That's very often, Wasted155! I don't read so much anymore, due to the watching of films.
Still I'd like to take some space for the following book: This post consists of my opinion on and quotes of
Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory (2006) by Norman Davies.
I, born and raised in the free and democratic West, thought I was well informed on the basics of WWII:
The Allied Powers defeated the Nazi regime. Allies good versus Nazi evil. The Americans and other Western nations defeated the armies of Hitler (especially because of D-Day, the biggest battle of WWII), coming in from the West. The USSR came from the East and together (50/50) the job was done. Concentration camps were liberated.
End of the story. It’s that simple. No doubt about it.
For many years I had this main perspective, which I already learnt on primary school. I thought I was ready to focus on singular events. Operations like D-Day and other battles close to my country were always very interesting. Lately I read a biography about one of my favourite actors, James Stewart, who served as a bomber pilot. The story about him was admirable. He was very good for his men, very careful in preparing every mission and he was a great pilot. Hardly a word about what happened below the plane. I admit that this was not necessary because the book was about
him, and the people he worked with. Still it made me curious. What went on in Germany? What happened further in the East?
Did I learn nothing at school then? Well, I knew that the Cold War followed. I knew that countries like Poland were never really “liberated”. And I knew that Stalin was a tyrant.
This book has really brought everything to the right proportions. It is immensely informative, not strictly about military events. It ranges from
interpretation to
warfare,
politics,
soldiers,
civilians and
portrayals.
I guess I have been influenced by what the French call
lieux de mémoire: historical sites and events which appeal to the collective memory so powerfully that they exclude or minimize all others.
Some examples:
- In the USA, Pearl Harbour and Omaha Beach
- In Britain, the Miracle of Dunkirk
- In Jewish history, Auschwitz
- In the Soviet story, Leningrad and Stalingrad
According to Davies “these near sacred subjects actively obstruct the broader vision and discriminating approach that are so badly needed.”
Patriotism doesn’t help much either when trying to see the big picture. Davies says that it can frequently be observed in the work of historians. What I also like about this book is that he describes how historical writing evolved:
“Under pressure from the philosophical trends of deconstructionism and postmodernism, historians lost confidence in their ability to undertake impartial analysis or to write coherent narrative”. And:
“Faced with torrents of unimaginable data, historians sought refuge in ultra-specialization. In the field of Second World War studies, none of these trends worked in favour of building new consensus.”
Davies picks out several works written about WWII. Authors, titles, what they write about and at times how they write. It serves as a guide to orientate for future readings. I probably won’t look forward to books by Stephen Ambrose (in the 1990s he became the “historian of the hour”). He was influential, and the biographist of Eisenhower. But “he accompanied his interest in the qualities of the American GI with an ideological stance holding that democracies raise the best soldiers” And “..he represents a form of Americocentrism that most non-Americans would instinctively reject”.
Also a universal message of Paul Fussel is presented: "The Allied part of the war of 1939-1945 has been sanitized and romanticized beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty".
Historians should stop with flattering the British or the American market. D-Day does not figure among the top ten biggest battles. Still some historians write 50 pages about it and spend 5 lines on the most decisive battle of WWII, namely the battle of Kursk.
“Sooner or later people will have to adjust to the fact that the Soviet role was enormous and the Western role respectable but modest.”
“Western commentators who accept the fact of Soviet predominance in the land war sometimes try to counterbalance it by stressing Western predominance in the air and at sea This argument would carry greater weight if the air offensive had achieved more decisive results, and if Germany had been more vulnerable to naval operations. As it was the Reich held out successfully against bombardments and blockade. And it was only finished off by the land assault to which the Red Army made by far the most effective contribution.”
Until here the
proportions. Now the evaluation of
criminality.
“…the main obstacle to an impartial exposé of wartime criminality does not lie exclusively in the poor flow rate of information. It has a psychological dimension. It has been compounded by the reluctance of Western historians to stain the reputation of the Allied coalition. The psychological term for such a reluctance is ‘denial’….”
“..a word needs to be said about the weasel phrase of ‘collateral damage’. In all official statements, spokesmen of the British or American bomber commands always regretted civilian losses, whilst maintaining that the aim was to hit military and industrial targets. This reasoning , however, does not withstand examination. Vast bombing fleets of 1000 aircraft or more were in their vary nature incapable of confining their targets to particular factories, railway junctions or military installations. They were sent to obliterate whole cities, in which it was perfectly well known in advance that the great majority of inhabitants were innocent civilians. The civilian deaths, therefore, were in no sense accidental or collateral. They were one of the integral and calculated consequences of misguided operations, which to continue to stain the reputation of the authors.”
A big part of the book grabs the atrocities of the two Totalitarian States, Germany and “our” biggest ally, the USSR. Shocking to read but necessary to do in order to understand the big picture which shows us that WWII certainly was “No Simple Victory”.
This book was very convincing, powerfully argued and (I can't say it enough) very, very informative. He tells things which some others omit, and he does that well. Certainly an inspiration for future historians.
I think that most readers will find their thinking enriched and stimulated by new facts and viewpoints, or perhaps even rethink their view of the war altogether.
I’d like to conclude with a quote from Michael Cook’s
review:
“Bubble-bursting conclusions like this keep tumbling out of the pages of Davies’s book. He concludes that it was the Soviet Union which defeated the Nazi war machine, with the British and Americans providing little more than “a sound supporting role” in the European theatre. Lest he seem a revisionist leftist or left-over Stalinist or a cranky anti-American, he is not. As an Oxford don who made his reputation with God’s Playground, a fine history of Poland, he simply wants a history stripped of nationalistic bias. Europe at War is the latest installment in his efforts to emphasise the importance of the “peripheries” in contemporary history.
Davies’s survey opens with the apparently simple issue of when the war began. A new memorial in Washington DC, which was built for the sixtieth anniversary of its conclusion, bears the words “World War Two, 1941-45”. The Poles, the British, the Norwegians, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians and the Danes, amongst others, feel differently. Michael Caine, the British actor, is said to have withdrawn his children from an American school when they told him that the war began in 1941.
A balanced viewpoint matters. Unless the United States, the world’s dominant power at the moment, acknowledges the sufferings and contributions made by other countries in the past, it is sure to misjudge their motives and reactions in the present. After reading Europe at War, the American reaction to 9/11 immediately springs to mind. Davies points out that the human and material losses sustained by the Poles in 1944 Warsaw Rising were 60 times as great as New York suffered on 11 September 2001 – “a World Trade Center disaster every day for two months”. Some European countries endured suffering for which there are no words – and no Hollywood movies. Britain’s civilian losses amounted to 0.1 per cent of its population. This was lamentable, but how can it be compared to 18 per cent in Poland and 25 per cent in Byelorussia?”
