Book review: Moral Combat: A History of World War II

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 13:13

MORAL COMBAT: A HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II BY MICHAEL BURLEIGH Harper Press, 672pp, £17.99

THIS is a powerful and timely book, all the more so because it appeared just after our self-obsessed establishment had done its clumsy best to forget about the 65th anniversary of Victory in Europe. Michael Burleigh's position is crystal-clear from the very start. He sets out to produce "a moral history of the Second World War", a conflict that he sees as "a necessary war against at least one regime which, uniquely, modernised barbarism into an industrial process".

Though he is too good a historian and too honest a man to ignore the dreadful moral cross-currents, like our relationship with that genial mass-murderer Stalin and Allied war crimes, he asserts, wholly correctly in this reviewer's view, that the latter "should not be elided with what are uncharmingly called collateral casualties, which were not the objectives of an operation".

This does not mean that we should be comfortable about events like the bombing of Dresden, but it does suggest that Vera Brittain was wrong to see some sort of moral equivalence between murdering people in concentration camps and killing them in air raids. Burleigh steadfastly maintains that strategic bombing "cannot be equated with Nazi crimes against humanity, though some historians have certainly endeavoured to do so with more or less malign intent". Moreover, long before Bomber Command was able to carry the war into Germany, the Blitz was like "a 9/11 once a month for a year".

The book is laid out chronologically, with an early chapter setting up "the predators" who came to rule in Italy, Germany and Japan. Burleigh is less gentle about the appeasers than several recent writers, and soon, in a chapter appropriately called "Brotherly Enemies", compares the "grubby realities" of the Communist and Nazi systems, both of which removed whole categories of people from the realm of reciprocal moral obligation.

He is right to maintain that, from the very start, there was something especially evil in Germany's war against the Soviet Union, defined by General Franz Halder's assertion that "in the east harshness now is mildness for the future".

As a military historian I have the highest regard for the fighting qualities of the German army, but I know that the shocking brutalities characterising German rule were not exclusively the work of the SS, for some army units behaved scarcely better.

There were moral complexities to the work of the Resistance in occupied countries, for reprisals routinely killed large quantities of civilians - many of whom had no connection whatsoever to the Resistance - when German soldiers or administrators were assassinated.The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich saw the Germans destroy the Czech village of Lidice, kill its inhabitants and go on to cut a swathe through the entire democratic and Communist underground and the Orthodox church to boot.

On the one hand, the assassination was "a justified act that swelled the Allies' moral capital" and was enthusiastically supported by the Czech leader in exile, but on the other it resulted in the deaths of around 5,000 people, casualties that cannot have been unanticipated.

When a Resistance bomb killed 33 security police in Rome, 335 Italians were shot in the Ardeatine Caves. An SS officer refused to participate, but a colleague warned him that this would have a bad effect on discipline and they shot the next five prisoners together. One Italian Resistance leader ordered his men to stop attacking Germans and to concentrate on blowing up roads and railways instead, though they continued to kill Fascist militiamen and collaborators, whom the Germans did not avenge.

More than one-quarter of British and American prisoners of the Japanese died in the course of their captivity, either from deliberate cruelty or casual neglect, and among the more ghastly examples of cruelty was the unanaesthetised vivisection of a US bomber crew, whose organs were removed one by one until they died.

Burleigh speculates that "the 15 million Chinese killed by the Japanese (may be] the deed that will prove to have turned most notably against Japan's interest, for there is no doubt about who is going to be the superpower of the 21st century".

In my view, this is one of the most important books on the Second World War to be published in recent years, and it is a particular pleasure to find, for once, an author who has not been let down by his cartographer.