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The Citizen
09-05-2025
- General
- The Citizen
The big lesson to be learnt from World War II
My mother, aunts and uncles all had stories to tell about those years, one thing we learnt is that war benefits nobody but arms merchants. A woman walks past WWII-era artillery guns at the colonnade of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War at Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow on October 31, 2019. Picture: Alexander Nemenov / AFP Growing up, I could not avoid becoming swept up in the stories of World War II. My uncle from Cape Town was captured at Tobruk in Libya and spent four years in a German-prisoner-of-war (POW) camp; my father experienced the Blitz in London and signed up for four years with the Royal Air Force (RAF), mainly fighting against the Japanese. My mother, my aunts and uncles all had stories to tell about those years. Long before the advent of the Internet, I devoured all the books I could find about the war. I marvelled at British Battle of Britain hero Douglas Bader, who lost his legs in a flying accident in the 1930s, but went on to bully his way back into a cockpit, commanding RAF squadrons and later getting shot down and interned in a POW camp. I learned, too, about South African fighter pilot 'Sailor' Adolph Gysbert Malan, absorbing his experiences in the Battle of Britain and later over Europe, before finding out years later, that my mother had met him after the war when she was a volunteer for the 'Torch Commando' – a group of liberal whites who started one of the first fightbacks against apartheid. ALSO READ: Echoes of Nazism still haunt the modern world Even now, I can put together an accurate timeline of events both in Europe and in the Pacific theatre, but I have realised that the predominance of Western sources – newspapers, radio and movies – mean I had a slanted view of who did what in that conflict. Ignorant Americans like to tell the Brits and the French that 'if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking French', implying they liberated Europe from Nazi control. And while the D-Day landings did mark a significant gain for the Allies, the fact that the Germans were now fighting on two fronts meant their days were numbered. In reality, it was the people of the Soviet Union – not only Russians, but Ukrainians and assorted other 'socialist republics' – who shed the most blood in the war and who played perhaps the decisive role in defeating Adolf Hitler. Without their resistance and ultimate victory at Stalingrad, the punishing massive tank battle at Kursk and their relentless drive from the east in 1944/45, it would have been far more difficult to bring Germany to its knees. ALSO READ: Indian WWII veteran, 97, wins pension battle That, of course, is not to discount the suffering and grit of the people of the rest of Europe – and the UK, particularly, which was heavily battered during the Luftwaffe air war campaign of 1940/41 – who have every right to mark the 80th anniversary of end of hostilities this week. The old alliances of the war years, though, are gone for good. It doesn't seem as though 'hands across the water', which encapsulated US-UK relations during the war, means as much now, given the bullying from the Trump White House. My father seldom talked about his experiences other than a comment once that 'war is a waste'. He always respected the suffering of my uncle whose time in a POW camp saw him lose all his toes and later, back in civvie street, when booze softened those memories, he lost his marriage and his health. My father said little when he saw me conscripted as a soldier, although he must have worried. When my son was born, I vowed I would never, as the Ballad of the Green Beret admonished, 'put silver wings on my son's chest'. If we learn only one thing from World War II, it should be that war benefits nobody but arms merchants. NOW READ: Love at any age: WWII veteran, 100, to wed in France
New Statesman
01-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
How the world stopped Hitler
Photo by Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images On 5 November 1930, just over two years before he was appointed head of the German government, the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler told a closed meeting of his followers that Germany had an inborn right to rule the world. In the 1880s, he said, the European great powers had divided the world between them in the 'Scramble for Africa', bringing large parts of the globe into their colonial empires. Germany had largely missed out. Next time, however, in the coming war, he would ensure that Germany came out on top, exercising what he called Weltherrschaft, 'rule over the world'. After he came to power, he cloaked this ambition in the rhetoric of moderation, frequently claiming that all he wanted to do was to revise the Treaty of Versailles, which had treated Germany unfairly by denying German speakers the self-determination promised to other national groups. The scales fell from the eyes of those statesmen and politicians in Europe who had tried to 'appease' him by granting his territorial demands, when he marched into Prague in the spring of 1939, conquering a large population of non-German speakers. When he attacked Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war. During the following years, a shifting and evolving collection of major world powers combined their forces in order to defeat the Third Reich and its fellow dictatorships, which included fascist Italy (from June 1940 to September 1943), and military-ruled Japan (from December 1941), as well as a number of smaller European states such as Hungary and Romania. The 'Big Three' powers – the British empire, the Russian-led Soviet Union (from June 1941) and the US (from December 1941) – all recognised the threat posed to them by Hitler's global ambitions and buried their existing differences to defeat the Nazi menace. In his new book Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, Tim Bouverie, a former political journalist at Channel 4 News and the author of the bestselling and widely praised Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, published in 2019, has set himself the task of charting their relationships with one another from the start of the war to its finish. This would be a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties. But Bouverie rises to it with aplomb. He has trawled through more than a hundred archives and researched great masses of diaries, memoirs, biographies and monographs. He writes gracefully and engagingly, and brings his subject to life with innumerable anecdotes and quotations. His judgement is level-headed, and he knows how to tell a good story. He has produced a major work of original history that is a pleasure to read. Bouverie begins with the French, whose alliance with the UK fell apart when German armies invaded their country and forced them to concede defeat in June 1940. From this point onwards, the independent French state, now confined to the unoccupied part of the country administered from the spa town of Vichy, was effectively in alliance with Nazi Germany, a state of affairs that led the British to destroy France's battle fleet, anchored in the North African naval base of Mers-el-Kébir, in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Germans. Ordered by Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister in May 1940, the action demonstrated to the world the determination of the British to resist Hitler, the scale of whose global ambitions Churchill had been one of the few politicians to realise before the war. Bouverie recounts with a wealth of colourful detail the emergence of General Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped into British exile and led the 'Free French' against the anti-Semitic, quasi-fascist Vichy regime. Prickly, difficult and endowed with what many thought was an exaggerated conception of his own importance, De Gaulle was taken seriously enough in the end for the Free French to be included in the alliance. It was not least De Gaulle who Churchill was thinking of when he remarked: 'There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them.' As one exasperated British official commented, the French general 'gave the impression of having studied diplomacy at the court of Cesare Borgia'. Overall, however, it was the Big Three who dominated, unsurprisingly in view of the huge superiority of their resources over those of others, including Nazi Germany. Despite their in some respects radical divergences in 'ideology, ethics, personality, political systems and postwar aims, as well as disagreements over strategy, diplomacy, finance, imperialism, the allocation of resources and the future peace', they stuck together and triumphed in the end, pooling their economic and strategic power and cooperating on a more or less continual basis. 'Only Hitler could have brought them together,' as Bouverie notes, and it is important to remember just how radical the Nazi dictator's war aims were, virtually without limit of time or space. Germany was never going to stop until it had achieved the 'world domination' he had promised his followers in 1930. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Churchill was aware from the outset that the British empire, vast and far-flung though it was, would need an alliance with the United States if it was to defeat the Nazis. As he said in his 'We shall fight on the beaches' speech on 4 June 1940, it would carry on fighting until 'the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old'. Bouverie charts in engrossing detail the slow conversion of the Americans to the realisation that Hitler posed a threat to them, too – not helped by the defeatism of the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy (a 'bumptious, ignorant Irish-Bostonian') – but boosted by the British ambassador in Washington, Philip Kerr (or Lord Lothian, dubbed 'Lord Loathsome' by hostile Foreign Office mandarins), until his death at the end of 1940, and by radio broadcasts from the Blitz by the American newsman Edward R Murrow. Churchill's personal relationship with the US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, warmed into genuine admiration on the president's side. But this could not conceal the fact that the balance of power was tilting towards the Americans, whose hostility to British colonialism Churchill was unable to mitigate. The ruthless and paranoid Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin emerges from this book as a skilled and cunning negotiator, who could use charm and even humour to forge good personal relationships with Churchill and Roosevelt. By contrast, the Chinese nationalist leader received widespread contempt at the time, fuelled by barely concealed racism. Still, it is good to see the Second World War treated as a genuinely global conflict for once. Indeed, it is one of the many virtues of this book that it covers so many seemingly marginal aspects of the war, from Spain to Ireland, Greece to Iraq. The apparently neutral country of Francisco Franco's Spain is the source of many entertaining details. Bouverie recounts how the nervous British ambassador to Spain placed a ladder against the embassy garden wall every night before going to bed in case he was arrested and handed over to the Germans. He need not have worried: the British government spent an astonishing £3.5m in the first year of the war alone bribing Spanish politicians not to intervene in the conflict. Bouverie perhaps puts it too strongly when he says that the Spanish dictator Franco was firmly in the German camp; in fact he was led by his low cunning to temporise and vacillate since he was unclear whether the Germans would win the war or not. After meeting with Franco to negotiate an alliance in October 1940, Hitler told his staff he would rather have several teeth pulled than go through the frustrating ordeal again. Despite its many virtues, the broad sweep of Tim Bouverie's splendid book is compromised by the virtual absence of the Germans. Time and again one wants to be told what were the actions of Hitler and the Nazis to which the Allies were reacting. Bouverie didn't need to write a comprehensive history of the war, but he did need to provide more information about the military and political context provided by the Germans and, for that matter, the Italians and the Japanese. Bouverie champions the 'unfashionable' subdiscipline of diplomatic history, but his conception of it is a very narrow one, involving mostly a handful of national leaders and their staffs, and one would have liked to have seen a broader conception of international relations here, such as one finds in the late historian Zara Steiner's classic volumes on the interwar period. A strange and wholly unnecessary distraction from the smooth flow of the narrative is provided by the frequent footnotes – some 126 of them, one every four pages or so, which provide additional comments and snippets of extra information, entirely separately from the endnotes, which provide the references. If it's not worth saying in the text, as I was taught as a graduate student, it's not worth saying at all. Such problems aside, however, this is a compelling and highly readable book that provides a mass of new and fascinating detail about the Allies in the Second World War. Tim Bouverie has produced a masterpiece. I recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in its subject. Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler Tom Bouverie Bodley Head, 688pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops Richard J Evans's 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' is published by Allen Lane Related This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall
