Fighting on all Fronts (2 page)

Given years of propaganda glorifying armed combat and the militarisation of Axis societies one might have expected a different response there. Yet according to Hitler’s munitions minister, the population of Germany in September 1939 was:

Noticeably depressed… None of the regiments marched off to war decorated with flowers as they had done at the beginning of the First World War. The streets remained empty. There was no crowd on the Wilhelmsplatz shouting for Hitler… Not a soul on the street took notice of this historic event: Hitler driving off to the war he had staged.
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Mussolini’s decision to join Hitler in June 1940 was even more unpopular. As Spriano explains:

Above all there was a general mood of aversion to Italy’s entering the war…exemplified by innumerable individual testimonies… The Italian secret police reported with a single voice, unanimously and spontaneously, from September 1939 virtually right until June 1940, Italy did not want the war.
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Yet something extraordinary happened as the war progressed. Instead of the usual waning of militaristic ardour after initial euphoria, and despite millions killed and maimed at levels unprecedented in human history, backing for the fight against the Axis grew. Opinion polls in the US showed rising approval for the war and President Roosevelt while support for peace initiatives declined.
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In Britain Mass Observers noted the same phenomenon. Since there had been little sympathy for imperialist war, this mood must have had a different source. Between 1939 and 1945 the meaning and character of the conflict had been transformed in the minds of many ordinary people. The way this happened varied from place to place according to the circumstances.

At its height the Nazi regime encompassed around 350 million people, from Norway to Crete. Although this fell short of the 450 million under the British Crown, it was still a considerable number. Bloody though the history of the British and French empires was, they had been built up over a considerable period and configured for long-term plunder of resources and provision of markets for goods. The Nazi empire by contrast was formed in the midst of all-out world war and, whatever the long-term ambitions of Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich”, its victims were
expected to sustain that effort immediately and wholeheartedly. The pillage was naked and immediate. German policy was to seize labour (by 1945 there were some 11 million slave labourers in the Reich) and resources from invaded territories. For those who remained “the costs of occupying a given area are to be borne by the area itself” by what was euphemistically termed making a “contribution for military protection”.
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As one historian explains:

These financial tributes soon exceeded the total peacetime budgets of the countries in question, usually by more than 100 percent and in the second half of the war by more than 200 percent.
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Apart from the extreme violence meted out to those conquered, the consequences of this economic policy showed up in appalling famines. In the Netherlands some 4.5 million people were affected. In Greece 250,000 died (out of a total population of 7 million). Although these figures fell short of the Bengal famine produced by British wartime policy,
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Axis occupation provoked resistance movements in country after country.

These were politically differentiated from their official governments for several reasons. The pre-war period had been dominated by the Depression during which governments everywhere pursued economic policies of austerity leaving a vast gulf between rich and poor. This was often accompanied by repression to crush any possible opposition. For example, in Yugoslavia parliament was abolished in 1929. The Metaxas dictatorship in Greece was established in 1936 and immediately arrested 50,000 communists. While formal democracy limped on in France, when the war began hundreds of communist-controlled councils were suspended and seven communist parliamentary deputies were condemned to death.
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If ordinary people had reason to distrust their erstwhile governments, these in turn were unwilling to wholeheartedly back domestic resistance. Whatever resentment the establishment felt towards the Axis for usurping their right to exploit, they dared not endanger that system by arming their own people.

That is not to say there were no supporters of governments-in-exile (or in the case of France of a segment of the old ruling class) in Axis-occupied lands. “Official” resistance movements included the Chetniks led by Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, the EDES (National Republican Greek League) in Greece and de Gaulle’s Secret Army in France. They were well supplied by the Allies but made little progress. The aim might be to rid the country of Axis control but this must not put the rule of the establishment at risk. Two things followed: the arms they held could not be
distributed to ordinary people and any serious military challenge against the Axis must await the arrival of Allied armies with enough strength to guarantee restoration of the old regime. This latter tendency has been called “attentism”.

These constraints largely condemned the official resistance movements to impotence or worse. In Yugoslavia and to a lesser extent in Greece, they even collaborated with the enemy against left wing resistance movements. The Chetnik leader, for example, declared that: “His main enemies were the partisans…and only when he had dealt with them would he turn his attention to the Germans and Italians”.
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The Axis appreciated this stance and not only supplied the Chetniks with weapons but coordinated operations with them.
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The mass popular resistance movements had quite a different purpose. Liberated from the pressure of their own ruling classes and backed by popular hatred of the Axis invader, they were able to draw huge numbers behind them in spite of appallingly difficult circumstances. Largely denied arms by the Allies and threatened by the Gestapo, Wehrmacht and the full weight of Axis imperialism, they achieved significant results at a terrible personal cost.

In Yugoslavia Tito’s partisans held down 200,000 Germans and 160,000 auxiliaries, suffering 300,000 dead and 400,000 wounded.
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In Greece EAM-ELAS (National Liberation Front–National Popular Liberation Army) killed 19,000 German soldiers and tied up significant Wehrmacht strength.
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In France a wide variety of radical resistance bodies launched large-scale heroic struggles. To assist the Allies with the D-Day landings the French resistance took on 12 German divisions and shortly afterwards liberated Paris against Wehrmacht opposition. Italy’s resistance mobilised some 200,000 to 300,000 partisans, kept some 25 Wehrmacht divisions occupied and cost them tens of thousands of soldiers.
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It was not just the impressive scale of the popular resistance that differentiated it from the official Allied war effort. While the latter wanted restoration of pre-war conditions (including all the repression and exploitation this entailed), the former wanted economic, political and social liberation. Tito, whose forces withstood not only the full force of German, Italian and quisling Croat forces (the Ustashi) but deadly Chetnik attacks and years of indifference from the Allies (including London, Washington and Moscow), wrote:

Our struggle would not be so stubborn and so successful if the Yugoslav peoples did not see in it not only victory over fascism but also victory
over all those who have oppressed and are still trying to oppress the Yugoslav peoples…if it did not have the aim of bringing freedom, equality of rights and brotherhood to all the peoples of Yugoslavia…
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In Greece’s EAM-ELAS the same motivations were present. One female resistance fighter, speaking in the 1990s, recalled that during the struggle “we women were, socially, in a better position, at a higher level than now… Our organisation and our own [resistance] government… gave so many rights to women that only much later, decades later we were given”.
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The French resistance had many currents but, as one study puts it, they were “virtually unanimous in predicting and declaring revolution”.
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The tone of the resistance press, which attained a daily circulation of 600,000 despite the Gestapo, was captured by this article: “the masses will not act unless they know what the aim is, and it needs to be an ideal that will justify their efforts and great enough to encourage supreme sacrifice”.
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This went far beyond driving out the Nazis and involved:

Liberation from material servitude: hunger, squalor, the machine

Liberation from economic servitude: the unfair distribution of wealth, crisis and unemployment

Liberation from social servitude: money, prejudice, religious intolerance

And the selfishness of the oppressors.
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The Italian resistance developed in a situation where the population had had to endure decades of fascism (from 1922 onwards) while the economy was far weaker than in Germany. During the conflict living standards collapsed and malnutrition stalked the working population. In the winter of 1942-1943 mass strikes swept the industrial north and this, combined with the Allies landing in Sicily, led the king and Fascist Grand Council to depose Mussolini in the hope of extricating itself from the war. This failed as the Germans proceeded to occupy the north and reimpose the Duce through the puppet Republic of Salò. The Italian resistance for obvious reasons therefore had no allegiance to its pre-war government and its economic system. Although dominated by the communists, even the Catholic segment adopted a radical tone:

the age of capitalism that has produced astronomical wealth and led to unspeakable misery, is in its death throes. A soulless regime encouraged the spread of poverty that was beyond belief, sabotaged the productive efforts of the people and deliberately provoked man’s inhumanity to
man… From the final convulsions of this age a new era is being born, the era of the working classes…
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Even in Britain, which was not under occupation (the Channel Islands excepted), there was enthusiasm for victory which, as Mass Observers noted, was indissolubly linked with the idea of a welfare state, a concept approved by 90 percent of people in polls.
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There were exceptions to this pattern, of course. For example, in Poland, a country which lost more people per head of population than any other but early on suffered the brutality of German occupation in the west and Russian occupation in the east, the resistance movement took a less radical form. Poland’s extensive “underground state” encompassed a range of viewpoints from left to right and included both the “official” form of resistance discussed above and more rebellious elements. In 1944 it was the pressure of the latter that compelled the former to give up waiting for the Allies and to launch the Warsaw uprising. In Latvia the sheer weight of the opposing imperialist forces was such that any hopes of meaningful resistance were extinguished. The 1940 Russian occupation was followed a year later by a German invasion. This was generally welcomed by the population and there was even a locally generated Holocaust of 70,000 Jews which pre-dated the German Holocaust.

The rhythm of popular resistance to imperialism in the Asian colonies differed from Europe. Here the Second World War had not initiated an era of foreign invasion but was a continuation of it. The British in India, the French in Vietnam and Dutch in Indonesia already operated with repressive brutality against subject populations. For example, India in 1919 suffered the Amritsar massacre during which some 1,000 non-violent protesters were butchered. In 1926 and 1927 Indonesian communists were arrested in their thousands and many were killed. In 1930 the French reacted to a Vietnamese nationalist attack on the Yen Bay garrison by executing many rebels and bombing villages indiscriminately.

The Japanese offensive that launched open inter-imperialist struggle in the East did not immediately change this dynamic. In India, for example, a local army was raised to fight to preserve the chains holding the sub-continent in subjugation. The burden of feeding this force pitched Bengal into a famine costing around 2.5 million lives. India’s Congress Party had offered to assist London’s fight against the Axis in return for a
promise of independence at the conclusion of war. When its offer was spurned and repression stepped up once again, the Congress Party took the road of resistance, inaugurating a “Quit India” movement in 1942. Gandhi intended to keep action within the frame of non-violent civil disobedience but after mass arrests of Congress leaders it soon escaped these confines, becoming a mass movement from below. Leadership fell to J P Narayan of the Congress Socialist Party who explained:

India’s fight for freedom is at once anti-imperialist (and therefore antifascist for Imperialism is the parent of Fascism)… We work for the defeat of both Imperialism and Fascism by the common people of the world and by our struggle we show the way to the ending of wars and the liberation of the black, white and yellow”.
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Britain quelled the Quit India movement but to do so it arrested 100,000 people and fired on protesters no less than 538 times, killing several thousand.

This proved to be only a temporary solution as war severely weakened the European colonisers with France and the Netherlands occupied and Britain under attack. Taking advantage of this situation, Tokyo rapidly supplanted former colonial masters in much of south east Asia.

In such conditions the resistance tended to be pulled in two directions. As the Quit India movement showed, some hoped that Allied rhetoric about fighting for freedom and democracy could be converted into national independence. Others, such as the Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno and Subhas Bose, leader of the Indian National Army (INA), swallowed Japan’s claim that it was campaigning to rid Asia of white racist domination. The former worked uncritically with the Japanese till the very end of the war. Bose organised Indian army prisoners of war (POWs) into a force which invaded India alongside Japan’s army, though without success. In Vietnam, France continued to be formally in control for most of the war, though it collaborated closely with Japan. So, despite Ho Chi Minh’s efforts to cultivate links with the Allies, the resistance had no choice but to oppose both camps. Alas, it was too weak to prevent a famine, again created by wartime conditions, that cost 2 million lives in Tonkin in 1945.