A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (71 page)

Italy was able to take advantage of these feelings when it attacked Ethiopia in 1935, and Japan did the same when it occupied Manchuria and attacked China. Then in 1938 it was Hitler’s turn. When he annexed Austria in March, and then demanded the German-inhabited border areas of Czechoslovakia in the summer, the dominant sections of the British and French ruling classes did not see any reason to risk war by opposing him.

Hitler was a racist psychopath, with ambitions to establish an ethnically ‘cleansed’ Germany as the central force in Europe and a dominant world power. But his strategy in the late 1930s was rational from the point of view of German capitalism. Pragmatically, he tested the extent to which the other imperial powers would allow him to expand Germany’s sphere of influence.

He showed the same rationality when he threatened Poland in the summer of 1939 after secretly agreeing to divide the country with Stalin in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. He knew Germany did not have the resources for an all-out military campaign lasting more than a couple of months. But he assumed that Britain and France would not support Poland any more than they had supported the Czechs. After all, the British government had accepted as recently as December 1938 that Poland should be a German satellite, and the British general staff had recognised that Poland could not be defended. Hitler knew he could conquer the country in a matter of days. He also believed that if France and Britain did intervene he would be able to defeat France very quickly, and then both its and Britain’s rulers would come to terms with him if he promised not to touch their empires.

He was mistaken about one thing. A group had emerged in the British ruling class around two hardened imperialists, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, which believed German dominance in continental Europe was a threat to the British Empire. For instance, the old German dream of hegemony extending through the Balkans towards the Middle East threatened the oilfields and the Suez Canal connecting Britain to its empire in India. Hitler’s move led others to begin to share their fears, creating sufficient pressure to bring about a declaration of war by both Britain and France after the German attack on Poland, and then, nine months later, prevented the British government accepting Germany’s conquests in Europe.

Hitler’s other calculations were correct. The French ruling class and an important section of the British ruling class entered the war reluctantly. They did nothing to help the Poles—although they did evacuate a section of the Polish army to serve their own purposes later on. Britain then spent the vital winter of 1939-40 backing a German-supported Finnish government in a war against Russia. Germany was able to use this ‘phoney war’ period to prepare for a
Blitzkrieg
offensive on France, through Holland and Belgium, with the aim of defeating its army before Germany’s own limited resources ran out.

Hitler was also right in his expectation of a quick victory against France. A German attack broke the back of the ‘Allied’ armies in Belgium and northern France in a fortnight in May 1940, forcing the British army’s evacuation from Dunkirk at the end of the month, and the German army entered Paris on 14 June.

This victory was the spur Mussolini needed to come into the war on Germany’s side, and left Hitler in undisputed control of Western and Central Europe. He was able to bide his time before deciding on his next move, even if his airforce came off worse in aerial combat over southern England (the Battle of Britain), so making an invasion of Britain difficult. A year after his victory over France he decided on a different option—a lightning strike with overwhelming force against Russia, with the expectation of an easy victory before the winter.

The nature of the war

Left wing and liberal opinion in Europe and North America saw the war as one between democracy and fascism. This view was propagated in Britain by newspapers like the
Daily Herald
(half-owned by the trade unions), the
Daily Mirror
, the
Evening Standard
(owned by the ardent imperialist Beaverbrook but soon to be edited for him by the Labour left winger Michael Foot), the left-liberal
News Chronicle
and the most popular of the photo magazines,
Picture Post
. It is still very much the orthodox view today. So, for instance, Eric Hobsbawm, in his history of the 20th century, calls it a war ‘between what in the 19th century would have been called “progress and reaction”.’
²³⁸

Yet this was not what motivated the leading figures on the Allied side. The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910, ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq, and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.
²³⁹

The leader of the second great power to join the ‘anti-fascist’ alliance, Joseph Stalin, was no more a democrat or a liberal than Churchill. He had already butchered most of the generation of Bolsheviks who had made the revolution, and had overseen the horrors of collectivisation, with the famines in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In 1939 he had made the deal with Hitler to partition Poland and retake control of the Baltic republics, to which the Bolsheviks had granted independence in 1917. This was no mere diplomatic buying of time—it involved both handing over to the Gestapo German Communists who had gone into exile in Russia and supplying Germany with war materials. Stalin was forced into the war by the German invasion in June 1941, after ignoring warnings of Hitler’s intentions from intelligence agents and the embassy in Berlin. His response to the terrible defeats of the first weeks of the invasion was to panic, and then to bolster his position ideologically by turning back to the Great Russian chauvinism of the period before 1917. He lauded the Russian generals who had conquered the non-Russian peoples of the Tsarist Empire, and baptised the war against Hitler ‘The Great Patriotic War’, not ‘The Great Anti-Fascist War’. Many non-Russian nationalities paid a terrible price for his turn to chauvinism. Stalin deported whole peoples such as the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Volga Germans thousands of miles to central and eastern Asia.

The third of the ‘anti-fascist’ leaders was Roosevelt. Before joining the war the US administration followed a policy of using the opportunity to build an ‘informal’ US empire to overshadow the formal European empires. As historian A J P Taylor explains:

Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, later complained bluntly that Roosevelt hoped former colonial territories, ‘once free of their masters, would become politically and economically dependent on the United States’.
²⁴¹

It was a squabble between colonial empires in the Far East that brought the US directly into the war. Japan was keen to expand its empire at the expense of other colonial powers, which were immeasurably weakened by the war, and began to advance south from China into French Indochina. But the US had its own interests in the region. It controlled the Philippines, and looked upon Chiang Kai Shek, who was still holding out against Japan in western China, as favourable to US capital. After an attempt to broker a deal for a division of influence with Japan fell apart, the US blockaded Japan’s access to desperately needed raw materials. Japan responded with its attack on the US fleet in Pearl Harbour, removing the major obstacle to the advance of its forces south to grab French, Dutch and British colonies in south east Asia.

What motivated many ordinary people to fight against Nazism was very different to the motives of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. There was a genuine hatred of fascism, especially as sections of the popular media explained what it was really like, often for the first time. The ‘big three’ leaders could not avoid playing on these popular attitudes. The Churchill wing of the ruling class was desperate in the summer of 1940. The British army had lost most of its military equipment, it (mistakenly) expected an invasion that would be difficult to resist, and a good half of the ruling class was in favour of an agreement with Hitler on terms which the Churchill wing saw as humiliating. The only way the group around Churchill could survive politically was by leaning on the Labour Party and the bureaucracy of the trade union movement. It brought in Labour’s leader, Clement Attlee, as deputy prime minister, and the most important trade union leader, Ernest Bevin, to oversee the labour requirements of the war economy. It could not hold such a government together without abandoning the imperialist class war rhetoric of the pre-war Tory party. Instead it spoke of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘the self determination of nations’. It also had to make a play of sharing out scarce food supplies through a rationing system (which did lead to an improved diet for the poorer sections of workers, although the rich could still eat luxuriously) and promise a massively improved welfare system after the end of the war. As rising Conservative star Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham) recognised, if the government did not give people ‘reform’, it risked ‘revolution’.

Similar considerations applied in the US, where the government employed the language of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism—with Eleanor Roosevelt fronting all sorts of liberal causes—and Hollywood forgot its pre-war aversion to anti-Nazi films like Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
.

Even in the Soviet Union, the war years saw a certain easing of the terror, despite the mass deportations of national minorities. In intellectual circles, at least, there was a brief feeling that the post-war years would be different—a feeling that comes across, for instance, in Vasily Grossman’s brilliant novel,
Life and Fate,
about Stalingrad and Hitler’s death camps.

Nevertheless, the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war. Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia.

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean. He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

Stalin’s desire to partition part of Eastern Europe with Hitler had led him to ignore the German threat to the USSR, so his armies were utterly unprepared when the onslaught came in 1941. The same concern with adding territory to the Russian sphere of influence led him in 1944 to order Russian troops to stand back while German troops smashed a rising by the Polish resistance in Warsaw. Only after the city had been destroyed did Russian troops cross the Vistula River to take control.

In the same way, the US government dropped its atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of the war, despite previous signs that the Japanese government was ready to surrender. This ensured that the surrender took place before Russian troops, advancing rapidly across Japanese-occupied Manchuria, could give Russia any real say in what happened in post-war Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki also brought home in the most horrific manner the US’s capacity to exercise global dominance.

All three powers had made it easier for Hitler to maintain his grip on Germany. They treated all Germans, not just the Nazis, as the enemy. A senior British civil servant, Vansittart, drew up plans to destroy all Germany’s industry and turn it into an impoverished agricultural country. The British and US air forces followed a policy of carpet-bombing civilian areas, causing huge firestorms which burned and asphyxiated over 100,000 civilians in places such as Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden—a city with no military or strategic importance. In Russia, propaganda broadcasts by the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg called on people to ‘kill Germans, kill Germans, kill Germans’. Such an approach provided no incentive for German workers to turn against their rulers, and made it easier for Hitler to hold his armies together to the last.

The ultimate barbarity

There is no questioning the barbarity of Germany’s rulers. Their occupation of Western Europe was brutal, their behaviour in occupied Poland and Russia barbaric, and their treatment of Europe’s Jews the ultimate horror of the 20th century. But it is still necessary to understand how this happened.