest political adventurer in modern political history … a half-breed American’. Lord Dunglass, who was, of course, to go on to become Prime Minister as Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1963, complained that since Churchill had taken over ‘the H of C had stank in the nostrils of decent people. The kind of people surrounding W are scum.'
A majority of Tory MPs would have supported peace with Hitler in the summer of 1940. What stopped them going down the road of collaboration with the Nazis was an alliance between the Labour Party and Churchill and his small band of supporters. Without the intervention of Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, the appeasers would have come to terms with Hitler. Far from the Tories being the bastion of patriotic resistance in 1940, without Churchill they would have surrendered to their instinct for betrayal and collaboration, as did conservatives throughout the rest of Europe. Churchill was kept in power by ‘the Labour Party – ceding the effective control of the British domestic front – a ragbag of maverick intellectuals and the press baron Lord Beaverbrook’. This overstates it a bit, but not by much. Incredibly, in the summer of 1940, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, of all papers, could proclaim that ‘Every rebel is our ally. We do not only fight a war. We must conduct a Continental revolution.’ Beaverbrook brought Michael Foot, among others, in to write this sort of stuff. Bambery covers this discussion extremely well.
Less successful is his account of the role of the Soviet Union in the conflict. Certainly, as Bambery insists, the Red Army played the decisive role in the destruction of the Wehrmacht. The overwhelming majority of German casualties, dead and wounded, were inflicted on the Eastern Front. This is even today something that many people are completely unaware of, so complete was the Cold War rewriting of the history of the war. Nevertheless, Bambery goes too far in the other direction in his concern to put this right. Too much of chapter six, ‘Russia: The Crucible of Victory’, reads like a celebration of the Red Army’s prowess. Indeed, on occasions, he can be accused of surrendering to the sort of romanticising of Stalin’s Red Army that was once widespread on the Left. Stalin’s crimes are acknowledged, but Bambery is overly concerned with demonstrating that his regime was not as murderous as the Nazis.
While the Red Army played the decisive role in the Nazi defeat, the human cost was tremendous. Red Army generals showed a callous and brutal disregard for the lives of their men and women that makes British First World War generals look positively humane. Stalin, of course, made surrender a crime, a crime that did not just have consequences for those who surrendered (over 300,000 ‘liberated’ Russian POWs were despatched to the Gulag at the end of the war), but also for their families. The parents and wives, the brothers and sisters, of men believed to have surrendered were sent to labour camps and their children were consigned to state orphanages where they got the treatment reserved for the children of traitors. Even worse, men who had actually died fighting up to the rank of general had their families punished in the mistaken belief that they had surrendered.
One particular episode captures the brutally paranoid perversity of the Stalin regime: the treatment accorded to a Russian fighter pilot, Mikhail Devyatayev, shot down and taken prisoner. In February 1945 he was a member of a POW working party repairing a German airfield. They killed their guard and stole a Heinkel bomber which he flew to the Russian lines. He took with him important intelligence he had gathered regarding the German V bomb programme. It seems fair to say that in any other combatant country these men would have been welcomed as heroes. Not in Stalin’s Russia. Here they were arrested, sent to the penal battalions, where five of them were killed in the remaining months of the war. Devyatayev survived the war but returned to civilian life as a criminal, denied any employment other than labouring. He was not rehabilitated until 1957 when he became, at last, a Hero of the Soviet Union. Devyatayev was, of course, one of the lucky ones.
Bambery is quite correct in arguing that Nazi atrocities against Russian POWs, one of their worst crimes, played an important part in stiffening Russian resistance, but he does not pay enough attention to the part played by terror. The Red Army went into battle with secret police units in the rear ready to execute deserters. How many Russian soldiers were actually executed by their own side? Certainly the number was in the tens of thousands. One of the more conservative estimates is that over 150,000 were executed. One crime that Red Army soldiers were not executed for was rape. Russian soldiers were guilty of the mass rape of thousands of German women and girls in the closing stages of the war, a crime that Bambery should have discussed. This is not to say that the Stalin regime was worse than the Nazis, but it is necessary to acknowledge the enormity of its crimes.
Bambery’s discussion of the Holocaust is largely incorporated into the chapter on the Soviet Union. It deserves a chapter of its own, such is the unique nature of the crime. His account is good as far as it goes, but really a more extended discussion is necessary. More on the part that anti-Semitic propaganda played on the German home front during the war would have been useful, together with more on the role that collaborators played in the killing and more on the Jewish resistance. There has been a great deal of recent research that Bambery could have usefully pointed his readers in the direction of. And, of course, it was Nazi persecution of European Jews, together with the failure of other countries to offer sanctuary, that made the Zionist project viable, with all the consequences this has involved in the Middle East. The Europeans and the Americans, one might argue, made restitution to Europe’s Jews at the expense of the Palestinians.
More generally, the chapter on the European resistance would have been strengthened by more discussion of the phenomenon of collaboration. The readiness of Europe’s ruling classes to collaborate remains an embarrassment, not least for the discomfort it causes for British Conservatives. (Vidkun Quisling, Hitler’s Norwegian puppet, for example, had to be stripped of his CBE.) Greater discussion of conflict on the British Home Front would have been useful. And the chapters on the war in the Far East and on the postwar world seem positively rushed - very much an opportunity missed.
These reservations aside, Bambery’s book remains required reading. Though not by any means a definitive account, it is a refreshing corrective to the slew of reductive, ‘good vs. evil’ narratives, and deserves to be widely read.
Chris Bambery’s The Second World War is well-written, in places positively brilliant, covering a lot of ground, laying bare the real motives of the great powers. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a definitive account. First of all, the book is too short. Bambery has just not got the space to do justice to the sheer scale of the conflict in a mere 248 pages of text. There is too much that he has had to rush and even leave out. A definitive history would have had to have been at least twice as long, probably more.
The first hundred or so pages, which cover the road to war and the early years of the fighting, are superb. Many readers brought up on the patriotic version of the war will be shocked by Bambery's account of appeasement and its persistence. There was, as he points out, no objection to fascism as such on the part of the British ruling class, merely a concern regarding the potential threat a resurgent Germany might pose to the British Empire. As late as 1937 even Churchill could remark that: ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country was defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.'
Churchill, of course, opposed the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasement and was only returned to office once war had broken out. When he finally replaced Chamberlain, he was still regarded with hostility bordering on loathing by most Tory MPs. When he took office on 10 May 1940, as Bambery points out, ‘Chips Channon wrote that it was “perhaps the darkest day in English history” and in the evening joined Lord Dunglass, Jock Colville and Rab Butler in toasting the “king over the water”, Neville Chamberlain.’ Butler considered Churchill’s speeches as ‘beyond words vulgar’ and thought that ‘the good clean tradition of English politics … had been sold to the greatest political adventurer in modern political history … a half-breed American’. Lord Dunglass, who was, of course, to go on to become Prime Minister as Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1963, complained that since Churchill had taken over ‘the H of C had stank in the nostrils of decent people. The kind of people surrounding W are scum.'
A majority of Tory MPs would have supported peace with Hitler in the summer of 1940. What stopped them going down the road of collaboration with the Nazis was an alliance between the Labour Party and Churchill and his small band of supporters. Without the intervention of Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, the appeasers would have come to terms with Hitler. Far from the Tories being the bastion of patriotic resistance in 1940, without Churchill they would have surrendered to their instinct for betrayal and collaboration, as did conservatives throughout the rest of Europe. Churchill was kept in power by ‘the Labour Party – ceding the effective control of the British domestic front – a ragbag of maverick intellectuals and the press baron Lord Beaverbrook’. This overstates it a bit, but not by much. Incredibly, in the summer of 1940, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, of all papers, could proclaim that ‘Every rebel is our ally. We do not only fight a war. We must conduct a Continental revolution.’ Beaverbrook brought Michael Foot, among others, in to write this sort of stuff. Bambery covers this discussion extremely well.
Less successful is his account of the role of the Soviet Union in the conflict. Certainly, as Bambery insists, the Red Army played the decisive role in the destruction of the Wehrmacht. The overwhelming majority of German casualties, dead and wounded, were inflicted on the Eastern Front. This is even today something that many people are completely unaware of, so complete was the Cold War rewriting of the history of the war. Nevertheless, Bambery goes too far in the other direction in his concern to put this right. Too much of chapter six, ‘Russia: The Crucible of Victory’, reads like a celebration of the Red Army’s prowess. Indeed, on occasions, he can be accused of surrendering to the sort of romanticising of Stalin’s Red Army that was once widespread on the Left. Stalin’s crimes are acknowledged, but Bambery is overly concerned with demonstrating that his regime was not as murderous as the Nazis.
While the Red Army played the decisive role in the Nazi defeat, the human cost was tremendous. Red Army generals showed a callous and brutal disregard for the lives of their men and women that makes British First World War generals look positively humane. Stalin, of course, made surrender a crime, a crime that did not just have consequences for those who surrendered (over 300,000 ‘liberated’ Russian POWs were despatched to the Gulag at the end of the war), but also for their families. The parents and wives, the brothers and sisters, of men believed to have surrendered were sent to labour camps and their children were consigned to state orphanages where they got the treatment reserved for the children of traitors. Even worse, men who had actually died fighting up to the rank of general had their families punished in the mistaken belief that they had surrendered.
One particular episode captures the brutally paranoid perversity of the Stalin regime: the treatment accorded to a Russian fighter pilot, Mikhail Devyatayev, shot down and taken prisoner. In February 1945 he was a member of a POW working party repairing a German airfield. They killed their guard and stole a Heinkel bomber which he flew to the Russian lines. He took with him important intelligence he had gathered regarding the German V bomb programme. It seems fair to say that in any other combatant country these men would have been welcomed as heroes. Not in Stalin’s Russia. Here they were arrested, sent to the penal battalions, where five of them were killed in the remaining months of the war. Devyatayev survived the war but returned to civilian life as a criminal, denied any employment other than labouring. He was not rehabilitated until 1957 when he became, at last, a Hero of the Soviet Union. Devyatayev was, of course, one of the lucky ones.
Bambery is quite correct in arguing that Nazi atrocities against Russian POWs, one of their worst crimes, played an important part in stiffening Russian resistance, but he does not pay enough attention to the part played by terror. The Red Army went into battle with secret police units in the rear ready to execute deserters. How many Russian soldiers were actually executed by their own side? Certainly the number was in the tens of thousands. One of the more conservative estimates is that over 150,000 were executed. One crime that Red Army soldiers were not executed for was rape. Russian soldiers were guilty of the mass rape of thousands of German women and girls in the closing stages of the war, a crime that Bambery should have discussed. This is not to say that the Stalin regime was worse than the Nazis, but it is necessary to acknowledge the enormity of its crimes.
Bambery’s discussion of the Holocaust is largely incorporated into the chapter on the Soviet Union. It deserves a chapter of its own, such is the unique nature of the crime. His account is good as far as it goes, but really a more extended discussion is necessary. More on the part that anti-Semitic propaganda played on the German home front during the war would have been useful, together with more on the role that collaborators played in the killing and more on the Jewish resistance. There has been a great deal of recent research that Bambery could have usefully pointed his readers in the direction of. And, of course, it was Nazi persecution of European Jews, together with the failure of other countries to offer sanctuary, that made the Zionist project viable, with all the consequences this has involved in the Middle East. The Europeans and the Americans, one might argue, made restitution to Europe’s Jews at the expense of the Palestinians.
More generally, the chapter on the European resistance would have been strengthened by more discussion of the phenomenon of collaboration. The readiness of Europe’s ruling classes to collaborate remains an embarrassment, not least for the discomfort it causes for British Conservatives. (Vidkun Quisling, Hitler’s Norwegian puppet, for example, had to be stripped of his CBE.) Greater discussion of conflict on the British Home Front would have been useful. And the chapters on the war in the Far East and on the postwar world seem positively rushed - very much an opportunity missed.
These reservations aside, Bambery’s book remains required reading. Though not by any means a definitive account, it is a refreshing corrective to the slew of reductive, ‘good vs. evil’ narratives, and deserves to be widely read.