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RETHINKING HISTORY, DICTATORSHIP AND WAR

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Rethinking History, Dictatorship and War New Approaches and Interpretations

Edited by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann

Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Collection copyright © Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, 2009. ‘History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy’ interview transcript © 2009 by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann; ‘Mapping the World: Richard Overy and The Times Atlas of World History’ © 2009 by Jeremy Black; ‘Martin Spahn, Hilaire Belloc and the Rise of Fascism: Fellow Travellers of a New “Political Religion”?’ © 2009 by Ulrike Ehret; ‘Regional History, Nazism and the Holocaust’ © 2009 by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann; ‘Defining “Human Security”: Roads to War and Peace, 1918–45’ © 2009 by Patricia Clavin; ‘Napoleon’s France: A Forerunner of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Dictatorships?’ © 2009 by Michael Rowe; ‘Captured by the Nazis: “Reciprocity” and “National Conservatism” in German Policy towards British POWs’ © 2009 by Neville Wylie; ‘How Soviet was Russian Society under Nazi Occupation?’ © 2009 by Nick Terry; ‘Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939–45’ © 2009 by Philip Sabin; ‘Bearing the Load: A Fresh Approach to Bomber Command’ © 2009 by Nick Chapman; ‘The British Army as a Social Institution, 1939–45’ © 2009 by Jeremy A. Crang; ‘The British Security Forces and the Jews in Palestine, 1945–48’ © 2009 by David Cesarani; ‘Air Power Lessons Learnt and Not Learnt: The Royal Air Force and the Gulf War, 1990–91’ © 2009 by Sebastian Ritchie. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2009 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 0 82644 323 6 Designed and typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain

Contents

Foreword

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

1 History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy Part I: The Way History is or Ought to be Written

1 25

2 Mapping the World: Richard Overy and The Times Atlas of World History Jeremy Black

27

3 Martin Spahn, Hilaire Belloc and the Rise of Fascism: Fellow Travellers of a New ‘Political Religion’? Ulrike Ehret

39

4 Regional History, Nazism and the Holocaust Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann

55

5 Defining Human Security: Roads to War and Peace, 1918–45 Patricia Clavin

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Part II: The Nature of Dictatorship 6 Napoleon’s France: A Forerunner of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Dictatorships? Michael Rowe 7 Captured by the Nazis: ‘Reciprocity’ and ‘National Conservatism’ in German Policy towards British POWs Neville Wylie 8 How Soviet was Russian Society under Nazi Occupation? Nicholas Terry

85 87

107 125

Part III: War 9 Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939–45 Philip Sabin

143 145

10 Bearing the Load: A Fresh Approach to Bomber Command Nick Chapman

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11 The British Army as a Social Institution, 1939–45 Jeremy A. Crang

175

12 The British Security Forces and the Jews in Palestine, 1945–48 David Cesarani

191

13 Air Power Lessons Learnt and Not Learnt: The Royal Air Force and the Gulf War, 1990–91 Sebastian Ritchie

211

Notes

227

Index

267

This book is dedicated to Richard J. Overy, our teacher, colleague and friend


Foreword

The contributions in this collection deal with three of the most important themes of historical studies: the way history is or ought to be written, the nature of dictatorships and the nature of wars. The primary focus is on modern Europe and two defining experiences in the first half of the twentieth century: the two world wars and totalitarian dictatorships. Both remain issues of intense debate and with ever widening ramifications. The book brings together a mix of established and younger experts who have been commissioned to think critically about these major themes and to write accessible and stimulating pieces that reflect on the historiography of their subjects, challenge existing interpretations and suggest ways in which the subjects are changing. Twelve contributions and a substantial introduction summarize what are complex findings, approach the topic from a variety of perspectives (nineteenth- and twentieth-century history; national and regional history; comparative history; cartography; biographical, intellectual, structural, social and military history) and address unresolved questions. This volume seeks to honour Professor Richard J. Overy, who turned 60 at the end of 2007 and is one of the great historians of his generation. Richard Overy has shaped our understanding of the main themes of this volume with the publication of over 20 books – most recently, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009), The Times Complete History of the World (2007), The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004) and Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands (2001) – and as editor of four books, author of countless scholarly articles and a regular contributor to radio and television. In a conversation that serves as an introduction, he reflects on some of the key issues of this book. Richard Overy’s scholarship stands out for a variety of reasons. At a time when detailed monographs have pushed most scholars into highly specialized fields, Richard has tackled big issues, often from a comparative perspective, and has dared to come up with bold explanations. Again and again he has successfully challenged existing interpretations and furthered our knowledge on an astonishing variety of topics, ranging from air power in the Second World War to the cartography of World History. Richard’s accessible and sharp analyses have brought him the plaudits of his peers, as well as securing him a mass readership

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F O R E WO R D

and mass audiences on TV and radio. Finally, Richard’s work always seems to fit the Zeitgeist, engaging with issues relevant to the time. I want to thank every contributor for making this book possible, especially Jeremy Black and Philip Sabin for their help in securing a publishing contract, Kim Pillay, Project Manager, and Ben Hayes from Continuum Books. Chris Szejnmann, Loughborough, April 2009

Notes on Contributors

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Graduating from Cambridge, he did postgraduate work at Oxford and then taught at Durham, eventually as Professor, before moving to Exeter in 1996. He has lectured extensively in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Singapore, Slovenia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and the USA, where he has held visiting chairs at West Point, Texas Christian University and Stillman College. A past council member of the Royal Historical Society, Black is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a trustee of Agora. He has been appointed to the Order of Membership of the British Empire for services to stamp design. In 2008, he received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History. He is, or has been, on a number of editorial boards, including those of The Journal of Military History, the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, Media History and History Today, and has been editor of Archives. His books include War and the World, 1450–2000 (Yale), The British Seaborne Empire (Yale), Maps and History (Yale) and European Warfare in a Global Context, 1600–1815 (Routledge). David Cesarani is Research Professor in History and Director of Research at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests span modern Jewish history, the history of the Jews in Britain, and the Holocaust. He is the author of Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award in History in 2006. His other books include Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1999), Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944 (1997), The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (1994) and Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (1992), in addition to many edited books. His most recent book is Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945–1948 (2009). Richard Overy was one of his history tutors at Queens’ College, Cambridge, 1976–79. Nick Chapman has had an extensive career in publishing and the media, publishing the work of several military historians and developing a strong interest in military history. It was as a book publisher that he and Richard Overy first worked

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

together, over 20 years ago, a relationship that was to continue at the BBC with The Road to War. Having left full-time work in 2003, Nick Chapman undertook a part time MA in War and Society at Exeter University, where Richard Overy supervised his dissertation on combat motivation in RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War. In addition to public and commercial commitments, including that of an editorial advisor to a London publisher on military history, Nick Chapman has undertaken a part-time PhD on change in RAF Bomber Command from 1945 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, again under the supervision of Richard Overy. Patricia Clavin is a Fellow and Tutor of History at Jesus College, Oxford, and Research Director of the Modern European History Research Centre in the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. She studied for her BA in History and her PhD, under Richard Overy’s supervision, at King’s College, London. She is an international historian with a particular interest in the history of economic, financial and political relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Her major publications include The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, France and the United States, 1931–1936 (London, 1996), Europe and the Great Depression, 1929–1939 (London, 2000) and Modern Europe: 1789–Present (2nd edn, 2003), co-authored with Asa Briggs. She is currently writing Bread and Butter Internationalism: The World Economy and the League of Nations, 1919–1946 (Oxford, forthcoming), with funding from the Arts and Humanities Council and the British Academy. Jeremy A. Crang is Senior Lecturer in History and Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests lie in modern British history with a particular interest in war, armed forces and society. He is the author of The British Army and the People’s War 1939–1945 (2000) and co-editor (with Paul Addison) of The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain (2000) and Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 (2006). Ulrike Ehret is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, or Research Fellow, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. She has been Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at University College, London, and is co-editor of the academic journal Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. Her research interests lie in the formation of social stereotypes, processes of national and religious identification, fascism and National Socialism. Her PhD thesis (2006), supervised by Richard Overy at King’s College, London, is to be published by Manchester University Press as Church, Nation and Race: Catholics, Modernity and Antisemitism in Germany and England 1918–1945 (forthcoming 2009). She has published her


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work in various academic journals, including European History Quarterly, History Compass and Nations and Nationalism. Ehret’s current research looks at conservative (Christian) politics and ideas in Europe from the interwar years to the 1950s, in particular popular opinion and the attraction of nationalist/fascist movements. Richard James Overy (b. 1947) was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge from 1973 to 1979 at Queens’ College, and from 1976 to 1979 was an Assistant University Lecturer. From 1980 to 2004 he taught at King’s College, London, where he became Professor of Modern History in 1992. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1997), a Fellow of the British Academy (2000), a Fellow of King’s College (2003) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2007). He was winner of the T. S. Ashton Prize in 1983, the Cass Prize in 1987, the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize in 2001 for a lifetime’s contribution to military history, the Wolfson Prize for history in 2005 and the Hessell Tiltman Prize for history, also in 2005. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of History at the University of Exeter, where he currently works. He has spent much of his research and writing life on the history of the Third Reich and of twentieth-century air power. He has also published extensively on the history of the origins and outcome of the Second World War and, more recently, on the Stalin and Hitler dictatorships. He has recently completed a study of interwar discourses on the crisis of civilization in Britain and is preparing a major study of the history of bombing in the Second World War. He is a regular contributor to press, radio and television and has acted as historical consultant for the BBC series Road to War (1989) and People’s Century (1994), the Anglo-Russian coproduction Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997), the BBC series Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (2005), and the ZDF programmes Goering (2004) and Hitler und Stalin (2009). Sebastian Ritchie is an official historian at the Air Historical Branch (RAF) of the Ministry of Defence. He obtained his PhD under Richard Overy’s supervision from King’s College, London, in 1994, and lectured for three years at the University of Manchester before joining the Air Historical Branch. He is the author of several classified histories of recent Royal Air Force operations in Iraq and Yugoslavia, and has also lectured and published widely on aspects of air power and air operations in the Second World War. His publications include the highly acclaimed book Industry and Air Power and numerous articles on the history of the RAF. Michael Rowe is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at King’s College London. He studied with Richard Overy at King’s College, London, before

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pursuing a PhD at Cambridge University. He was then Prize Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford, before taking up the position of Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he stayed from 1999 to 2004. He then took up his current post in King’s. He has published numerous articles and chapters on Napoleonic Europe, especially Germany. His major publications are From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003) and Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe (ed., Basingstoke, 2003). He is currently working on a book on national mobilization in the age of Napoleon. Philip Sabin is Professor of Strategic Studies at King’s College, London. He is a long-standing member of the Chief of the Air Staff ’s Air Power Study Group, and has published numerous chapters in the Study Group’s publications, the latest one being on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. He has had other close connections with the British armed services, including his role in developing an academic partnership at the Joint Services Command and Staff College and his vice-chairmanship of the Council of Military Education Committees. Professor Sabin’s research interests now lie in the analytical modelling of conflict, from ancient to modern times. He recently co-edited (with Hans van Wees and Michael Whitby) the award winning two-volume Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (Cambridge, 2007) and published a major monograph on Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World (London, 2007). He is currently writing another major study, Simulating War (London, forthcoming 2011). Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann is Professor of Modern History at Loughborough University. He was born in Munich, studied in London (for a BA at Royal Holloway, University of London, and then for a PhD under Richard Overy’s supervision at King’s College, London) and taught at Royal Holloway, Middlesex University, and the University of Leicester, where he was director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies between 2004 and 2007. His major publications are Vom Traum zum Alptraum: Sachsen in der Weimarer Republik (Leipzig, 2000), Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red’ Saxony (Oxford, 1999), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (co-edited with M. L. Davies, Basingstoke, 2006) and Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (co-edited with O. Jensen, Basingstoke, 2008). He is currently writing Contesting the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, forthcoming 2010). Nicholas Terry has lectured in history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Bristol. He is a historian of modern Germany, with research interests in the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War. He has


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published several articles, including ‘Conflicting signals: British intelligence on the Final Solution through radio intercepts and other sources, 1941–42’, Yad Vashem Studies, 32 (2004). He is currently revising his PhD – on the German military occupation of Russia and Belorussia between 1941 and 1944, and completed under Richard Overy’s supervision in 2006 at King’s College, London – for publication, and is also researching the war crimes investigations of Auschwitz in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Neville Wylie is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. Before coming to Nottingham in 2000, he taught at University College, Dublin, and the University of Glasgow, was a visiting lecturer at the Graduate Institute for International Studies, Geneva, and held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Centre of International Studies and New Hall College, Cambridge. He studied under Richard Overy as an undergraduate history student at King’s College, London (1986–1989), where he won the University of London’s Derby-Brize Prize (1989). He is co-editor of the journal Contemporary European History and author/editor of The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War: Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946 (Routledge, 2007), Britain, Switzerland and the Second World War (Oxford, 2003) and European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War (Cambridge, 2002). He is currently completing a study on British POWs in Germany entitled The Politics of Prisoners of War: Britain, Germany and POW diplomacy, 1939–1945 (Oxford, forthcoming 2009).


1

History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy1

PART I: BECOMING A HISTORIAN: REFLECTIONS ON THE WAY HISTORY IS OR OUGHT TO BE DONE 1. What got you interested in history, and what made you decide to become a historian? It is obviously quite hard to think of the exact point when I realized that history was what I was fascinated by. I think that it was my mother who was always interested in history, who first aroused my interest. She had some idiosyncratic interests and was fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons. I had books and materials that she had collected as a teenager, which I remember looking at when I was 7 or 8. From that stage onwards I was always fascinated by history, and it never occurred to me that this was an oddity for a 7- or 8-year-old. But my real love was for Ancient History. I did Latin at school until I was 18, and for a long time I thought that I wanted to become an archaeologist. […] I had a particular interest in Ancient Egypt. But by my middle teens I began to realize just how archaeology was developing. Even then it was becoming a very scientific subject and I recognized my limitations. I might have a historical imagination but I had no scientific skills at all, no capacity for science really, and about the same time I became much more interested in contemporary politics and current affairs. When I was age 15 or 16, I realized that my primary interest intellectually was in engaging with ideas and political issues and concepts of the twentieth century. I am still fascinated by archaeology: I read all the articles in the newspapers I can, I go to exhibitions and I have a small collection of antiquities in a cupboard, where I try to keep an artefact from every known civilization. I have never lost that fascination with the fact that you can have an artefact from every civilization going back the last 6,000 years and yet they can all be housed in a single cupboard. By the time I reached 16 or 17 I was doing history as an A-level subject. It was the only subject that really engaged me. What I enjoyed most was the sense that one could argue with other people’s views of the past. And I suppose by the time I had gone to university I

2

R E T H I N K I N G H I S T O R Y, D I C TAT O R S H I P A N D WA R

could not imagine myself doing anything else. My mother wanted me to go into the Church, and just before I went to university I was visited by the local dean of ordination in Somerset, who was very keen to sign me up. But I knew that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and in my first term at Cambridge I lost my faith entirely almost overnight. So that was never really an issue any longer. But coming from a tiny grammar school in Somerset I had a terrible inferiority complex about what I was capable of doing, and I assumed that when I got to Cambridge I would meet geniuses and that being a historian would be a hopeless ambition. But in fact I got completely absorbed by it. What I liked about it was this capacity to link together imagination and analysis in ways that very few other subjects allow you to do. And after that I worked extremely hard because I knew that the only way you could get on was to achieve a lot at university level. And from that point on I have spent 40 years as a historian. 2. What influences were there in your formation and during your career? I think it is quite usual for historians to say that they read such and such a book and that this transformed their view of history or their commitment to history. I find it hard actually to pinpoint a particular influence but I am aware of the fact that when I was a young historian in the 1960s so much history being written in Britain was written from a Marxist or sub-Marxist perspective. I read Marx, and then briefly became an enthusiast for Communism in the late 1960s, early 1970s. I absorbed the current view in the 1960s that everything could be explained by labour protest, peasant rebellion and so on, and that one needed to look at the economic structures to be able to understand or explain historical development. I think I did more or less take that on board without much criticism. So I chose to become an economic historian, and my first work focused a lot on the economic dimension of history. But it was in the 1980s that I went through something of a sea change in my view of history and the historical process. […] There were two philosophers – both of them German in fact – who I think had an enormous influence on the way I understood history. The first was Hegel, and I have come to the (perhaps arrogant) conclusion that it is very difficult to be a historian and not to have some familiarity with what Hegel has said and done to transform our approach to the past. Above all I think from Hegel what I took was the realization that ideas play an extraordinarily important part . . . in understanding the way in which human history has developed. The social and economic dynamic which had attracted me at first was not irrelevant but it had to be understood in terms as Hegel understood it: as the result of a dialectical process in which tensions, antagonisms, between the material world and the world of ideas and culture explain how history moves forward; above all that history is not just materialist – and for the first 10 years of my career I was a materialist. So that was a very important stepping stone. The second one was my growing familiarity with

H I S T O R Y, D I C TAT O R S H I P A N D WA R

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Nietzsche. […] Nietzsche for me was extraordinary because much of what he writes and the way he writes match my own views about everything from the paradoxical nature of reality to confronting death and the true nature of the human condition. Nietzsche was very important both for my personal life, in the way in which I have confronted issues and problems and think about the nature of reality, and because he made me think again about my history rather differently and certainly made me aware – much more of course than Hegel, whose views are really very different – of the indeterminacy of history, that some historical issues have no answer. I think I’ve been brought up as all Western European historians were, with a rather narrow rationalism. I think the recognition is important that there are some questions to which there are not answers, or that there are different answers, diverse answers – and I don’t mean that in any kind of fancy post-modern way but simply understanding the paradoxical nature of much of human experience. Sometimes people ask me questions at conferences: ‘Why did Hitler do X?’, and sometimes you just have to say: ‘We don’t know’; ‘Maybe he did not understand it fully himself when he made that decision.’ There is an extraordinary reluctance in the Western intellectual tradition to accept that we cannot always have an answer, or that the answer is not going to be a progressive one, or that there may be a number of different answers and explanations which are ambiguous or contradictory. 3. Most of your writing has focused on the interwar crisis and the Second World War.2 Why did you not do more work on the origins of this devastating first half of the twentieth century, in other words the period before the First World War, or on what happened after 1945? […] The First World War was in a sense accidental, and it changed the terms entirely for Europe for 25 or 30 years. Its aftermath – psychological, cultural, political, economic and so forth – represented an extraordinary distortion of the way in which Europe was going to develop. I do not hold the view that Europe pre-1914 was all rosy and happy, but there were trajectories from before 1914, dominant trajectories, which would have produced a very different outcome in the twentieth century. After 1945, of course, the discourse on ‘progress’ had to be rediscovered or reinvented by Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Different forms of progress, but there is a sense that Europe gets back on a trajectory which it had lost in 1914. I have been preoccupied with the exceptionalism of this 25year period. Many historians emphasize the continuities, and I am also keen now to encourage younger historians to think across the divide of 1945. But I still see those 25 years as an extraordinary period which has generated its own patterns of explanation. […]

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4. Do you have any regrets about work you have done, or not done? I have a number of regrets. I do not regret things I have not done because I hope I still have 20 or 30 years of writing ahead of me and I still have many questions I want to be able to address. In terms of things that I did not do but I should have done I have one profound regret which makes me embarrassed every time I think about it: it is that I spent a long time working on the economy of the Third Reich between the 1960s and the 1980s, and it never ever really occurred to me that the issues I should be addressing would be issues connected, for example, with the campaign against the Jews or the expropriation of Jewish wealth. In other words, that I should link my economic history with the wider nature of the Third Reich. It just never occurred to me, and most of the works I have read and books I have looked at from the 1960s and the 1970s did not see it either. It was assumed in the form of a Marxist narrative of the Third Reich that the system was dominated by capitalists, in which state capitalism repressed workers. It is not that I left it out because I did not want to write about that – for a long time it just never really occurred to me. I think looking back it is shameful the extent to which we were dominated by class categories and incapable of seeing the nature of racial discrimination and its wider manifestations. I was very pleased to have the opportunity in 2005 to give the annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow and I chose as my subject the economics of the Holocaust. I gave my lecture on the period from the early economic discrimination in 1933 through to the massive expropriations of the Second World War. I think probably in choosing this subject and giving that lecture I felt somehow that I had not exactly expiated my sins but somehow come to terms with a subject which I had started 30 years before and which I had failed really to understand fully. 5. How would you describe a good historian? This is a very difficult question. I think it is probably easier to describe a bad historian. I think above all the hallmark of a good historian is historical imagination: to be able to put yourself back in the period in which you are interested and make that imaginative leap, not to share the assumptions that surround you in the contemporary world but to imagine that the rest of history has not yet happened. I think that historians find that enormously difficult to do, but I think that imaginative leap is critical before you then start applying your normal skills of research analysis to the period that you are interested in. This is extremely difficult to do even for the twentieth century. It is very important to recognize that people do not know what is going to happen – the expectations or ambitions might be very different from reality – or indeed history might for one reason or another take a sudden shock turn. So I have come increasingly to think that the most important thing a historian does is to place himself in that


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context and I think much of the best history has been done in the Medieval and early Modern periods, where historians have been able to do that to quite an extraordinary degree, whether they are looking at language or the symbolism of pictures, or whether they are looking at religious discourses, and so forth. They have enhanced their capacity to put themselves imaginatively back in their period and to shed all the things that clutter up the mind from the modern day. I think historians in the Modern period do not do that enough. […] 6. Why should people care about the past? How can the past talk meaningfully to us today? I think it is not so much a question about people caring about the past as that the past is impossible to ignore. A useful analogy is to see history as a collective human mind . . . just as individuals we spend a lot of our time going back and thinking about our own past, decisions we made and mistakes we made, trying to unravel our own psychological narrative. I think that is what we do as whole societies too. We do it now in quite professional, rational ways. If we did not, we would still do it but in the way societies might have done it 400 years ago: through folk songs, memories, traditional rites and so on. The past is something which is always with us. It is impossible, rather nightmarish, to imagine a community which has turned its back on the past. Having said that I think that there are enormous dangers in commodifying the past. […] So much of life has been commodified in the last 30 or 40 years. The past is presented in cosy chunks and we are encouraged to experience the past as consumers. One thinks, for example, of the ‘Blitz experience’ in the Imperial War Museum. I cannot imagine how anybody would have a desire to experience the Blitz, but it has become a commodity which is sold to schoolchildren who go there and have this ‘experience’. Managing the past or relating the present to the past is a great responsibility and a difficult thing to do well; and I worry that our appropriation of the past is becoming increasingly superficial and consumerist. I think as historians that is something we have a responsibility to combat. 7. Can we learn from past wars and genocides? There is a difference between the question can we learn from past wars and genocides and should we learn from past wars and genocides. Of course it is tempting to say: ‘Let’s go back and look at past wars and see what lessons we can learn for today.’ But all of these things are subject to very different sets of circumstances. There are too many contingent things, I think, to be able to pass judgement very easily. We should clearly learn from past wars and genocides; we should look back and we should say that that choice was the wrong choice; we should recognize the frailty of decision-makers when they are confronted with real choices. But the process of applying history to the present is extraordinarily unsophisticated

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and underdeveloped. There was a move a couple of years ago to see whether the British Government would consider having a permanent historical advisor. Although one might think that this is a good idea, I think that decision-makers are not going to listen to historians. They are going to say: ‘That’s very interesting, thank you, but you know we face this pressure, that pressure, these difficulties.’ For the general public, learning from past wars and genocides seems fairly straightforward. In the Western world people deplore both and hope that they do not happen again. They deplored war in the 1920s and 1930s but the Second World War happened nonetheless. I have come to realize over the years that this idea of learning from the past, which is what people are so keen on, or the relevance of the past, which governments are trying to teach in schools, the relevance of history for the present, and so forth, is a largely misplaced endeavour. We can do our best to highlight these elements of the past and to explore the conditions which made them extremely likely. But in the end all we can rely on is the vigilance of contemporary elites or the contemporary public to ensure that these are not paths one chooses. I am very struck by the war in Iraq in 2003. There were a lot of lessons one could have learned about that. The public was overwhelmingly hostile to the idea of waging war. The decision-makers had their own trajectory and it is disheartening, I think, to recognize that still, in the twenty-first century, the will of most ordinary people is to live in peace but the circumstances that shape political decisions produce very different outcomes. 8. What is your view of the ongoing debates as to whether there is objective knowledge about the past? I was brought up in a school of English historical writing which assumed that there was objective truth and that you just had to describe and define it – approach the past rationally. It has taken me some time to shed this idea. Clearly the past is apprehended in a wide variety of different ways, and there are different narratives which have to be reconciled. It is not a question of there being objective history; it is a question of recognising the variety of subjective elements which are injected into any narrative and which it is the job of the historian to be able to apprehend and explain. I am less attracted to the idea, which currently seems to dominate the British education system, that all historians are biased. This seems to be the corollary to the idea that there is no objective truth, that narratives are paradoxical and complex. It is claimed that all historians tell only partial truths, or that all historians are biased or prejudiced. The historians’ view of the past is coloured, of course, by their preconceptions, their intellectual interests, the intellectual trajectories they might have travelled, and it would be useful to know more about those. But the idea that somehow we are biased and therefore that what we say is a deviation from the ‘truth’ is of course an absurdity.


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9. Much of your work has focused on the Second World War, which, in your own words, saw a ‘horrifying catalogue of human destruction’ with ‘no equal in history’. However, again in your own words, the security and prosperity enjoyed in the West since 1945 ‘have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war’.3 How then is it possible for us, in the West, to empathize with the past, in particular the suffering and horrors of the victims? I think it is very difficult but historians have to make that kind of leap. It is very difficult to understand those circumstances because we live largely in nonviolent societies and imagining how whole cohorts of people could engage in atrocities, even that mass armies could be made to fight, becomes harder and harder to do. In the 1960s, when I first became interested in the history of the Second World War, it did not seem so difficult to explain and I do not remember trying to explain it to myself. I took it for granted that a whole generation of young men were conscripted and went off and killed each other. Because the two world wars were then quite recent and a lot of people were around who had fought in the First World War, it seemed almost normal, that it was characteristic of modern European history. It has taken me the whole of the last 30–40 years of historical research to realize that it is not normal: it is abnormal. It is abnormal not just for European societies but for other societies too; and that means it is increasingly difficult for historians to really understand the nature of perpetration and victimhood. I think one of the important things historians have got to do is to find an adequate language, an adequate set of explanatory tools, to do justice to what it was that Europe did during that period. We are getting closer to that, partly because historians have had to borrow a great deal from social anthropology, social psychology and so forth, having to do what scientists do routinely when they talk about violence. […] 10. You seem to have made a habit of challenging orthodoxies throughout your career. For example, the orthodox interpretation of the origins of the Second World War stressed an aggressive German foreign policy and the ‘evil’ dictator Hitler, who was fortunately challenged by the ‘good’ Allies in the defence of democracy and freedom. You argued that a much broader and complex interpretation was needed and stressed the interplay of specific factors and more general causes ‘making for instability in the international system’. Or, as in Why the Allies Won, you argued that Allied victory was not at all predictable but took shape because of a dramatic transformation among the Allies between 1942 and 1944.4 To what extent do you regard practising history as a kind of ‘rebellion’, and how has this shaped your career? I think I have been more argumentative than most historians in the course of my career. I have always read the standard view or consensual view about something and thought: ‘What is inadequate about that? What does not work in the explanation?’ I think I am instinctively a troublemaker – that I see a thesis and

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think: ‘What is wrong with that thesis?’ What I have not written about but on which I have strong views is the outbreak of the First World War, the Fischer thesis and the dominant view which emerged from the 1960s onwards that Germany was largely responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.5 I have never accepted this view and perhaps at one point I might like to write about it. But it seems to me that really I am doing what historians do for every period, which is to challenge the prevailing myths, for example the prevailing myths surrounding the outbreak of war in 1939. It is not intended, of course, to say that we should have given Danzig to Hitler, or that Hitler would have been a reasonable statesman, as A. J. P. Taylor argued.6 But in the context of Europe in the late 1930s there remain enormously complex questions. I have come more and more to recognize that the important issue to ask is not ‘Why did Hitler want to fight Poland?’, which he clearly did, but ‘Why did the British declare war on Germany in 1939?’ If you do not do that, you will not understand how war then becomes a possibility. For the Second World War itself we find the idea that there is a standard progressive liberal narrative of the twentieth century, which is that along came this awful thing fascism, which you had to stamp out and you stamped it out. But the Second World War was clearly not predetermined – nothing is predetermined. A great deal had to take place historically before victory became a possibility. […] Allow me to follow up on this: is it the task of every historian to be as rebellious as you are? Is this part of how you would define a good historian? I think all historians ought to, yes. The given view, the prevailing consensus, has to be examined critically and challenged if necessary. I do not think all historians do that to the same degree but I think it is an essentially critical discipline and it cannot operate unless it is a critical discipline. To be telling a story is not sufficient. […] 11. I would like to ask you a few questions about your approach to researching and interpreting history, and would like to start by asking whether you are using specific tools to do history? In other words, do you subscribe to specific concepts or methodologies? Ever since I recognized the extent to which my historical writings were coloured by what I call sub-Marxism, the current historical discourse in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, I have fought shy of writing history which reflects a particular conceptual or methodological approach. I hope that my general practice of history is methodologically professional and acceptable, but I do not approach it from any particular conceptual point of view. I hesitate to write those kinds of books where you start off with your first paragraphs on Foucault, and so forth, and then assume that somehow that shapes the way in which you approach the narrative. I don’t need Foucault’s permission to write what I write. From that


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point of view perhaps the history I write is less intellectually rigorous, but I think at the same time it is more flexible. 12. What is the relationship between economics and other elements in the historical process? I think there has been a problem for a long time in writing history in which economics has been given an extraordinary degree of explanatory weight. I have come more and more to realize that economics is a very general term which one has to disaggregate, and that one has to talk about all the different elements of economic life, social institutions, social practices, prevailing culture and so forth. Economic phenomena have to be included in some kind of integrated approach to the past. Economics on its own, as a separate category of explanation, is often used by historians (and I have used it in the past myself) as if it explains everything. I have come more and more to recognize that it does not, because this would simply be writing determinist history. 13. Many of your books cover extremely broad topics, especially The Air War, The Road to War, Why the Allies Won, Russia’s War and The Dictators. While such broad approaches have made your work extremely popular and are widely read, most historians produce very detailed case studies with very small print runs that are only read by their immediate peers. Is it possible to tackle broad topics and to do justice to the complexities of each factor contributing to the whole? Or, to put it differently, are there not dangers of simplification? I think it is not only possible but absolutely essential to tackle broad topics. I do not mean by that that one should not study narrow subjects – I have studied narrow subjects as well – but I think that historians have an obligation to ask big questions about the periods that they study and to give big answers. I do not think that big answers need to be an oversimplification. One can deploy a great deal of complex detail in supporting general conclusions. I always wanted to ask big questions. I do not get as excited intellectually about small questions or about narrow research. I suppose I see myself as one of those historians whose job it is to take much of what has been written by my peers, excellent material though more narrow and focused, and to find some way of integrating that into some broader explanation of the past. […] I hope to challenge people to ask big questions and to think about them differently. 14. You have played a major role in the public understanding of the past through your work in historical atlases.7 Can you tell us why maps are so important to you, and what you have tried to achieve as producer and editor of maps? My relationship with atlases is now quite a long one, more than 20 years of work, but my introduction to it was largely accidental. I was invited by John Keegan

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to contribute to The Times Atlas of the Second World War, and he wanted me to contribute on things I had written about: war economies and air power. I was fascinated by this. I have always thought that maps are very important in history and I often deplore the fact that a great many history students know very little geography. But one thing I like about the map and the short text that goes with it is that it challenges you as a historian to say a lot in a small space. I think it is an exercise that would be good for all historians. […] My Atlas of the 20th Century starts in the 1890s and goes to just after 2000. And it means that you have got to think of a lot of different subjects, a lot of topics, and you have got to be able to condense down a huge amount of detailed material and historical argument into 700 or 800 words. And what you then need is the maps to do a lot of the work for you. Once I began to work on maps I became very interested in what it is that maps can tell you and how we map things and what is capable of being mapped. And over the course of the 20 years I have been able to persuade the people who I have been working for that it is possible to map more and more, and to map things which one would not normally have mapped. It is also important to ensure that an atlas includes everything that it ought to include. One thing that is very striking about the atlases that I took over in the 1990s, the big Times Atlas of World History – now The Times History of the World – is that it had almost nothing, for example, on the Holocaust. […] Mapping world history is not a simple thing, but it is something which is constantly developing as the history develops and as we realize one can ask more questions of the past in different ways. Introducing racism, for example, and the consequences of racism, having a spread on genocide, is something which is obvious, but it was not so obvious 20 years ago. […] 15. What would you hope the reader would take away from your work? […] I am very aware of the reader because I want to write exciting history that people find accessible and enjoy reading. But I want to challenge them too. I want them to come away from reading what they have read thinking differently about something. They may not like what they read, but it will make them reflect, I hope, on issues that they previously took for granted. And I have always been attracted to the idea that history is not the property of the historians. It is public, it is the public’s history – it is not ‘our’ history. I have always been attracted by the idea of writing books which will have a wide readership, that are read by people who are not professional historians – read by people who are interested in thinking about the past differently. […] 16. Currently we live in rapidly changing societies (globalization, multi-ethnic societies, technological revolution and so forth), which requires us to rethink the meaning and purpose of history. In particular, the technological revolution affects the way we communicate with each other and how we think and learn. How do


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you think historians should meet this challenge? What are your thoughts on ‘doing history’ in the twenty-first century? I think it is a very important point that historians have got to come to terms with the repercussions of the extraordinary communication revolution of the last 10 years and the way in which history is communicated and history is learnt. At the moment we seem to be in a situation in which we are constantly trying to catch up with that process and not quite understanding its implications. There are clearly very positive things because it means that a wide variety of previously rather inaccessible material from medieval charters through to police reports from the Eastern Front are now available to students online. The disadvantages are that much of the history that is presented through the new media is packaged into ‘sound-bite history’, there are lots of encyclopedia entries, and there are lots of unprofessional discourses available on the web which are extremely difficult for professional historians to monitor. People studying history have an alarming temptation to use this material as if it was somehow generated by people who have thought about the past and tested the detail. I think there are two separate strands here. Historians will find opportunities in presenting archive material on the web, an extraordinary advantage, over the course of the next 20 or 30 years. At the same time the web will encourage short cuts for people who are studying history, and that is something which has to be contested all the time. The limitations of the media have to be understood and that is really our job. But I am not sure that we are doing it fully. I am not sure that we do make it clear to people sufficiently that the art of being a historian is, in fact, about going out to archives; it is still about doing an extensive amount of secondary reading not available readily on the web; it is about intellectual engagement, intellectual argument, discussion, about human activity rather than electronic communication. […] 17. I would like to ask you a few questions about the relationship between the subject of history as it is embedded in universities, and the ‘outside’ world. We have already touched upon potential tensions between scholarly work and writing for the mass market, but you have also acted as advisor on major historical documentaries, such as The Road to War, Russia’s War and Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial.8 Could you reflect on the relationship between academic history, popular history, publishers and the media, and whether this has changed in the course of your career? I think that the relationship between professional historians and the wider public and reader is a very important one because it is the opportunity historians have not just to talk to their peers and students, which is an important process in itself, but also to ensure that the way history is apprehended by the public is accurate, demythologized and stimulating. One of the problems I have seen over the last 30 years in working a lot in television is that history is becoming commodified, popularized and vulgarized. It is possible to produce high-quality

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historical documentaries but it is also possible for the television and the media to trivialize the past. I find it regrettable that there are so many programmes about the past which are designed to fit with the way in which current television culture has developed. I think that the involvement of historians is very important, whether this is being involved in documentaries about the wives of Henry VIII or about the Third Reich. Sometimes this might be a disillusioning experience but it is essential to ensure that, bit by bit, public consciousness about key issues in history is shifted in ways in which professional history is also developing. […] It is important that we do not separate the two things into a ‘public’ history which we view as nonsense, and ‘our’ history which we regard as scrupulously scholarly. There has to be some kind of marriage between the two and the only way we can do that is by engaging in both. 18. Have you got any thoughts on the future of history as a discipline or the profession of historians? […] I think there are two problems about the development of history as a profession. One is that there is an increasing pressure to make academic life in some sense relevant and socially useful, which asks: ‘What will it contribute to the social product?’ Of course this is profoundly anti-intellectual. What historians do is think freely and critically and that is their job. I worry that professional historians will be compelled, because there is a single paymaster, to write more and more the kind of history the paymaster is interested in. This is more a problem in Britain than it is in Europe, certainly. But in the United States too much of the research is in some sense politically driven and politically funded. That is a problem and it comes back to the point that in some ways the freest individuals are those historians who have chosen to be non-academic historians who can write what they like critically, if they choose to do so, and can do what they want without any of the normal constraints. I think that we will see over the next 20 or 30 years a growing division between these two different constituencies and that the non-academic historian will become a more and more important phenomenon, capable of writing and generating extremely good history. The profession has got to safeguard against the idea that history can be written to order, and I worry a little bit that the way history is going to be presented and packaged, whether it is for research exercises or whether it is to satisfy student demand, is going to undermine the intellectual foundations on which historical writing is based.


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PART II: THE NATURE OF DICTATORSHIP 19. How does one explain the rise and fall of dictatorships after the First World War? Are there generic explanations or do explanations lie in the specific background and condition of individual societies? I think that it is not one or the other but both. Clearly there are particular political and social pressures which explain particular dictatorships in the interwar period. But there are also generic issues following the collapse of the empires which dominated much of Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Issues about modern ideas of leadership, about the inadequacies of liberal politics, about the link between modernity and experimental authoritarian forms of rule. Although the prevailing discourse is always to imagine that Europe should have generated liberal democracies during the early part of the twentieth century, I think that is not a conclusion we should necessarily arrive at. Much of the intellectual life and political discourse in this period was trying to cope with the implications of political modernity and social change. This gave rise to an extraordinary collectivist mentality, encouraged also to some extent by nationalism, which in the interwar years became more and more powerful. This situation led to attempts to create integrated communities in which each member was to act for the whole. This ran entirely contrary to the individualist drift of the nineteenth century. That was the battleground of this period. It was not just Hitler against the rest, but Hitler was to some extent an expression of an increasingly anxious introspective view of modernity for much of Europe’s population unable to cope with its implications. Dictatorships became an answer people could understand. 20. How did dictatorships function after 1914, and did this differ from previous periods? I think that the period of dictatorship in Europe was historically unique and that it is difficult to compare it with other periods. It is not accidental that it occurs at a particular stage in the development of Modern Europe. The comparison is often made of dictatorship to authoritarian monarchy, and in particular the link between the German support for Hitler and the German relationship with Wilhelm II. I have never really accepted that argument. It seems to me that dictatorship was chosen deliberately because it was different from monarchy and people had different expectations. Monarchs had let them down. The ways in which a monarch sustains rule, legitimizes monarchical authority and is related to the other institutions and the class structure in a state is quite different from the ways in which dictatorship works. […]

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21. Ian Kershaw and Hans-Ulrich Wehler have famously argued that the most important integrative factor of Nazi Germany was Hitler’s ‘charismatic leadership’.9 What do you think of this interpretation? The position of Hitler in our explanations for the way that dictatorship was exercised after 1933 is complex. Much of the early interpretation assumed that Hitler had extraordinary qualities which people were somehow hypnotized by. Most of the modern scholarship does not accept that view and increasingly emphasizes the importance of the wider community in the acceptance and endorsement of Hitler’s conception of leadership. It is not a question of Hitler leading the German people, saying: ‘Here I am, follow me’. It is a question of German people looking for somebody to follow and finding Hitler and colluding with the messianic self-image which Hitler was able to construct. It seems important to focus on that relationship and how people could induce themselves to believe that they needed a Messiah figure and that Hitler was the most appropriate Messiah figure. The qualities of Hitler himself are much exaggerated. […] 22. How do you assess the relationship between Nazism and modernity? I think it is absolutely clear that the emergence of the German dictatorship was intimately linked with Germany’s history of modernity. That does not mean that modernity always generates dictatorships and that the relationship is automatic or obvious. But the aftermath of the First World War, when Germans were trying to develop a functioning capitalist society, trying to come to terms with modern notions of citizenship, responsibility and trust, trying to come to terms with the operation of a completely new democratic order, did place extraordinary strains on German society which could only be mitigated by sustained economic success and gradual political maturity (as you get in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany). The problem for Germany, for Russia and for other parts of Central and Southern Europe is that economic and political modernity was thrown at them very rapidly. Under the different circumstances of a flourishing world economy and stable political orders they might have coped with what modernity presented – but in this case they did not. If one compares, and it is seldom done, the impact modernity has on non-European areas which are subjected suddenly to imperialism and the things which imperialism brings with it – old systems are broken down, traditional life is turned upside-down – whether it is Japanese society, Indian society, African society, they all have to cope with these tensions and they do so often with a lot of violence, authoritarianism and substantial human cost as well. I think we often think of this as simply a European problem because of this compartmentalization of European history and extra-European history. In fact if we look at the crises of modernity in Central and Southern Europe, they have something in common with the crises provoked by modernity in other parts of the world as well.


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23. Since the 1990s scholarship has ‘identified the importance of racial thought in shaping the policy and practice of the Third Reich’. Is there ‘a risk that the notion of the “racial state” paints a portrait of the Third Reich that is too coherent, homogenous and intellectually driven to be fully persuasive’?10 I think there is a problem in seeing or defining the Third Reich as a racial state. But I think one has to bear in mind that this conception was important at the time because there has been too much written about the Third Reich which ignored the racial dimension or, put the other way around, ignored the attempt to produce a narrow, exclusive Aryan state. And not only in relation to Jews, but to plenty of other groups as well – and making that shift was very significant. It was important to see the extent to which biological politics as we now understand it was an essential feature of National Socialist ideology, whereas so much of the earlier work on the Third Reich tended to be class based – social categories, in other words, were important. It does carry the dangers that we now try and tar everything with the same brush and we forget what a diverse society it was and how people negotiated their way into the Third Reich and what the Third Reich represented in a variety of often different ways dictated by place, by geography, by region, by class, by opportunity. For many Germans the racial dimension was not particularly important, while they were led by people whose driving thought was: ‘How can we construct the racial utopia’? […] 24. During the Cold War the comparison between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany was framed around the theory of totalitarianism. Since the fall of European Communism in the late 1980s this concept seems to have made a comeback. What is your view of the concept of totalitarianism, and, more generally, is it possible to compare Nazi Germany, which was driven by a genocidal racist ideology, with Stalin’s Russia, which was driven by a socialist utopia? On the question of totalitarianism I think it is very important to emphasize how different the approach in the 1950s was from the approach of historians in the last 10 or 15 years. Totalitarianism in the 1950s Cold War sense was really about systems of power which describe the nature of authority as ‘total’ and the possibility of resistance as limited. The view of totalitarianism that has emerged in the 1990s is much closer to what the original term meant when it was coined in the 1920s. It is about the total claims, or the totality of the claims, made by the collective on behalf of the collective. It is not just a question of top-down power, though top-down power clearly exists. It is much more a conception of the collective community which emphasizes the importance of ensuring that everything, from all forms of cultural production, intellectual life, institutional development and so forth, is linked with a single and coherent conception of the collective. And in that sense I think it is very helpful in understanding both the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The comparison that is to be made between these is

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about how the systems operate. What is it that sustains dictatorships? It is not a question of saying they are the same, because they manifestly are not. They were driven by different intellectual trajectories. There is, however, more in common in ideology than one is usually prepared to admit. For example, in the Soviet Union and in Hitler’s Germany abortion and homosexuality were both contested issues. In both states ‘asocials’ were defined and punished in the same way. So we should not automatically assume that these were entirely diverse ideologies. But their driving force is different. What struck me about the comparison was how utopian systems driven by images of totality actually ended up with practices that were very similar, political cultures which were very similar and social aspirations which were very similar. This makes clear again the extent to which the emergence of mass dictatorship in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe was actually something which had some generic dimension and was not something that was only particular to these societies. […] 25. Are Hitler and Stalin, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, history? In other words, do we need to historicize them and compare them with other dictatorships and periods? I am not sure whether it is useful to compare them with other dictatorships and periods because I do think these are both products of their own period for which there are particular explanations which you would not find in the 1970s or the 1980s. A comparison with other dictators is also difficult. I was criticized for not comparing Hitler and Stalin with Mao Zedong. But I am not a historian of China and I was also struck by the fact that whatever similarities there might be, it was a very different society and a very different historical moment which produced the Chinese Communist experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, and I would hesitate to compare this with Germany or Russia. Having said that, it is very important to historicize them in the sense that so much attention is lavished on Stalin, so much attention is lavished on Hitler, there is the danger of seeing these as little chunks of history we take out of the broader picture. So the Third Reich becomes simply itself, and Stalin’s Russia becomes simply itself, rather than it being recognized that Stalin’s Russia grows out of Lenin’s Russia and that something resembling the shadow of Stalinism survived in Eastern Europe until 1989. And in the case of Hitler realizing that these are not Germans who suddenly come from nowhere. They are Germans who grew up in the First World War and in the 1920s. They are Germans who helped to construct the West and East German states after the end of the Second World War. From that point of view it is extremely important to historicize them, so as to understand why one society breaks down and makes dictatorship possible. And, in the German case, the extraordinarily important question of how a state, having gone through the previous 25 years, adjusts to creating a functioning democracy, as West Germany does in the 1950s.


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26. There are a rapidly growing number of films about Hitler, most famously Downfall from 2004. Do these films facilitate a more normal attitude towards the Nazi past or do they lead to a problematic aestheticization of history that replicates the images through which the Third Reich represented itself? I think there is a problem with the development of popular feature films about the Third Reich. […] There is a danger that films trivialize and glamorize deeply disturbing subject matter and turn them into ‘another Hollywood movie’. The problem is that through these films something lodges itself in people’s minds: that these are topics that have become acceptable and that one can be entertained by these films. But there is nothing entertaining about the Third Reich. The Third Reich is a deeply demoralizing story. I much prefer films which take a fraction of the story and do something interesting with it. I saw recently the film The Reader (Der Vorleser), which I was very impressed by. […] It took an extremely complex issue about perpetration, in this case about a woman perpetrator, which added extra layers to the film. I thought that anybody seeing it would come out with awkward questions to ask about the nature of perpetration and punishment. And if one can make films like that, which interlink with but don’t glamorize or focus on the Third Reich, one gets much better results. One of my favourite films is Sophie’s Choice, which does exactly this in an extremely sensitive way. And it does not trivialize it by the fact that it involves some kind of sentimental romantic triangle, or that there is sex in the film. […] It highlights that there are extraordinary moral dilemmas to be faced by very ordinary people and how they cope with it. Films that can present these issues sensitively have an important function.11

PART III: WAR 27. In the 1980s you explained the origins of the Second World War with the ‘nature of the international system’. In this, Britain and France wanted to maintain a status quo to protect their empires while Germany, Japan and Italy were new rising powers who were ‘seeking to transcend and overturn the old order’.12 Is this still how you would explain the outbreak of war in 1939? No, I think I have changed my perspective on this question quite a bit. I would still argue that it is very important to understand the breakdown of order in the 1930s as a collective breakdown. In other words, we need to understand what the United States is doing, what the Soviet Union is doing, what Britain and France and so forth are doing. It is not just the question of Germany or Japan disturbing the international order. They do so only because, in fact, the international order permits them to do so. So we need to ask much wider questions about the system as a whole. What worries me is the idea of Britain and France defending

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their empires as an explanation. It is clear they did not want to let their empires go, that their self-image was of imperial powers, and that imperial power was the source of their world authority. So clearly that plays a part, as they do not want to be suddenly presented with a fait accompli in which their established role in the world, which goes back 200 or 300 years, had been overturned overnight. That is what happened to the European empires in 1918–19 and it represented a real shock for the way Europeans experienced it. But I would emphasize much more now the role of public opinion and the growing sense in the two Western populations, in Britain and France, of not just the crisis of empire but the deeper crisis of civilization affecting established liberal values and a growing determination of important fractions of their populations to confront fascism, which they identified as the key enemy. And increasingly the government came to share those views, not just for empire’s sake but because it seemed that the whole fabric of Western civilization could only be saved by going to war. And that modifies my conclusions quite a bit. It means that it is not just something which is generated in foreign offices but something which is generated among the wider thinking public as well as it confronts these issues. I think the idea of rising powers is now perhaps a bit old-fashioned too. What is interesting about Italy, Japan and Germany is that the elites that came to dominate those states in the 1930s were incapable of thinking about the world order except in traditional terms: in terms of territorial empire and becoming an imperial state and deriving economic benefits from imperialism. Of course that is what Britain and France and the Netherlands had done for a long period of time. So there is a curious sense in which these revisionist states had all missed the boat. Rather than building new orders, as they called it, they were actually building old orders. And the old orders were entirely inappropriate to what it was that societies in Africa, the Middle East or the Far East or indeed Soviet society were expecting of the future. They were expecting imperialism to unravel and collapse – as it did. So I think that the emphasis on ‘new’ is a bit misplaced. These are new regimes thinking in old terms. In other words, they wanted to supplant Britain and France to become major imperial powers but were trapped in a time warp by thinking that empire was the future, when it was not. Empire was just coming to an end. 28. The so-called ‘War in the East’ is commonly described as the most brutal theatre of war between 1939 and 1945 – possibly the most barbaric in human history. Do you agree with this, and how do you explain this? I think we have to be very cautious in describing the ‘War in the East’, between Germany and the Soviet Union, as the most barbaric. The war between China and Japan was also extraordinarily barbaric. The reason it does not have the same high profile as the Soviet–German war is that we know so little about it and no real effort has been made even to construct a proper sense of the level of casualty,


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which was almost certainly as great, perhaps greater, than the casualties on the Eastern Front. The barbarism of the Japanese armed forces is something we have made very little attempt either to research or to explain, although there are hundreds of eyewitness accounts of extremely barbarous acts. […] Overall, the explanations on the German and the Soviet side are much more sophisticated and developed. But even there we cannot answer the question fully because we have not been honest in our appraisal of the Red Army and its behaviour. Almost all the accounts of barbarism on the Eastern Front are still about the barbarism of Germans and German forces or security police. We need to see this much more as a symbiosis really between what is happening on both sides of the line. One also needs to remember that many of the barbaric acts against partisan areas are typical of how all armies behave in a war against irregulars. From the Soviet point of view we know far too little about the way in which they treated prisoners of war, far too little about battlefield atrocities, far too little about the way in which the Red Army treated its own population. Partly this is because these things are simply never admitted. But it is also true that Russian historiography has no interest in exploring mass rape in Germany and no interest in exploring the deliberate death of Soviet citizens from the Soviet side during this period. […] Finally, it is important to distinguish between what was done to the Jewish population in the area, which fitted with a particular set of priorities for the regime, and what happened in the partisan sweeps, where regular warfare almost always takes the character of civil war and invites atrocities and counter-atrocities. There is a need, then, for a quite sophisticated approach to the issue of barbarization which includes, among other things, an analysis of the perception of one side by the other, the particular circumstances of combat and what it is that reduces the restraints on barbarism. […] 29. How do humans become perpetrators? I take this to mean perpetrators in the sense of ordinary men, people who are non-violent and apparently normal psychologically, who prove themselves capable of engaging in atrocity. It is very important to distinguish between two things here. One is the question of how men – and it is mainly men – commit atrocities. What happens to them in social psychological terms or in physiological terms? How do they actually commit atrocity? And the second thing is what permits atrocity to take place? Why does atrocity happen? I think they are separate issues, because the first is about human behaviour, for which science has a much better answer than history, and the second is about historicizing perpetration. It seems to me that it only works with a particular conjuncture of circumstances. It can be driven ideologically, by political ambition, by racial or tribal rivalry; it can be triggered by some particular set of circumstances. The trigger is very important to understand because most societies, even societies in conflict, do not perpetrate

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atrocities against each other. But there are moments, or sometimes longer periods, when you do get atrocious behaviour. It is very important to understand the historical trigger mechanism which makes that possible. This is not just something in the perpetrator’s mind, but something which happens in the wider context . . . which, in my view, critically removes the restraining element. 30. What was the role of air power in the Second World War, and how does this compare to contemporary wars? It is possible to exaggerate the role of air power in the Second World War. But it is one of the critical factors which made victory possible, and without the effective exercise of air power in the last stages of the war Germany and Japan had no chance of avoiding . . . absolute defeat. Could air power have won the war on its own? […] Almost certainly not. What was important about the Second World War was demonstrating the importance of effective combined arms. And that is exactly what the Germans and the Japanese showed everybody at the beginning of the war. What they failed to do was to sustain that commitment in the face of escalating economic demands and the impact of bombing. So air power does not win the war on its own but it is a critical factor without which it is difficult to see how the Allies would have won. In subsequent wars there was some uncertainty about how air power might be used, but the Americans were convinced of its decisive impact. In Vietnam, for example, they exercised a huge amount of air power, which had no effect in the end on reversing the outcome – which was a victory by poorly armed guerrilla forces. The same happened in Korea. […] The lesson that had to be learnt was that in the Second World War what had been really critical was tactical air power, involving fighter aircraft, fighter-bombers, medium bombers and so forth. And in most of the short wars which have been fought over the course of the last 20 years it has been the tactical exercise of air power which has been critical. Tactical in the sense that it supports the ground forces or in the sense of degrading the military and economic capability of the enemy, which was practised in the Balkans during the Bosnian war and the Kosovo war. It took a long time for air-force commanders to understand that the lesson of the Second World War is not that you drop lots and lots of bombs on people and flatten their cities, but that you use air power very clinically and if possible in combination with the other armed forces.


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PART IV: HOW SOCIETIES HAVE COME TO TERMS WITH THEIR PASTS 31. What is your assessment of how Germany and Britain have come to terms with their pasts? It is obvious that Germany and Britain have come to terms with their pasts in deeply different ways. Britain was a victor power in both the major world wars. Britain did not suffer during that period anything like the rest of continental Europe: there was no real economic breakdown. It had the recession, but there was nothing like the German inflation or the complete disappearance of Russian capitalism. There was also no civil war and no mass ideologically driven movements. It is possible to look back at that period of British history, as people do, as a history of success, of proving that liberal democracy was the way Europe should have been going too. As a result it is possible to domesticate the experience of the First World War and of the Second World War with stories of continuous heroism in a just cause. It is striking that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has chosen to publish a new book on heroism in the Second World War. This seems to me to cement the fact that the British myths of the Second World War are in essence political myths. They are necessary for politicians as reference points. […] For the Germans, of course, it has been entirely different. […] In 1914 it looked as if the century might be the German century (Germany was at the forefront of the modern in terms of art, technology, science and so forth), and it did turn out to be the German century – but for the wrong reasons, of course. Coming to terms with that descent is an extraordinarily difficult thing. […] What seems remarkable to me is the capacity of German society after the Second World War to become an effective, functioning, democratic, capitalist society again. […] I think that the contrast between the crass way in which the British celebrate their last century and the intellectually sophisticated, culturally demanding, psychologically difficult way in which younger Germans have come to terms with their past is a sobering one. 32. Recently a number of eminent experts on Modern Germany have described the development of German society since 1945 as a great ‘success story’.13 Twenty years ago such an assessment would have raised many eyebrows, but not today. What is your view of this? I do think that the evolution of Modern Germany over the past 60 years is a success story – if a nation can claim to have a success story. Of course historians are very alive to the fact that this raises a number of paradoxes, not the least, of course, that a lot of those West Germans who dominated the elites of the 1950s and the 1960s had been in the SS or the Hitler Youth and so forth, or had

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been engaged in some approving activity in the Third Reich. […] But one has to remember what it is that had to be overcome. Not just the level of physical destruction, but the psychological crisis facing so many Germans in 1945. […] After the Second World War there was also a strong sense of German victimhood along the lines of ‘We were all victims of the Third Reich’ or ‘victims of Hitler’; or ‘We were victimized by the Allies’ or ‘victimized by Communists in Eastern Europe’. What it did not then produce was a politics of revenge. What it did not produce was a rerun of what had happened after 1918–19. One might say that there was not much room for manoeuvre and that the coming of the Cold War helped to cement Germany with its strong anti-Communist credentials into the Western bloc – a coincidence which speeded up that process of integration both within German society and then between Germany and the wider international community. But that should not mask the fact that for many Germans there was so much to come to terms with, so much to realize, so much raking over what had happened in the recent past. That was a very difficult thing to do. And it was done in the face of a great deal of hostile external criticism. For example: the idea that the Germans were solely to blame for the war and the Holocaust, or that all Germans were Nazis. These are simple stereotypes which have survived in some quarters right down to the present day. So it was not just a question of overcoming their own past, but overcoming what other people thought about their past, which was an equally difficult thing to do. And I think that they have done it with an extraordinary degree of self-knowledge, sense of responsibility and vigilance. […] 33. There has been a growing literature emphasizing the immorality and illegality of Allied bombing, declaring Allied bombing of German cities a war crime comparable to Nazi or Japanese war atrocities.14 What is your view on these claims and the fact that some of these books sell vast numbers of copies? This is an extraordinarily contested area and it is one of those areas where one has to choose one’s words extremely carefully. I was very distressed to discover myself in a book recently described as one of the enthusiasts for bombing simply because I had described the effects bombing had on Germany and estimated them as much more effective than much of the conventional discourse suggests. When discussing the question of bombing it is very important to separate out the historical judgement of what it did from the moral judgement of whether you think that bombing whole cities and incinerating their inhabitants is a good thing. Obviously I do not think that! – and who would think that? Simply writing about bombing and its impact does not by implication mean that one regards bombing as ethically acceptable. […] The issue of whether it was a war crime is a more vexed question and it raises a lot of interesting issues about perpetration and about the relationship between perpetration of atrocity and modernity or


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modern systems. […] What we need to do when we talk about bombing is to understand what it is about modern systems of war-making which made the bombing choice possible, because Allied airmen knew they were imposing high levels of civilian casualty. […] We need to reconstruct the intellectual or mental world and the institutional structures which made it possible to do it over and over again. Not just for 6 months but for 4 or 5 years. Historians have an obligation to explain how that is possible. […] Whether it is a war crime or how you define it as a war crime is an issue of international law or moral philosophy rather than an issue of history. But I do think that it is an important issue why nobody has any doubt that it was an atrocity when German soldiers burnt down a Russian village in the middle of a partisan sweep, but it was not regarded as an atrocity, certainly not regarded as a war crime, when Allied bombers incinerated a whole city. That does raise extremely awkward questions which historians are perhaps not well equipped to answer. […]


PA R T I

The Way History is or Ought to be Written


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Mapping the World: Richard Overy and The Times Atlas of World History Jeremy Black

The standard approach to historiography is deeply flawed. Telephone-kiosk history – works for which all those interested can be fitted into a telephone kiosk – prevails. Scholarly weight is usually measured in terms of new ideas and the related research, but generally in very narrow fields, and there is an undervaluation of the wider angle. Related to this, there is an underplaying of the scholarship involved in explication, let alone of the importance of the latter. As another linked problem, reaching out to a popular audience tends not to attract those concerned with historiography. This indeed is a major difficulty with the latter subject as conventionally studied and taught, and is particularly the case with the tools of the trade, the ancillaries of history, such as historical dictionaries and encyclopedia, and, in this case, historical atlases, which are crucial to the creation of spatial images and narratives of the past. Yet these works are used by far larger numbers than are conventional works of historiography, and, crucially, they form a bridge to an adult world that is not obliged to fulfil particular pedagogic functions. Richard Overy has played a major role in the public understanding of the past through his work in historical atlases. This has been twofold: first, his own atlas on the twentieth century, The Times Atlas of the 20th Century (1996); and, secondly, his role as one of the editors of the Times historical atlases, the leading large-format historical atlases, the first being published in 1978 as The Times Atlas of World History but now, rather misleadingly, entitled The Times Complete History of The World. This appeared in new editions in 1984, 1989, 1993, 1999, 2004 and 2007, and the purpose of this article is to focus on the last three editions. Overy is the fourth of the editors, each of whom has been an innovative scholar of great and deserved international distinction. The first two editions were edited by Geoffrey Barraclough, the third by Norman Stone, the fourth by Geoffrey Parker, and the fifth, sixth and seventh by Overy. This essay aims to set Overy’s contribution in context. It does so not only through a careful study of the successive editions of the Times Atlas (the title employed here for consistency’s

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sake even though no longer used by the publishers), but also by means of an interview conducted on 6 March 2008.1 The first edition was a major project in which about £500,000 was invested,2 an enormous sum for the time. This historical atlas very much contrasted with the dominant style of German historical atlases of the period, Germany being the most prestigious national school3 and particularly influential in the USA. The German works displayed a much greater concern with line precision, but also less imaginative cartography and an absence of supporting text. The selfconscious innovative approach and methodology of the new atlas were reflected in the perspectives of its maps: special computer-derived map projections were used. As Geoffrey Barraclough noted in his introduction: ‘We have sought . . . to emphasise different historical situations by employing a variety of different projections . . . the results may not always be familiar, but we believe they may open new insights.’4 Thus, the map of the rise of the Ottoman Empire helped to stress the importance of trans-Pontine Europe and of the Turkish gains at the expense of the Mamelukes, instead of focusing, as was conventionally the case, on the Turkish advance into the Balkans. Similarly, the map of the resurgence of Muslim power from 1520 to 1639, itself an instructive time-scale, stretching from Bengal to Morocco, offered a perspective that brought the centres of the Muslim world into prominence. Most strikingly, the map of the Adriatic, with the south provocatively at the top, threw considerable light on Venetian strategic problems, as well as indicating the significance of Otranto, which the Turks seized in 1480. This map indicated the importance of John Cole’s observation that, by thinking of each country or region as having a right way up and as being mapped on a particular projection, we may limit our perception of past problems.5 The Times Atlas also made a definite attempt to break away from Eurocentricity, and this was correctly seen as one of its defining points, designed to make it both intellectually and cartographically distinctive and novel, as well as more attractive commercially. Barraclough claimed: Our aim has been to present a view of history, which is world-wide in . . . conception and presentation and which does justice, without prejudice or favour, to the achievements of all peoples in all ages and in all quarters of the globe.6

In fact, the balance was still in favour of the history of European peoples, and, albeit to a considerably lesser extent, has largely remained so. While, for example, one double-page spread in the fourth edition of the concise version (1992) was devoted to Africa c. 900–1800, ten were entirely devoted to Europe in this period, and Europe also played a major role in another two. Moreover, Asia received far more attention than Africa or America before the European impact, while there was a relative lack of South Asian compared to East Asian coverage. Nevertheless,

M A P P I N G T H E WO R L D

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the atlas was more global than its German counterparts, and also sought to demonstrate global relationships. Barraclough wrote of: links and interplays . . . it is not simply a series of national histories loosely strung together . . . it is concerned less with particular events in the history of particular countries than with broad movements . . . spanning whole continents.7

Aside from world maps, the first edition of the Times Atlas also demonstrated relationships in a number of maps that combined much of Eurasia and part of North Africa. The perspective is particularly useful for polities based on western Asia, such as those of Alexander the Great and his successors, as well as Byzantium and (as mentioned above) most of the major Islamic states.8 Such coverage is especially appropriate for demonstrating the impact of nomadic peoples on settled societies, for example the extent to which the Mongols impinged on China, Persia and Europe.9 In ‘The Crisis of the Classical World’, rather than seeing the ‘Barbarian’ invasions as an assault only on the Roman world, the atlas presented these (correctly) as a series of related crises, stretching to China, with dynamism provided by the ubiquitous arrow.10 The map of medieval trade routes also linked Europe to China. There were also welcome additions in successive editions. Thus, the fourth edition included ‘Italy Divided’, a new map which vividly illustrated the political fragmentation of north-west Italy in the early Modern period, the specialism of the editor, Geoffrey Parker. This map, however, replaced the already mentioned map of the Adriatic, the perspective of which was felt too novel for many readers.11 With its innovative use of interesting perspectives and its coverage of much non-political material, the Times Atlas has altered the general perception of what a historical atlas of the world should contain. By 1995, the main atlas was available in 17 languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Hebrew and Portuguese, and had sold 1.1 million copies. The publisher sold the film to other publishers or printed it for them. Times Books provided black film with boxes around the maps, the co-publishers translated the text and sent back their own black film, to which Times Books added the maps. Some of the foreign-language editions contained additional material. The French publishers insisted on changes for their version, Le Grand Atlas de l’histoire mondiale (Paris, 1979), while Atlante Storico Mondiale (Milan, 1993), which was based on the third edition of the Times Atlas, included an Italian section with 23 large pages of text and illustrations, offering a miniature history of Italy, followed by a largely political and military cartographic section with 107 maps. The Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira Atlas Histórico (Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, 1992), which was also based on the third edition, included, at the end, a history of Portugal illustrated with maps, although, unfortunately, none dealt with the last three centuries.

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The Times Atlas was a great success, but also very much of its time, both conceptually and technologically. For example, there was a progressive ideology, with a clear, differentiated notion of civilization, one that was readily separable from an uncivilized barbarian ‘other’. The spread on the commercial and cultural bonds of Eurasia was preceded by a section introduction stating: By ad 100 . . . an unbroken zone of civilized life from the Atlantic to the Pacific . . . The area of civilization was still narrow and exposed to unrelenting barbarian pressures, and development in the different regions was still largely autonomous; but with the expansion of the major civilizations and the elimination of the geographical gaps between them, the way was open for inter-regional contacts.

There was also a technological limitation, in that the first edition was very much of its time with its artwork and peelcoat-based mapmaking. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there had been a rapid spread in the use of transparent overlays of plastic material for drawing and scribing, while photography replaced lithography in the main process of map reproduction in the 1950s and 1960s. A map was compiled as a multilayered system of overlays, with information registered on a base map on which typographers had placed type. Peelcoats (photographically opaque films) had information for each colour on the map scribed (cut) away, so that the reproduction house could expose each peelcoat, make a suitably coloured printing film, and then combine the films for proofing. Since there was one peelcoat for each tint on a map, a single map might require ten or twelve peelcoats. This was expensive in materials, and any correction was clumsy, slow and costly. The computer-based systems of the 1990s and 2000s, in contrast, offered ease of production, and thus more editorial control and product coherence. Computers store material previously divided between several flaps in a database, and maps are produced as a raster that consists of many minute dots. These record symbols as dots, lines or surfaces, and the information can be presented on screen, where it can be edited, and the entire map printed out in one process. Geographic base maps are stored as digital images, and the separation of storage (the digital map) and display makes the analysis and presentation of the data more flexible. Manuscript and printed maps can be added to the computer data bank by digitization, using either a cursor that traces the line on the map, with the position of the cursor being recorded by an electronic co-ordinate system, or an automatic scanner. Digitization allows colours and typestyles to be changed, either individually or globally throughout a project, at the touch of a button, and line and colour work can be modified almost as easily. This makes it possible to plan for coherence and continuity in an atlas. Design and cartographic processes therefore can


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be integrated more easily. It is possible endlessly to modify bases to fit the design requirements. The entire world coastline and world drainage area are available on databases. They can be output in different projections, in different sizes and with different centre points, which saves the endless process of drawing coastlines for individual maps. This makes it easy to rescale a map while designing the spread on which it goes, which was complete anathema in the 1980s. Furthermore, it is easy to design, use and modify complex and pictorial symbols, and to achieve fades and blends which hitherto were very clumsy or downright impossible. All of this makes it much easier to design a map that not only looks good and is accurate, but also appears impressive when integrated with other elements such as timelines, photographs, text, artwork and so on. Digitization frees up editors. In the 1990s, in contrast, the cartographic process was so complex and unwieldy that the editor had scant control. He or she was presented with a symbol design, for example, or a way of presenting a particular piece of information, as a fait accompli. Now, instead of concentrating on the exigencies of the production processes for maps, and being ruled by them, editors are able to devote more attention to how best to communicate information, which increases the potential commercial value of an atlas, although it also poses a challenge to editors. New technology provided an opportunity for a radical reworking of the Times Atlas. Much of the earlier work ‘creaked’, both conceptually and in terms of presentation, and Overy was aware of this, having been employed as a consultant on the fourth edition. There had in truth been problems with the atlas from the outset. To take examples from the first edition that are still in place, a full-page map opposite the text ‘The Rise of the Modern State in Northwest Europe 1500 to 1688’ included the British Isles, France and the Low Countries – a valuable combination; but, whereas the Dutch Revolt, as well as French rebellions between 1568 and 1653, and British counterparts between 1497 and 1638, were included, there were separate maps for the French Wars of Religion and the British Civil Wars. Thus readers were offered neither a map of the Wars of Religion nor one of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis. Similarly, in ‘The Emancipation of the Peasantry’, a valuable map of a generally unmapped issue, depicting the situation in the early nineteenth century was confused by including the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. Colin Jones, a prominent scholar of modern French history, glanced at more widespread difficulties when he noted: I was asked to revise the Times Historical Atlas maps on the French Revolution. The first edition had completely incomprehensible boundaries for the 1789 Great Fear. When I queried this, they sent me almost literally some back of the envelope scribblings based on a non-historian reading G. Lefebvre’s book on the subject – but on a particular page – they had missed Lefebvre’s map altogether.12

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Moreover, as Overy was well aware, the mapping of American history was poor and there were serious gaps in the coverage of Chinese history. In 1995, it was suggested that ‘it is time to rethink totally the Times Atlas, not least by increasing the number of maps so that their individual chronological range is reduced’.13 There was thus a serious problem at the time Overy was brought in to edit the atlas. He had a background of work on the historical atlas of the Second World War, edited by John Keegan,14 for which he had produced the innovative maps on air warfare. This led to his being asked to do more work for that atlas, although he was dismayed by the level of error in it. His work on this atlas recommended him to the publisher; so also did his work on the fourth edition of the Times Atlas. The publisher’s viewpoint was set out in a letter sent in 1999 by Thomas Cussans, then Senior Publishing Manager at HarperCollins: We have just completed an entirely new edition of the big Times Atlas of World History, now known as The Times History of the World (the change of title is an attempt to broaden the book’s appeal; time will tell whether it is misguided). The book, being published early next month, has been taken to pieces and very largely reassembled, chiefly because for the first time the maps were produced digitally, which in turn allowed us the opportunity for a major re-fit. Frankly, 20 years on, it was high time. Though the underlying structure remains much as before, the appearance has been transformed and a number of new features added. At the same time, every text has been re-written. It has been a monumental effort, but well worth it. It is a spectacular-looking beast and as a work of history still pretty impressive.15

The result was indeed impressive. One major opportunity, however, was still missed: the historical cartographic perspective. There was no real attempt to include examples of historical maps, setting past views of the world in contrast with modern knowledge in order to underline that ours is not the only way to consider space, place and the world. This lack of cartographic variety across time in the Times Atlas was linked to a somewhat overly determined account of history. It is also instructive to consider how the contemporary conception of space, as defined on historical maps, played a crucial role in the decisions of major players. One good example would be the inclusion of the reconstruction of the world map by Paolo Toscanelli (1474) that showed Asia to be on the western side of an easily traversable Atlantic, a map that helped convince Christopher Columbus to sail west from Spain in 1492. It is also possible to superimpose symbols, for example arrows and battle sites, on the historical map.16 In addition, the fifth edition of the Times Atlas was very much a book with maps. There was little integration of texts and maps. Moreover, the maps were a good summary of highly conventional cartographic techniques of the period, but did not compare with the cartography and cartographic methods of The


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Historical Atlas of Canada, a justly acclaimed work, which also represented an impressive development in atlas production.17 Nevertheless, the fifth edition of the Times Atlas represented a major advance on earlier editions, not least in layout. Furthermore, four additional spreads appeared in it. There was also cross-fertilisation from The Times Atlas of the 20th Century, which, at 239 pages, offered a detailed coverage of its subject. For example, there were 14 maps on the Middle East, including detailed maps of Kurdistan, Lebanon, the Yom Kippur War and the Israeli-Palestinian agreement. In the sixth edition of the Times Atlas, there was another welcome extension in the geographical range, with new spreads on New Zealand and Polynesia, Korea, Canada and Mexico. In addition, thematic spreads were added at the close: on warfare since 1945, terrorism, racism and deportation, and the crises in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Both of these developments reflected Overy’s commitment to comprehensiveness and to an explicit engagement with topics. In his introduction to the sixth edition, Overy noted: An effort has been made to spread the scope of the atlas geographically, particularly with more emphasis on the Americas and the Pacific rim . . . The new spreads on the modern age are intended to reflect the lengthening period since the end of the Second World War . . . Though its shadow still lingers, the nature of the world system and the issues that confront the contemporary world have changed very substantially since 1945.

The introduction also referred to the revival of popular religion worldwide, ‘an outcome that seemed unlikely when the first edition of this atlas was put together’, and to environmental issues. This commitment to comprehensiveness and, for the recent period, to a topic section was taken further in the seventh edition, which, quite properly, took account of the changing nature of the world in recent decades, more particularly since the end of the Cold War, not least environmental concerns and the salience of religion. By the summer of 2007, when this edition appeared, over two million copies had been sold, sales continued to hold up despite the high price (which, indeed, was noted by Overy in conversation), and the atlas had been translated into 18 languages. Consideration of new editions generally focuses on the coverage of recent decades, not least because they witness the most revision and are the centre of sales publicity; but it is also pertinent to consider earlier sections. Here the atlas benefits from the projections made easier by the technology referred to above, as in the map of South-West Asia used to depict the first cities. Some of the more questionable assumptions of earlier editions, however, remain in place. For example, the section opener ‘The First Civilisations’ asserts a dichotomy ‘between the civilized world and the barbarian world outside’, an approach that dramatically underplays the more positive interaction frequently seen, for example between

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China and the steppe peoples. Linked to this overly stark division is a tendency to provide clear boundary lines when it would have been useful, in text and cartographic devices, to suggest less distinct boundaries. This can be seen repeatedly, not least in the depiction of archaeologically defined cultures, and in the maps of the Hellenistic world in 241 bc and 188 bc and of the Germanic kingdoms in 493 ad. A more informed position is taken with the maps of the Seljuk, Churid, Qara-Khitan, Khwarizm and Qara Qoyunlu Empires, for the keys reveal that the boundaries are approximate; similarly, with the use of core areas in the map of major states of north India, c. 1390–1450.18 Alongside overly firm boundaries, there is still an overuse of arrows without any real discussion of the problems they pose. Large arrows moving in a general direction, for instance those in the map on tenth- and eleventh-century monastic reform in Western Europe,19 are essentially diagrammatic, pictorial and readily understood, but their value for analytical purposes, and the degree to which they describe events or processes at the scale used, are both limited. In contrast, the traditional geographical techniques of area, line and point use more precise methods, such as dot distribution or choropleth maps, that may, however, be more difficult to understand. The Times Atlas concentrates on the former type of map, though with valuable exceptions, such as the map of the medieval colonization of the Black Forest. This map highlights what was absent in much of the atlas’s more conventional cartography, such as the map immediately underneath on Christian commercial expansion in the Mediterranean from 950. The latter map runs together political events from 924 to 1235 (one wonders if such simultaneity would be displayed for 1697 to 2008) and does not use the opportunity to depict trading bases or any indices of the size of or change in trade. Unfortunately, the text here and elsewhere consists of supporting essays rather than explication of the map, which is a major lost opportunity. This, however, points up a quandary in all historical atlases, namely the extent to which they are to be seen as true historical atlases, with the focus on maps, rather than studies of the past in which maps and text are independent forms of explication. Whatever the criticism, the Times Atlas, fortunately, is not an ‘atlas’ of the type in which maps do not predominate.20 There are also more detailed quandaries and problems in the latest edition of the Times Atlas. On the spread ‘The Age of Revolt 1773–1814,21 there are questions about the respective sizes of the maps, about what is shown on them, and about the descriptions offered by the key. In regard to the first of these, the space devoted to the Batavian Republic is disproportionate to that given to the American War of Independence, and the map of the former does not contribute anything. It only shows boundaries, and their limited significance is not brought out. In contrast, the small scale of the map of the War of Independence means that relatively little is displayed. Seven battles are depicted, but the choice


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is curious. ‘Jamestown July 1781’ scarcely compares in significance with Long Island, Brandywine or Guilford Court House, all of which are omitted. Moreover, the map of revolts and revolutions in Europe and America is actively misleading, presenting, as it does, Hungary in 1790 as an area of peasant revolt, when, as the text makes clear, aristocratic opposition was more significant. The years 1755 and 1793 are given as the dates for rebellion in Corsica, not the key year, 1768. All of this indicates the extent to which all historical atlases are works in progress. This makes the opportunity to interview an editor particularly valuable. Such an interview underlines the extent to which individual perspectives and choices shape what are presented as authoritative works of reference, and also draws attention to the manner in which the role of historiography in intellectual history and historical method does not, unfortunately, generally extend to the more popular types of historical work, such as historical atlases, despite their importance for popular views. More particularly, much of the fashionable work on cartography in the last quarter-century, such as the writings of Brian Harley and Denis Cosgrove, is apt to detect bias, if not conspiracy, and then to make it the analytical, if not explanatory, device for the subject.22 In contrast, information about the actual processes involved in mapmaking, such as that obtained through the interview process, underline the autonomous character of mapmaking, and the important role of the practical problems involved in the acquisition, analysis and depiction of information. It is striking how little use has been made of interviews or, indeed, questionnaires. There are of course serious problems with this approach. The most readily apparent is that of confidentiality, for the relationship between authors or editors and publishers is such that it is unlikely that many details about the process of production will be vouchsafed, especially if disagreements occur. This situation is not specific to atlases but is part of a more general problem, and one that leads to the frequently misleading tendency to judge works by their finished form. For example, how many editors of collected works have been criticized for a failure to include a chapter on a or b when one was indeed commissioned but the author failed to deliver? – and so on. Yet, for atlases, this relationship between editors and publishers is more important because the publishers play a greater role than with most books, as they define the parameters for the cartography. In so far as atlases are map-based, this is a crucial point, and it remains one for the Times Atlas despite its change of title, to which, Overy is happy to admit, he was very opposed. Overy thought highly of the first edition of the Times Atlas, feeling that it was the best historical atlas of the time, for its comprehensiveness and for its scholarly rigour. He argued that many historical books contain maps, but that these maps fail in nearly every account, as they lack geographical information to go with the symbols displayed. Liking the texture and physicality that effective mapping

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offers history, he welcomes the detail such mapping provides, and indeed detail is an aspect of the liking for maps felt by many of those who produce them. Overy finds cartography a challenge in representing history in imaginative ways, noting that it gives something that is missing if absent. To him there is also an inherent interest in what the map will tell the reader. He correctly argues the value of the spatial sense and the need to locate where events occurred and the spatial relationship between points, as with the Holocaust, which, he points out, was seriously neglected in British and German historical atlases of the 1970s and 1980s, including the Times Atlas. More generally, he emphasizes the value of an adequate accompanying text, which, indeed, is a feature of this work. In taking on the editorship, Overy saw the need to digitise the maps and, in providing a comprehensive redrawing, to make corrections, but he also felt it necessary to use the opportunity to provide a less Eurocentric atlas. Arguing that China provided the ‘central spine in world history’, he found it ‘bizarre’ that several centuries of Chinese history had been left out in the early editions, and, in the fifth edition, this led to an improved treatment of China, but he states that it was difficult to find Chinese scholars willing to think geographically. In the sixth edition, there was a need, he felt, to improve the treatment of China anew, while maps of New Zealand and Korea were also added. The latter reflected a marketing decision but also an opportunity, as Korea has a complex history. The factor governing how much could be done in terms of actually redrawing entire maps while Overy was editor was in large part the cost of doing this. Even if a greater number of changes were desirable, it was necessary to make choices. This is a key explanation for the pace and nature of what has been possible during Overy’s editorship. He was also concerned about the poor treatment of the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This he attributed to the lack of American scholars thinking geographically, which, he argues, led to a poorer quality of mapping in the American spreads. Linked to this, he notes the limited quality of American feedback on the atlas, and, more specifically, the lack of interest in producing a map of Native Americans over the last three centuries. More positively, Overy throws light on changes that he is able to make. Having decided that the mapping of the Industrial Revolution was very repetitive and provided ‘a rather uninteresting story’, he reduced this in favour of expanding the treatment of Napoleon, as more was now known about the Napoleonic Empire. Similarly, there was major coverage of the Holocaust. Indeed, there was a more general treatment of racism and ethnic violence, including a discussion of the Armenian Massacres, which were referred to as such. This led to some anxiety about whether the atlas could be sold in Turkey, but it was not a determining issue, and the coverage of the massacres has continued, even though the atlas is banned from Turkey. Overy also made a major commitment to providing thematic maps at the close of the atlas. Originally developed in his atlas of the


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twentieth century, these aroused some scepticism in the publisher, Times Atlases, but, in the end, they were included, and offer a valuable global component to what is an atlas of world history. Subsequent changes have followed the mould of the fifth edition, and this is seen as a continuing process. Indeed, before the fifth edition was published, consideration was already being devoted to the sixth, which contained several additional spreads. The seventh edition was no more than an updating tweak, but the eighth edition will include an overhaul of the American spreads. These are encouraging developments, which reflect Overy’s commitment to mapping what is relevant. Clearly, there are other ways to do this, and, in particular, it is not clear that the text adds as much as the maps. Moreover, the latter lack much of the detail that Overy correctly applauds, notably detail of the topography. For example, the detail offered in the map of France under Louis XIV (p. 215) is lacking in many of the maps. On the same spread, the map of the War of the Spanish Succession, repeated from earlier editions, is flat and offers little detail. Moreover, compared to the standard German works, there is an impressionistic character to some of the mapping, which is a disappointment as digitization provides opportunities for such detail. The overall conclusion is favourable to Overy in that the maps added in his editions are generally an improvement on what has come before. However, there has not been a comparable willingness to discard and replace some of the earlier maps, and there is room for more change here. What is impressive is that Overy has taken a well-established work and has improved it greatly. The Times Atlas is no longer focused on the cartography of the 1970s. The imagination of the original has been preserved and its quality has been enhanced. Hopefully, Overy will preserve details of his interaction with the publishers and contributors for the archives. This will throw light on the resolution of inherent cleavages in the process of atlas production: editor versus publisher, text versus maps, and vision versus technological limitations.


3

Martin Spahn, Hilaire Belloc and the Rise of Fascism: Fellow Travellers of a New ‘Political Religion’? Ulrike Ehret

Martin Spahn and Hilaire Belloc were already well-known writers, historians and politicians by the time they emerged as outspoken advocates of the political right in the interwar years. To many Catholics in Britain and America, especially among writers and intellectuals, Hilaire Belloc was ‘a giant as a man of letters’, the ‘most prominent Catholic figure of the age’, who became the ‘emblem of right-wing Catholicism’ in the interwar period.1 A staunch defender of Catholic culture and the interests of the poor, Belloc came to eulogise Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco as the men who would save Europe from materialist and Bolshevik doom. Martin Spahn’s ‘conversion’ from the socially conservative yet democratic Centre Party to the right-wing German Nationalist People’s Party (DNVP) in 1921 had gained the DNVP significant publicity and popularity among conservative Catholics.2 To them, Spahn offered a nationalist yet Christian alternative to the Centre Party and the anti-Catholicism of völkisch groups. This mixture of nationalist pride and Catholic faith became a pole to which sections of the disintegrating Catholic milieu, particularly Catholic youth, students, academics and nobles, gravitated. Spahn eventually left the right-wing DNVP to join the faction of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in the Reichstag in June 1933 without becoming a member of the party itself. Contemporaries as well as historians have seen in the First World War and the social and political upheaval that followed it a break in European history that ended an older order.3 Writers like Arthur Koestler and Klaus Mann celebrated the profound changes in society and mores as an avant-garde liberation, a time when old values had to be reviewed, judged and revised.4 To others, these new times symbolized the loss of social and moral certitudes. In her search for the origins of totalitarian thought, Hannah Arendt emphasized the importance of the loss of tradition, purpose and meaning – particularly of the ‘Roman trinity of authority, tradition and religion’. Men and women emerged into a void, where an ideology like fascism or communism appeared to offer the ‘escape into wholeness’ they had longed for.5 Following Arendt’s cue, historians like Emilio Gentile and

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Roger Griffin recently revised the older concept of ‘political religion’ as a process of ‘sacralisation of politics’ by fascist and communist movements. Their promise of ‘wholeness’ and the advance of a ‘new man’ and thus a new society, Gentile and Griffin argue, contributed significantly to the popular appeal of such movements.6 The return of ‘political religion’ initiated a lively debate among historians. From among the critics, the cautions of Roger Eatwell and Geoff Eley are relevant to this story. Both fear that a focus on fascist style over substance obscures the political, material and social interests that people pursued in their support for fascist movements.7 On a different occasion, Geoff Eley acknowledges that the twentieth century saw the institutionalization of a novel ideology, an amalgam of popular sovereignty and ethnic nationalism that increasingly targeted minorities. At the same time, he stresses that such an ideology was bound to political structures and historical actors and that the interwar democratic republics were failed by ‘undemocratic conservatives’.8 Hilaire Belloc and Martin Spahn wrote and worked between the conflicting poles of traditional religion (Catholicism), nation and modernity. They were of the same generation. Belloc was born in August 1870 in St Cloud, near Paris, to the French–Irish barrister Louis Belloc and his English wife, Elisabeth Parker Belloc. Spahn was born five years later into a prominent family of German political Catholics in Marienburg, a far-eastern corner of Imperial Germany, just south of Danzig. They were both too old to fight in the First World War and post-war revolutions, events that marked the lives of those born between 1890 and 1905 and who were most likely to support the new style of politics offered by the nationalist right.9 Although both eventually subscribed to fascism and National Socialism, it wasn’t the promise of a new religion that led to their conversion. On the contrary, it was the hope of seeing their traditional beliefs and values return to the heart of European society under the protection of these movements. Belloc and Spahn shared a world view resembling a conservative, Catholic ‘cultural code’. They criticized the materialism of the modern world, championed Christian values and preferred a ‘social Caesarism’ to parliamentary democracy. An integral part of their world view was an anti-Semitism that saw in the Jews a conspiratorial force behind world finance, communism and party politics to the detriment of European Christian nations. Yet neither Belloc nor Spahn started their careers in reactionary conservatism. Belloc had been a radical Liberal Member of Parliament and Martin Spahn had grown up politically in the moderate conservative milieu of the largely Catholic Centre Party favouring a modernizing Bismarckian conservatism. Their different biographies and experiences in national political cultures inevitably shaped their perceptions of the world. Yet had they met, they would not have agreed on even the core principles of their world views, such as their Catholicism and admiration for a corporative social order. Catholicism for Belloc was a revolutionary force in the form

M A R T I N S PA H N , H I L A I R E B E L L O C A N D T H E R I S E O F F A S C I S M

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of Leo XIII’s papal encyclical Rerum Novarum as well as the source of European Christian culture. To Spahn, Catholicism was the conservative rock on which traditional society could be rebuilt, but it was essentially only one means to a more important end: the union of the German nation. Both were zealous missionaries in the pursuit of their ideals, to which they devoted their political activity as well as their historical writings. Belloc’s ideal was the return of Catholic culture as the main political and moral source for a reformed, socially just European society. Spahn wrote and campaigned for a true conservative national union of all Germans, Protestant and Catholic, in a new German Reich. This article follows Belloc and Spahn on their respective missions, the evolution of their world views and how these directed their political activities and shaped their views and uses of history. Their chosen paths show that neither Belloc nor Spahn fell into a social and moral void after the upheavals of the interwar years. Not the lure of a new ‘political religion’ but their old beliefs in, and ideals of, the powers of traditional religion and nationalism (respectively) inspired their missions and their journeys.

GROWING CERTITUDES: EARLY INFLUENCES Belloc studied Modern History from 1892 at Balliol College, Oxford, as one of the few Catholics to be enrolled at university after the 1871 Act opened English universities to Catholics.10 It was here that his eccentric persona was crafted. Clever, cynical and belligerent in debate, Belloc celebrated his first successes as polemicist and orator as president of the Oxford Union (the university debating society) and cultivated a style of argument he would later expound in his writing.11 Even then, he was known for his exaltation of French culture and Catholicism but also as a fervent advocate of democracy and an opponent of statist tendencies. These principles had their roots in earlier influences. Intellectually Belloc was inspired by a mélange of the Parkes family’s radical liberalism12 and the social Catholicism of Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster Henry Edward Manning. Cardinal Manning had been a family friend since the conversion of Bessie Belloc to Catholicism in 1864 and later became Belloc’s early spiritual and political mentor.13 Belloc adopted Manning’s love for European Catholic social thought, democracy and Christian-style socialism, but also his contempt for the parliamentary party system as a camouflage for greed.14 Belloc eventually professed a Catholicism more radical than that of England’s Catholic gentry or conservative Catholics on the Continent. He also lacked the sentimental enthusiasm of the convert and was scornful of the then fashionable mysticism of a personal union with God.15 Belloc saw himself as a natural sceptic, and people who got to know him were surprised that there was so little ‘religion’ in him.16 Belloc’s Catholicism was more absolute,

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an act of will and faith in its dogma. ‘Être Catholique, c’est tout . . . to remake Europe is our intense and urgent call,’ he wrote to Ronald Knox on the occasion of his conversion.17 Essentially, however, he was touched by the mysticism that shrouded the universally identical rites of celebrating Catholic Mass.18 In politics, Belloc was as radical and obstinate as he was in his religion. He essentially began his political life as a social revolutionary and crusader for the exploited.19 Wilson, Belloc’s biographer, suggests that ‘Belloc had Manning to thank for the fact that he was not a socialist’.20 Aged 19, Belloc witnessed the stark social injustice in Britain in the grievances of London’s dock-workers during their 1889 strike. Belloc consequently dedicated his journalistic skills to political movements that promised ways to realise his ideals of social justice and Catholic culture. Together with Gilbert Keith Chesterton, he supported the syndicalist unions in Britain. Belloc saw in syndicalism and its emphasis on ownership and participatory democracy an antidote to the ‘Servile State’ that dictated the entire life and work of its citizens.21 Next to his concern for social justice Belloc pursued his other main aim in politics: to further Catholic interests and to ‘enlighten’ the public about the corruption of Britain’s elites. As Liberal MP for South Salford (1906–10), he opposed the Education Act 1902 because it withheld public aid to sectarian, and thus also to Catholic, schools, and he supported Home Rule for Ireland.22 It was not long, however, before Belloc lost faith in the reality of a democratic society. His experience as an MP ultimately confirmed his view of the unjust and corrupt government by parliament.23 The Marconi Affair (a scandal around business and financial investments by cabinet ministers based on insider information) a year later only confirmed his suspicion of an alleged Jewish conspiracy, the corruption of the elites and the deficiencies of parliamentary democracy.24 These experiences and Belloc’s skewed interpretation of British national politics were noticeable breaks in his political life which changed him from a social radical in youth to a burned-out republican in middle age to an advocate of ‘social Caesarism’ in the 1920s. Eventually, the Spanish Civil War was the catalyst in the ossification of his views on the Jews and the advantages of a dictatorship. Yet he had found the cornerstones of his political and religious beliefs, which accompanied him through life: the liberty of the individual from undue intrusions by state power; and the wider distribution of private property to the end that every citizen was able to participate in government independent of political or economic constraints.25 In contrast to Belloc, Spahn was all about the nation. History and religion were mere means to further this guiding principle. Spahn would later claim that it was Marienburg Castle, of the Teutonic Knights, that had nurtured his love for Prussian history, that it had ‘[sunk] the concept of a nation into his soul without ever leaving it again’.26 While his father, Peter Spahn (born 1868 in Nassau), always considered himself a compulsory Prussian (Muss-Preusse) despite his


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political and professional commitment to the state (he was district judge in Marienburg and later Prussian Minister of Justice between 1917 and 1918), Martin felt Prussian through and through, even though he grew up in the heart of political Catholicism, which fostered a mentality of besieged Catholicism for decades after the Kulturkampf. Like Belloc, Spahn was made at university. Formative for his view of history and his nationalism were his teachers, Protestant national-liberal historians such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Gustav Schmoller and Max Lenz. Their Prussiacentred interpretation of the German nation moored Prussia firmly at the centre of Spahn’s perception of German history.27 He found his ideals in Prussian history, state and statesmen because they had led the German nation from its early beginnings in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations to a unified modern nation. Next to the nation, Catholicism was a lifelong companion for Spahn as it was for Belloc. Yet Spahn experienced its influence through the conservative institutions of German political Catholicism rather than through the presence, talks and thought of one man, as Belloc had taken in Manning’s Catholicism. This difference shaped the two men’s attitudes to Catholicism. To Belloc, Catholicism was a revolutionary and spiritual force that guided his entire life and writing. To Spahn, it was a conservative political and social power, a guarantor of German conservatism and the social order of Imperial Germany. While he was wholeheartedly committed to the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine state, his relationship to political Catholicism, in particular its main representative, the Centre Party, remained tense throughout his life. He saw in the largely Catholic party a hazard to national unity. In his eyes, its foundation had deprived German conservatism of broad Catholic support and thus weakened it considerably.28 Spahn’s main political aim before the First World War, therefore, was to bring Catholics back into the national and conservative fold, to encourage them to withstand the lack of ‘Germanic forces within the Church’.29 This joint struggle of German conservative forces against the political was a political theme Spahn pursued first within the Centre Party and later in the DNVP. In terms of organization of state, Spahn admired the effective and modern organization of the Bismarckian nation state, the paternalistic, ‘skirted democracy’. Before the war in 1914, he elaborated on the disadvantages of democracy in an article in the Catholic learned journal Hochland. Democracy, Spahn explained, was the most unjust rule, a means to deceive the masses, whose only power was to elect its representatives every five years while a clique of professional politicians and international capital held actual power in a ‘terrible absolutist rule’. Spahn shared with Belloc a scepticism of democracy and a love for a ‘soziales Kaisertum’, but not the idea of a ‘general will’ as a government’s legitimacy. Preferable, according to Spahn, was a monarchy in which a just and impartial monarch

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headed the national government and was thus much better suited to further the common good and initiate the social policies necessary to bind the worker to the state, who would otherwise join the socialist movement. Rousseau’s ‘general will’, which Belloc favoured, was for Spahn a force that needed to be kept in check by Prussian paternalistic politics, which favoured the election, by universal vote, of a parliament, but one entirely de-politicized and limited to the role of advisory council to the Kaiser.

DEFENDING CERTITUDES: HISTORY BY SPAHN AND BELLOC The way Belloc and Spahn wrote historical texts depended not solely on their world views but also on their relationships with the historical profession. Both had always been more writer, journalist and politician than academic historian. Belloc never gained the academic post he had so longed for after graduating from Oxford.30 Throughout his life, he had to subsidize his historical writings through his novels, journalism, lecture tours and various editorships of fringe newspapers. The academic career of Spahn, on the other hand, was impressive. He was professor of history in Strasbourg by the age of 25 and continued his career at the University of Cologne after the war. Yet Spahn was hardly found in the lecture halls of his universities and spent more time in the offices of the DNVP in Berlin and the Politische Kolleg, the educational institute he directed from 1921. Neither Spahn nor Belloc, therefore, felt institutionally restrained in their work as historians. In their missions as historians, Martin Spahn and Hilaire Belloc could not have been more different. Spahn wrote national history of the younger Prussian school, stressing the unity of the German Reich rather than the (Protestant) supremacy of Prussia, the latter having been favoured by the previous generation in the tradition of state-historian Heinrich von Treitschke. The intention was instead to join the ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ narratives of German history. Belloc, on the other hand, wrote a decidedly Catholic counter-narrative to the popular histories of England and the British Empire. He sought to contest the Whig bias of British historiography, which emphasized the development of parliamentary government in the rise of the British Empire. In Belloc’s eyes, this historiography exalted the forces that destroyed Catholic universalism and helped spawn a new class of predatory capitalists that prevented England from returning to the Catholic European fold.31 However, to prepare the return of a Catholic culture to England it was necessary to teach Catholics about their history. Without this knowledge there would be no Catholic identity or self-confidence with which to defend Catholic interests in a Protestant national culture.32 If there was a golden rule to Belloc’s history writing it was that ‘conviction


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makes the good historian’.33 His craft was less based on objective facts than on the principle of faith, thus his history was more about expounding a fundamental dogma than a science. He was not overly sensitive about accuracy or objectivity, as history was about ‘flair’, about the senses, smells and spirit of an epoch.34 Objectivity forced history into a sterile corset.35 The protagonists of Belloc’s books often embodied his own philosophical views at the time. As a youthful social revolutionary (in the late 1890s), he wrote on Danton, Robespierre and Napoleon, who, in his interpretation enforced the ‘general will’ that had emancipated the people from a corrupt aristocratic rule in the French Revolution. Napoleon became one of Belloc’s admired ‘energetic men’, who was the ‘incarnation of the community in one man’, the conclusion to the French Revolution, a modern Caesar who managed to unite the French nation on the basis of a new set of values.36 The conviction of the ageing Belloc that history moved according to the antagonism between Catholic and non-Catholic culture was the central conflict that his ‘heroes’ of the religious wars in England, Cranmer, Cromwell and James II, had to battle. Belloc’s focus on historical biography as well as the creative liberties he took in his narrative were very much part of the British tradition of ‘amateur’ historical writing.37 The choice and interpretation of his ‘heroes’ certainly were not. The way Belloc wrote it, history was a mirror that reflected the ‘eternal forces’ that he read into current events – and ‘proved’ his interpretation right. His analysis of Franco’s Spain is a prime example of how his history served as self-fulfilling prophecy as well as of his religious focus on history. Therein, Spain was the most Catholic of European nations. It stood for the Catholic faith as the guardian of Western civilization and an extension of European culture. A victory of the anti-clerical republicans would mean the end of Western Christian civilization.38 In his writings on Spain, Belloc undertook no socio-economic analysis of the situation of the working poor in industrializing the country as he had done in his previous works on Danton, Robespierre and Napoleon, even though their situation was not unlike that of the London dock-workers in 1899, whose efforts Belloc had actively and emotionally supported.39 He identified superficially the deep-seated class struggle but eventually identified the orchestrations of the Communist Party behind the revolt of the industrial proletariat, led essentially by Moscow and assisted by Jews and Freemasons. These forces conspired against the Spanish nation and the Catholic Church because they were not Christian and lacked any national loyalty.40 Franco, on the other hand, was for Spain what Danton, Robespierre and Napoleon were for the French Revolution: the personification of the Spanish people’s ‘general will’.41 To Spahn, writing history was a patriotic duty. To enhance a national consciousness among Germans, historians ought to recount and demonstrate the thousand-year existence of the German people and its path to the glorious

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nation it had become under Bismarck’s guidance.42 Spahn saw in Prussia the prime essence and motor of the German nation. Yet, in contrast to his teachers, he avoided the claim that the nation’s character was essentially Protestant. As historian, he pursued the same aim as he did as politician and publicist: to bring German Catholics into the national fold and raise their consciousness for the German nation as it grew under Bismarck and Prussia.43 Inevitably, Spahn’s main core of historical writing covered Prussian history from the seventeenth century to its rise as a European power. Spahn had good reason to celebrate himself as the educator of German Catholics. The so-called Fall Spahn in 1901 that followed Spahn’s appointment to a designated Catholic professorship at the University of Strassburg essentially confirmed the young professor of history in his task of instilling in his Catholic audience in Alsace a German national consciousness. Against the opposition of conservatives, liberals and academics, such as Theodor Mommsen, who feared for the independence of science, Spahn’s appointment was supported by Emperor Wilhelm II, who saw in this professorship an exercise in nation building as well as a service to the largely Catholic population of the recently acquired Alsace-Lorraine. In a telegraph to Count Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Wilhelm II announced: ‘. . . I am pleased to prove to you and My Catholic subject that I will always employ recognized scientific diligence based on a love of the fatherland [and] fidelity to the Reich to the advantage . . . of the fatherland.’44 Spahn was no more fanatical than Belloc about accuracy in his historical writing. He wrote his histories through a purposeful choice of suitable facts and a deliberate neglect of others. An anthology of biographies of great Germans (Weltgeschichte in Charakterbildern) presented German history in a Prussian light through the conscious choice of subjects who had helped to build Bismarck’s Germany.45 A more transparent instrumentalization of history was Spahn’s report for the Verein deutscher Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller during the First World War that justified its aim to annex Lorraine and its rich resources by selecting arbitrary historical facts that all proved the apparent Germanness of Lorraine.46 Similar to Belloc’s, Spahn’s history said more about his own contemporary views of the world and his ideal of the German nation than of the realities of the past worlds he described. His image of Bismarck, for instance, changed over time and is a mirror of changing conservative and nationalist ideas.47 Up to the outbreak of the First World War, Bismarck was in Spahn’s portrait the guarantor of klein-German unity. During the war Bismarck changed into the champion of a greater Germany that looked towards Eastern Europe as its imperial backyard. Finally, from the 1920s onwards, Spahn projected his increasingly völkisch ideas onto the historical figure of Bismarck, who now spoke for a unified Mitteleuropa under Germany’s guidance, an advocate for a third Reich based on the myths of Volk and Raum.48


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ADVANCING OLD CERTITUDES IN TURBULENT TIMES: THE POST-WAR YEARS Belloc strongly supported Britain’s involvement in the First World War because it fought on France’s side and thus a Christian battle against ‘Prussian barbarism’.49 The historical watersheds of twentieth-century Europe – the First World War and socialist revolutions – did not shatter his world view. He remained stubborn in his renunciation of parliamentary democracy, which he had set out in 1911 in Cecil Chesterton’s The Party System.50 The destructions and upheavals that the war brought only helped to clarify Belloc’s view of Europe’s future, which he published in 1920 in Europe and the Faith.51 He claimed that European culture was essentially Catholic yet embroiled in a cultural struggle with Protestantism. A return to a Catholic Europe was the foundation on which to build his ideal society.52 Like many conservative intellectuals at the time, Belloc identified the fault in post-war modern society as a loss of religion and, so the Bellocian thesis, a battle against the Catholic Church. Yet unlike conservative Catholics on the Continent, he did not see the source of this hostile modernity in democracy and egalitarianism, nor historically in the French Revolution and the ‘ideas of 1789’. Instead, disaster broke over Europe through ‘the Calvinist organisation which spread and strengthened itself, preventing spiritual unity from its origin to our day’.53 In ‘Essay on the Distribution of Property’ (1936), Belloc eventually suggested how contemporary society be organized on the basis of European Catholic civilization.54 By that time he had fully embraced the modern ‘Caesars’, Mussolini and Franco. Much of his latest blueprint for a new society resembled the proposals of conservative Catholics on the Continent. He advocated an ideal of small rural and self-sufficient communities, the organization of society in estates. Different from traditional conservatism, however, was the role of the state, which in Belloc’s view needed to be interventionist in order to protect the independence of the self-governed guilds, distribute property and constantly artificially restore and maintain the new society. Belloc held no illusions about the possibility of reforming the existing capitalist society. What was needed was a radical cultural revolution, possibly using dictatorial powers to protect ‘the middle class standard’ from the powers of high finance and plutocracy.55 For this Belloc favoured not the hereditary dynasties of European monarchies but a dynasty of heroic men who could force society out of the narrow path of petty hedonism: I have no doubt that monarchy is what is needed now in every European nation . . . but . . . an existing dynasty like that of Philip of Orleans would be of the least effect . . . What will save our society when it comes will be some new line of Dynasties sprung from energetic individual men who shall seize power . . . [The present parliamentary system,

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U.E.] is everywhere despised and at the same time it is oppressive and dreadfully corrupt. It means in practice government by a few rich men with an absurd preponderance of financial banking and largely Jewish power. That can’t last.56

Belloc eventually found the new dynasty of energetic men in Benito Mussolini and General Francisco Franco, who appeared to lead the ‘general will’ of the people and re-establish Catholic culture in the heart of Western civilization. He never condemned Mussolini and his methods, including his imperialism and anti-Semitic laws, but showed understanding that a nation on the rise cannot afford an ‘international’ element like the Jews.57 At the same time, Belloc sought to promote the ideals of a corporative, just and morally upright society in his support of guild socialism in Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Distributist Movement. Through Belloc and Chesterton, Distributism became one of the most important influences on Roman Catholic thought in the English-speaking world.58 It grew out of Anglicanism and the traditions of Christian and guild socialism. It promised a society in which everyone was an owner and to secure the citizen’s liberty and independence, eventually fostering a truly democratic society. Belloc and Chesterton still hoped to approach this ideal through the re-education of British society by means of Chesterton’s journal GK’s Weekly. Apart from writing for his friend’s journal, Belloc also toured the country giving talks on the dangers of socialism and unchecked capitalism, leading public debates on the threat to human dignity from materialist science and chairing symposiums on the ‘new societies’ that should emerge. The relative stability of conservative politics and the success story of the young German nation came to an end with Germany’s military defeat in 1918. Spahn had believed in Germany’s victory to the very end and was shocked at the announcement of the Reich’s unconditional surrender.59 Eduard Stadtler, a student and friend of Spahn’s and partner in many publicist and political endeavours of the radical right, later recollected that he had found Spahn looking ‘like half a human wreck’ in November 1918.60 Germany’s military defeat had direct consequences for Spahn’s personal life. With the French occupation of Alsace in November 1918, he fled the city for Berlin and resigned from his professorship. Yet insult was added to injury when the Soldiers and Workers’ Soviet of Strassburg proclaimed an independent Republic of Alsace-Lorraine on 11 November 1918. This seemed like a popular rebuke of Spahn’s ambition and purpose as history professor to educate Catholic Alsatians into good conservative Germans. His personal disappointment is captured in his resignation letter, as is his conviction of how religion, history and nation ought to relate to each other: I was called to Strassburg as a Catholic and professor of modern history to help to reclaim this land in a special way spiritually and intellectually . . . My assignment seems to me


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accomplished from that hour when Reich and people have relinquished Alsace-Lorraine to France by signing the armistice . . . With every new day, these events move me deeper and stronger. My faith in the nation has been transformed into debilitating shame. As a German I do not feel to have any right to reside or work in Alsace any longer, nor to appear before the people and work amongst them, in particular not as representative of my profession as I have understood it and still do.61

As well as temporarily ending Spahn’s secure livelihood as an academic in Strassburg, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to France abruptly halted his mission to convert Alsace’s Catholics into good Germans. Yet it is misleading to put too much emphasis on the war as a factor that profoundly dislocated Spahn’s personal life and world view. The network of conservative Catholicism still functioned as a safety net for his career. Not only could he continue his academic work as history professor in Cologne from 1920 after Adam Stegerwald, chairman of the anti-socialist Christian Trade Unions, had advocated his (Spahn’s) case against the reservations of Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne.62 He also continued his political career, although no longer as representative of the Centre Party but as DNVP delegate to the Reichstag, and retained a dense network of like-minded conservatives in industry, agriculture, student and trade unions and the Catholic aristocracy alike. The events that radicalized Spahn’s thought and politics were not so much military defeat and the revolutions that followed, the factors usually seen as important in the radicalization of German conservatives. On the contrary, Spahn initially felt that revolution had paved the way for new experiments to establish a reborn, Christian and truly conservative Germany.63 The real shock to Spahn was the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919 with the aid of the Centre Party, in which he saw a betrayal of the party’s conservative tradition and duty. After the ‘dreamland of the armistice’ and the hope to retain a monarchy in Germany had ended, Spahn’s entire work was dedicated to the destruction of the republic as the outcome of the ideas of 1789 and the decadence of the Wilhelmine period.64 Most obvious was his break with political Catholicism in 1921 and the vision that it could aid conservative aims. His aim was no longer to de-confessionalize the Centre Party, but to end its influence by depoliticising German Catholicism entirely while preserving its social and moral function in the conservative tradition of the Church. To rebuild conservatism became Spahn’s main task after 1919, still according to his prime principle of national union. If he was a conservative of the Bismarckian school before the war, he now joined the ‘Young Conservatives’ in their efforts to establish a new Reich that preserved the values of Bismarck and adapted these to Germany’s post-war position. At the same time, his idea of a nation grew more völkisch and expansionist, as it did across the conservative spectrum. The

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emphasis in this national project was consequently on nurturing German nature and history as the foundation of a German national community.65 The new Reich could then arise built on solidarity across classes and the denominational divide, as well as on a secure geopolitical footing in a Mitteleuropa union.66 Spahn saw in religion an essential means to rebuild his ideal society and consequently devoted considerable energy to overcoming the division between conservative-minded Catholics and Protestants.67 His new society was still organized according to the corporative ideal and governed by a monarch, but it allowed some concessions to the popular desire for democratization, of which he was well aware, although these were limited to those social spheres that touched on people’s everyday needs: their unions in factories, in agriculture and within the crafts. In order to find a ‘historical’ explanation for the nation’s current ‘defeated’ existence as a republic, Spahn explored his idea of a reborn German Reich in numerous articles on the Thirty Years War. This first European war had torn apart the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations (in Spahn’s eyes the source of the German nation) into hostile confessional camps, yet Germany had managed to rise again after successfully establishing a new order. To overcome the contemporary denominational division for the sake of the German nation had by now been Spahn’s raison d’être for more than 30 years. His reissues and discussions of the German Catholic Romantics, such as Joseph Görres or the ‘workers’ bishop’ Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, reminded his readers of Catholic thinkers who stood for a self-confident, German and Catholic corporative world view.68 At the same time they decried the effects of modernity, Liberalism and callous capitalism that Spahn saw at work in Weimar Germany. This fitted his own postulate of an organic and corporative state but was at the same time an attempt to patronize the classic representatives of Catholic conservative thought and political action for his German nationalist politics in the hope that conservative Catholics still loyal to the Centre Party would identify with the German right. After the establishment of a German republic, Martin Spahn remained active in party politics despite his hostility to democracy. He left the now republican Centre Party for the monarchist DNVP (now an assemblage of disparate pre-war conservative interests), which he represented from 1924 in the Reichstag. His choice to continue his work within a political party served his main interests: national union and strengthening German conservatism. It enabled him to pursue a new conservative Sammlungspolitik that would concentrate Germany’s conservative forces, including German Catholics. Spahn was involved in the Reich Catholic Committee of the DNVP, a group of conservative Catholic DNVP members whose aim was to canvass Catholic votes away from the Centre Party. The realization of a conservative German nation was Spahn’s aim in politics as in his world view and writing history. Offered the choice between national and Catholic interests, Spahn opted for the nation. When he voted with the majority


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of the DNVP faction against the Prussian Concordat with the Vatican in 1929, he could not have set a clearer signal as to where his priorities lay, quite to the dismay of the leadership of the Reich Catholic Committee.69 Spahn’s work in parliamentary politics should not be read as a sign of his reconciliation with the ‘system’ after he had politically supported the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920 and the ambitions of General von Seeckt, Reich Defence Minister Gessler and the Bavarian right to overturn the Berlin government in 1923.70 His aim remained the creation of a united conservative and völkisch front against the Republic. To achieve this he concentrated his Sammlungspolitik behind the political scenes where he sought the support of like-minded influential conservatives across class and denominational divisions. These included Adam Stegerwald, the leader of the Christian Trade Unions, leading figures in German industry such as Hugo Stinnes and Alfred Hugenberg, and Catholic aristocrats who were patrons of the agrarian associations.71

ANTI-SEMITISM Anti-Semitism was part of the conservative worldview of Belloc and Spahn. Snide comments on Jews figured in Belloc’s early – still radical, liberal and democratic – writings and accompanied him throughout his life, growing increasingly delusional during the Spanish Civil War. Spahn, on the other hand, only really discovered a ‘Jewish problem’ after the war when engaged in his efforts to unite German conservatism under the auspices of the DNVP. His willingness to include German Jews in a new German Reich diminished as he adopted a more and more völkisch and exclusionary interpretation of the German nation. Belloc’s anti-Semitism was a consequence of his belief that European culture was essentially Catholic. Where salvation was Catholic, Protestantism and Jewry as the perceived historical opponents of the Church became Europe’s antagonists. ‘The sympathy of the English for the Jews was not a positive sympathy between the national English religion and the Jewish national religion: it was a negative sympathy born of a common attitude towards a common opponent, the Catholic Church . . . and for whatever reason, whether it be Protestantism here or Rationalism abroad, tends – but not indeed with any very great violence – to sympathise in a negative way with whatever else is opposed to the Church, and the Jews are therein included.’72 Since Catholicism was not just a Christian denomination to Belloc but a way of life that encompassed faith, national mores and tradition, his interpretation of the ‘Jewish question’ was not theological or even religious, but cultural and political. He made this quite clear in his contributions to GK’s Weekly, the Distributist journal of his friend Gilbert Keith Chesterton, where Jews and Judaism stood for opponents of everything Catholic.73 Since the

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‘Jewish problem’ was a civic and national problem in Belloc’s eyes, he did not see any merit in the traditional Catholic solution – conversion. In his 1922 book The Jews, he advocated instead a political solution, whereby the Jews as a ‘people apart’ should receive a nationality and social sphere separate from that of their host nations.74 If Marx’s history evolved in the dialectics of class struggle and Hitler interpreted history as race war, Belloc thought history was determined by clashes of cultures. The role of the Jews as eternal enemy to European Catholic culture fitted his very own world view well and coloured his wilful interpretation of European history and current events. The Dreyfus Affair in France provided an epiphany in his belief in a ‘Jewish question’, as he saw in it a proof of how profound Jewish collusion and influence were across Europe. It was one of many historical events that followed, such as the Marconi Affair in 1911 and the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, in which Belloc believed he had found affirmations of his world view. Now in his mid-60s, Belloc saw in the Spanish Civil War the incarnation of the historical struggle between Catholicism and its opponents: The French Revolution was founded by patriotism and property, the Spanish is founded on Jewish Communism which especially attacks those fundamental ideas of our Western Civilisation. What the two movements have in common is hostility to the Catholic Church, but in the French case that hostility came in from the side, it was incidental . . . but the Communists’ attack on the Church is its main activity. That is why it was a good strategy on the part of the Moscow Jews to attack Spain. I think they would have succeeded if it had not been for Franco forestalling them.75

Belloc always insisted that he was not an anti-Semite, a word that he equated like most contemporaries with the race hatred of German National Socialism. He could complain about the violent anti-Semitic diatribes in the New Witness newspaper under the editorship of Cecil Chesterton and he later denounced National Socialist racial persecution of Jews. Yet his dislike of Jews was a strong enough conviction to act on in support of political movements that also loudly voiced their suspicions of them.76 His brand of anti-Semitism would not have led Jews to their deaths. Yet in his writings, the Jews – in their entirety as a people – were perceived as a threat to Christian European culture. Equally, the solution he presented in The Jews would have affected every Jew, as it would have led them back to their medieval ghettos, where, organized according to their own guilds, they would have lived side by side with, but separate from, their non-Jewish neighbours. Spahn’s anti-Semitism did not feed on his Catholicism, as Belloc’s did on his, but was driven by his wish to regenerate the German nation. In Spahn’s eyes, Jews had become a nation apart and an additional danger to the already historically


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fragile national union of Germany. Consequently the relation between Jews and Deutschtum had become a question that demanded an answer.77 Anti-Semitism was not Spahn’s raison d’être as it was for the core leadership of National Socialism, but dealing with the ‘Jewish question’ was a central chapter in his plans to rebuild the German nation. He made the importance of anti-Semitism quite clear in a letter to the nationalist student union Ring deutscher Katholiken (which he founded in 1924), where he stressed that anti-Semitism was absolutely necessary if the students wanted to succeed in the resurrection of religious life and a wholehearted devotion to the state. He continued: I see the fight against the excessive domination of Jewry as one of our main objectives. We have to be anti-Semites, both as Christians and as Germans; it cannot be ignored that especially Jewry putrefies our religion and our patriotic ideals in every respect. We must, however, insist that the nature of today’s anti-Semitism evolves into a more idealistic form. Today it is mainly based on race hatred and hostility. As long as it remains that way, it is something negative and cannot create positive values. We have to distance ourselves sharply from these rabid Nazis and have to develop our attitude towards Jewry into a positive Christianity and Germanentum.78

In common with Belloc’s, Spahn’s antipathy to Jews was strong enough to act on by propagating anti-Jewish sentiments and by supporting those organisations, like the DNVP and its Reich Catholic Committee, which saw the same causal link between a successful national regeneration and a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’. The 1920 programme of the Committee declared: the most important task of the present lies in the maintenance and revival of the Christian nationalist idea, particularly among the masses that have been seduced by socialism. This task determines at the same time our stance towards the Jewish question. While we acknowledge the law of Christian charity that excludes no-one, we are not prepared to concede to an alien and international people either secret nor public political influence that exceeds their numbers by far, that threatens our cultural identity and usually does not contribute to a Christian national education [Volkserziehung].79

An emphasis on Christian national education was dear to Spahn’s heart, too.80 Only such an education could ‘stop the wheel of history’.81 From 1921 Spahn practised just such a national education as director of the Politische Kolleg, which had been founded by radical ‘young conservatives’ around Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Heinrich von Gleichen and, under his leadership, became a think tank close to the DNVP. The Kolleg could reach beyond the nationalist student corps as half of its students were not university students but young leaders of youth and agrarian organisations.82 Its nationalist education claimed to have

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a conservative-nationalist point of view but was essentially völkisch and antiSemitic with lecturers such as Count Erich von Reventlow and courses on ‘Race, People, State’ or ‘World Revolution and Völkisch Policy’. Since the ‘Jewish question’ was seen within the German right as one of the main obstacles to national regeneration, the Kolleg without fail informed its students about the ‘Jewish Question in the Light of Racial Disintegration’. This course taught the writings of racial anti-Semitism’s fore-fathers: Lagarde, Langbehn, Chamberlain and Eugen Dühring.

CONCLUSION The reason for the departures of Hilaire Belloc and Martin Spahn from traditional politics must not be sought in ideology alone. Structural explanations, in particular changes to the political landscape in post-war Britain and Germany, were a necessary background to their intellectual and political development. The two political parties that had largely formed the governments of the previous 20 years in both nations, the Liberal Party in Britain and the Prussian Conservatives in Germany, were not only in disarray after the First World War but also offered no feasible solutions to social problems or fears of national decline. Worse, they were not able to stop the advance of socialism and communism, forces that Belloc and Spahn abhorred. Without a hope of founding a successful alternative party, in Britain’s two-party political system in Belloc’s case and in Germany as a feasible competitor to the Centre Party in Spahn’s, both men focused on their main skills – politics, journalism and history – in a bid to re-educate and reform British and German society respectively. There is no doubt that their individual views of the world, or of how the world should look, shaped their political commitments. Yet neither had to search for a new or even an ersatz religion. Their world views developed over decades around their respective core ideals of Catholic culture and the German nation. It was not the ‘political religions’ of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism that persuaded Belloc and Spahn to support the nationalist right, but their hope of seeing their missions – the return of a Catholic Europe and a truly conservative national union in Germany respectively – fulfilled under the leadership of Mussolini and Hitler. Although both rejected the crude racism of National Socialist anti-Semitism, their own world views accommodated an exclusionary anti-Semitism, Belloc’s because he saw in the Jews the traditional antithesis to Catholic culture, Spahn’s because völkisch nationalism could no longer reconcile the interests of ‘Germandom’ with those of German ‘Jewry’.

4

Regional History, Nazism and the Holocaust Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann

INTRODUCTION It is impossible to escape Nazism and the Holocaust even more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War. The topic continues to attract an ever-growing number of academic publications, debates, controversies, memorial events and exhibitions, artwork, documentaries, feature films, radio programmes and media articles. These are motivated in part by a desire to remember victims, educate society and find viable answers and explanations to complex and seemingly impenetrable questions that go to the heart of human behaviour and feelings. How do humans, especially ‘ordinary’ people, become murderers? How do we comprehend the gruesome experiences of victims? How do perpetrators and victims come to terms with their pasts? But the continuing interest in Nazism and the Holocaust in the public and private spheres is also driven by a fascination with evil and violence, an ever-growing commercialization of the past, and attempts by politicians and pressure groups to exploit the past for present and future purposes. Each generation has put forward its own interpretations of the Nazi dictatorship. The general trend, however, has been a gradual, albeit painful, move from denial and repression towards openness and a willingness to confront the past. However, it has taken three generations since the defeat of Nazism for the topic to be approached with genuine directness. This is particularly true of Germany, the ‘perpetrator society’. In Germany in the 1990s, for the first time, the act of killing, the role of ordinary men and women in the persecution and killing of Jews and other minority groups, and the unbearable suffering of the victims, moved into the centre of a debate that was often very public. This does not mean that no deficiencies remain: while most Europeans today agree that Nazism and collaboration were evil and deadly, according to private family discourses there were hardly any Nazis in one’s own family, and most of the Continent was, to exaggerate slightly, engaged in heroic resistance fighting or hiding Jews.

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What about our capacity to explain Nazism and the Holocaust in a coherent way? Is it possible to come to general explanations of complex topics such as perpetrators, victims and bystanders?1 Is it possible, for example, to compare the motivation of the ‘architects of genocide’, Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and others, with that of the hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian ‘shooters’ who served in the SS, police and Wehrmacht, or in the administration in the Reich and in the occupied territories? And what about their support: the collaborating officials in the occupied territories or in allied countries, particularly in Romania and Croatia, and the several hundred thousand foreign auxiliary forces who served in auxiliary police, the Wehrmacht and the SS?2 Or what about the many individuals, groups and states that have been subsumed within the category ‘bystanders’? Experts have rightly warned of the inherent and substantial complexity of this diverse group.3 And finally, turning to the victims, where we have an unprecedented number of testimonies to confront the experience of persecution: do we not face an impossible task if, in trying to incorporate their complex experiences into a coherent whole, we are sensitive to the multiple identities and voices of victims?4 This growing awareness of the complexities of Nazism and the Holocaust is based on our steadily improving knowledge of the events that took place following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and the Nazis’ seizure of power, which made possible the pursuit of their unprecedented racist-genocidal agenda. No other historical topic has attracted more academic output, witness projects, projects on memory and commemoration and works in art and literature than the Holocaust. Of course important gaps remain, and some issues present us with clear limitations of what we can comprehend and convey. Nevertheless, our understanding of the events between 1933 and 1945, and thereafter, is far more sophisticated and subtle than it used to be. It is easy to forget that interpretations once suggested there was a near magic process through which Hitler transferred his will onto the masses, or that the manipulative techniques of Nazi propaganda cloaked an irrational ideology. Research on Nazism and the Holocaust was once dominated by a central approach and the ‘view from the top’. Everything seemed to originate with Hitler and his closest henchmen; everything seemed to be controlled from the headquarters of the Führer, Himmler’s SS and so forth. Regional studies have questioned the image of a centrally organized and apparently monolithic Nazi dictatorship and, instead, emphasize different everyday-life experiences and different features of the regime in different localities. This approach offers more differentiated explanations of the often-diverse attitudes and behaviours of the population and its relationship with Nazism. Germany was a fractured nation, culturally, politically and economically, and the distinct identities of regions had a decisive influence on the political orientation and behaviour of the local population.

R E G I O N A L H I S T O R Y, N A Z I S M A N D T H E H O L O C AU S T

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Because local and regional studies normally focus on manageable geographic areas and on the lives of ordinary people, they also appear less abstract. As a result, developments become more tangible and more comprehensible. This chapter surveys the important contributions local and regional history have made to our understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust, and concludes by highlighting some of the key issues confronting those working in the field today.5

REGIONAL HISTORY AND RESEARCH ON NAZISM Until the 1970s research on Nazism was dominated by studies from the centre. These focused predominantly on structural history and on leading personalities of the Nazi regime.6 Owing to this perspective ‘from above’ and the influence of the static theory of totalitarianism, the National Socialist regime often appeared as a monolithic bloc: hierarchical, efficient and propped up by omnipresent terror. This interpretation was challenged by, among others, a number of influential local and regional studies from the 1960s. Studies at the local level showed that society under Nazism was not cohesive and uniform but marked by contradictions and rivalries.7 The end of the 1970s saw a turn towards social history – history ‘from below’ and ‘everyday life’ history. An important impetus for this change of perspective was the pioneering research project on the social history of political behaviour in Bavaria during the National Socialist period, led by Martin Broszat.8 The Bavaria Project aimed to scrutinize concepts such as Gleichschaltung (bringing into line), resistance and public opinion, and, through the study of daily perceptions and interpretations under Nazism, offered a more differentiated picture of society.9 While this seemed ground-breaking at the time, more recently some scholars have criticized the approach as describing a too rigid polarization of a terrorist regime on the one hand and a sceptical population that was forced to conform on the other.10 In the 1990s, regional research on Nazism was characterized by the analysis of local – regional political traditions and socio-psychological milieu conditions.11 This was based on the understanding that an appreciation of collective attitudes was essential to the explanation of social behaviour. Indeed, numerous studies underlined the importance of mentalities, and also of religious orientation, in the political behaviour of the population. For example, Chris Szejnmann demonstrated the ways in which deep-rooted local traditions determined the success or failure of Nazism among the local population in Saxony, a bastion of the organised working class in Germany; Norbert Fasse, in his study of the complex relationship between Catholics and Nazism in the Münsterland, showed that ‘the Catholic province was not at all an island of resistance and innocence’ (686); and

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Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann’s study of the relationship between Nazism, proletarian housing and socialist organizations concluded that in the first phase of the dictatorship the decision whether to conform or resist was largely determined by deep-rooted bonds that existed within milieus. With the increasing disintegration of these milieus, however, workers based their behaviour more and more on individual decisions.12 In short, these studies showed that regional traditions played an essential role in the behaviour of people before 1933, including their attitude towards Nazism, but that their influence gradually diminished during the dictatorship. The regional approach has helped to fill many gaps in our knowledge of Nazism over the last two decades. Regional studies produced the first systematic empirical analysis of the much assumed impact of Nazi propaganda on the voting behaviour in Weimar elections (Ohr); illustrated how Nazi members of state parliaments adapted to regional peculiarities (Probst); and emphasized the importance of local Nazi Party branches to the stability of the regime, especially during the war years (Reibel).13 Furthermore, the combination of biographical studies and regional history allowed systematic conclusions to be drawn about Nazi elites and the structure of rule in regions of the German Reich – for example, in Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, the Saarland and Lippe – and made scholars aware of similarities, but also differences, between regions.14 The approach of regional history and the history of everyday life has also shaped important questions regarding the consensual basis of the Nazi regime among the population. Today, the long-held view that a brutal regime controlled the German population primarily through ‘seduction and authority’ is untenable. Ian Kershaw, while working on the Bavaria Project, already emphasized ‘the bitter divisions and dissent of everyday reality in the Third Reich, in stark contrast to the propaganda image of a “National Community” united by its leaders’. Additionally, he famously argued that ‘the “Hitler-Myth” can be seen as providing the central motor for integration, mobilisation, and legitimisation within the Nazi system of rule’.15 Since then, research into the attitude of the population towards the Nazi regime has flourished. It seems, however, that views are split into two camps. On the one hand is an optimistic interpretation that highlights the forms of social continuity before and after 1933, the Nazis’ willingness to co-operate with traditional elites, and features of dissent and opposition within the Third Reich. On the other hand, a more pessimistic interpretation stresses the way in which German society adapted to and collaborated with the Nazis. Jill Stephenson, firmly in the former camp, recently described a fractured domestic consensus among the population in Württemberg during the war years, emphasizing clear opposition to the regime’s anti-Catholic and agricultural policies.16 By contrast, Andreas Ruppert and Hansjörg Riechert stressed for Lippe the ‘high degree of consensus


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between Nazi regime and population’ until the collapse of the regime.17 They explained this stability with a number of factors: the Nazis’ toleration, indeed active support, of non-political local customs and traditions; the employment of forced labour, which stabilized the economic situation; and the Nazis’ success in keeping the war out of the heads of a large part of the population. Very recently a student team led by the influential historian Götz Aly used innovative public-opinion research to investigate the attitude of the population afresh. Among numerous topics, the group looked at the frequency of the National Socialist forenames Adolf (Hitler), Horst (Wessel) and Hermann (Göring), and the style of obituaries in newspapers during the Second World War. Aly dismissed most of the existing literature on the grounds that it is based on ‘problematic’ reports of the security services or uses random samples of letters from the front (Feldpostbriefe), which are not quantifiable or representative. The results of this new study have challenged the currently dominant view of a ‘consensual dictatorship’ (Konsensdiktatur) which benefited from vast numbers of fellow travellers. Aly and his team differentiate more decisively between ‘scepticism and trust in the Führer’.18 Finally, over the last few years a number of regional studies have looked at municipal authorities and local governments and their integrative role during the Third Reich. Even these low administrative levels had to implement Nazi policies, and, owing to their close contact with the population, they also had the important function of keeping up the morale of the people.19 While older research assumes there was a bipolarity of party and state and highlights structures of conflict between the two, these recent studies emphasize ‘orderly structures’ (ordnende Strukturen) and ‘functional cooperation’ between various supporters of the regime, which ensured murderous efficiency and guaranteed that the National Socialist system functioned up until the final weeks of the war.20 Since the late 1980s, such studies of local authorities have been fostered by an increasing focus on the Nazi policies of persecution, robbing and annihilation (which will be discussed later on). It has become evident that it was only possible to achieve such lethal ‘efficiency’ with the help of local authorities and that there was hardly a measure of persecution ‘in which local authorities did not take part or were [not] at least informed about’.21 In fact, during specific periods of the Third Reich the impulse towards radicalizing the persecution of the Jews came from the local level – from mayors, town councillors and local councillors – and, as Wolf Gruner argues, for that reason local authorities ‘have to be understood and investigated as a place, upholder and driving force of the persecution against the Jews’.22 Other case studies have meanwhile confirmed this change in paradigm and describe a ‘reciprocal dynamic’ of local and central policies.23 The participation of local authorities in the Arisierung (Aryanization) of Jewish property is currently attracting particular attention. After Frank Bajohr

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had shown the involvement of large parts of the population in Hamburg in the policies of persecution and annihilation of the Jews – ‘normal’ citizens participated in the robbing of their Jewish fellow citizens and publicly auctioned cheap possessions of Jews who had been murdered in the East24 – studies of local authorities came up with similar findings: throughout the Reich local authorities proved to be ‘unscrupulous profiteers’, driving Jewish employers out of social and economic life and acquiring cheap ‘Jewish’ real estate.25 The latest research explains the efficient collaboration between local Nazi Party organizations and the traditional administrative machinery with the ‘permanent pressure of discipline on communal officials’ and the traditional zeal with which officials performed their duties. For Hanover, where, as in Augsburg, the municipal authorities were largely staffed by traditional career officials who showed remarkable readiness to implement Nazi policies, Rüdiger Fleiter described this phenomenon with the phrase ‘loyalty despite reservations’. All in all, it has become clear that the seemingly powerless and apparently apolitical local authorities in the Third Reich were a long-cultivated myth. Local-authority officials often acted as independent protagonists, contributed to the considerable mobilization of resources and were an integral part of the persecution and crimes of the Nazi regime.26 It is interesting that this was fostered by regional traditions. Bernhard Gotto described for Augsburg a widely accepted and continuously reproduced ‘Swabian’ organizational culture among the functional elites of party, economy and administration that harmonized smoothly with pushing forward Nazi objectives.27

REGIONAL HISTORY AND THE HOLOCAUST Up until the 1990s, research on the Holocaust was marked by a central approach and by suppression and denial in perpetrator societies and societies with collaborators.28 The Nuremberg Trials accentuated the myth in Germany that the demonic top Nazi leadership had centrally planned the Holocaust and had used the sadistic henchmen of the SS and Gestapo to pursue this. All other Germans had apparently only participated in the Holocaust against their will: they had been ‘forced’ to carry out ‘Führer orders’ as any resistance would have endangered their own lives. Additionally, the Holocaust became identified with the death camps in the East, in other words a secret event that took place far away and was removed from witnesses. Finally, since the 1960s, mass genocide has been portrayed as a ‘mechanised crime’ – a modern ‘automism without people’ – which was driven by abstract structures, institutions and loyal officials such as Rudolf Höss (commandant of Auschwitz I and II) and Adolf Eichmann (central organizer of the deportation of over 3 million Jews as part of the ‘Final Solution’).29 It would be


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wrong to conclude that German society completely repressed or denied all crimes committed during the Nazi dictatorship. However, in the post-war years the discourse often focused not on the horrors suffered by Germany’s victims – Jews, Romanies, homosexuals and so forth – but on the suffering of Germans under Nazism and then the Red Army, in particular the plight of German expellees from the East and of German POWs in the Soviet Union. As late as the 1980s the dispute between the so-called intentionalists and functionalists concentrated on the precise chronology of the decision-making at the centre of power and Hitler’s role in it. The places of crime and the perpetrators of crimes continued to be largely ignored. However, some changes were taking place. To start with, the boom in local history and the history of everyday life led to a growing awareness of the places of crimes and the perspectives of victims.30 Furthermore, a growing number of studies looked at the policies of racism and annihilation from various perspectives, including Einsatzgruppen activities in Belarus and the Baltic nations, ‘euthanasia’ killing, the concept of ‘racial hygiene’, forced sterilization and the involvement of German geneticists and anthropologists in the selection of Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill and the retarded for sterilization and genocide.31 This led to a diversification of approaches and research methods. Christian Streit’s investigation of Soviet POWs and Ulrich Herbert’s study of foreign workers in the war economy of the Third Reich marked the beginning of numerous local studies that focused on individual prisoner and work camps and the situation of forced labourers in individual companies.32 These studies of the ‘policy of annihilation from the regional perspective’ opened up completely new perspectives. For example, while forced labour, concentration camps, mass extermination and war industry seemed to form a cohesive whole, a machinery of genocide, there were differences in timing, in the priorities of institutions and in the treatment of forced labourers and concentration-camp prisoners.33 In the 1990s the controversies in Germany over the ‘Wehrmacht exhibition’ (which challenged the post-1945 myth that the Wehrmacht was not involved in the Holocaust but waged an ‘honourable’ war in the East) and the ‘Goldhagen debate’ (Daniel Goldhagen being a US – Jewish historian who claimed that the Holocaust was driven by a genocidal anti-Semitism shared by the vast majority of Germans) sparked a broad public debate about perpetrators, their motivations, the scenes of crimes, the nature of the killing and the terrible suffering of the victims.34 Fifty years after the end of the war, and following the arrival of new generations, German re-unification and deep-rooted changes in society, the time seemed ripe for an open and critical attempt to come to terms with the problematic Nazi past. And with it, aspects of the Nazi policy of annihilation moved to the centre of research on the Nazi dictatorship. This led to a refocusing of attention away from the centre of decision-making on a number of other perspectives:

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the variety of institutions, authorities and ‘desktop perpetrators’ who played a decisive role in the planning and pursuit of the destruction of the Jews; the concrete realization of the genocide in the occupied territories; and, finally, the huge number of individuals who participated in the murder of the Jews.35 During the Goldhagen debate it became clear how limited knowledge was of the extent, the form and the role of anti-Semitism and its exact relation with the Holocaust. Furthermore, how did this virulent German anti-Semitism differ from anti-Semitism elsewhere? There was hardly any empirically based evidence of anti-Semitic violence during the Weimar Republic, and how and to what extent anti-Semitism gained a foothold among normal citizens. Now a number of pioneering studies have used the local – regional approach to tackle some of these research gaps. Most importantly, they have challenged the traditional view that there was a straight continuum, a direct link, between anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.36 They emphasize the role of the First World War and of the Revolution as a period of crystallization in which a new and dynamic anti-Semitism of exclusion, which became widely accepted in large swathes of the population (in particular, the bourgeoisie), replaced the traditional anti-Semitism of integration or segregation.37 Additionally, previous interpretations of anti-Semitic violence have been questioned:38 violence against Jews, according to this latest research, was not an isolated or non-typical occurrence (Reichmann; Zimmermann); nor, so these studies say, is it the case that the majority of Germans were not particularly interested in the ‘Jewish question’ before 1933 (Kershaw).39 The latest research on, and interpretations of, anti-Semitism during the Nazi dictatorship also taps into local and regional sources.40 A significant event was Otto D. Kulka’s and Eberhard Jäckel’s recent publication of the reports of the Nazi surveillance forces on Jewish activities and organizations, and the attitude of the non-Jewish population towards these and towards the regime’s policy on the Jews.41 This material was drawn up at local, regional and Reich level and opens up ‘new perspectives’ for the overall interpretation of Nazi ideology and policies on the Jews, and Jewish life during the Nazi dictatorship. The enormous scope of this project underlines the practical obstacles in pursuing comprehensive comparative regional history. Two editors and six contributors sifted through large collections in more than 30 archives in Germany as well as in archives located in the former German territories in Poland. In many respects this project crystallizes both the advantages and the disadvantages of the local – regional perspective. While local reports provide ‘the most immediate version of the events’ (as the editors say), they also ‘offer only a selective picture’. The editors were aware of the problematic nature of these sources, but stuck by their belief that they allow a differentiated picture of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, and that they show the great variation


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of Jewish life under the conditions of persecution and exclusion.42 Raul Hilberg, in his pioneering work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), emphasized (and then reinforced in the second edition, in 1995) the importance of local initiatives in the Holocaust, the importance also of officials as innovators and problem-solvers (both, of course, aspects that the now criticized functionalists argued), and, finally, the tacit consensus and the widespread participation of the whole occupation apparatus in the genocide.43 It was not until the 1990s, however, that a new generation of young researchers systematically investigated these theses and published important regional studies of the Holocaust and the occupied territories. These researchers were spurred on by Christopher Browning’s exemplary microanalysis of Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg, whose members shot at least 38,000 Jews in Poland.44 The great majority of them became executioners although they had the chance of not participating in these mass shootings. Browning’s focus on the murderous activities and motivation of these 500 ‘ordinary men’ put this central issue at the top of the scholarly agenda for the first time. He explained the behaviour of the men with a multicausal, anthropological approach (a willingness to obey orders and authority, group conformity and peer pressure, career-mindedness, the brutalizing effects of a racist imperialist war, and the insidious effects of constant propaganda and indoctrination), and based his conclusion on sociopsychological studies which emphasize how social-group processes create specific conditions which can have a uninhibiting effect, potentially turning ‘ordinary men’ into brutal murderers.45 Finally, Browning emphasized that the genocide was not only driven by a central decision to exterminate but was also a process in which local initiatives played a crucial role. Indeed, a number of pioneering studies – Dieter Pohl’s work on the Nazi persecution of Jews in Eastern Galicia and the Lublin district of the Generalgouvernement; Thomas Sandkühler’s study of the genocide of Jews in Galicia; Christian Gerlach’s investigation into the annihilation in Belarus; and Bogdan Musial’s study of the civil administration and the murder of Jews in the Generalgouvernement46 – emphasized the remarkable regional variations in the process of annihilation. These studies are based on the exploitation of a large number of primary sources from the newly opened archives in Eastern Europe and engage deeply not only with the perspectives of perpetrators, accomplices and beneficiaries, but also with the fate of victims. Studies of Eastern Galicia in particular (Sandkühler und Pohl), where mass executions had taken place on an unprecedented scale for nearly two years, show the shocking brutalization of perpetrators. Equally, people with different attitudes became sensitized, like Berthold Beitz, who with his wife saved hundreds of Jews from certain death. Scholars described complete debureaucratization and extreme corruption where people who appeared energetic could intervene in the

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‘Final Solution’. Here, at the local level, mass murder was intentionally initiated and often carried out as a public spectacle – independent of directives from Berlin and long before the German officials organized the mass murder in the Belzec death camp.47 The regional perspective also shows the smooth co-operation of practically all occupational bodies – civil administration, security police and Wehrmacht – as well as the important role of local groups – from auxiliary police to community officials – in the mass murder of the Jews. These new studies emphasize the variety of motivations for murder, including regional peculiarities: it was due to lust, racial madness, group pressure, the desire for personal enrichment, or utilitarian motivations.48 For example, Dieter Pohl showed that mass murder in the Generalgouvernement was prompted by logistical problems that arose because of the occupation, while Thomas Sandkühler argued that mass murder in Galicia sprang from the effects of a programme of road-building and a shortage of food, Jews being killed as ‘useless eaters’. In short, local studies have allowed more precise descriptions of crucial aspects of the origins and development of the policy of annihilation, and also of the motivations of perpetrators. The latter has raised the question of the influence of long-term and short-term developments; in other words, can we explain these murderous activities by invoking deep-rooted anti-Semitism and notions of ‘racial hygiene’, or by pointing to local predicaments and improvisations during the war? It seems worth mentioning some of the latest research developments in regard to resistance and collaboration. Recent studies of collaboration and heroic resistance differentiate ‘between a variety of enthusiastic, unquestioning, conditional, tactical and unwilling collaboration as well as between different grades of resistance’.49 Research in this field shows the differences as well as the similarities in the behaviour of the population in different regions – for example, the motivation of local perpetrators in Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus and the Ukraine.50 Bernhard Chiari, in his analysis of ‘the daily routine behind the front’ in Belarus from 1941 to 1944, showed the radicalizing effect of the chaos, the incompetence and the dynamic culture of violence of the German occupation. These elements helped ignite enormous social tensions that had accumulated during the previous two years of Soviet occupation and eventually led to the destruction of society.51 There is no space here to discuss other aspects, such as culture, the Heimatbewegung (the ‘homeland movement’), the role of women, the murder of ill people, and concentration camps – all topics in which a local or regional approach has led to important new findings.52 Christopher Browning has rightly pointed out the advantages but also the limits of a local – regional approach to history in the study of the Holocaust: while detailed studies have proved the importance of local and regional initiatives, warnings and explicit orders from the centre were equally important in the emergence and development of the Holocaust; and while occupation authorities


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were normally united in the view that the Jews had to be exterminated, there were also disagreements between competing German organizations and conflicts between competing priorities.53 In the end, Browning regards the pioneering role of the centre as the decisive factor: However important local factors were for local variations in carrying out the Final Solution, the policies of the Nazi regime set not only the goals that local German authorities were expected to pursue but also the parameters within which they were free to operate. And in the end, one way or another, the Jews were murdered . . . In summary, therefore, local initiatives that suited the purposes and policies of the regime – such as the early killings by Police Battalion 309 and the Tilsit commando – were seized upon and institutionalized with alacrity. Local initiatives – such as the use of Jewish labor in Brest – that clashed with the long-term goals and policies of the regime were temporarily tolerated but brushed aside when the time came. But local initiatives that challenged the regime’s policies in principle – such as Arwed Kempf ’s failure to ghettoize the Jews of Kovel – were crushed with draconic severity.54

Browning’s conclusion seems convincing. At the same time, experts have moved away from structuring debate in terms of traditional dichotomies such as centre and periphery; instead, they tend to emphasize the reciprocal influences of centre and periphery.55

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK Local and regional research have made invaluable contributions to our understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust. They allow us to come to far more differentiated and precise assessments of the often-diverse behaviour of Germans and non-Germans towards Nazism than do national and central studies; and they allow us to make a more concrete and immediate evaluation of the complex motivations and behaviour of perpetrators, fellow travellers and bystanders, and of the experiences and reactions of victims. Local and regional perspectives are indispensable for a sound understanding of the behaviour of human beings, because with them abstract aspects become concrete and real.56 The most important ‘discovery’ to have flowed from this approach to history is that the Nazi genocide emerged from within German society. The realization of racial fantasies through the segregation, robbery and genocide of Jews and other minorities was, after all, only possible through the mass participation, at the local level, of ordinary Germans, Austrians and nationals of occupied territories. Recent research seems to challenge the notion of conclusive explanations and often stresses ambiguities and complexities. This becomes evident when

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one looks at the relationship between long-term factors (disposition through anti-Semitism) and short-term factors (radicalization through barbarization during the war and so forth) in the motivation of perpetrators. Overall, the findings suggest that disposition was more important among the so-called ‘architects of genocide’, while the behaviour of the ‘shooters’ – the members of the Einsatzkommandos, auxiliary police, SS and Wehrmacht, who made up a cross-section of German – Austrian society – was prompted more by situational factors. However, these are extremely complex matters which often influenced each other in complicated ways. Even the fanatical perpetrators who committed crimes out of moral conviction (the ‘ideological elite’ or Überzeugungstäter), like the leadership corps of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office57), had to experience a cumulative radicalization to grasp that it was actually possible to implement their most extreme ideas. Faced with a never-ending flood of detailed studies which often apply different research methods, some scholars have called for a more holistic approach to the subject. Most importantly, Saul Friedländer has called for an ‘integrated history of the Holocaust’, which would require the adoption of as many perspectives as possible, in place, time, level and so forth.58 A fruitful analysis of Nazism and the Holocaust requires a combination of a long-term perspective that draws upon the concept of milieus and mentalities, and the short-term history of events.59 This, however, should not reduce German history in the first half of the twentieth century to a quasi-predetermined result of developments that took place in the nineteenth century (the stuff of ‘special path theory’). Local and regional studies have revealed the influence of particular social, cultural, economic and political identities of localities and regions on the political orientation and behaviour of their populations. Regional traditions and milieus opened up unique chances for the phenomenal success of Nazism. Equally, they placed in front of the Nazis serious obstacles before they came to power in 1933. However, such obstacles were overcome during the dictatorship through a combination of terror, Gleichschaltung, conversion to the National Socialist state, and the compromises many people made with the regime. The Nazis made compromises around regional traditions and milieus, and made serious efforts to exploit regionalism. Overall, rather than watering down the regime’s totalitarian claim, this stabilized and strengthened the system and, most importantly, helped to realize the core of National Socialist ideology: the creation of a genocidal-social Darwinist racial dictatorship. The broad acceptance of many important aspects of the Nazi dictatorship has often been underestimated. The majority of Germans, whether Protestants or Catholics, shared a deep-rooted and extreme nationalism similar in tenor to contemporary religious fundamentalism, which became their only source of hope during a period when a mentality of crisis infected the whole country (involving


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anxieties about modernization and secularization, the trauma of Versailles and the hardships caused by inflation and economic slump). This nationalism assumed a unifying momentum and went hand in hand with different regional traditions. In the final years of the war, its integrative role (of which the ‘Hitler myth’ was a part) weakened dramatically, while factors such as region, Heimat, family and religion grew in strength.


5

Defining Human Security: Roads to War and Peace, 1918–45 Patricia Clavin*

At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the call of the General Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, for a world ‘free of want’ and ‘free of fear’ resulted in the creation of the Commission on Human Security. Desmond Tutu, an alumnus and Fellow of King’s College, London (KCL), where Richard Overy, another Fellow of KCL taught for 25 years, welcomed the initiative ‘as a rare message of hope’ in a world ‘where war, terrorism and humanitarian crises can seem all-pervasive’.1 What was new about the commission was its claim to offer a paradigm for defence centred on people not states. It stressed the role of globalization in posing new challenges and new opportunities for international security because the flow of goods, services, finance, people and information highlighted more than ever before the many ‘interlinkages in the security of all people’.2 The UN’s new emphasis on addressing the question of security ‘from below’ and on connections also finds an echo in the approaches taken to the history of globalization since the 1990s.3

THE WAY TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF SECURITY But were the problems and the approach identified by the Human Security agenda as new as its architects claimed? The years between the two world wars were a period whose history has been dominated by exploration of the actions of nation states and of the statesmen who had their unique perceptions of the world in crisis. Richard Overy’s work has centred on examining these events, yet his writing, often against the dominant historical current, has always been * An early draft of the paper on which this chapter is based was presented at the annual conference of the European Association for Banking History in Frankfurt in May 2008. I would like to record my thanks for the opportunity to reproduce it in its current form here. The conference proceedings will appear in a volume edited by Peter Hertner, Gabriele Teichman and Juan Carlos Martinez Oliva, Continental and Global Networks of Credit and Capital in Historical Perspective (London: Ashgate Press, forthcoming). The research for this article was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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sensitive to the limitations of a state-centred approach to international relations and to the meanings of ‘security’. His study of the origins of the Second World War, for example, was configured around this perception of the pivotal role played by state actors and their relationships to the ‘wider forces at play in the system [that] help to build up, stone by stone, the Road to War’.4 He took this further in his ‘broad brush and wide canvas’ account Why the Allies Won and in his path-breaking study War and Economy in the Third Reich.5 One of the most important essays in the latter explored four different elements of the Nazi war economy – the financing of the war, the level of consumer spending, the diversion of labour to the war and the role of women – to dispel the myths of Germany’s ‘easy war’ and the wider ambitions of German foreign policy. Overy’s exploration of the historical political economy of the German nation and the mid-century crisis in international relations has been consistently complex and subtle. His interpretations of the meanings of security are broad and varied. They do not only feature statesmen and nation states, but also what the League of Nations used to call ‘the common people’. This broader understanding of the variety of forces at play in international politics was evident in the inter-war period itself. By the 1930s, the League of Nations, in particular, sought to underline a wider understanding of security than that envisaged by President Woodrow Wilson’s emphasis on state sovereignty and military security. In August 1939, for example, the League of Nations published a special report entitled ‘The Development of International Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs’ (which subsequently became known as the Bruce Report, named after Stanley Bruce, the former Australian Prime Minister and enthusiastic internationalist, who chaired the committee). The publication of the report obviously came at a critical moment both in the history of international relations and of the League, and although much of the League’s history comprised such critical moments, the prospect of world war was undoubtedly the most serious. The introduction of the report was especially striking: In the early days of the League, it was perhaps too often assumed that international cooperation necessarily implied international contractual obligations and that the success of such co-operation could be measured by the new obligations entered into . . . But many of the really vital problems, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to settlement by formal conferences and treaties – the primary object of international co-operation should be rather mutual help than reciprocal contract – above all, the exchange of knowledge and the fruits of experience.6

In effect, the Bruce Report stressed the value of transnational networks in facilitating international co-operation and the development of the world economy, a prominent theme of this chapter. It also sought to shift criticism of the League

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away from its failure, well documented in the subsequent historiography, to secure lasting agreements in the fields of disarmament and economic relations, the 1932 Disarmament Conference and the World Economic Conference of 1933 being two of the most prominent villains of the piece. Instead, the report emphasised the pioneering work of the economic, financial and social sections of the League, and its contribution to the processes by which international cooperation was facilitated. Prescient, too, was the League’s frustration that few could see beyond its failure ‘to preserve peace from all risk of outrage’. As the report put it, ‘the League is not and never has been an institution concerned solely with the prevention of war. Its economic and humanitarian work, which is now an essential element in the promotion of peaceful civilisation, has always constituted a large part of its activities.’7 The report backed this up by demonstrating that more than 60 per cent of its budget by 1938 was spent on facilitating economic, financial and social co-operation.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND ECONOMIC SECURITY The historical record of the Economic and Financial Organisation (EFO) of the League is hugely underresearched.8 Yet it offers a unique site through which to examine the development and refashioning of connective tissues binding finance and capital, merchants and bankers, politicians and voters, and nation states to intergovernmental organisations in the years between 1918 and 1945. When discussions about a new international organisation began in earnest in 1918, there were no plans for its agenda to include the consideration or co-ordination of international financial relationships. Statesmen, bankers and economists alike feared the potential anarchy that would be unleashed by allowing the polyglot League into so sensitive an area of policy. But by 1920 the difficult financial environment in which nation states found themselves challenged these assumptions. In particular, the continued economic dislocation of Central and Eastern Europe, the infectious problem of inflation, the end of the post-war boom and the spectre of communist revolution starkly illustrated both the global ramifications of international financial stability and that the world economy was not likely to right itself without international co-operation. The crisis of Central and Eastern European capital thereby helped to generate new networks of financial and human co-operation. Much of what we know about the history of that co-operation in the years between 1918 and 1945, which facilitated the stabilization of national and international economies and went on to generate a reconstructed gold standard, comes from the history of central-banking diplomacy. This is made up of a cast

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of powerful and charismatic bankers typified by Benjamin Strong and Hjalmar Schacht, with what has recently emerged as a strong supporting chorus of money doctors who, in Marc Flandreau’s characterization, travelled abroad armed with knowledge of how problems arose and offering insights into how to solve them.9 This history of international financial relations, although with a very different thematic focus, shares a common preoccupation with that of the League of Nations more generally, namely its determination to measure the efficacy of the advice given and the measures implemented. This chapter moves away from this preoccupation with efficacy, at least in its first two parts, to create space to explore the variety, vitality and durability of capital and human networks in a period of history that, particularly after 1929, is more usually associated with the rise of nationalist forces inimical to internationalism of any kind. The networks it scrutinizes were reflected in and generated by EFO, whose history shows the ever-increasing circles of international financial co-operation of the interwar world and is rich in its demonstration of the paradox of outcomes. The organization served as a clearing house for intelligence, expertise and experience that generated, contained and stabilized a specific notion of international financial co-operation in the twentieth century.10

THE ROLE OF NETWORKS When it was established in 1920, EFO was the first world institution dedicated to economic and financial co-operation, although it brought together many ideas and practices from the past. It was distinguished from the outset by the quality and range of its membership: Richard Vassar Vassar-Smith of Lloyds of London; John Pierpont Morgan (1867–1943), the American financier; Gustav Ardor, President of the Bank of the Netherlands; the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel – these were among the co-signatories of the petition of more than 100 men from the worlds of finance, academia and politics, drawn from the eight leading economies, that helped give birth to the Economic and Financial Committee in the wake of the Brussels Conference.11 The institution’s claim to novelty, however, did not lie in such connections, even though they provided important links to the financial history of the period before 1914 and grew in strength and expertise during the First World War. Nor was EFO’s early mission particularly striking. Indeed, part of the reason nation states came to support the call for a financial and economic organization within the League was the early limitations placed on its remit: to collate national financial and economic information, to formulate appropriate international statistical methodology and to disseminate the co-ordinated data internationally. Defying some of the expectations of its early founders, however, EFO quickly grew in ambition and in size.12


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Where EFO’s novelty came from was its bounded relationship with the League of Nations and two of that body’s governing principles: the primacy of national sovereignty and a commitment to fostering world democracy underlined particularly through the Assembly and Council. The primacy of national sovereignty was reflected in EFO’s structure. Unlike the League of Nation’s Health Organisation (LNHO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), EFO comprised three distinct elements, although two of these were to be found also in the LNHO and ILO. Rather than categorise these three elements as discrete units, it is more helpful to see each as a distinct network with a series of connections, flexible and sometimes changing, to the next network. The arrangement was somewhat akin to an intricate piece of lace. The first network, the outer circle of lacework, comprised a large and fairly heterogeneous transnational network of economists and financiers nominated by member and non-member countries. The analogy in the LNHO would be the medical experts recruited to its ranks. The second strand, which grew in number and strength during the course of the lifetime of the League, was the Secretariat.13 During the 1930s this came to dwarf the secretariats of the other sections of the League, giving EFO a disproportionate influence within the permanent staff of the organization. In the 1920s, EFO’s secretariat was led by the Briton Sir Arthur Salter and in 1931 was notionally divided between the Italian Pietro Stoppani, who managed the Economic Committee, and the Briton Sir Alexander Loveday, in charge of the Financial Committee. (Loveday was the dominant figure in the partnership and the two committees were merged into one under Loveday’s leadership during widespread staff cuts in the League in 1939.) The Secretariat was supported by what became a separate unit, the Economic Intelligence Service (EIS), which absorbed and expanded upon the intelligence-gathering work for which, in 1920, EFO was originally created. The third and inner network – and this is where EFO differed from the LNHO and the ILO – was an intergovernmental committee that comprised nationally appointed delegates who, notionally, were in charge of directing EFO’s programme of work. In practice, EFO’s drive and ambition came from the Secretariat, while the variously configured supporting networks of ‘experts’ – economists, bankers, industrialists, etc. – formed its intellectual backbone. The intergovernmental dimension, embodied in the so-called Second Committee, on the other hand, was frequently divided. This hampered EFO’s influence significantly as its work, like any intergovernmental committee of the League, was bound by the convention that the committee had to unanimously agree to launch any given enquiry (into the operations of the gold standard, for example) or policy EFO wished to recommend to member and non-member governments. Over time, both the expert and Secretariat groups in EFO came to complain that it was the intergovernmental dimension that limited their freedom and effectiveness.

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In the 1930s there was certainly some truth to this, but it is also clear that these intergovernmental aspects of EFO’s work were important to the efficacy of its transnational impact in the longer run. By this, I mean its contribution to global and European economic relations into the 1950s and 1960s. (This, and how far EFO was a continental European rather than global institution, is a different, though interesting, question.) Considerable tension also existed in EFO and the League’s claim to promote both world democracy and international financial co-operation. Of course, the League’s global claim was by no means comprehensive at the start, given that it was a further seven years before the defeated European powers, most notably Germany and the USSR, became members. The United States’ delegates too participated only at the first tier of activities – the transnational networks of expertise; governmental representatives were only present at specially convened conferences, never for meetings of the intergovernmental Second Committee comprising members nominated by the Council and Assembly. This notion that the League reflected a global community was always problematic. Some countries never had much to do with the League, while others began to withdraw their membership (although sometimes still participated in specialist committees) during the course of the 1930s. Nevertheless, for a key period in international history, EFO embraced representatives from some 60 countries. Moreover, there was space, particularly in the Secretariat and expert committees, for smaller nations to make an intellectual impact incommensurate with their financial power. This was especially the case if their delegates were smart and effective – here, of course, Ragnar Nurkse from Estonia, Gottfried Haberler from Austria, Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands and his student Tjalling Koopmans14 spring to mind. All these men used EFO as a springboard both to develop their contributions to economic science and to further their international careers.

THE TENSION BETWEEN GLOBAL DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC SECURITY The League’s novelty lay not only in its global reach (potential as much as realized), but also in its claim to world democracy. The aspiration for world peace expressed in much of the liberal internationalist thought of the period was to be fulfilled by promoting democratic globalization through the creation of a form of world government.15 (International communism obviously played an important role as the defining ‘other’ in the liberal world’s promotion of international co-operation after 1920, as the motivations behind the League’s financial intervention in Central and Eastern Europe illustrated.) The League’s


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structure echoed this democratic claim, notably in the Assembly and Council, which theoretically governed its work. The democratic structure of the League, while recognizing the principle of state sovereignty, was intended to bring about a consensus for concerted action that frequently proved impossible to achieve and inflated expectations, which were bitterly dashed in the 1930s. It also raised important fears among those already suspicious of the League’s ‘true’ intentions. Republican senators in the USA were not alone in their fear of misconception abroad that the League was ‘some sort of super-government and that there is something in the Covenant which subtly transfers authority in our national concerns from Washington to Geneva’.16 More challenging for the advocates of international financial co-operation, however, was the League’s expressed commitment to open diplomacy that accompanied this emphasis on democracy.17 The League’s claims to openness and inclusivity, however much it might have fallen short of them, were an important part of its bid for international support. As one American League enthusiast put it, ‘the American people – the people of all democracies – are instinctively suspicious of public business conducted behind closed doors’. He believed that for the League to succeed it needed ‘to marshal the faith and belief of the common people, understanding and sharing in the plans and purposes of their leaders’.18 If the proceedings of the Council were surrounded by secrecy, if information was released to the public solely through a series of colourless and empty communiqués, the confidence of the people in the sincerity of the enterprise would be undermined. But this drive for inclusion and transparency sat very uneasily with financiers in general and leading central bankers in particular, none more so than successive Governors of the Federal Reserve Board of New York (the equivalent of today’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve). Benjamin Strong and George Harrison wanted only ‘the most responsible people’ to serve EFO, proceedings to be slow, publicity to be avoided, and no reports ‘as to substance’ published.19 The League’s production of colourless communiqués was not confined to the province of international finance, where the strategy made sense because illconsidered or divisive communiqués had the potential to unsettle international markets and undo the best-intentioned efforts at international co-operation and co-ordination. EFO hosted conferences and committees on a huge range of topics related to production, employment and international trade. Almost all League publications that were the result of these conferences and committee work were bland because the rules governing the League’s output demanded that all members had to agree on the content before it could be made public. (The rising number of ‘minority’ and dissenting reports published after 1930 was testimony to the mounting frustration this stipulation engendered.20) This claim to world democracy, and all the frustrated expectations and

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limitations it generated, came to weigh very heavily on the League. This was never clearer than in the years between 1933 and 1936, which witnessed the spectacular failure of League efforts to defend national democracy in the face of Japanese, Italian and German imperialism, and to co-ordinate liberal capitalism at the world economic conference of 1933. But these public failures also reinforced the strand of technocratic internationalism that was part of the founding rationale for the League, and which came to form the most important aspect of its legacy to the financial history of the mid-twentieth century. Technocracy in the interwar period is more usually identified with the drive by business leaders, engineers, politicians and intellectuals to stabilize national societies and economies, but recent studies by Martin Kohlrausch et al. draw out the utility of the concept in an international context.21 Central is the term’s emphasis on the application of science to remedy a problem to enhance social harmony, and the central role accorded to technicians, not politicians. Co-ordination rather than planning, however, stood at the heart of League technocracy, and aside from the wish to promote sound economic and financial advice, it was shaped by a determination to use the dissemination of science and technology around the world as a means to generate support for the cause of internationalism. The latter impulse was also evident in the LNHO and EFO initiatives focused on improving Europe’s infrastructure to support its economic interconnectivity. Typical was its support for Alberto Pirelli’s scheme for an integrated Leaguesponsored European road network which would, its supporters in EFO believed, form a powerful incentive to keep tariff and migration controls down and the international spirit alive.22 But technocratic internationalism also ran counter to the democratic internationalism it sought to provoke. It prioritized scientific voice over political representation, and it was necessarily conducted in a rarefied and technical language by specially selected experts. In many instances the League’s search for financial co-operation also prompted the Secretariat to resort to covert diplomacy, members of the League secretariat tacitly acknowledging Myrdal’s later recognition that technocratic co-operation needed secrecy to be of value. He claimed the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe was effective because it stressed: the technical, non-political nature and by avoiding all publicity . . . The greatest secrecy was kept up: the committees met in private, had no formal rules of procedure, no records were kept except an account of agreements reached between all or a number of states, and no votes were ever taken. The state officials acted together with the Secretariat as restricted “clubs”, keeping much independence towards their home governments and anyhow avoiding public interest and debate.23


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But the lack of transparency also held dangers for the future. This approach was undoubtedly shaped by the experience of the League. Indeed, the emphasis on the ‘technical’, non-political side of its work was the hallmark of EFO’s approach. Secrecy and independence were less easily achieved, but EFO’s growth in the 1920s and early 1930s, and the repeated reorganizations that followed in its wake, helped the Secretariat circumvent the requirement for transparency in the League’s founding covenant. EFO came to comprise a wide variety of bodies that were reorganized and renamed a number of times following its creation. It is small wonder officials and, subsequently, historians struggled to determine what EFO was up to given its dazzling variety of committees, sub-committees, delegations, commissions, sections, organizations and services. When it came to financial diplomacy, the confusion was useful.

GATHERING ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE EFO made a seminal contribution to the development of three types of technocratic internationalist networks in the interwar period. The first was the League’s contribution to what might be called, in a corruption of Michael Billig’s work on nationalism, ‘banal financial internationalism’: developing the networks and procedures by which financial data could be secured, correlated and disseminated.24 Some of this information was published, in title series such as the annually published Statistical Yearbook of the League of Nations, the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, Money and Banking, the Review of World Trade and the World Economic Survey. It was not easy work. League officials consistently complained of countries’ unwillingness to supply the data requested, or to supplying it in a form that was of limited use. The League also had to shelve some of its more ambitious statistical projects, such as the proposal to develop a comparative international index on ‘standards of living’. (It floundered, of course, on the contentious question of how ‘standards’ might be defined.) But despite these obvious limitations it was important, path-breaking work. Many of these publication series were later taken over by the United Nations and, in some instances, the League versions were assessed by their users as superior to the UN publications.25 These statistical compilations were supplemented by annual reports from the Economic and Financial Section on the general economic situation, notably the reports of the Delegation on Economic Depression and the World Economic Survey. Financial statistics, of course, were harder to come by than economic ones, and during the course of the 1930s both content and supply were distrusted. League materials, however, were on occasion the only comparative materials available. The various American agencies engaged in post-war planning, for example, all drew on League statistics in their early work on calculating the potential impact

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of post-war reparations. (League figures on population and migration were also widely used and were acknowledged, in the words of a State Department official in 1944, as a significant improvement on many of the shortcomings of the ‘rudimentary’ statistical information available after the First World War.26) Arguably more important than the quality of the statistical series produced, especially when set against the development of private and state accounting practices of the period, was the degree to which EFO and the EIS socialized member states as to the value and importance of submitting economic and financial information to a global agency, and the degree to which that agency generated a particular view of the world. Great effort was put into specifying its statistical ‘mission’ and the development of consistent categories, although there is still much to learn about the work of the EIS. The practice of collecting, collating, analyzing and disseminating data established the League as a, if not the, major hub of economic and financial knowledge production that assembled and stabilized a specific view of the world economy. The network of data dissemination, with its particular focus on the importance of developing criteria on which national performance could be compared and correlated, also reinforced the transnational dimension of the League’s work. (The term transnational is used here to emphasize the League’s interaction on this level with non-governmental organizations.) Data for the League’s 1931 inquiry into the functioning of the gold standard, for example, came in from central banks, private banks, gold-mining companies, universities, private foundations and governments.27

CO-ORDINATING NATIONAL ECONOMIC POLICIES The importance of this ‘banal’ internationalism to the development of a network of interconnected financial expertise spanning the globe was reinforced by the League’s efforts both to co-ordinate and reshape national financial policy. Generally, these efforts are seen by historians to have had limited practical effect in the 1920s and to have played an almost negligible role in the 1930s, which is when the real weight of EFO’s contribution in the field of the financial history of ideas is considered to have come to bear.28 But archival research reveals the picture to be more complex and the verdict less clear-cut than this. When the international organization, rather than the nation state, is taken as the primary site of historical enquiry, new skeins of co-operation and the potential for future globalization are revealed. Financial co-operation was regarded as one of the most sensitive areas of EFO’s activities, for the challenge it posed to national authorities, to private interests and to the stability of the market. The novelty of international co-ordination and co-operation facilitated through a formalised


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structure like the League could only ever develop incrementally. EFO socialized financiers by sustaining the practice of co-operation in some of the liberal economy’s darkest hours in the 1930s. The prospects for international financial co-operation were never more bleak than in the aftermath of the failure of the World Economic Conference of 1933. Often forgotten in the spectacular history of Roosevelt’s bombshell message and the attempted temporary stabilization agreement negotiated by central bankers in London to coincide with the opening of the conference, was the fact that the conference was sponsored by, and given a particular structure and global claim through the work of, the League of Nations.29 But the breath-taking failure of the monetary side of the deliberations of the conference, in particular, prompted some earnest soul-searching within EFO as to both the conduct and the content of international financial diplomacy. The working practice of the League meant that participants in the 1930s were socialized into the practice of international discussion, if not co-operation, through a busy annual cycle of intergovernmental and expert meetings. Those which took place in the black mood after the World Economic Conference, a number of delegates agreed, enjoyed ‘the frankest discussions that had ever been held . . . [bringing] out into the open issues which have developed among countries in the way of conflicting policy’.30 This candour was not reflected openly in the League’s published reports because of both the sensitivity of the issues discussed and the League’s commitment that all published accounts of its work had to be agreed by all the participants. But the blandness of the published record should not be taken as a fair representation of the vibrancy and vitality of League efforts to co-ordinate monetary policy in the most trying of circumstances. And these circumstances were at their most trying by the mid-1930s. League officials in EFO were keen to redeem the institution’s reputation, damaged also by the collapse of the Disarmament Conference in 1933 and ham-fisted attempts to deal with the Ethiopian crisis, through a renewed focus on financial and economic co-operation. While the new candour and energy of private discussions were cause for hope, the fractured world of global monetary relations was not. Central, as it had been since the time of the League’s inquiry into the functioning of the gold standard, was the question of currency stabilization since the departure off gold of sterling and associated currencies in 1931 and the US dollar in 1933. The League has long been seen as an advocate of monetary orthodoxy throughout the 1930s. But in fact the private minutes of meetings at the League and close reading of the materials relating to the Gold Delegation inquiry demonstrate this was not the case. In the 1930s, EFO’s primary focus was to retain the breadth of its membership and the range of its intergovernmental and expert network. This prompted it to increasingly value its role in the socialization of

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officials into internationalism and the opportunity this afforded for negotiations to take place, including covert ones, over advocating the ‘right policy’. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, EFO’s notion of what the right monetary policy should comprise had begun to change. Contrary to its established reputation for advocating monetary orthodoxy, it explored a multiplicity of approaches to the gold-standard crisis, and, by 1934–35, the secretariat of the League and the network of experts that underpinned its work, were advocating a number of schemes centred on a co-ordinated devaluation of member currencies in a reformed monetary system, and not a return to the gold standard.31 Throughout this work, EFO continued to put greater store on sustaining the network of members than on advocating the ‘right policy’. Given that financial questions were causing a great deal of tension between Britain, France and the United States at a time when their position as the world’s pre-eminent democracies was under threat from a variety of directions, this approach was no bad thing. It was echoed in EFO’s efforts to tie financial co-ordination to a wider set of issues connected to the breakdown of the gold standard on the one hand and international diplomacy on the other. EFO’s attempts to explore the issue of clearing (some of the technical work here was later to inform the creation of the European Payments Union) demonstrate how its notion of an international financial network did not just pertain to questions of membership, but also to the inter-relationship of one aspect of financial diplomacy to another.

A DIPLOMACY OF EXPERTISE32 EFO’s contribution to the emergence of financial technocratic networks that collected data and to the co-ordination of national financial policy regarding the gold standard and clearing, connected to its wider contribution regarding the most appropriate institutional structures to safeguard liberal internationalism. This was its third and final contribution to the history of financial networks in the 1930s. By 1937, officials of EFO’s secretariat had grown ever-more frustrated by the degree to which they were in the thrall of political inertia within the League thanks to the collapse of diplomatic relations between the totalitarian and democratic powers. The subjective perspective of the officials involved is revealing because it demonstrates that EFO officials were irritated almost as much by the nationalism of the democratic powers, notably those of the British Treasury, as it was by National Socialist Germany. EFO officials began to lobby aggressively for the relationship between EFO and the League to be reformed. The semi-detached status of the International Labour Organization and the Health Organisation was an important guide. So, too, was the increasingly vociferous and public American support for the economic and financial activities of the


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League of Nations. In an enthusiastic letter the American Secretary of State wrote how ‘the League of Nations has been responsible for the development of mutual exchange and discussion of ideas and methods to a greater extent and in more fields of humanitarian and scientific endeavour than any other organisation in history’.33 EFO’s efforts to reform the League helped to shape the work of the Bruce Committee, which was formed in 1939. The work of this committee has been lumped together generally with the history of the discredited policies of economic appeasement in the run-up to the Second World War. But the Bruce Report was much more about reconfiguring the administrative structure and the League’s wider contribution to peacekeeping than it was about economic appeasement.34 Although its work, as some commentators would have it, came too late to save the League, the Bruce Committee boasted two interesting achievements. The first was its distillation of and reflection on, in print, the League’s work on economic and social relations and its highlighting of the continued global interdependence of the late 1930s, when most countries in the world were flirting with, if not entirely infatuated with, ideas of economic self-sufficiency and nationalism. The second was its success in drawing out why neither conventional bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, nor the League of Nations as it was currently structured, was best placed to address economic and social questions. In the words of the Bruce Report, experience had shown that social and economic issues which ‘affect the daily lives of every man, woman and child’ could not be solved by purely national action.35 International co-operation was essential, but to achieve its potential the League needed to be reformed in order to put the economic and social agenda centre-stage, and, as far as possible, politics should be removed from economic policy. How was this to be done? Well, what the report did not mean was that politics could be taken out of issues like trade protection, unemployment or monetary co-operation. Rather, the intention was to limit the power of the Second Committee (the intergovernmental committee that sat between EFO and the Assembly and Council and was supposed to direct EFO’s work) and replace it with a Central Committee. The Central Committee would direct both economic and social activities independently of the Council and Assembly, and its membership, crucially as far as EFO was concerned, did not have to solely comprise existing members of the League of Nations. In short, therefore, the Central Committee offered a potentially leading role in this agency that would work semi-independently of the League to the United States. It could be led by a non-member country and individual (there was talk of appointing an ‘economic superman’ to oversee its work). In effect, reform would enable the United States to join.

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The Bruce Committee was determined to give EFO and the Social Division of the League the same independent status as enjoyed by the ILO and the LNHO. It also intended to co-ordinate EFO’s programmes with those of the ILO and LNHO to effect what the UN today would call human security.36 A number of figures at the League were behind this drive to restructure it. Most historians have emphasized the role played by Joseph Avenol, the penultimate and disgraced Secretary General of the League (a Conservative French nationalist who toadied up to Vichy) as the principal driving force behind the committee’s work.37 Certainly, in 1939 and 1940 Avenol sought to hijack the work of the Bruce Committee for his own unsavoury motives. There were rumours at the time in Geneva, Paris, London and Washington that he planned to make the Bruce Committee part of a larger scheme to ‘disband the Council and the Assembly in order to put himself at the top of a “Directory”’.38 There was some truth to this. Loveday was right to suspect that by September 1939 Avenol had become deeply hostile to British membership of the Secretariat: at this point he tried to purge it of British representatives altogether, so that, according to the Greek Undersecretary General Thanassis Aghnides, Avenol could ‘create a new economic block consisting of Germany, Italy, France and Spain’, from which England would be excluded and made to ‘expiate for her crimes’.39 But Avenol’s actions were unrepresentative of the Secretariat as a whole. Though the League appeared to be in meltdown, almost everyone else in the Secretariat was busy fighting to ensure its survival. In fact, the chief agency behind the drive to restructure the League was EFO. War in Europe, of course, meant the Bruce reform was not enacted. Although Avenol was eventually banished in disgrace, the League’s sense of intellectual isolation and physical diminution continued to intensify. By July 1940, more than 50 per cent of its staff had been sacked and Italy had declared war on Britain and France. With the fall of France, Geneva was now almost entirely cut off from the free world. But it was not the end of EFO, for which rescue came from two quarters: the nation which had abandoned the League at birth, the United States, and the British Foreign Office. The latter believed the war made it ‘essential to maintain the League as a basis of whatever co-operative international effort is built up after the war’.40 While the Foreign Office refused to let Avenol wind up or surrender the League, the US State Department, through a deliberately opaque set of negotiations, ensured that EFO was moved to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. There it stayed for the remainder of the war, enjoying a dense and varied set of interactions with the variety of agencies and individuals that were planning post-war reconstruction. The financial networks created and supported by EFO in the interwar and wartime period played an important role in shaping international reconstruction after the end of the Second World War. This is a complex and subtle history, but just a few examples will have to suffice. Ragnar Nurkse’s study The International


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Currency Experience (Geneva, 1944) made a central contribution to the intellectual and practical framing of the Keynes – White plan and the development of the International Monetary Fund; EFO’s work on trade was central to informing the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; and EFO’s emphasis on the central role of peasant agriculture in the stability and vitality of the European political economy was taken up in the European Economic Community’s Common Agricultural Policy.41 Aside from its intellectual contributions to the financial and economic history of the twentieth century, EFO’s preoccupations with the institutional setting of policy also remain relevant. It argued that the institutional dimension in which economic and monetary policy was implemented was as important as, or even more important than, finding the ‘right policy’, a conclusion that echoes the recent research of new political economists such as Tim Besley42 – as did its emphasis on the close relationship between economic stability, the distribution of wealth, and war. The depth of this conviction and the longevity of the network that sustained it were underlined by the fact that some of the founding members of the Organisation of Economists for Peace and Security (which began life in 1989 as the Organisation of Economists Against the Arms Race) were former members of EFO.43 EFO’s long-forgotten contribution to the history of financial networks in the interwar period is a rich demonstration of the paradox of outcomes. The intellectual and personal connective tissues that facilitated its contribution to lesson-learning and policy development in the Second World War were strengthened and deepened throughout the 1930s, just as imperialism and militarism tightened their grip around the world. These ties were not lost but reshaped, and bonded within and between new institutions and networks, generated in the war, that shaped the history of globalization and regionalism after 1945.


PA R T I I

The Nature of Dictatorship


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Napoleon’s France: A Forerunner of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Dictatorships? Michael Rowe

Historians have not been blind to possible parallels between Napoleon and the twentieth-century dictators. Such an association was being drawn as early as the 1930s. Alfred Cobban described Napoleon as the first modern dictator, while Pieter Geyl – himself a victim of Nazism – similarly made comparisons though concluding, not surprisingly, that Napoleon was nowhere near as bad as Hitler. More recently, Desmond Seward has noted parallels in the careers of Hitler and Napoleon. However, most current scholarship on the twentieth-century dictatorships treats them on their own terms.1 This matches the reticence of the dictators in drawing parallels between themselves and Napoleon. Hitler said very little about Napoleon. He did visit Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides shortly after Germany’s occupation of Paris, echoing in a strange way Napoleon’s visit to the tomb of Frederick the Great after defeating Prussia in 1806. Nonetheless, Hitler’s own self-perception as a ‘world-shaking’ event and his view of Napoleon as ‘only a human being’ left little scope for comparison. Stalin, given the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Bonapartism and Napoleon’s problematic position within the collective national Russian memory, had absolutely no interest in associating himself with Napoleon. Mussolini, in contrast, did compare himself to Napoleon, but stressed that he, Mussolini, was the greater. The lesser dictators similarly underplayed Napoleonic associations, preferring instead to locate themselves in national traditions that were, for the most part, hostile to or ambivalent about Napoleon. One of the few exceptions was in Poland, where positive memories of Napoleon’s role are reflected to this day in the words accompanying the national anthem. Hence, it was quite natural that General Pilsudski should dwell on the more obvious parallels between himself and Napoleon.2

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DYNASTIC LINEAGE Napoleon’s lack of an obviously assured position within a historical – dynastic chain of succession, coupled with a reluctance to rely solely on the legitimacy conferred through the ballot box, forced his regime to seek alternative sources of entitlement. Here, we can see parallels with the twentieth-century dictatorships, which were similarly devoid of dynastic claims, and for which democracy was similarly problematic. Napoleon’s own interest in history is documented well enough, and, at first sight, history provided a host of possible contenders with whom he might link himself in the public mind. Nonetheless, the politics of early-nineteenth-century France placed real restrictions on who might profitably be used. Napoleon placed considerable distance between his regime and the preceding Bourbon line, whose re-establishment in the form of the Duc de Provence – later, Louis XVIII – remained a possibility that terrified republican France, on whose support Napoleon relied. Hence, even relatively promising Bourbon rulers, like Henry IV, were considered far too divisive politically.3 It was necessary to go back further. One possibility was linkage with the tradition of the Roman emperors, something that seemed natural given the territorial extent of the Grande Empire following the string of French victories over Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1805–09. It was in this context that the French Institute suggested granting Napoleon the titles Augustus and Germanicus, and inscribing these on the Arc de Triomphe, whose construction was just beginning. However, Napoleon rejected the proposal, partly on the grounds that the only Roman who met his high standards was Julius Caesar, and he was not an emperor, and, above all, because these were ‘foreign’ titles for which he had no desire.4 The only obvious candidate who met the relevant criteria of being French, an empire-builder and a lawgiver was Charlemagne. Napoleon’s association with this medieval ruler had the added benefit of appealing to the newly acquired Germanspeaking regions of the Napoleonic Empire, where the tradition of Charlemagne as a German emperor remained alive. The parallels were consciously played up by the French regime, with Napoleon heralded as a new Charlemagne who would regenerate the Carolingian Empire with his laws. Napoleon, according to this official line, was the founder of the ‘fourth dynasty’, the Bonapartes, who now took their place among the Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians.5 To what extent was this struggle to establish a lineage characteristic of the twentieth-century dictatorships? To an extent, all availed themselves of this obvious legitimating device in public representation. This was even the case with Stalin’s Soviet Union, whose avowed governing ideology – Marxism-Leninism – seemed to offer least scope for drawing on Russia’s past rulers to confer legitimacy. That the regime nonetheless felt compelled to establish a lineage was

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evident early on, in the prominent display of images of Marx, Engels and Lenin at official parades, and in the embalming of Lenin’s body within a mausoleum set against the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.6 Both forms of display harked back to earlier traditions: the public parade of icons was a practice Russia had inherited from Byzantium, while Lenin’s tomb reflects the medieval practice of exhibiting the earthly remains of saints. Stalin’s self-location within the longer span of Russian national history really took off during the Great Patriotic War, however, in a process most famously symbolized in the release of films, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, depicting key moments in the foundation of the Russian state.7 A partial rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a decidedly more Tsarist look to military uniforms, were part and parcel of this trend. Yet, given its Marxist-Leninist underpinnings – not to mention the fact that the Soviet Union contained a substantial non-Russian population – association of Stalin with heroes from Russia’s past remained problematic. Hitler faced a similar difficulty, albeit for different reasons. Fundamentally, his self-perception as unique made it impossible for him to identify with any other mortal. Nonetheless, Nazi propaganda did locate Hitler at the end of a line of heroes that included Frederick the Great and Bismarck.8 The linkage of such figures to a specifically Prussian and hence statist reading of German history, however, limited their use for an ideology rooted in völkisch notions that held the state to be of subordinate importance to the race. Franco’s regime, in certain respects, stood closest to the Napoleonic in terms of self-representation. As did Napoleon, Franco confronted a potential Bourbon pretender, which necessitated placing a degree of distance between himself and the dynasty that had most recently ruled Spain. Also like Napoleon, Franco nonetheless identified himself with figures drawn from what he considered the Golden Age of Spanish history, including notably Charles V and Philip II. As with Napoleon, too, this association was expressed in heraldic symbols: where Napoleon used the Merovingian bee, Franco used the imperial crown and shield of Charles V. And Francoist set-piece events, like their Napoleonic equivalents, consisted of a curious blend of new and old: parades of modern tanks and aircraft juxtaposed with the flags flown in medieval battles against the Moors. Unlike Napoleon, Franco was persuaded not to move into the main royal palace in his capital city, but in most other respects both adopted the trappings of monarchy. Franco’s image, like that of Napoleon, appeared on coinage. Napoleon, even while still First Consul, occupied the pew reserved for Louis XVI when attending church; Franco, similarly, entered and left church under a canopy, thereby assuming for himself a royal privilege. As with Napoleon, Franco’s assertion of traditional regalian rights over the Catholic Church caused friction with Rome that was but barely patched up in a concordat.9 On the other hand, there were significant differences. Franco might, for example, be styled ‘Caudillo by the Grace of God’; Napoleon, in an

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important contrast, was ‘Emperor by the Grace of God, and the Constitution’, a formula Franco would never have accepted; and while Franco’s selection from history reflected a determination to entrench a narrow vision of Spain that excluded as many as it included, Napoleon consciously avoided celebrating elements that risked reopening the sectarian wounds of the 1790s.

LEADER, STATE AND NATION The relationships between leader, state and nation raise new difficulties. One reading of fascism is to see it as an extreme form of nationalism born of some massive perceived national injustice whose reversal can only be achieved through ‘regeneration’. Whether one should apply this argument to Stalin’s Soviet Union seems questionable. Certainly, the Soviet Union under Stalin reversed the territorial losses of the First World War and re-established a geopolitical position comparably favourable to that enjoyed by the Russian Empire following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. However, Stalin’s quest for territorial accretion was a response to external threats that demanded the establishment of a western buffer; it was not primarily motivated by a need to avenge the defeats inflicted upon Nicholas II’s Russia by Japan in 1905 and Germany in 1914–17. Russian nationalism was played upon by Stalin during the Great Patriotic War, but as a tool; it was not fundamental. The narrative of national rebirth is a characteristic of the dictatorships of the right rather than the left. Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany had all experienced severe foreign-policy defeats in the recent past. For Spain, defeat at the hands of the United States in the brief war of 1898 led to a profound crisis in self-confidence as well as the tangible loss of the vestiges of Spain’s empire in the Americas and Pacific. Franco’s self-perception as the regenerator of the ‘true’ Spain, as opposed to the Spain of liberals and Freemasons responsible for defeat, was profound.10 For Italy, the equivalent defeats were at Adowa (1896) and Caporetto (1917). The latter might have been avenged through the acquisition of vast territories in the Near East, as had indeed been foreseen in agreements concluded with the Entente. This failed to happen, not least because of Turkey’s ‘regeneration’ under Atatürk in the early 1920s.11 Mussolini’s own rise and foreign policy, of which the invasion of Abyssinia was the high-water mark, were the consequence of this perceived need to wash out earlier stains.12 In Hitler’s Germany, the element of response to national humiliation was combined with a degree of cultural pessimism evident even before the First World War, itself a defeat against which the setbacks suffered by Spain and Italy pale.13 The response went far beyond reattaining some previously held position, requiring instead the wholesale ethnic and territorial reordering of Eurasia.14

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Extreme nationalism has been identified as an element that the French Revolution and twentieth-century fascism have in common.15 In the eighteenth century, France, too, suffered a series of foreign-policy humiliations. Defeat in the Seven Years War (1756–63) in particular represented a massive loss of face for a monarchy that only 50 years earlier had undisputedly occupied the top position. Worse, this defeat, which was compounded by last-minute setbacks in the American War and a further humiliation in the Netherlands – France’s own backyard – on the eve of the Revolution, undermined the whole domestic political order: first, the attempt to compete both on land (against Prussia) and at sea (against Britain) bankrupted the French state; second, the widely held perception in France that these defeats were the result of the alliance concluded in 1756 with Habsburg Austria, and sealed in the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, meant the setbacks were blamed on the regime itself rather than on some marginal group. The resulting disillusionment with the monarchy goes a long way to explaining why the French officer corps in particular did not prevent the disturbances of 1789 developing beyond a bread riot.16 The initial passivity of revolutionary France after 1789 – the various declarations to the effect that wars were caused by kings and not free peoples, and the refusal to be drawn by Spain into a war with Britain over Nootka Sound – would, however, seem to undermine the attempt to draw parallels with the bellicose fascist dictatorships, which demonstrated no such pacifist sentiments at any stage of their existence. The parallels again become convincing, though, if one continues the account into late 1791, a period that saw passivity give way to increasingly hysterical rhetoric directed primarily against the Habsburg Monarchy. In early 1792 this culminated in the outbreak of a war that would last for 23 years.17 Even then one might object that there was a qualitative difference between the French Republic’s declaration of war against Austria and Mussolini’s offensive into Abyssinia or Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Though the radicalizing dynamic of French revolutionary politics played the greater role, Habsburg miscalculation and Prussian territorial greed meant that Vienna and Berlin were not entirely blameless. Furthermore, the French entered the conflict promising liberation, not territorial expansion. Initially, the French practised what they preached in the territories they occupied following early successes in 1792. The occupation authorities installed local radicals in places like Mainz, and organized elections in which all adult males could participate, albeit on one condition: that they swore an oath committing themselves to basic revolutionary principles. This seemed reasonable enough to the French, but was rejected by the majority of those living under occupation. Worse was to follow: when Coalition armies went on the offensive at the end of 1792, they were assisted by the inhabitants of occupied areas in the expulsion of French forces. The effect of this in Paris cannot be underestimated: the realization

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finally dawned that most Europeans wished to conserve their existing tangible rights and privileges rather than be ‘liberated’ by the French army. Robespierre’s prediction about soldiers making poor missionaries was proved correct. The response was to ditch international idealism and retreat into revolutionary chauvinism. Foreign revolutionaries were among the first victims of this new French policy, which characterized above all the Jacobin Republic of 1793–94, just as foreign communists were sacrificed by Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’.18 Within France, the failure of other Europeans to contribute to their own liberation bred contempt and contributed to a nationalism that celebrated France as a unique repository of republican virtue. Preservation of the Republic from destruction by both external forces and internal subversives required an unprecedented degree of mass mobilization, and it is this process that again has led to parallels being drawn with twentieth-century dictatorships. In particular, the famous decree of 23 August 1793, ordering the levée en masse, in which the entire population was committed to the defence of the Republic, has been compared to Goebbels’s declaration of total war in 1944.19 The means used by the Jacobins to effect this mobilization, including not only the employment of compulsion on a large scale, but of rallies and festivals that celebrated self-sacrifice in the interests of the state, together with an unprecedented intrusion of the government into the running of the economy, control of the press, suspension of the rule of law and annihilation of opponents on the basis of category, again foreshadows the twentieth-century dictatorships.20 Only the Jacobins’ fall from power limited the extent and duration of this phase. One might object that the policies collectively constituting the Jacobin ‘Terror’ represented an unplanned response to an unparalleled crisis. More sinister from a twentieth-century perspective were signs that policies involving massive infringements of liberties were being implemented not in order to get through a crisis, but rather to create a nation that conformed to some rational ideal. One might label this utopianism, a problematic concept but one that in this context implies the will to reach quickly, whatever the cost, some ideal endpoint that needs no subsequent improvement. Utopianism was not a feature of Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. It is detectable in Hitler’s monumental schemes for the creation of an ethnically pure Reich of 100 millions. Stalin’s Soviet Union lies somewhere in-between. His schemes for rapid economic development might be seen in the context of an ideological Marxist-Leninist drive to create an ideal society populated by New Soviet Man; it might also be linked to a far older Russian tradition of playing catch-up with the West. This would categorize Stalinism, like fascism, as a ‘developmental dictatorship’, motivated primarily by foreign-policy considerations.

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UTOPIANISM VERSUS PRAGMATISM Napoleon had little time for the utopianism of the French Revolution. Instead, his regime’s policies were distinguished by pragmatism. Revealing of the difference is the issue of linguistic uniformity. Committed revolutionaries believed linguistic uniformity crucial for political engagement by the entire citizenry, and hence recommended the elimination of local patois and non-French languages through a combination of public education and military service. The Jacobins shared this vision, but with their typical impatience and disregard for human rights proposed more extreme measures for reaching this ideal, including mass deportations and killings of minorities.21 Napoleon’s attitude, in contrast, was summed up by his comment: ‘Let them speak their jargon, as long as they fight like Frenchmen.’22 Nor was Napoleon a fundamentalist on other issues revealing of the revolutionary tendency to radically reshape society according to rational principles, irrespective of older traditions. He was, for example, something of a sceptic when it came to the introduction of metric weights and measurements, which his regime did little to enforce.23 Similarly, he allowed the revolutionary calendar, which took the establishment of the Republic as the beginning of modern time, to lapse, before finally abolishing it in 1806. Not that ‘vision’ can be dismissed entirely from the Napoleonic episode. Indeed, whether or not Napoleon and his collaborators were motivated by some bigger idea beyond simple aggrandisement remains something of a bone of contention.24 Evidence is deployed by both sides, and indeed reasons are found for why Napoleon might be said to have tended towards pragmatism on the one hand or something more idealistic on the other. For the latter, one might point to Napoleon as an educated product of the Enlightenment who had spent his youth dreaming about the regeneration of his native Corsica. One might further highlight his training to a high standard in mathematics and military engineering and his service as an officer, hence his proclivity to force existing conditions to conform to rational principles. On the other hand, one can point to Napoleon’s experiences of the 1790s, and in particular his experience of administering occupied territories in such a way as to extract out of them the maximum resources for his undersupplied army. This generally meant accepting society as it was and working through established elites. This pragmatism, arguably, gained the upper hand after Napoleon seized power in France in 1799 and proceeded to conquer a vast Continental empire. However, Napoleon’s empire could never be a one-man show, as it depended upon thousands of collaborators to function. Many of these were undoubtedly enthused by the idea that they were engaged in some great civilizing project. This was especially the case with the younger generation of educated men from the empire’s social elite, who entered upon their professional careers in the final years of the regime. A product of the fusion of

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the old-regime elite and revolutionary notables, these young men increasingly formed the backbone of the imperial administration, serving in outposts stretching from Rome to Hamburg, and Illyria to Catalonia. Their fathers no doubt lost their idealism during the bitter struggles of the 1790s, which had produced little other than disorder. The new cohort, in contrast, attacked the business of regenerating the more primitive parts of the empire with something approaching revolutionary zeal.25

INCLUSION OR EXCLUSION: TREATMENT OF THE ‘OTHER’ What makes the twentieth-century dictatorships obnoxious to modern sensibilities is not so much their utopianism as their cruel treatment of entire categories of people. Nazi Germany stands out in this regard, as here the extermination of whole groups was not simply a means to an end or an unintended outcome, but rather an end in itself. Stalin also envisaged the elimination of categories defined by race, but this was more part of a traditional agenda of securing the Soviet Union from external attack, hence the need to eliminate minorities in exposed regions. How does the Napoleonic Empire score on the basis of its treatment of ‘categories’ in pursuit of its great civilizing mission? It was quite natural that, as products of the late Enlightenment, imperial administrators should particularly associate civilization with the state of economic development and the quality of government: in brief, ‘arts and laws’. It was further quite natural that Europe, and within Europe France, should be adjudged as occupying the top rung of civilization according to these criteria. This alone justified looting occupied Europe of its best artworks and storing them in that great repository of Western civilisation, the Louvre; but was it theoretically possible that with good governance all peoples of the expanding empire, irrespective of social or cultural background, might aspire to joining France on the top rung?26 There was some equivocation when it came to social inclusiveness. This reflected the Enlightenment’s ambivalence over the extent to which it was desirable, on utilitarian grounds, for ordinary people to be educated beyond their station. This was a sentiment Napoleon shared with Frederick the Great and Joseph II.27 It found expression in Napoleon’s educational reforms, including the replacement of the progressive secondary schools set up under the preceding regime with elitist lycées that were designed to produce technocrats for the imperial bureaucracy and officers for the army. ‘Public utility’ might cut both ways when it came to the issue of equal opportunities: it served to justify the unprecedented extension of religious tolerance in much of Continental Europe in the 1780s. Persecution of productive religious minorities, so the argument ran, would undermine economic development. At the same time, public utility

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could be used to justify the maintenance of a stratified society, as was the case, for example, in the new Prussian law code of 1794.28 Napoleon’s rehierarchization of France after 1799 – his determination to create a foundation composed of blocks of granite, not grains of sand – was thus perfectly in harmony with the progressive intellectual trends of the day, as it too was justified on grounds of public utility. Certainly, committed republicans chafed at Napoleon’s introduction of the Légion d’Honneur in 1802, and complained even more about the creation of the imperial nobility in 1808. Back came the titles and crests. However, there were two crucial differences that justified the new hierarchy in utilitarian terms: promotion was based upon merit; and the new noble titles did not come with fiscal or judicial privileges. Theoretically, anyone could rise to the elite within the Napoleonic system. To quote a phrase common at the time, every humble soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his backpack. In practice, the constitutional system restricted real engagement in politics to an elite of landowners. However, in this it was merely a product of its times. Were equal opportunities extendable to all outposts of empire? Napoleon’s bureaucrats were sufficiently confident in the universality of their own ideals to think so. The ‘New Frenchmen’ from Germany and Italy might be lazy now, but they had done great things in the past. Their lands were potentially very productive, and they would ultimately be ‘regenerated’ under good French administration. Even the Illyrians, though far down the scale of civilization because of an unproductive soil and a history of incompetent rulers, might be assimilated fully, though only after a period of intensive care.29 Where the limits of the inclusiveness of Napoleon’s empire were tested to destruction was with respect to the Jews. The problem was not so much that Jews were primitive according to the measures employed by the imperial bureaucrat: they were not, as they lived a settled rather than nomadic existence, and if anything scored above average marks for literacy, urbanization and engagement with those sectors of the economy considered especially advanced. The real problem was that despite all this, they still failed to assimilate in the estimation of the imperial administration. Initially, this worrying paradox might be explained in terms of the damage done by centuries of persecution. However, this ended with the law of 27 September 1791, which made Jews equal citizens. Following this liberation, so the logic went, Jews should have assimilated. However, doubts that this had in fact occurred were raised in Napoleon’s mind when complaints were sent in from non-Jewish administrés in the Alsatian departments (where most of the empire’s Jews lived) to the effect that Jews were engaged in unethical business practices. Napoleon responded by convening a meeting of Jewish leaders and, following this, enacting legislation that made Jews something less than equal citizens. The legislation placed various restrictions on Jews for a period of ten years, after which there would be a review to see whether this minority had

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‘regenerated’ itself. The ten-year period would be adjudged to have worked if Jews could demonstrate, among other things, that they were supplying proportionately as many conscripts as non-Jews, and if they approximated non-Jews in terms of their occupations and attendance at public educational establishments, and in the volume of legal cases involving usury. Especially noteworthy in all this was the regime’s conviction that Jews were somehow physically unhealthy, hence the emphasis on military service and engagement in farming as indicators of regeneration.30 All this was justified in ‘modern’, ‘enlightened’, utilitarian terms – criteria that were absolute and non-negotiable, and through which theoretically anything might be justified including setting aside basic freedoms. In this sense, Jews and other minorities were potentially better off under the old world of rights and privileges. These discriminated – they did so between all estates – but at least there were real legal boundaries to that discrimination. One is left wondering what the Napoleonic regime would have done had Jews failed the quality-assurance exercise due in the late 1810s. Would it have abolished the restrictive legislation? Would it have renewed it for an additional ten-year period? Would it have increased the severity of the restrictions by, for example, refusing to authorise marriages of Jewish couples, or compelling Jewish children to attend public schools, or forcing all young Jewish men to serve in the army? Or might it have admitted defeat and adopted something akin to apartheid? Napoleon lacked a big idea apart from the vague civilizing ideal that all enlightened Europeans of the period shared. This contrasts with the later dictators, who all sought to impose a narrow and contested vision against considerable opposition. Napoleon’s was a post-revolutionary regime, not a revolutionary one. Its whole ethos in this regard was to rebuild out of the sectarian wreckage inherited from the Directory of 1795–99. Ralliement – the rallying of ideological opponents of the Revolution to the new regime – and amalgame – the amalgamation of the old landed elite with the new revolutionary elite – were the catchwords of the new order. Essentially, this was the exact opposite of Europe’s twentieth-century dictatorships, which were instead characterized for the most part by ideological sectarianism: Franco’s belief in the existence of ‘two irreconcilable Spains’;31 in Stalin’s case, not only an underlying Marxist-Leninist belief in the currency of class struggle of which politics was merely the superstructure, but intolerance of those deviating from the regime’s narrow interpretation of Marxist-Leninism; in Nazi Germany’s case, the physical elimination of political opponents who constituted a separate category in the concentration camps marked out with the red triangle; and a similar lack of political tolerance in Mussolini’s Italy, although, in terms of physical violence meted out, milder than the other three.32

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VIOLENCE, TERROR AND REPRESSION It is not just the ideological narrowness that marks out the twentieth-century dictatorships, but rather the extent to which this manifested itself in the violence they were prepared to employ against opponents. This violence was generally unconstrained by independent judiciaries, and hence arbitrary in its application even if particular categories were especially targeted. How violent and arbitrary was Napoleonic France? All states are practitioners of the art of violence to some extent.33 Edmund Burke predicted that regimes born of revolution would make up for their legitimacy deficit through a greater reliance on violence.34 Initially, Burke’s predictions flew in the face of the evidence. However, following the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792 an upsurge of violence in France itself lent credence to his warnings. Sporadic violence on an ever-increasing scale eventually gave way to the far more systematic terror – the Terror – associated with the Jacobin Republic of 1793–94. Features of the Terror foreshadowed comparable events of the twentieth century: killings on an unprecedented scale; the selection of victims according to broad subjective categories; arbitrary justice administered by special tribunals bearing little relation to regular courts; reliance upon anonymous denunciations; collective punishments meted out against relatives of the accused; and show trials in which the verdict was decided in advance. The worst of the Terror burnt itself out in the summer of 1794, with Robespierre’s fall. Not that France was characterised by tranquillity in the late 1790s. The regime immediately preceding Napoleon, the Directory, was disturbed by widespread violence. Some of this was political, but much of it was simple banditry born of socio-economic turmoil and the breakdown of the state. Napoleon’s prime objective on seizing power in November 1799 was to master this disastrous situation. To what extent did he employ arbitrary violence to do so? The balance between formal legal constraint on executive action on the one hand, and the room to act arbitrarily on the other, was a delicate one. This statement of itself appears to set Napoleonic France apart from the twentieth-century dictatorships. Observers at the time, and immediately after, disagreed over whether Napoleonic France was a paradigm of legal order, as for example symbolized by the jury trials in open court the regime introduced and the legal codes it promulgated, or a police state. The answer is that it was both. Napoleon himself stressed that government by its nature necessitates, on occasion, arbitrary action, and that, furthermore, the best constitutions are ‘short and obscure’: those that create the fewest legal entanglements for government. In part this was also a reaction to the Directory, whose constitution was extremely long, precise and almost impossible to amend without resort to coups d’état that fatally undermined the legitimacy of the regime. Napoleon wished to avoid this. Hence his ‘short and obscure’ constitution of Year VIII left plenty of legal elbow room for the regime.

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The new regime availed itself of this, and, in particular, of the clauses that allowed the suspension of constitutional provisions in those departments adjudged to be in a state of emergency. In effect, such a suspension occurred in close to half of France during the Consulate, with the west and south especially affected. A set of institutions, some of which were inherited from the Directory, exploited this leeway to establish order: the paramilitary Gendarmerie composed in part of military veterans who patrolled the countryside on foot and horseback; the military divisions, into which the approximately one hundred civilian-run departments were grouped; special non-jury courts composed mainly of Gendarmerie and army officers; and the Ministry of Police, under the former Jacobin terrorist Joseph Fouché.35 These instruments proved their worth in grinding down disorder and imposing the regime’s will. Given their success, it is hardly surprising that they should have been in part preserved by subsequent French regimes, whether Legitimist, Orleanist, Bonapartist or Republican, and aped by other European states, especially in southern Europe. The Gendarmerie, for example, inspired the formation of the Piedmontese (and later Italian) Carabinieri and the Spanish Garda Civil. Both institutions figured in the repressive tool box employed by Mussolini and Franco, though in the former case they remained ultimately loyal to the King. Similarly, the division of France into military subdivisions had its parallels elsewhere. Indeed, in Spain, the prominent position of military governor and captain-general in, respectively, each province and region, and with it the applicability of military justice over civilians who in some respects resembled a population under military occupation, ended only with reforms in the early 1980s.36 Despite similarities, and, indeed, some institutional continuities, there were fundamental differences between the motivating spirit behind Napoleonic repression and that associated with the twentieth-century dictators. For Napoleon, the operation of the security state was less about crushing political opposition and more about establishing a peaceful order that was the precondition for the introduction of the kind of regular civilian government so admired by liberals throughout Europe. Napoleonic France is comparable more to the British state in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a context that also witnessed the use of non-jury courts, detention without trial and the army for policing purposes. The ultimate aim was always to reach a position where such extraordinary arrangements became redundant; and, as occurred in Napoleonic France, regular civilian administration was introduced as soon as the necessary conditions were met. There is little sense that the repression associated with the twentieth-century dictatorships can be reduced to a temporary expedient, or that a relatively liberal order based on the rule of law was the end that these regimes were aiming for. Napoleonic repression was the exact opposite of the dynamic towards ever-greater violence detectable, for example, in Nazi Germany – where law

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was reduced to the ‘Will of the Führer’37 – or the ongoing vindictiveness of the Franco regime. Stalin’s Soviet Union is slightly more complex in this regard: here, recent interpretations suggest that Stalin genuinely aimed for something akin to a Rechtsstaat, but that this was effectively sabotaged by regional party bosses who feared for their own positions.38 This was akin to France in the 1790s, where arbitrariness and terror were as likely to be associated with local forces as with the central state. Ending such terror demanded stronger, not weaker, state institutions. Local autonomy under the sectarian conditions of the 1790s was a recipe for vendetta, something Napoleon understood and countered with centralization. For example, the tightening of the operation of military conscription under Napoleon can, at first sight, be interpreted as a victory for the authoritarian state. However, the appointment by central government of outsiders on recruitment panels as opposed to reliance on local notables provided protection to those vulnerable to local score-settling. The same observation can be made with regard to the replacement of local jurors with panels of judges with no local roots and hence impervious to intimidation, as well as policing by outsiders under firm central control and the appointment of prefects outside their departments and their regularly rotation lest they establish local roots.39 Napoleon disliked disorder and irregularity. Possibly, this was on account of his military background and his experience of operating in a strict chain of command. He went to considerable lengths in re-establishing and maintaining the civilian version of this chain. Arbitrariness had its place in his regime – the extraordinary kidnap and execution of the Duc d’Enghien in 1804 was a spectacular example – but essentially it was something Napoleon reserved for himself and used sparingly. It was not a prerogative he shared with his subordinates. Violence in particular was to be kept under central control. It was not left to local thugs or death squads masquerading as executors of the state’s will but motivated by sectarian hatreds.40 Repressive impulses came from the centre, not – as appears to have been the case to a considerable extent under Stalin, for example – the localities. Central to the Soviet terror of the 1930s were special tribunals, or ‘troikas’, composed of local party officials.41 Such an arrangement, which in effect simply prolonged the civil-war conditions of the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution, would have been anathema to Napoleon, who promised upon seizing power that the Revolution was over. Instead, everyone was constrained by the rules. Mayors, occupying the lowest tier, could only correspond with the tier above, and breaking rank was not tolerated. Similarly, the pernicious cycle of denunciation was broken. Denunciations no longer constituted the basis of action against local officials, as they had done previously. Instead, cases involving officials – no matter how minor – accused of wrongdoing were considered by no less a body than the Council of State, at the apex of government. Political

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prisoners, of whom there were several hundred, might be held without trial by order of the Ministry of Police. However, their cases were examined annually by a high-level Senate committee, which considered whether their continued detention was warranted by the threat they posed.42 This is not to ignore the more sinister aspects to Napoleon’s regime. Its secret-police apparatus was tiny compared to the vast NKVD and Gestapo empires, but as Paul Corner writes with reference to Mussolini’s Italy, fear is generated less by the actual size of such an organization than by the fact that it is largely unknown.43 This fear existed in Napoleonic France, though it was not unique to it even at the time.44

LEGITIMIZATION AND REPRESENTATION Napoleonic repression differed from that practised by the twentieth-century dictatorships in that it was relatively small-scale, largely contained within bounds and designed to pave the way for a functioning legal order. However, the Napoleonic regime, like the later dictatorships, required legitimating expressions of public adulation yet feared open expression of political opposition. In Napoleonic France this hypocrisy manifested itself in a voting system of Byzantine complexity. At a basic level, all adult (male) citizens could vote. On the face of it this made the new regime more democratic than its predecessor. However, this feature was nullified by a convoluted filtering mechanism of multiple tiers of electoral colleges. Membership of these was determined in part by tax qualifications, and elections were generally for two candidates, one of whom would be picked by the government. Furthermore, the national representative institutions that elections were for – the Tribunate and Corps Legislatif – enjoyed only limited powers, and these diminished over time as Napoleon operated through the part appointed/part co-opted Senate.45 Similarly, the Napoleonic plebiscites confirming the Constitution of Year VIII, and amendments of 1802 and 1804, left much to be desired of large-scale manipulation by government. That said, it is possible that a majority of Frenchmen who bothered to vote genuinely backed Napoleon, especially in 1802 and possibly in 1804, as the regime was immensely popular at the time. However, Napoleon, like his nephew Napoleon III in the 1850s and 60s, required not a simple majority; both rulers understood themselves to be above party or faction, and hence something well in excess of a majority was required. Bonapartism required the same kind of percentages as are familiar to twentieth-century democratic peoples’ republics. The representative element built into the Napoleonic constitutional edifice served primarily an acclamatory purpose, not a democratic one. In addition, it was designed to provide an additional check on the regular administration. Napoleon’s prefects have been styled ‘little emperors’, though the term was

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never a close reflection of reality. Rather, these officials were part of a chain that stretched from the Minister of the Interior down to the mayors. Their freedom of action was limited. Furthermore, they constituted but one pillar on which the Napoleonic edifice rested. Other pillars included the judicial hierarchy (subordinate to its own Paris-based ministry), the police structure (also under its own ministry for most of the period), the tax-collecting edifice, and the military hierarchy (including the Gendarmerie and military divisions). It would be wrong to describe this mass of parallel structures in terms of the Polycratic chaos Hans Mommsen identifies in the Third Reich: Napoleon’s structures were far from chaotic, primarily because each was limited to a well-defined legally subscribed sphere that precluded too much overlap.46 At the same time, a degree of competition was useful when it came to the flow of information from bottom to top. In this context, the separate hierarchy of electoral colleges and councils, stretching from the communes upwards, provided Napoleon with an independent source of information, or early-warning mechanism. It also provided, in theory, a check on the administration, including especially when it came to going through the financial accounts. In this sense, local democracy, such as it was, strengthened the central government’s control over the localities. One can see parallels here with Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s, where local elections were seen primarily by the Kremlin as a good discipline against ‘centrifugally minded local leaders’.47 The need for public adulation and a check against local administration spoke in favour of some form of representative mechanism, with the Napoleonic-style plebiscite emerging as a particularly useful tool for later regimes characterized by a blend of populism and authoritarianism.48 Such regimes typically moulded public opinion through a variety of means that are now familiar, but which were something of a novelty in the Napoleonic era. Napoleon’s handling of the newspaper press is indicative. Censorship was nothing new, of course, nor restricted to France. Under the Old Regime most European states operated a dual censorship involving both the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. For France this ended with the Revolution of 1789, which witnessed an explosion of newspapers, pamphlets and flysheets collectively representing the entire political spectrum. This liberal press policy ended under the Jacobin Republic, when the expression of opinions contrary to those enunciated by the government became extremely dangerous. The Directory, however, reverted to a freer system, which Napoleon inherited on his seizure of power in 1799. Napoleon’s own view on press freedom was summed up in the statement that he would be out of power in three months if he allowed the newspapers a free rein. Given this sentiment it is not surprising that his regime was marked by an inexorable tightening of restrictive mechanisms. These were cleverly masked by the establishment of a special Senatorial body – with the Orwellian title Commission on Liberty of the Press – that was supposed to denounce infringements of press

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freedom.49 Needless to say, it never struck down any government decision in this regard. Meanwhile, Napoleon used the Ministry of Police to enforce tight censorship. To increase control, his government progressively restricted the number of authorized newspapers so that by the end of the Empire a mere four were published in Paris. Additional local newspapers were allowed in the departments, but these needed to draw their political articles from the authorized Parisian papers and otherwise consisted chiefly of official announcements from the prefecture, trivial news and advertisements. Just as in Nazi-occupied Europe people tuned into the BBC for an alternative account of the progress of war, so in Napoleonic France citizens increasingly relied upon the foreign press in forming a rounded opinion. Indeed, reports from frontier departments spoke of people flocking across the border merely to read foreign newspapers.50 As noted, censorship was nothing new, or indeed unique to Napoleonic France. What is noteworthy in this period, however, is the extent to which governments in France and elsewhere took a proactive role in shaping public opinion, and the sophistication of the methods employed.51 Theorists of propaganda identify some key ingredients that help ensure success in shaping opinion; these include, ideally, the blotting out of alternative views, playing on existing prejudices and making sure that propaganda does not appear to be propaganda.52 Blotting out alternative opinions was difficult in Napoleonic Europe: the machinery of the state – for example, the system of border controls – was insufficient to achieve this, though it was attempted. More invidious, and a portent of strategies familiar in the twentieth century (including in democracies), was the employment of subtler techniques. These included creating specialized press bureaux that sifted through the foreign press and practised the art of ‘rapid rebuttal’ – that is, making sure that critical comments were countered immediately and not left to fester; buying up newspapers on the sly and then manipulating their editorial policies in a way that was not apparent to the public; and planting specially commissioned articles favourable to the regime. Similar sophistication in shaping public opinion was demonstrated in other ways. The revolutionary French regimes of the 1790s made the mistake of attempting to impose new values by challenging existing opinions head-on. This was nowhere more evident than in the attempt to replace the religious festive cycle that up to that point had governed the lives of the majority. A new republican festive cycle was thus devised, with its own feast days replacing those of the Church. The ultimate expression of this policy came with the introduction of the revolutionary calendar. This policy failed, as it ran directly counter to existing prejudices. Indeed, the policy was counter-productive, as it simply prompted people to adopt that simplest of mechanisms for demonstrating opposition and well nigh impossible to stop: the boycott. The majority simply failed to turn up to celebrate the Supreme Being on the newly instituted ‘decade days’; instead,

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people continued to mark Sundays by laying down their tools and donning their best, and there was little the government could do about it.53 Napoleon’s strategy was far more effective. It involved grafting his own personality cult onto existing traditions.54 A good example was the newly instituted Feast of St Napoleon, which was made to coincide with one of the most important events of the Church calendar: the Assumption (15 August). Co-option of the Church also found expression in the Napoleonic catechism, introduced in April 1806: this was integrated into the weekly liturgy, and threatened those who resisted Napoleon with eternal damnation. Napoleon furthermore associated himself with local civic traditions and histories. This took the form of publicly sponsoring the restoration of ancient monuments, reinvigorating local festivities and market days, and designing new heraldic devices that again associated old symbols with those of the ‘fourth dynasty’. Previously independent social organizations were progressively taken over by the state – again, a precursor of the policies of the later dictatorships. The fate of Freemasonry is indicative. In this period Freemasonry was an integral part of elite culture, and Napoleon in effect turned it into a branch of state with its own hierarchical structure, at the apex of which stood Napoleon’s own brother, Joseph, as Grand Master. The notion that Freemasonry should act in the interests of humanity as a whole was swept aside. Instead, lodges were told to break their links with enemy states, to celebrate the various Napoleonic military victories and to open and close meetings with chants of ‘Vive Napoléon le Grand.’ Progress up the Masonic hierarchy was now on the basis of attachment to the regime.55

PERSONALITY CULTS AND LEADERSHIP QUALITIES The personality cult developed around Napoleon certainly foreshadows features of similar cults built around the twentieth-century dictators. However, it shares even more traits with the representation of monarchy common to most European states in the eighteenth century.56 Indeed, Napoleon’s coronation ceremony of 1804 was sufficiently orthodox in its content to serve as a model for the coronation of George IV in 1820.57 Can the same observations be made with regard to the substance of Napoleon’s leadership, as opposed to its style? In particular, can one employ some of the ideas applied to the twentieth-century dictators with Napoleon? Was he a weak dictator? Did his subordinates ‘work towards him’? The leadership styles of Stalin and Hitler varied considerably. In each case, however, there was little doubt as to the vital role played by the leader. Research in the 1960s on Hitler’s Germany may have revealed a surprising degree of Polycratic chaos within the Nazi state;58 however, the centrality of Hitler in the system is difficult to deny. Hitler may have adopted a hands-off approach, but,

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as Kershaw notes, few though his policies were, they were non-negotiable. In that sense, Hitler was not weak but simply decided to opt out. Where Hitler did intervene directly was in Germany’s war effort, though with disastrous results as demonstrated by Overy, who highlights defective leadership as one of the major contributory factors in Germany’s eventual defeat.59 Hitler proved incapable of providing strategic direction, as his self-perception as sole guardian of Germany’s destiny prevented him discussing his broader intentions. He also proved incapable of delegating. He had no sense of his own limitations, but interfered ceaselessly in matters that should have been left to subordinates. He also removed capable professionals who told him unpleasant truths, but stuck to old comrades like Göring who proved woefully incompetent, with the result that Germany, uniquely among the combatants, ended up fielding a weaker military team than the one with which it started.60 With Stalin the situation was different: in the 1930s, his combination of brutality and unrealistic target-setting meant his subordinates increasingly concealed bad news.61 That, and long-standing weaknesses in the institutional power of the Russian state, meant that his dictatorship was arguably weaker than Hitler’s. Nonetheless, his management of the Soviet war effort was more effective. Stalin, unlike Hitler, recognized his limitations as military leader and mastered the art of delegation. He also had the capacity to select competent military subordinates, whom he appreciated for their honesty. In addition, Stalin was an accomplished administrator, which is hardly surprising given his initial rise to pre-eminence through the Party machine. This made him well qualified in an era when wars required managers rather than leaders.62 Napoleon’s personal leadership qualities are difficult to deny.63 He provided strategic oversight, which he communicated to his subordinates. He delegated where necessary. Indeed, the whole employment of subordinate army corps, an art in which Napoleon was the first master, depended upon a willingness to entrust subordinates with great responsibility. Certainly, Napoleon could be meddlesome and intervene in matters that were seemingly trivial. He had a great memory and a fetish for statistics. However, the crucial point is that he was never overwhelmed by the detail. He was a good administrator, something underplayed in the public mind in part because it hardly conformed to the heroic image that most Napoleonic propaganda sought to project.64 Napoleon built around himself administrative and military structures fit for the purpose of providing strategic oversight, planning and implementation. In the military field this meant above all the Imperial Headquarters, which were sub-divided into Napoleon’s Military Household, the Army General Headquarters and the Intendance, responsible for supply.65 Collectively, these organs provided not only strategic oversight and planning, but, crucially, translated those plans into detailed orders for transmission to subordinate units.

NAPOLEON’S FRANCE

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Like Hitler, Napoleon believed himself marked out by destiny. Unlike Hitler, he did not believe this spared him reading reports, chairing committees, dictating instructions, helping draft laws, conducting inspection tours and making numerous administrative appointments. He spent hours on end on horseback and typically worked a 14-hour day. Unlike Hitler, but like Stalin, he was happy to be presented with opposing opinions so long as these were expressed within the confines of the appropriate committees (especially, the Council of State) and not made public in such a way as to make him look ridiculous. The instructions issued by Napoleon were precise and allowed for little interpretation. Local authorities in Stalin’s Russia might haggle about the quotas of arrests and executions with which they were presented by the Kremlin; there was no such haggling from prefects when it came to the conscription quotas sent out from Paris. Nor, given the rigour with which the administration was organized, was there any scope for ‘working towards the Emperor’.66 Additionally, and unlike Hitler, Napoleon was generally sound in his choice of subordinates. These he selected according to their abilities, though the less objective criteria of whether or not they were ‘lucky’ also figured prominently when it came to the preferment of general officers. Political or ideological commitment played far less of a role. Indeed, this was arguably a real weakness of Bonapartism, as exposed during moments of existential crises, such as the Malet conspiracy of 1812, when reports of Napoleon’s demise in Russia almost led to a collapse of government, or in early 1814, when key figures forced Napoleon’s abdication, thereby smoothing the transfer of power to Louis XVIII.

CONCLUSIONS The similarities Napoleon shared with one or more of the dictators were superficial, while the differences between them were profound. One can detect similarities with individual dictators in particular areas. Like Stalin, Napoleon was an effective manager. Like Hitler, Franco and possibly Mussolini, Napoleon viewed himself as picked out by destiny. Like Hitler, Napoleon came to power with the help of disaffected elements from the previous regime who mistakenly believed they could control him. On the other hand, his relationship to his adopted nation was analogous in some respects to Stalin’s, and different from the narrower territorial conceptions of the right-wing dictators. Not only was Napoleon, like Stalin, originally an outsider who eventually ruled an empire rather than a nation state, but also the ideological underpinnings of both regimes retained a universalistic element that was never entirely smothered by notions of building socialism in one country or of putting France first. Like all the dictators, Napoleon employed the media to propagate a leadership cult, though in his case

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this drew very heavily on the iconography of Old Regime monarchies. His troubled relationship with the Catholic Church bears some resemblance to Franco’s. Similarly, like the dictatorships, his regime employed some familiar repressive instruments, including censorship, secret police and extra-judicial proceedings. There was also a similar worrying tendency to diminish the ability of private social organizations to operate independently of government. Two differences are fundamental. The first relates to politics. Napoleon operated in an era before the emergence of the mass political party. Stalin’s rise to power, in contrast, is inexplicable without reference to the Soviet Communist Party, an entity that of course survived him. Hitler’s relationship with the NSDAP was different: this was a ‘leader party’ whose destiny was dependent upon the Führer in a way that was not true of the Communist Party and its General Secretary. Napoleon’s regime knew no parties. Indeed, looking ahead to the Second Empire of his nephew, Napoleon III, it is quite obvious that Bonapartism was fundamentally opposed to the whole notion of party politics and could not survive the new political environment characterized by mass political movements and professional politicians. It was too much rooted in the earlier ‘politics of notables’, and above all too much a reaction to the sectarian strife of the 1790s, to comfortably embrace the notion of rival political movements competing for power. Second, the nature of Napoleonic repression was different from that of the later dictators. Most obviously, the number of political prisoners and executions was modest by twentieth-century standards. Above all, the arbitrary element of Napoleon’s regime was a means to an end. Once pacification had been achieved the regime quickly moved to replace the instruments of arbitrary rule. In their place it brought in a regular administration bound by laws that were subsequently celebrated by liberals throughout Europe and beyond.

7

Captured by the Nazis: ‘Reciprocity’ and ‘National Conservatism’ in German Policy towards British POWs Neville Wylie

The treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) has traditionally been seen as a key element distinguishing the conduct of warfare after 1939 from earlier conflicts of the modern era. The First World War saw high mortality rates among certain sections of the POW population but in general the prisoners’ suffering arose from a mixture of administrative incompetence, negligence and the scarcity of basic commodities, not from any premeditated policy of victimization on racial, ideological or national grounds. By contrast, the deliberately inhumane treatment of prisoners during the Second World War is taken as exemplifying the particular ideological and racial character of the war after 1941, whether in the form of a ‘war without mercy’ between the Japanese and Western powers in Asia or the struggle that set Nazi Germany against its Communist foe in the Soviet Union.1 Germany’s treatment of Soviet POWs typified this process. As ‘the soldierly concept of chivalrous warfare’ was not deemed applicable to a war against racial inferiors, Soviet prisoners were denied any protection under international law and were left to die of starvation and disease, or worked to death in German factories and work camps.2 The dominance of racial and economic factors in Nazi Germany’s POW policy has recently been questioned, however, by the Freiburg historian Rüdiger Overmans. According to Overmans, the ‘decisive factor’ in German policy after 1939 was the principle of reciprocity and a ‘national conservative value system’ that predated Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933.3 In making his case, Overmans does not shrink from tackling the tricky issue of Germany’s treatment of Soviet POWs, but the strength of his argument lies in his insistence on evaluating attitudes and policies towards all Germany’s captives – French, Belgians, Poles, Italians, Yugoslavs, British, Americans, etc. – rather than limiting his focus to one uniquely unfortunate group. When treatment of Germany’s entire POW population is taken into account, it is the continuities in German policies between the two wars and the persistence of traditional German national attitudes

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and prejudices that come to the fore, and not the dominance of Nazi racism, as assumed by earlier scholars. There is not the space here to examine all aspects of Overmans’ provocative thesis. What we can do, however, is test its validity in so far as it relates to German attitudes towards British prisoners. Clearly there were obvious differences in the experience of British POWs in German hands during the two world wars, the balance of POW numbers and the tempo of military operations. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in 1914 and 1939 British prisoners were considered ‘worthy’ opponents and given privileges denied to the majority of Germany’s captives. In both wars, the flow of relief parcels – so critical for the prisoners’ physical and mental well-being – held up well, at least until the last months of fighting. Even after 1939, Berlin categorized its prisoners by the uniform they wore, rather than the colour of their skin or their religious convictions. There were variations in German practice, but those prisoners selected for special treatment were singled out largely for political reasons. Czechs who had left the protectorate after March 1939 were treated as traitors and prevented from benefiting from the AngloGerman exchange agreements over the repatriation of sick and wounded POWs. South Africans of German stock were encouraged to shift their allegiances to the Fatherland. But Jewish soldiers, sailors and airmen in British uniform were spared the brutal logic of Nazi racial policies and allowed to sit out the war in captivity without serious victimization; so too Britain’s Indian soldiers.4 When Hitler tried to seek revenge for his defeat in the dying days of the war, his chosen victims were Britain’s ‘terrorist airmen’ (Terrorflieger) and the scions of British aristocracy and the families of its military and political leadership.5 Instead of dwelling on the day-to-day treatment of British POWs, this paper focuses on Germany’s policy on reprisals, for it is here that the concept of reciprocity, upon which Overmans places such importance, is most readily observable. Reprisals are the principal mechanism by which belligerents are able to take their adversaries to task for violating their legal or moral obligations. While they may entail acts ordinarily deemed illegal, successive generations of military philosophers have recognized their value in holding belligerents to agreed norms of behaviour.6 The 1929 POW Convention explicitly prohibited the use of reprisals against POWs, thereby granting them a privilege hitherto granted only to sick and wounded, through the earlier ‘Red Cross’ conventions in 1906 and 1864. But despite this, reprisals remained widely recognized as a legitimate mechanism for restraining the conduct of warfare, and it is questionable whether 1929’s injunction against the use of reprisals on POWs was ever fully embraced by the military establishments of the major powers.7

CAPTURED BY THE NAZIS

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GERMANY’S ‘NATIONAL CONSERVATIVE VALUE SYSTEM’ One of the difficulties in testing Overmans’ thesis is the absence of any agreement on exactly what constituted Germany’s ‘national conservative value system’ and how this shaped attitudes towards prisoners of war. Overmans does not define the term and instead simply refers to German practices during the First World War. While there is no firm consensus on the nature of captivity under the German Reich after 1914, far less agreement on the intentions behind German policies, there are a number of observable features that provide a useful yardstick with which to measure Germany’s later behaviour. One of the most significant is the traditional scepticism shown by the German military towards the whole edifice of the law of armed conflict. Germany never explicitly rejected legal constraints on its military activities – successive governments dutifully signed and ratified the international instruments governing the use of force in war – but German publicists, and the military themselves, frequently expressed themselves against the German ‘War Book’ of 1908, dubbed the ‘sentimentality and flabby emotion’ of those who sought to ‘influence the development of the usages of war in a way which was in fundamental contradiction with the nature of war and its object’.8 These writings, as Geoffrey Best observes, ‘egged on the military to whatever forceful measures they (as theoretically distinct from their political masters) saw fit, and sustained their natural proclivity to think that whatever secured their exclusive military idea of mastery was legitimate’.9 Germany’s ‘dirty war’ against French franc tireurs in 1870–71 was decisive in developing a military culture that shunned many of the humanitarian advances secured over the last decades of the nineteenth century. The effect this had on Germany’s brutal treatment of the Herero in 1904–5 and Belgian civilians in 1914 is well documented by historians, but there was also an appreciable impact on German thinking on the position of POWs.10 Despite Berlin’s ratification of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Regulations – and the 1906 Geneva Convention – German legal scholars and military writers repeatedly maintained that military necessity overrode prisoners’ rights, including, in certain circumstances, the right to life. No war act could, in the words of one international-legal jurist writing in 1907, be considered criminal ‘if it is necessary to maintain the troops or to defend against a danger that threatens them and that cannot be stopped using other means, or in order to carry out a legal operation of war or to secure its success’.11 Such views did not go unchallenged inside Germany; nor was it German generals alone who frowned upon the lawyer’s remorseless encroachment into military affairs.12 But nowhere was the concept of military necessity quite so expansively defined, or so widely embraced, as in Imperial Germany, nor were the virtues it spawned so deeply inculcated within the institutional culture of the military class. The German military felt

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constrained only to follow those elements of international law that complemented their own conception of the martial code. The impact these views had on German policies and practices after 1914 can be seen in two areas. First, as Ute Hinz has recently shown, the economic demands of total war hastened the erosion of prisoners’ protected status and encouraged German officials to view them as a valuable, and easily exploitable, source of labour.13 By late 1917, so enmeshed were POWs in the German economy that the high command sacrificed the early return of German servicemen from Russia in order to retain custody over its vastly larger number of Russian prisoners. To do otherwise, Ludendorff claimed, would ‘lead to a collapse of our whole economic life’.14 Secondly, from the outset, Germany adopted what amounted to a hierarchy of treatment towards its prisoners, whereby Russian and Romanian prisoners were subjected to much harsher treatment than their counterparts from France and Britain. National stereotyping was by no means a new phenomenon to German POW camps in 1939. Finally, the ambiguous attitude taken towards the pre-war legal norms encouraged the emergence of policies that were at best indiscriminate towards POWs and at worse vindictive and inhumane. As early as 1915, pre-war norms protecting POWs from random acts of violence began to give way to practices in which compulsion became increasingly prevalent. By 1916, when British and French POWs were regularly organized into labour battalions, physical violence was routinely used to enforce discipline and maintain levels of output.15 In the final years of the war, POW work detachments were employed at the front lines, and prisoners’ health deteriorated so sharply that doubts were raised over the number of prisoners deemed unfit for work. For the first time, ill or injured prisoners were forced to convalesce in the occupied territories and were not moved to sanitaria in Germany.16 Of particular significance to our concerns is Germany’s record of reprisals. From the beginning of the war, reprisals were used to ‘police’ relations between the two sides and ensure reciprocity in the treatment of POWs.17 Though Berlin had been swift to institute reprisals, the form taken in the early years was fairly innocuous: denying prisoners their mail or Christmas parcels, or discriminating against certain politically sensitive categories of prisoners. In early 1915, for instance, British aristocrats were detained in military prisons in retaliation for Britain’s seclusion of German submariners.18 Over the course of 1916, however, partly in response to the perceived success of earlier actions, German attitudes hardened and reprisal measures became noticeably more ferocious. In April–May 1916, in retaliation for alleged Entente departure from customary practice, Berlin transferred British and French prisoners to ‘reprisal’ camps in the East, where they were housed in sparse barracks and forced to undertake gruelling work on inadequate rations. The following year saw similar measures, this time in the form of labour detachments detained in makeshift enclosures at, or just


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behind, the front line and employed on war-related duties, often under shellfire from their own side. In both cases, prisoners were actively encouraged to write home about their experiences, in the hope – rightly as it turned out – that public opinion would force a change in official policy. German ‘reprisal violence’ during the second half of the war was, as Heather Jones notes, ‘deliberate and skilfully targeted’ towards strategic ends, and designed ‘to exploit the French and British public’s sense of outrage at prisoner atrocities, at the deliberate cost of prisoners’ health and, in some cases, lives’.19 Although Germany’s treatment of prisoners may have been qualitatively different from that of its adversaries, the Entente powers were by no means innocent in their handling of German POWs. Both used POW labour behind the front lines, and France deliberately transferred German POWs to Morocco – with disastrous consequences for their health – in order to impress the local population. In German eyes at least, there was sufficient evidence of prisoner abuse at Anglo-French hands to cast doubt on the Entente’s claim to the moral high ground at the war’s end.20 Germany’s contribution to the new POW Convention in 1929 certainly gave the impression that it was committed to the humanitarian project. Its leading association for former POWs, Die Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener, successfully lobbied for prisoners’ interests and assumed a prominent role in German discussions over the new POW Convention.21 At the Geneva conference in 1929, Berlin not only pushed for a more comprehensive convention than most delegations were prepared to accept, but also supported Article 2’s blanket prohibition on the use of reprisals against POWs, despite doubts expressed by some of the former belligerents over the wisdom of such a move.22 Yet if Germany’s performance at Geneva suggested that its attachment to the doctrine of military necessity had waned, elsewhere signs were less encouraging. The proceedings of the Leipzig ‘war crimes’ trials in 1921, where some of the defendants were accused of maltreating Entente prisoners, showed that the ‘national-conservative value system’ remained very much alive. Indeed, instead of upholding the POWs’ revered status, the trials merely provided a forum for the German military to refine and, in some instances, extend those concepts such as Kriegsnotwendigkeit, Kriegsbrauch and das Handeln auf Befehl that had so frequently justified the dilution, or rejection, of humanitarian constraints in the past. The trifling sentences handed out to those found guilty only went to underline the widespread conviction that a German soldier could not behave criminally so long as his actions were directed towards securing a ‘legitimate’ military goal.23 Despite Germany’s ratification of the 1929 POW Convention in March 1934, and updating of its army field regulations, traditional attitudes towards legal constraints on military activities were left unchanged.24 Instead of being viewed as innocent victims of war, POWs remained, in the words of

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Dwinger’s best-selling POW memoir, an ‘army behind barbed wire’.25 A ‘lessons learnt’ study of Germany’s experience with POWs between 1914 and 1918, published by the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, dwelt almost exhaustively on the damage caused by POWs to German economic and security interests during the war.26

GERMANY AND BRITISH POWS AFTER 1939 Before turning to Germany’s reprisal policy after 1939, a few preliminary remarks need to be made about changes in German policy-making between the two wars. The first relates to what S. P. Mackenzie has dubbed the ‘mutual hostage factor’ – the number of prisoners held by each side at any given time – and the consequent ‘leverage’ parties were able to bring to bear in their relations over POWs. In contrast to the First World War, when there was very rough parity in prisoner numbers, the collapse of Allied military fortunes in the summer of 1940 handed Germany a ten to one superiority. This dominance waned after the winter of 1941, but Berlin still held three times as many prisoners as Britain by the end of 1942, and it was not until after the D-Day landings in June 1944 that numbers finally equalized.27 For most of the war, then, Berlin enjoyed a substantial numerical advantage over its adversary, which enabled German decision-makers to act, confident in the belief that if it came to a show-down, London would simply be unable to match German measures. The second point relates to the distribution of authority within Germany. During the First World War, and especially after the establishment of labour companies behind the front line in 1916, authority for the treatment of British POWs lay with the German army rather than with the government.28 The decision to initiate reprisals still resided in Berlin, but day-to-day authority over the employment, conditions of detention and upkeep of prisoners lay with the Oberste Heeresleitung (Army High Command; OHL), or corps commanders. The War Ministry’s impotency in the face of the military is no better illustrated than by the OHL’s unilateral decision in March 1918 to employ British and French POWs within 30 kilometres of the front line, in violation of an agreement concluded with London the previous summer.29 By contrast, before 1 October 1944, when responsibility for POW camps was handed to the SS, the principal organization responsible for managing POW affairs, the OKW, was able to exercise a fairly full measure of control over British prisoners, at least in so far as their basic treatment was concerned. British POWs were, by and large, quickly removed from the zone of active military operations and concentrated in permanent camps inside Germany or the occupied territories. The OKW had to ward off the predatory


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ambitions of the Reich’s Labour Ministry, Propaganda Ministry, the SS and the internal security forces, but the structure of authority, starting with the OKW’s Kriegsgefangenenwesen (POW Department) and working down through the Wehrkreis (military district) commands to the individual camp commandants, functioned relatively smoothly until late 1944. So, too, did relations between the OKW and Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt), whose legal department was responsible for liaising with foreign governments, the protecting powers, relief agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).30 The problem for the OKW lay not so much in the execution of agreed policy but in the formation of policy itself, in circumstances in which established policies and routines could be overturned by the arrival of instructions from the Führer’s headquarters. By late 1944, the remit of the OKW and Auswärtiges Amt was so limited that only the most routine matters were dealt with in Berlin: any issue of substance had to be referred to the Führer’s headquarters, where decisions could wait months for a reply.

REPRISALS Throughout the war, Germany enacted reprisals against the prisoners in its hands in retaliation for actual or perceived wrongs committed by its enemies. As in 1914–18, the majority of the reprisal measures were fairly tame, and Berlin showed an early interest in reprisals to exert an influence over its adversaries’ behaviour. By December 1939, Berlin had no fewer than three reprisal measures in force, and although these were directed against Britain’s civilian internees, not prisoners, as the two governments had agreed to apply the standards of the POW Convention to civilians wherever possible, Berlin’s confrontational attitude hardly augured well for the future health of the POW regime. On 7 June 1940, when rumours reached Berlin of the execution of German paratroopers behind French lines, the OKW immediately announced that ten French POWs would be executed for every German paratrooper killed by French hands. The reprisal was only averted by the speedy intervention of the ICRC, whose delegate was able to provide assurances that German prisoners were being well cared for.31 Over the course of the war there were five major reprisal measures directed against British POWs: 1.

2.

The detention of several hundred POWs in two unsanitary ‘reprisal camps’ – both subterranean forts – in east Prussia in retaliation for Britain’s use of inadequate facilities at Fort Henry, Ontario (February–June 1941); The last-minute cancellation of an exchange of sick and wounded POWs in October 1941 in retaliation for the imprisonment of German civilians in Iran;

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3.

The use of Cholm ‘reprisal camp’ in Poland in retaliation for the ill-treatment and victimization of German prisoners at Latrun Camp, Palestine (August 1942–May 1943); 4. The confiscation of shaving articles, rank badges, toiletries and eating utensils from officer POWs in Oflag IX A/H, Spangenberg, in response to the ill-treatment of German officer POWs on board HMT Pasteur during a voyage between Port Said and Durban in March 1942 (September 1942–November 1942); 5. The shackling of several thousand British POWs in retaliation for Britain’s use of handrestraints, notably during the Dieppe raid in August 1942 and commando raids on the Channel Islands in early October 1942 (October 1942–November 1943).32

A number of obvious points stand out from this list. First of all there is the matter of timing. Although British prisoners were ill-treated during the latter years of the war – the murdering of the ‘Great Escapers’ from Stalag Luft III in March 1944 and lynching of downed Allied airmen being the most obvious examples – these episodes were not so much reprisals as acts of revenge, designed to put an end to mass escapes and intimidate Allied pilots respectively. They did not seek to alter British detention practices or hold London to its obligations under the POW Convention. Berlin’s use of reprisals was also relatively brief. It turned to reprisals when Britain was on its knees in 1941, indulged in a spate of measures over the course of 1942 as British forces started to return to the field, and then largely desisted from further measures after the autumn and winter of 1942–43 in the wake of the shackling affair.33 While the timing clearly reflected Berlin’s advantage regarding POW numbers, the fact that it abandoned the practice in 1943, when it still enjoyed a 3:1 superiority in numbers, suggests that its use of reprisals was not solely driven by considerations of the ‘mutual hostage factor’. Secondly, what is perhaps most striking about Berlin’s adoption of reprisals in early 1941 is not its readiness to embark on a path of confrontation over POWs but its reluctance to do so. Before the Fort Henry incident, Berlin had deliberately eschewed reprisals, even when the lives of German prisoners appeared to be at stake. It did nothing to halt London’s transfer of POWs across the Atlantic in July 1940, despite the very real danger that the transport vessels might fall —victim to submarine attacks en route. Berlin could easily have placed British POWs in harm’s way, or transferred them to parts of the occupied territories or into the custody of their allies, where the facilities and resources needed to meet the provisions of the POW Convention were lacking. The OKW stepped back from challenging Britain’s right to evacuate POWs and though it considered proposing to London that German POWs be detained on the Isle of Man if British prisoners were concentrated in a single, safe locality, it eventually let the matter pass without comment. The reprisal following the Fort Henry incident – sending British POWs to


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two ‘punishment camps’ in East Prussia – was, moreover, triggered by a relatively junior official, Major Breyer of the OKW’s Kriegsgefangenenwesen, without prior consultation with other interested parties in the OKW. That Breyer could act with such ease suggests that Berlin’s restraint before this date was not due to any institutional or procedural restrictions. The OKW could have initiated reprisals on British prisoners had officials so wished. Notwithstanding the fact that Germany’s superiority in POW numbers effectively cushioned it from the danger of Britain retaliating with its own reprisals, within a fortnight of the Fort Henry reprisal measures taking effect the OKW moved to reduce the possibility of similar incidents occurring in the future. Its ‘foreign relations department’ secured agreement that no reprisals involving British prisoners could be imposed without its authorization or before the matter had been pursued through diplomatic channels.34 Breyer avoided an official reprimand, but his subsequent actions suggest that he was, temporarily at least, chastened by the episode. The Fort Henry reprisal thus remained an isolated incident. The OKW and Auswärtiges Amt refrained from taking matters into their own hands or retaliating against British prisoners over subsequent months, despite the arrival of alarming reports about the treatment of German prisoners and wounded in Greece and Crete over that summer (1941).35 The exception to this rule – the cancellation of the cross-Channel exchange of sick and wounded POWs in October 1941 – arose not from a change of heart in the OKW but from Hitler’s unexpected intervention. In negotiating an exchange that adhered so closely to the POW Convention, German officials appear to have been motivated by a desire to demonstrate magnanimity and largesse: it is difficult to see how else they would have justified an exchange that would have released 1,200 Britons in return for only 142 Germans. Hitler, however, insisted on suspending the exchange in the hope of exerting pressure on London to release German civilians detained in Iran. By all accounts, the permanent bureaucrats in the Auswärtiges Amt and OKW were embarrassed by the affair and resented the Führer meddling in their area of expertise.36 In assessing German attitudes at this time, it needs to be remembered that, on the whole, Britain’s treatment of German prisoners was hardly provocative. London did what it could to pre-empt problems before they arose and insulate POW issues from the broader conduct of the war. Berlin could, then, object to the use of tented accommodation in India or complain about delays in POW mail service or the use of coloured or Jewish sentries in the United States and elsewhere, but generally speaking British detention practices gave little grounds for complaint, at least in terms of the physical well-being of German prisoners. It was precisely because London chose not to exploit German POW labour that the OKW became concerned in 1945 over the psychological impact of such prolonged and unproductive imprisonment.37 Breyer’s comments, penned in

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the midst of discussions over how to respond to the ill-treatment of Germans at Latrun, illustrate the situation well. Despite the alarming reports reaching Berlin over the detention regime at Latrun, Breyer could not hide his surprise at the moderation shown to a prisoner who had been found guilty of striking a guard: a three-month imprisonment instead of the death sentence or, at least, a ‘very long prison sentence’, as would have been meted out had the incident occurred in Germany.38 But if Berlin was generally satisfied by the material conditions of British captivity, it found ample reason to complain about the manner in which Britain’s regulations were applied. It was on this level – over questions of honour and military bearing – that Berlin invariably chose to institute reprisals against British prisoners. It was not the facilities at Latrun, far less the detention regime, that irritated German observers, so much as the affront to German honour of Britain’s segregation of diehard Nazis from their fellow prisoners, the use of Polish sentries and the decision to expose the inmates to taunts and verbal abuse from the local Jewish population. The same sort of thing is true of the Pasteur incident: the looting of the officers’ belongings and draconian restrictions placed on them onboard the Pasteur rankled, but what really angered the OKW was the parading of German officers, unshaven and dishevelled, through the streets of Durban. The OKW’s public announcements on these matters leaves little doubt that what was at stake was the defence of the honour and status of the German armed forces and military class. Officials never framed their discussions in ideological terms, notwithstanding the fact that Latrun’s inmates had been deliberately victimized on account of their Nazi beliefs, and that in Canada the Nazi hard core sought, and invariably succeeded, in imposing ideological conformity among the camp population. Nor did officials explicitly refer to Germany’s numerical superiority in justifying the use of reprisals. Indeed, German action appears to have been partially driven by a desire to demonstrate Berlin’s concern for its men in British hands, irrespective of how few of them there actually were. It is important to remember that though Britain’s captives were few, the Luftwaffe pilots shot down over southern England, the submariners fished out of the icy mid-Atlantic and the hardbitten veterans of Rommel’s Afrika Korps were considered the cream of the crop and heirs to Germany’s illustrious military traditions. The exceptional lengths to which Berlin went to keep its men supplied with relief parcels and furnish them with the flags, paintings and other accoutrements necessary to transform their sparse barracks into outposts of the Fatherland, are testament to the esteem in which these men were held inside Germany.39 It was, then, the defence of traditional values that lay behind the OKW’s decision to deny British POWs razors and bathing utensils in retaliation for the Pasteur incident. The men were to be humbled and belittled both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the civilian population, not caused any real discomfort.40


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The objective was clearly, if rather awkwardly, expressed in the OKW announcement distributed to British POWs at the time: ‘although previously it has always been the endeavour of the German Supreme Command to grant the British prisoners of war every chivalrous consideration, it is not possible to afford them more rights of self-esteem than are granted to German prisoners of war in British hands’.41 Berlin’s response to events at Latrun reflected this outlook and was entirely in keeping with the position it had taken during the First World War, when its enemies had segregated German submarine crew or sought to make political capital out of detaining German POWs in Morocco.42

THE SHACKLING INCIDENT The shackling crisis was the most protracted dispute to affect Anglo-German POW relations of the entire war. It was also the gravest and had the potential, at least, to precipitate Berlin’s withdrawal from the POW Convention, a possibility that only surfaced again in mid-February 1945, in the aftermath of Britain’s obliteration of Dresden.43 While the crisis had its own immediate causes, it cannot be understood without appreciating the increasing tempo of disputes involving POWs since the summer of 1942, and the mounting intensity of fighting between the two sides, in particular Britain’s adoption of ‘area bombing’ in the spring, its use of commando raiding parties in Western Europe and the first signs of organized resistance to Nazi rule on the continent, funded, resourced and directed from London. When the shackling crisis broke in early October 1942, there were already two reprisal measures in force in German POW camps, in reaction to the Latrun and Pasteur incidents. These were not, however, the only incidents to have attracted German attention. Earlier that summer, Rommel’s forces in North Africa had stumbled across British regulations governing the techniques to be used to ‘soften up’ German prisoners before interrogation, which included a variety of unsavoury measures from sleep deprivation to the denial of food, water and companionship. Equally worrying information came to light in late August, with the discovery of orders at Dieppe which showed that Canadian forces had been instructed to bind the hands of their captives to prevent them destroying sensitive documents. Although, with the exception of the 8th Army’s interrogation techniques, Britain’s actions were more demeaning to their captives than life-threatening, Berlin’s reaction, as Bob Moore rightly notes, ‘indicated an alteration in German policy to a more directly reciprocal response to real or imagined mistreatment of its servicemen in enemy hands’.44 As early as May 1942, German officials had pressed the Swiss for their views on Britain’s attitude towards the humane treatment of POWs. As one official put it early the following

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year: ‘in spite of assurances . . . that [Britain] would stick to the convention, both in spirit and letter, the British authorities had not apparently seen to it that this policy was carried out effectively’. In light of this, the OKW had decided there should be ‘an “equalisation of treatment”, i.e. an eye for an eye’.45 The hardening of German attitudes reflected in these remarks was typified in a change in Berlin’s use of reprisal measures over the latter half of 1942. In contravention of the OKW’s earlier injunction against using reprisals before matters had been pursued through diplomatic channels, Berlin’s reactions to the Latrun and Pasteur incidents saw Berlin consciously shun the good offices of the Swiss Government. The prisoners’ written complaint to the Swiss legation was deliberately held up, and, as a consequence, London only caught wind of the reprisals when the men’s letters began arriving home several months later. Only with the Dieppe incident in August – when London swiftly denied the existence of a shackling order – were reprisals averted before they could be put into effect. The shackling incident in early October was, then, part of a pattern of events that strained relations between the two sides and eroded German confidence in British commitment to agreed norms of behaviour. The use of the prisoners themselves to convey news of Germany’s reprisals to London suggests that, in the OKW at least, officials were happy to apply First World War precedents when responding to what appeared to be a new set of circumstances over the course of 1942. But what about developments outside the realm of POW relations; how did they affect German attitudes? Clearly the treatment of POWs did not occur in a vacuum. It was success on the battlefield that filled the POW pens: Britain lost 11,000 men to German captivity at Tobruk in June, but turned the tables in November with its victory at El Alamein. The fighting also intensified over the year, as did the rhetoric employed by each side. Having been driven out of German skies in late 1941, the RAF returned to menace German cities the following spring, launching the first devastating ‘1000 bomber raid’ in the summer. British forces also made their presence felt on the continent in the form of commando raids. At sea, deterioration in the nature of fighting was exemplified by events following the sinking of the SS Laconia in August 1942, when German submarines, which had stopped to pick up the Laconia’s survivors, were attacked by British aircraft and forced to abandon their rescue attempt. It would be the last time that Admiral Dönitz allowed his captains to respond to the pleas of men adrift in mid-ocean.46 There was, finally, a marked deterioration in political relations, with the British Government pledging itself to trying the German leaders for war crimes at the end of hostilities. The German documents leave little doubt that Berlin’s reaction to the discovery of the bodies of German soldiers with their hands bound, shot while attempting to escape from a commando party on the island of Sark on 3 October, were influenced by their reading of these broader military and political developments.


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The events on Sark not only demonstrated the hollowness of London’s earlier assurances about the rules of engagement followed by its raiding parties, but also placed Britain at odds with Article 3 of the POW Convention, which insisted on the humane treatment of prisoners at all times. The OKW had little hesitation in threatening to ‘equalise’ the treatment of British POWs by binding the hands of 1,000 prisoners captured at Dieppe. When London refused to back down and instead promised to match German reprisals, Berlin immediately trebled the number of prisoners in chains. Within a matter of days, then, the crisis had escalated to a point where some 3,000 men on each side were shackled. The situation remained unchanged until early December, when, under intense pressure at home and from the Canadian Government in Ottawa, the British Cabinet agreed to suspend its shackling order – ostensibly in response to an earlier appeal by the Swiss protecting power. Though British POWs were temporarily released from their chains over Christmas and the New Year, the shackles returned in early 1943 and continued to be used, in a more or less symbolic fashion, until Berlin officially withdrew the measure in November 1943. Should we see the willingness of both sides to physically restrain their captives as analogous to the cycle of violence that took hold in Germany’s treatment of its Entente prisoners in 1916–17? There is no question that in German eyes POW questions became increasingly ‘securitised’ over the latter half of 1942, as the conduct of the war encroached on what had hitherto been considered a humanitarian space. The issue at stake in the shackling crisis revolved around Britain’s treatment of POWs on the battlefield – i.e. the conduct of military operations – and not, as before, the treatment of prisoners at, or en route to, their places of work or detention.47 The same basic considerations underpinned Hitler’s infamous ‘Commando Order’ of 18 October 1942, which stipulated that British commando forces were to be liquidated on capture. The genesis of this decision lay in the Führer’s mounting irritation at the menace posed by British raiding parties, an attitude not dispelled by the successful defence of Dieppe on 19 August. In early September, Hitler felt it necessary to withdraw elements of the strategic reserve, some of which had already been committed to the offensive in southern Russia, to deal with the perceived threat from the West.48 The execution of British commandos had, therefore, an explicit military objective – to intimidate British planners and sap the morale of its raiding parties. ‘It is essential,’ Hitler insisted in a revealing interview on 6 September, that we should give the British as good as we get, eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We must straight away declare that from now on pilots descending by parachute will be fired on, that submarines will shell survivors from torpedoed ships, regardless of whether they are soldiers or civilians, women or children! Within a month those cads over there will have realised that they hold the muddy end of the stick, and will act accordingly.49

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But the Commando Order also reflected a growing realization that the stakes of the war in the West had been raised owing to the intensification of military operations and the broadening of Allied war aims. The impact of such views on the handling of the shackling crisis was unmistakable. In seeking to enlist Tokyo’s support, Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop urged his ambassador to impress on the Japanese the fact that ‘we have reached the point in this war, at which the existence (Sein oder Nichtsein) of the peoples of the tripartite pact is at stake’.50 In mulling over the implications of the shackling crisis in late October, Joseph Goebbels concluded that ‘the war is entering a new phase . . . Everyone must come to realise that it is now a life and death struggle and that he who wins, wins everything, and he who loses, loses everything.’51 What distinguishes the shackling crisis from earlier episodes is the level of intentionality behind German actions. London’s flustered response to the OKW’s threat to shackle prisoners after the Dieppe raid clearly caught the Führer’s imagination: ‘the handcuffing of a hundred and thirty officers after the Dieppe raid had a splendid effect’.52 And it was with this in mind that the Führer turned in early September to pondering further ways of embarrassing the British Government. The tenor of his thinking is clearly evident in the following remarks: I make no secret of the fact that in my eyes the life of a single German is worth more than the lives of twenty Britishers, and in this respect we hold the advantage. We hold infinitely more prisoners-of-war than they do, and the great thing is to capture as many ‘honourables’ as possible. […] They are completely indifferent to the fate of the ordinary soldier, but the hanging of half a dozen British Generals would shake British society to its very foundations. […] If they were to threaten more drastic reprisals, we will retort by hanging the captains of all ships sunk! […] The British are realists, devoid of any scruple and cold as ice; but as soon as we show our teeth, they become propitiatory and almost friendly!53

Though expressed in typically brutal terms, Hitler’s fixation with the possibility of victimizing Britain’s ‘honourables’ has clear echoes of Berlin’s successful reprisal measures in 1915. Less than a week later, Hitler asked for information on the number of British captives held by Germany and its Axis allies. The figures could only have fanned his eagerness to exploit Britain’s weakness in this area. Against some 25,000 Germans thought to be held by the British, there were some 74,318 Britons in German captivity, a further 81,956 in Italy and 135,800 in Japan.54 Hitler did not manufacture the shackling crisis – London never denied the use of hand restraints on Sark – but there is little doubt that he actively seized the opportunity to engineer a crisis in an area where he clearly believed Germany held the upper hand.


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Quite what he hoped to achieve in provoking a showdown remains a matter of conjecture. It is likely that the threat to shackle British POWs was part of the broader effort to deal with Britain’s commando raids. The OKW’s communiqué threatening reprisals after the Sark episode coincided with an ominous statement about the illegality of Britain’s commando methods, which anticipated Hitler’s secret Commando Order issued ten days later. But while the shackling and Commando Orders were clearly linked, it would be wrong to assume that military considerations dominated German thinking. Goebbels’ expansive diary entries at the time leave little doubt that Hitler’s primary objective lay in punishing Britain for its failure to adhere to accepted forms of behaviour in the treatment of POWs. ‘The Führer,’ he wrote on 10 October, ‘is convinced that the English could not see the party through and . . . believes [they] will be compelled, sooner or later, to revert to a decent handling of German POWs.’55 Goebbels certainly shared Hitler’s outlook. In confronting Britain, Germany would, he opined, bring about ‘a humanisation of warfare, at least in so far as it related to POW questions’.56 That Goebbels believed the British were capable of mending their ways is seen from his reaction to a report on the interrogation of British pilots, which he read the day before the crisis broke. ‘Oddly enough,’ he wrote, ‘the English fliers admitted to a set of humanitarian constraints. […] In the long run, it is naturally no fun for a young man to throw his bombs on residential areas.’57 The principal architect of German policy, General Alfred Jodl, head of the army planning staff, clearly assumed, from the first days of the crisis, that the ‘reprisal war’ would be resolved through diplomatic channels, and with this in mind arranged for all correspondence to be passed to the Foreign Ministry for preparation of Germany’s legal case.58 Irrespective, then, of the growing intensity of fighting over the course of 1942, it was the evidence of British ill-treatment of German POWs in the latter half of the year that prompted Hitler to provoke a showdown in early October. This is important to keep in mind, for had the issue at stake been of a military or political nature, German officials would not have been so obviously unsettled by London’s refusal to back down or conform to traditional ‘gentlemanly’ forms of warfare. Britain’s readiness to follow Germany in trebling the number of POWs in chains completely flummoxed the Reich’s leadership. According to Goebbels, only Hitler showed any confidence in being able to ‘weather the storm’ and bring the episode to a successful conclusion.59 To accomplish this, however, further pressure was required. Jodl was instructed to assemble evidence of British misdemeanours during the Crete campaign in early 1941, which had lain, undisturbed, in the Auswärtiges Amt since the previous summer. His ‘White Book’ was released to the press on 18 October.60 In the meantime, broad hints were dropped in Germany’s overseas broadcasts that Berlin might withdraw from the Geneva Convention should Britain refuse to mend its ways.

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The ‘massive attack’, as Goebbels described it, on London’s position was effective. Although Jodl’s White Book failed to generate much excitement in the British press, the German propaganda campaign added to the already widespread unease over the direction of British policy, especially in Washington and Ottawa, and ultimately forced London to search for a way out of the crisis by late November. In this sense, Hitler’s gamble on the fragility of Britain’s domestic consensus proved correct.61 At the same time, however, some German officials clearly swallowed their own rhetoric. It was the catalogue of atrocities committed against German servicemen in Crete that convinced Goebbels that the war had entered a ‘new phase’. The feverish atmosphere created by Jodl’s sensational findings probably helped silence those who might otherwise have opposed Hitler’s blatantly illegal, secret Commando Order, the circulation of which coincided with the publication of the White Book. Yet if, in retrospect, Britain’s unilateral abandonment of its reprisal measures represented a defeat for it, Berlin’s victory was far lesser than many in London feared. For one thing, Britain upheld the right of its commandos to bind the hands of their captives on the battlefield. Its refusal to back down on this point meant that if Germany was to force London to return to a ‘humane form of fighting’, its reprisal measures would have to remain in place.62 For another, Berlin’s continued shackling of British prisoners into 1943 proved an irritant to AngloGerman relations and compromised German efforts to secure agreement on issues of mutual interest, from the recognition of hospital ships to the exchange of sick and wounded POWs.63 It quickly became clear to German officials that it was the reprisals themselves, and not London’s deep-seated antipathy towards traditional norms, that prevented the two sides from reaping the benefits that flowed from the humane conduct of hostilities. The shackling episode was, then, salutary for both parties, and explains why Berlin largely abandoned the use of reprisals to influence British treatment of its captives over the last two years of the war, irrespective of its frustration at Britain’s continued use of shackles on the battlefield. The deliberate maltreatment of British POWs in 1944 – notably the execution of escaped POWs from Stalag Luft III in March 1944 and the lynching of downed pilots later that summer – inevitably flouted the chivalric code so beloved by the German military but did not overturn it, far less replace it. Berlin viewed both deeds as exceptional measures, justified by London’s recourse to ‘irregular warfare’ and low-level terror attacks on German civilians. It did not consider them reprisals as such; nor did it carry them out with the intention of improving Britain’s treatment of German POWs.64 Germany’s position was explained most succinctly by General Jodl in late February 1945, when he tried to dissuade Hitler from taking Germany out of the Geneva Conventions in retaliation for the destruction of Dresden. Jodl based his case on pragmatic assessment of the benefits that would accrue from


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maintaining German compliance with the international codes, a line of argument he later justified before the Nuremberg tribunal as being most likely to secure Hitler’s approval. Nevertheless, before setting out his defence of the status quo, Jodl tellingly drew the Führer’s attention to the connection between the modern codes – to which generations of German military thinkers had shown such scorn – and a century’s worth of unwritten customary international law (Völkergewohnheitsrecht), which, Jodl argued, embraced ‘the last principles of humane warfare’. Observance of Völkergewohnheitsrecht was nothing less, he noted, than a ‘prerequisite for membership of the international community’.65 For a regime that had plummeted to depths of depravity unknown in the modern era, that had turned the power of an industrialized state against its own citizenry and overseen a policy of genocide, such protestations in support of ‘customary international law’ inevitably ring rather hollow. But it was nevertheless these ‘principles of humane warfare’ that underpinned Germany’s traditional conception of the chivalric code, a conception which, as we have seen, was accepted not just by members of the Wehrmacht but also by Hitler, Goebbels and other leading figures of the Nazi regime. When such men talked, as they frequently did, of the ‘soldierly’, ‘honourable’ or ‘chivalrous’ art of warfare, or criticized their adversaries for failing to comply with such forms, they gave voice to a set of values that pre-dated the Nazis’ rise to power, and demonstrated the extent to which ‘national conservative’ attitudes were able to coexist alongside Hitler’s ‘world view’.66 The shocking absence of any echo of humanity in German attitudes towards Soviet POWs did not prevent Germany from viewing its treatment of other captives through a chivalric lens. As Jürgen Förster notes, the Wehrmacht’s accommodation of Hitler’s genocidal policies in the East ‘was determined in large measure by a consensus on both ideological matters and Germany’s role in Europe and world politics’.67 Ultimately, it was Germany’s ‘national conservative value system’, and not the principle of reciprocity, that proved decisive in shaping Germany’s outlook on its British POWs. Naturally, the latter was integral to the former. It was the recognition that Britain was a worthy foe that justified Berlin reciprocating British standards of treatment: no amount of German POWs in Russian hands would have improved Berlin’s treatment of its Russian captives. Reciprocity also accounts for the success of the POW Convention in providing both parties with a mutually recognized framework for mediating their relations and shaping their expectations. The remarkably high survival rate of British prisoners in German hands – about 97 per cent – was due in no small measure to the willingness of both sides to offer reciprocal facilities for the distribution of relief parcels and to aspire, at least, to meet agreed standards of treatment.68 Reciprocity also played a part in insulating German detention policies from the invidious effects of Nazi racial ideology. But reciprocity can be double-edged:

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it can lead to the deterioration of relations as much as their improvement. It is also a highly complex phenomenon, which relies on the sequential trading of equivalents and agreement on a common set of values, neither easy to achieve in the midst of total war.69 Moreover, as we have seen, the active policing of reciprocity, through the sanction of reprisals, was relatively short-lived, effectively from early 1941 to late 1943. The obvious inequality in POW numbers was not as decisive as sometimes assumed. True, Hitler’s interventions in October 1941 and October 1942 were prompted by a confidence born of Germany’s overwhelming numerical superiority. But such considerations had little effect on German thinking towards reprisals outside these events, and London’s resolute stand on the shackling issue in late 1942 clearly exposed the limited utility of relying on the ‘mutual hostage factor’ to influence British behaviour. Germany’s ‘national conservative value system’ thus affected German behaviour and shaped its expectations. It also, however, provided a bank of experience and precedents to inform policy-making. Though all the major powers drew lessons from the First World War, the OKW appears to have been particularly attentive to Germany’s past experience. In contrast to the British War Office, whose report on the First World War was left unread until long after the Second had started, the OKW, from as early as 1937, was holding discussions that were informed by a careful study of the imperial War Ministry papers.70 As a consequence, German decision-makers – from bureaucrats in the OKW POW Department to the highest authority in the land – allowed their actions to be coloured by past experience. The influence was particularly marked in the choice of tactics; whether over the type of reprisal, the use of prisoners’ letters to communicate German intentions, or the reliance on British public opinion to sway policy-makers in London. More significantly, Germany’s reading of the past had a profoundly sobering influence on German actions. It encouraged Berlin to limit the scope of its reprisal measures, and gave it pause for thought before it was tempted into extracting political or military advantage from its haul of British prisoners. It also reined in those who wished, during the final months of the war, to discard international law altogether. ‘Just as it was wrong in 1914,’ wrote Jodl in February 1945, ‘that we ourselves . . . took the whole guilt of the war on our shoulders . . . so it would be wrong now to repudiate openly the obligations of international law which we accepted and thereby to stand again as the guilty party before the whole world.’71 Britain’s seizure of the moral high ground on the POW issue after 1915 had been part of this process, enabling London to indict German officers for war crimes, turn neutral opinion against the Reich and besmirch the illustrious record of the German military.72 Though irrevocably compromised by its association with Nazi excesses, the German military was nevertheless anxious not to repeat the lesson.

8

How Soviet was Russian Society under Nazi Occupation? Nicholas Terry

Comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism have a long and complex pedigree.1 For historians as well as social scientists, the ‘temptation to compare’ Nazism and Stalinism is hard to resist, whether on an empirical level or in seeking to find ‘the right family name’ for the two dictatorships.2 Three factors make global comparisons virtually unavoidable, no matter what objections are raised. First, the two regimes were seen by a great many contemporaries as more alike than not.3 Second, the clash between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945 formed the pivot around which twentieth-century European history revolved.4 Third, the two dictatorships were unarguably the most murderous in European history.5 A fourth reason to compare emerges when the perspective is shifted from a global, systemic focus to the territories over which the two regimes fought. The histories of all East European nation states are rendered incomprehensible without some form of comparison between Nazi and Soviet rule. Much of the impetus to revive the concept of totalitarianism in recent decades has therefore perhaps unsurprisingly come from East European intellectuals both before and after the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’.6 Especially for historians of the borderlands annexed in 1939 and 1940 by the Soviet regime and then overrun by the Nazis in 1941, the necessity to compare is entirely unavoidable. Such comparisons must be extended beyond the borderlands of eastern Poland or the Baltic states into the whole of the territory occupied by Nazi Germany during its invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944. In seeking to understand the nature and texture of the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union, historians have tended to neglect the Sovietness of the occupied territories. Questions of continuity between peacetime and wartime societies, or of the influence of prewar social experiences on wartime behaviours, are rarely if ever asked. The reasons for this neglect are manifold. First, the occupation was never complete and always coexisted alongside the titanic struggle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht at the front. German occupation policy, especially in the large zone

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under military administration, was therefore shaped by specifically military factors as much as by racial – ideological goals.7 Second, the sheer radicalism of Nazi occupation plans and goals, above all in the closely related triad of the ‘Hunger Plan’, the ‘General Plan East’ and the ‘Final Solution’, implied the total destruction of prewar Soviet society in either the short or long term. Even though these utopian plans could not be fulfilled, with the signal exception of the systematic genocide of Soviet Jewry, the intention to treat the occupied Soviet territories as an apparent tabula rasa has captivated the interest of generations of historians.8 Third, the horrific violence under German occupation towards the multiple victim categories of Soviet POWs, Jews, the urban population and the inhabitants of ‘partisan zones’ was so obviously structurally determined by the Nazi political economy of racial value and its calculus of military, economic, racial – political and ideological factors that the German perspective alone sufficed to explain virtually all of its extent. The baroque complexity of the German occupation regime in the Soviet Union, as in Eastern Europe as a whole, has proved to be of further entrancement.9 As a result, contributions towards a social history of the German occupation of the Soviet Union remain few and far between.10 This chapter argues that a closer examination of the continuities and discontinuities between peacetime and wartime Soviet society in the regions that fell under Nazi rule, as well as of the influence of prewar experiences on wartime behaviour, can reveal much to help increase our understanding of the occupation. Though Nazi policy and the war itself set the structural parameters of the occupation and inflicted the lion’s share of the violence, German rule was influenced by several legacies of the prewar social order. The first of these consisted of the consequences of Stalinist modernization and repression during the 1920s and 1930s. Collectivization, ‘dekulakization’, repression and the ensuing terror polarized Soviet society, producing both winners and losers with corresponding inclinations to resist or collaborate. Second, in spite of efforts to ‘de-Bolshevize’ the occupation zone, significant remnants of the Soviet system remained in place, whether administrative, socio-economic or cultural. The second half of the essay examines how occupiers and occupied interacted with each other, and how Nazi and Soviet forms of behaviour could fuse together. First, it shows how the German administration attempted on occasion to impose specifically Nazi practices in ways that pushed either with or against the grain of Soviet experiences. Second, it describes the continuum of occupier – occupied relations as a whole, ranging from the practices of petitioning and complaint to those of informing and denunciation. The question of social participation should be raised not only with regard to the peacetime or domestic violence experienced in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as has been emphasized in the converging research on police terror and repression under both regimes, but also regarding the occupied territories. If, as Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth

H O W S O V I E T WA S R U S S I A N S O C I E T Y U N D E R N A Z I O C C U PAT I O N ?

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argue, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were both ‘really violent societies’, to what extent did pre-existing habits of behaviour in Soviet society contribute, deliberately or inadvertently to the extent of violence under Nazi occupation?11 A full set of answers to the questions raised above would take much longer than the confines of a chapter. Not least among the space limitations is the requirement to restrict the geographical focus. The region under examination here corresponds to the rear areas of Army Group Centre, whose occupation zone straddled the central Russian provinces of Kalinin, Smolensk and Orel, as well as the eastern provinces of Belorussia. As the dominant culture both before the war and under German occupation was Russian-speaking, for brevity’s sake both regions will be referred to as ‘Russian society’. Nor can this chapter address the full complexity of Nazi occupation policies, and leaves out of consideration many well-researched themes, in particular the fate of Jews, POWs and the population immediately behind the front or in the partisan zones, concentrating instead on examining behaviour in firmly German controlled territory.

THE SOVIET LEGACY Soviet rule after the end of the Russian Civil War ushered in a 20-year period of considerable economic, social and cultural transformation. A common denominator of both the Soviet and Nazi regimes was their shared willingness to resort to large-scale projects of social engineering. The Russian countryside was the most affected by this, as it would be under the German occupation and the influence of Nazi economic and security policies. Strikingly, in the eyes of the experts of both regimes, rural overpopulation was a significant problem. From studying the writings of Soviet economists and geographers, German planners came to a similar conclusion, one that they would draw on during the occupation.12 In the 1920s, Soviet planners estimated an ‘excess population’ of 13.5 million peasants was to be found in western Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia.13 The Stalinist modernization project was designed to reduce this overpopulation through industrialization and urbanization. Collectivization and its accompanying policy of ‘dekulakization’ were designed to free up the ‘excess’ rural population and to provide labour for projects in remote regions of the north or Siberia. German commentators such as Otto Schiller observed all of this from their posts in the German embassy in Moscow.14 While collectivization and the promise of industrial employment drew off much of the surplus population without force, the Soviet regime resorted to outright coercion as well. ‘Dekulakization’ displaced a total of 2.5 million peasants across the whole of the Soviet Union over the course of 1930 to 1931. Of this total, approximately 74–75,000 deportees came from Belorussia and around 35–36,000

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from central Russia.15 Many more were dealt with locally and therefore not subject to deportation. In stark contrast to the experiences of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus and Volga, neither collectivization nor ‘dekulakization’ in the central region led to outright famine, yet hunger was common. In fact, the population of Belorussia increased slightly in the years of collectivization and the subsequent famine owing to the arrival of refugees before the Soviet regime closed the Ukrainian border.16 Collectivization coincided with the repression of nationalist intelligentsias in both Belorussia and Ukraine. New data on the regional breakdown of secret police repressions indicate there were approximately 1,600 executions and 30,000 arrests in Belorussia during 1930 and 1931, the majority aimed at the urban intelligentsia.17 Some of this repression, however, fell on the resisting peasantry in the wake of widespread protests against collectivization during 1930. Slightly fewer than 1,000 ‘mass disturbances’ involving at least 100,000 participants occurred in Belorussia and the Western Oblast. Protests in Belorussia, while not numerically as significant as in the Ukraine, were perhaps more violent, involving a somewhat higher proportion of cases of arson and assaults and even the murders of several dozen Soviet activists.18 More serious still was a full-scale uprising in the Belorussian town of Beshenkovichi.19 It is striking that the upheaval of ‘dekulakization’ resulted in approximately as many victims of Stalinist repression as the ensuing ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–38. The regional data now available show that in the three Russian provinces Kalinin, Smolensk and Orel 62,277 people were arrested in 1937–38, while in the Belorussian SSR 58,967 were arrested.20 Comparison with the 1939 census figures for these regions shows that slightly over 1 per cent of the population in Belorussia and Smolensk provinces was directly affected by the Terror, while slightly over 0.5 per cent of the population in Kalinin and Orel provinces was caught up in the complex sequence of ‘mass operations’. Belorussia especially was hard hit by the ‘Polish operation’ under the rubric of Order 000485, designed to ‘ethnically cleanse’ a potentially threatening ‘diaspora nationality’, in particular from the border regions.21 In Belorussia, the Polish operation claimed slightly more victims than the parallel ‘kulak operation’ under the rubric of Order 00447.22 As one of the aims of the Terror was to cleanse the Soviet Union of potential traitors in the event of war, the purges can be seen to have failed in their primary aim, since collaboration with the German occupiers emerged regardless, as much as they succeeded in reducing the potential number of willing collaborators. The upheavals since 1917 had produced several cohorts of the disaffected. The earliest such group dated back to the time of the Revolution and Civil War between 1917 and 1921, consisting not only of émigrés but also of former Tsarist elites and their descendants who remained inside the Soviet Union. Under German occupation, the few survivors among the so-called former people (byvshie liudi) were often


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restored to positions of power and authority. German military administrators would, for example, by preference appoint as judges lawyers educated under Tsarism, despite their advanced age.23 Many teachers were similarly recruited from the ranks of the ‘former people’. Such collaborators proved to be politically reliable and loyal to the Germans but suffered from several drawbacks. First, they were extremely old and were mostly already retired by the time of the war. Many requested relief from their positions, in some cases because they were 70 years of age.24 Second, they formed but a fraction of their former number, and could scarcely be relied on to provide sufficient cadres for any kind of administration. In practice, these were largely drawn from the next group (chronologically) of the disaffected, the victims of Soviet repression. Kulaks made surprisingly few appearances in the collaborator administrations under Nazi occupation. By contrast, many leading collaborators were repressed members of the intelligentsia, especially the technical intelligentsia – doctors, teachers, engineers and agronomists. Emblematic in this regard was Bronislav Kaminski, a trained engineer arrested in the 1930s, who became the leader of the so-called self-administration district of Lokot, near Bryansk, as well as commander of the Russian National Army of Liberation (RONA).25 His great rival, Mikhail Oktan, editor of the Orel newspaper Rech, was similarly repressed in the 1930s.26 The reliance on such home-grown dissidents was in part a product of German reluctance to exploit the White Russian émigré diaspora. Attempts in July 1941 to set up a Belorussian National Committee in Bialystok and Vilna were neutralized.27 However, both Wehrmacht and SS nonetheless imported a number of émigrés to assist with the construction of a local administration in 1941: 30 Belorussian émigrés were brought from Warsaw to Minsk by Einsatzgruppe B,28 while the Army recruited many interpreters from the White Russian diaspora, offering a loophole for them to slip through. Several princes served with Army Group Centre in 1941, and one later commanded a unit of Eastern Troops.29 Key figures from bourgeois circles, in particular the extreme nationalist and fascist groups in the emigration, found niches in the occupied territories. By early 1942, émigrés, predominantly from the fascist National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (or NTS), dominated the town administration of Smolensk.30 The political agitation attempted by such émigrés fell on largely deaf ears, however. For example, copies of the émigré newspaper Novoe Slovo were distributed by German propaganda units in Vyasma during the summer of 1942. The 56-year-old head of the forest district of Novo-Dugino offered the following comment on the paper to a German officer: One reads the paper with great amusement, because it gives the impression of a paper out of the Tsarist times, so that one feels almost transported back to one’s childhood.

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Nobody writes in such an old-fashioned way these days. The editor seems to have spent the last thirty years in a sealed box and not noticed any of the happenings in the world and has now climbed out of his box. One reads the paper, laughs and throws it away as meaningless.31

Émigré propaganda did not work on a population that had become used to Communist propaganda methods. The forester’s complaints highlight how the majority of the population, including collaborators, had been Sovietized. Sovietization, after all, did not solely encompass Stalinist repression but included positive measures to expand educational and cultural opportunities, as well as efforts to build up the Party and other mass organizations. There were both winners and losers in the process of Stalinist modernization. The Belorussian historian Vladimir Kuz’menko has calculated that approximately 150,000 members of the intelligentsia, including teachers, engineers, doctors and other professionals, were recorded in the January 1939 census across eastern Belorussia.32 On the eve of the German invasion, across the whole of Belorussia (thus including the newly annexed territories of eastern Poland), there were 75,000 full and candidate Party members, alongside 265,000 members of the youth organization the Komsomol disproportionately concentrated in the fully Sovietized regions of eastern Belorussia.33 Even if the Communist Party could never muster more than a thin presence in the countryside, a wide variety of other official positions were opened up to collective-farm workers: only one in five collective-farm chairmen was a Party member in 1938. The legacy of Soviet rule, therefore, was a society containing numerous potential fissures. Sheila Fitzpatrick has described the Soviet village after collectivization as an extremely fractious, divided society. Owing to repeated purges, there were probably more former Party members in the countryside than active ones. Peasant resentment at collectivization persisted throughout the 1930s.34 The towns were harder hit by the Terror of 1937–38 than was the countryside but also prospered more from Soviet cultural modernization and contained a higher proportion of Party activists. A substantial pool of the disaffected and a sizeable number of regime loyalists were therefore present side by side when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.35

LIFE IN THE RUINS OF SOVIET SOCIETY In the wake of the German invasion, existing Soviet civil society both in the towns and in the countryside more or less collapsed under the onslaught. Military conscription, the evacuation of a substantial proportion of the urban industrial workforce and the flight of officialdom together caused the equivalent of a


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heart attack. ‘Economic life has completely died out in old Russia,’ reported one German observer in the summer of 1941. ‘At the moment, where the commissar is absent, every commune, sovkhoz and kolkhoz administration has fallen apart.’36 In October 1942, the Germans retrospectively estimated that the population of the zone of operations of Army Group Centre had fallen from 10 million before the war to just 6 million. Urbanization had dropped from 24 per cent to 12 per cent.37 Though the Soviet reaction to the invasion had caused much of the falloff, German actions, including both the genocide of around 150,000 Jews in the same region as well as the casualties inflicted by collateral damage, anti-partisan operations, political repression and, above all else, hunger, played a large part in depleting the population so drastically. Bomb and shell damage wrecked many cities and towns. Although the commissars had either fled or been hunted down and shot by the invading forces of the SS and Wehrmacht, and although the outward signs of the Soviet order were symbolically torn down, much remained amid the ruins that was recognizably Soviet, or was even deliberately retained by the occupiers. Streets were renamed, monuments blown up and Party property requisitioned, but neither the built environment nor the paper legacy of Soviet bureaucracy could be dispensed with. The relics of Soviet red tape were simply taken over by the German occupation authorities. Since the majority of registration work and supervision was delegated to the local authorities, it was easiest for district (rayon) administrations to implement the system they already knew. The town authorities of Mogilev, in late November 1941, demanded six forms of identification in order that a recipient could receive ration cards.38 Soviet-era passports were retained well into the occupation, with new German details affixed into existing documents.39 In similar fashion, entire bureaucracies and industries were retained intact: Soviet road-building authorities, the district-level agricultural requisitioning organizations and, most notoriously, the collective farms themselves. Restarting industrial production likewise relied on existing factories, workforces and, for their finance, branches of Gosbank.40 Little effort was made to privatize the economy. Soviet state ownership was simply transformed into German state ownership. On the margins of the economy, there was some toleration of privately owned shops, but this was limited. In Bobruisk, permission to open cafés and restaurants was granted in April 1942 but revoked within four months after 107 ‘tea-shops’ swiftly sprang up, the majority of which sold vodka under the counter, resulting in occurrences of public drunkenness.41 Most remaining shops were not privately owned but administered by local authorities. Roslavl was served by seven shops with a total turnover in January 1943 of half a million rubles, yet over half this turnover was generated by a single public canteen.42 The shortage of basic consumer goods was not unprecedented: after the end of the New Economic Policy, most artisans

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had been forced into collectives, known as artels, or had gone into industrial employment, resulting in a drastic peacetime shortage of shoes and clothing.43 The shortage only intensified in the aftermath of the invasion, and in particular after the mass murder of Soviet Jews, prompting an almost universal chorus of complaint from German economic staffs at their ‘absence’.44 A new class of craftsmen thus had to be created from the Russian urban population. In order to qualify, would-be craftsmen had to take proficiency tests in their chosen trade. These tests soon revealed that many ‘craftsmen’ were in fact unskilled workers who had sought temporary licenses simply in order to claim rations and avoid supervised work, so as to speculate on the black market.45 Not only institutions but also mentalities and practices of everyday life persisted. Some of the strategies for survival adopted under the occupation inevitably resembled those already in existence in Soviet peacetime society during the 1930s.46 ‘Connections’ proved just as vital for survival as before. The consequence was rampant corruption among the collaborator administration alongside the emergence of extensive black markets.47 German administrators were confounded by the constant motion of the population, whether this was to switch to better-paid jobs or to travel to and from the towns in search of food or better living conditions. This was a direct continuation of the population turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s. The historian Moshe Lewin has drawn attention to this phenomenon of tekuchka, which can be translated both as ‘everyday routine’ and, in the Soviet context, ‘spontaneous mobility of the workforce’.48 Nazi and Soviet responses to this phenomenon were in many ways identical: attempts to passportize and register the population, mass arrests of beggars and tramps in razzias, and resort to forced-labour camps to hold the recalcitrant populations.49 German authorities expressed despair at the poor labour discipline of Soviet workers. Their frustration was formulated in racist terms, the causes of the indiscipline identified as a feature of the intrinsic national character of the Russian people. ‘The Russian is Russian and can be compelled to reasonable achievements only with excess numbers of people and effort,’ 4th Army’s Economics Leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Gravenhorst, complained: The Bolsheviks tried with an ingenious reward system, with the Stakhanovite movement or similar means, to master this Russian phenomenon of lethargy. They did not succeed. Even less will Germans inexperienced in Russia succeed to achieve the same as before with fewer workers.50

Though German report-writers compiled increasingly detailed observations of the population’s behaviour, this unofficial ethnography could not distinguish ‘Soviet’ forms of behaviour from ‘Russian’ behaviours. In fact, much civilian behaviour echoed traditional methods of individualist resistance adopted by


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peasant and newly urbanizing societies – blank incomprehension, foot-dragging, absenteeism, the use of cultural norms as ‘weapons of the weak’.51 Canny Russian and Belorussian townsmen and peasants alike tried to extract additional holidays from the German authorities, demanding to celebrate Christmas, New Year and Easter twice, according to the Russian Orthodox and Western calendars.52 If the Germans had opened up this opportunity by abolishing the Soviet order, they only had themselves to blame.

NAZIFYING SOVIET SOCIETY The example of Soviet peasants and workers claiming religious holidays highlights the deeply ambiguous character of the public sphere under Nazi occupation. Despite the presence of a limited number of émigrés and the restoration of religious freedom, no return to the Tsarist order was possible.53 Soviet culture was forcefully banned, while Nazism was not originally intended for export to the Slavic lands.54 Yet despite the outward contradictions, something like an ‘export model’ of National Socialism designed for Soviet consumption did emerge. More strikingly still was the manner in which this process of Nazification dovetailed with existing Soviet norms and practices to produce a distinctively totalitarian public sphere under military – colonial auspices.55 Anti-Semitism provided a common ground for the Germans and their collaborators; indeed, perhaps, the common ground. Since it could not rely on the appeals to racial superiority it directed at German soldiers, Nazi propaganda, whether produced by German agencies or the collaborator press, revolved around anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik themes.56 Despite its absence from public Soviet discourse, anti-Semitism had persisted as a subterranean current in Russian society. Its virulence stemmed not simply from Russian society’s long-standing intolerance of Jews, but to an extent from the refraction of class conflict into ethnic conflict.57 In a political culture that interpreted anti-Semitism not only as political incorrectness but also repressed it severely, anti-Communist feelings were most easily expressed against Russian and Belorussian Jews. For example, the year before the invasion, in the Russian town of Klintsy, it was felt that ‘the Jews’ had bought up all wares in the local market. A Russian woman faced off with a Jewish housewife and declared: ‘There needs to be a war, so that you disappear!’ She was arrested for her outburst.58 Anti-Semitic propaganda served less to incite collaborators against Soviet Jews than as an ongoing ideological justification for the ‘new order’. Long after Russian and Belorussian Jews had been murdered en masse, collaborator newspapers such as the Vitebsk edition of Novy Put (New Way) incorporated lengthy attacks on the vanished Jewish communities.59 In 1944, 2,000 Russian-language copies of

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed to the peasantry by German agricultural officials.60 German propaganda agencies were relative latecomers to the occupation, with many units not arriving before the autumn of 1941 and few Russian-language newspapers being published before the end of that year.61 Alongside the propaganda companies and detachments answering to the German High Command, or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), and linked to Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, another agency, the BB (Betriebsbeförderung or Works Promotion) groups of the economics staffs, played a hugely significant role by indoctrinating the urban workforce. The BB groups were recruited primarily from officials of the German Labour Front (DAF). In 1941 they were exceedingly few in number, but were steadily reinforced through 1942 until, by mid-1943, there were 56 BB officials in the army group area, comparable to many other sub-departments of the German occupation bureaucracy.62 This small cadre of DAF men displayed an astonishing level of activism in the major urban centres. Their responsibilities eventually encompassed the supervision of civilian ration offices, the oversight of artisan production and training programmes, the management of kindergartens and other welfare dispensations, the assessment of workers for premiums and bonuses, and the distribution of points cards for rationed consumer goods. DAF officials were also to organize the shop floor of every worksite, appointing spokesmen and stewards, and to disseminate propaganda within the workforce. By October 1942 they were attempting to regiment the everyday lives of a significant proportion of the 220,000 non-agricultural workers in the region, in particular the 65,000 workers in industry and forestry.63 The ceremonial distribution of premiums and points cards was the usual centrepiece of so-called shop-floor meetings (Betriebsappelle) and festival days. These public gatherings and factory meetings provide a strange echo of Stalinist practices during the 1930s. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that BB propaganda so vigorously attempted to train the workforce to ‘speak Nazi’ where once Soviet propaganda had taught it to ‘speak Bolshevik’, in the memorable phrase of Stephen Kotkin.64 Every workplace in the zone of operations was to display a portrait of the Führer, and next to this a blackboard measuring 2 m by 3 m was to be nailed to the wall, on which newspapers and other propaganda could be pinned. In addition, a series of ‘workplace slogans’ (Betriebsparolen) were published for compulsory display in lettering 20 cm tall.65 In 1941, these were often almost tragicomically inappropriate. Slogan No. 3 asked: ‘Russian worker, how stands it with the food supply?’, while No. 4 declaimed: ‘Russian worker, does your money have value and what can you buy for your money?’ When slogan No. 10 was issued in 1942, the Russian worker was asked: ‘Help with the reconstruction of your homeland!’ By the last year of the occupation, Betriebsparole 1/44 simply demanded an increase in output and threatened slackers with the labour camp.66


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Within each workplace, the BB groups installed spokesmen or ‘factory helpers’ (Betriebshelfer) and also sought out stool pigeons to inform them of changes in morale or signs of political dissent within the workforce. Nomination as a Betriebshelfer was no small matter. The spokesmen were heavily indoctrinated in preparation for their task of preaching Nazism to their fellow Russian workers. In Orel, during the last quarter of 1942, political education courses began approximately every three days. Particularly intensive was the political indoctrination directed at the Betriebshelfer within the artisan collectives.67 Whereas in August 1942 in Orel a total of 69 workplaces with 2,567 employees were covered by the Betriebshelfer system, by April 1943 this had risen to 622 plants and workshops with 13,362 workers and 1,406 craftsmen, overseen by 195 spokesmen and spied on by 44 informers. Considering that the BB official responsible for Orel, Kriegsverwaltungsrat (Military Administration Counsellor) Fred Müller, arrived only on 4 August 1942, this was an impressive achievement. Over the winter of 1942–43 Müller organized an almost unceasing round of Betriebsappelle, first celebrating, on 20 October, the anniversary of the liberation of the city, with 73 gatherings attended by 10,601 workers and artisans, an occasion recorded for the German newsreels; then commemorating the anniversaries of the re-establishment of several factories, before celebrating the Orthodox Christmas on 7 January with 28 gatherings and 2,260 attendees, giving out premiums to 1,279 workers.68 During February Müller and his Betriebshelfer distributed thousands of copies of a brochure written by Mikhail Oktan, editor of the Orel newspaper Rech, entitled ‘Jews and Bolshevism’, as well as a pamphlet, ‘What is National Socialism?’ He also secured 60 cinema and theatre tickets each day to be distributed to the workforce, while also issuing 3,876 coupons for makhorka, the coarse Russian tobacco, 4,000 coupons for 1,000 kg of soap, 564 coupons for textiles and 10,000 coupons for goods worth 100,000 rubles. In March Müller organized an exhibition of art by local painters, seen by 6,000 visitors. Both attendance at the exhibition and the take-up of the free cinema tickets would have been higher had it not been for several extremely heavy Soviet air raids that month, which caused severe unrest among the population. Hitler’s birthday was celebrated on 20 April and the town decorated and beautified for the occasion. Twelve thousand pictures of the Führer and 6,000 paper flags were given out to 13,600 workers attending 115 gatherings, along with 300 swastika flags on loan. Easter brought a two-day holiday.69 For May Day 1943, in conjunction with the propaganda company of 2nd Panzer Army, Müller organized a festival programme to encompass practically the whole of Orel. Between 8.30 and 10 a.m., the workforce, 15,845 strong, gathered in 121 Betriebsappelle. Premiums to the tune of two packets of makhorka each for men and women smokers, and 4,625 pieces of Gablonzer jewellery for the women, were given out. A quarter of the workforce also received half a

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kilogram of salt each, while 12 plants were rewarded with clothing and shoes for their special achievements. In some plants presents for the workers’ children were also handed out. Placards, newspapers, wall slogans and 1,500 paper flags were distributed. Loudspeaker vans carrying Russian-speaking propagandists broadcast speeches to the larger factories. Some workshops held concerts and dances. Unfortunately, the day’s celebration began to sour when it turned out that, contrary to expectations, no supplemental rations could be organized for the communal midday meal. Nonetheless, 8–9,000 people sat down for lunch. In the afternoon, the May Day parade was to be held; carnival floats had been constructed by 17 different workshops for the occasion. The town square was decorated with pylons 4 m high bearing the DAF insignia. Disaster struck, however, when the planned march past of an Ostbataillon (Eastern Battalion) was cancelled and the crowds lining the streets were halted at the edge of the town square so that a German military convoy could travel through the town in response to an emergency at the front. The festivities fell flat as a result. More successful was the afternoon children’s party, which attracted a huge crowd and at which coffee, pastries, sweets and toys were given out. The extent to which the German occupiers organized public gatherings often involving a quarter or more of a town’s population is remarkable. Orel was far from unique in this regard. Whether such events were always appreciated by the town-dwellers is another matter. Most popular were undoubtedly the harvest festivals held on 4 October, as well as religious festivals, precisely because these were seen as apolitical.70 In late 1942, the installation of Bishop Stephan in Smolensk and the reopening of the Nikolai Cathedral in Bobruisk both attracted huge crowds, even including many youths, otherwise usually rather indifferent to religion because of Soviet anti-clerical propaganda.71 The official public gatherings to celebrate May Day remained, though, the largest occasions. In 1943, these attracted no fewer than 12,000 people in Vitebsk, 7,000 in Orsha and a total of 108,720 in the larger towns across the entire army group zone of operations.72 In 1944, 10–12,000 attended the public ceremony in Bobruisk.73 Yet such gatherings could also be used to signal distance between the occupier and the occupied. The 1942 May Day parade in Borisov was marked by an ostentatious silence in response to every speech, whether by a German or by a Belorussian collaborator.74 Similarly, the decision in 1943 to name 22 June as a ‘Day of Liberation’ was greeted with widespread indifference and poor turnouts, though the belated order to hold celebrations on the day also played a part in reducing attendances. Nonetheless, 6,000 workers turned out to watch a march past of an Ostbataillon in Gomel.75 Festivals and holidays were perhaps more appreciated for the break from work they provided than for their political significance. That the German authorities sought to teach their Soviet workforces to ‘speak


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Nazi’ even while holding racist views of Russians and Belorussians did not vitiate the essential thrust of policy. Forcing the population to speak Nazi would prevent them from speaking Bolshevism, no longer the language of conformism but of rebellion.

PETITIONING, COMPLAINTS AND THE PUBLIC CONVERSATION UNDER OCCUPATION The deadening conformity of the public sphere notwithstanding, both occupier and occupied needed to communicate with one another, and did so to a degree that both challenges assumptions about the nature of the occupation and suggests continuities with prewar patterns of behaviour. One such continuity can be found in the frequency of petitions and complaints, especially in the first half of the occupation, during 1941 and 1942. Russian and Belorussian civilians were sufficiently emboldened to continue to petition and complain to the authorities, much as they had done under Tsarism and Soviet rule.76 The files of the Secret Field Police, or Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), abound with examples of complaints, particularly from women, about thefts and assaults by German soldiers. When the German programme of agrarian reform was introduced in 1942, many former kulaks complained bitterly at their exclusion, there being no basis in the German regulations on which to reverse the expropriations they had suffered under Soviet rule.77 Surviving examples of written communications with the German or collaborator authorities show some of the hallmarks of the Soviet-era petitions described by Sheila Fitzpatrick in her work on this subject, along with an intriguing mix of Soviet linguistic forms and what the letter-writers assumed was the Germans’ own language. This mishmash of styles is also evident in the letters of collaborator administrations to the German authorities, which often took on a petitioning form. The Bobruisk town authorities asked in early 1942 for the ‘liquidation of banditism in order to take part in the new life under German direction’. Both ‘liquidation’ and ‘banditism’ were well-worn Soviet clichés. Only the use of ‘Sir’ instead of ‘Comrade’ betrayed the changed circumstances.78 Other traditional Russian protest tactics persisted under the occupation as well. German reports in 1943 occasionally noted ‘scenes’ at the departures of transports of workers to Germany; when such incidents are described in any detail, it is clear they were in fact bab’y bunty, the ‘women’s riots’ described by Lynne Viola as a phenomenon of peasant resistance to collectivization.79 In Mogilev, during the summer of 1943, mothers gathered to wail at the departure of their conscripted sons and daughters.80 In Klimovichi district a rumour that former Red Army men released from captivity would be reinterned led to a kind

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of protest march by their wives from the countryside to the district capital.81 Such public protests, as with most petitions, remained wholly ineffective in altering the resolve of the occupiers to enforce their policies. In some cases, moreover, outspokenness towards German authority could prove just as lethal as towards the prewar Soviet authority. Several examples from Roslavl and its surrounding area illustrate this point. Ivan Aniskin was shot for insulting a German soldier and spitting in front of him, while a 57-year-old woman was sentenced to three days’ arrest for insulting a German corporal. Insulting collaborators could be just as dangerous: Sofie Skorzova was sent to the Roslavl concentration camp for calling a Russian volunteer to the Wehrmacht a ‘traitor’.82 Many instances of ‘speech’ actually involved song and music, which seemed to be a particularly important vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction under the occupation. In one case a Russian teacher was given permission to hold a dance, at which she was arrested for singing a song with supposedly anti-German lyrics, but she was released when it became apparent that she had no idea what the song was about and that it had been in common currency for over a year. Four other teachers, meanwhile, were arrested for teaching their schoolchildren a perfectly innocent lyric that had been set to the tune of the Internationale.83 More overtly pro-Soviet sloganeering and propagandizing cost hundreds of Russians and Belorussians their lives. Even ‘spreading rumours’ was criminalized, although the exemplary punishments meted out to rumour-mongers did absolutely nothing to stem this phenomenon.

SOCIAL PARTICIPATION IN TERROR As some of the above examples hint, the German police forces were utterly reliant on information from the population to identify suspects. They were aided in this regard by the fractiousness of Soviet society they inherited after the invasion. Especially during 1941, a veritable explosion of accusations and revenge-taking ensued after the arrival of German occupiers.84 The persistence of denunciation under the occupation is one of the more remarkable continuities in social behaviour between peacetime and wartime Soviet society.85 Denunciation was not confined to the towns but extended also into many villages in the countryside. Nor did denunciation simply take the form of a single, anonymous complaint: the authors of most denunciations identified themselves to the authorities, and collective accusations were also quite common. In one instance, 11 people put their names to a denunciation.86 As was the case under Stalinism in the 1930s, the ‘accusatory practice’ of denunciation could serve several purposes. During the Stalinist purges in the countryside many villagers detourned the aims of the purges and used them against the local Communist establishment,


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denouncing unpopular local officials – ‘the mice burying the cat’.87 Under the Nazi occupation, peasants and townspeople alike used denunciation to settle local or personal scores. In one case, a collaborator policeman denounced a Russian woman as a spy because she had refused his advances.88 From 1942 the pro-Soviet underground also resorted to denunciation in order to disrupt the collaborator administration, spreading false rumours or making false accusations against teachers, collective-farm chairmen, district chiefs and other officials.89 The most well-known collaborator in central Russia, Bronislav Kaminski, was denounced as a Bolshevik in 1942 on average once a month by inhabitants of his self-administration district. The denunciations, all of which were written and many signed, were kept on file but ignored.90 Denunciation was just one form of co-operation between the Soviet civilian population and German security units. In 1941 Germany’s Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, was a largely information-driven conflict. Relative to the subsequent years of occupation, collective reprisals were few: of 5,295 villages destroyed in Belorussia during the war, only 150 were burnt down in 1941.91 The military records show at first only a sporadic resort to collective atrocities as a means of enforcing German rule in Russia. What the German military’s war diaries and reports show instead is an astonishingly laborious effort to build up accurate intelligence on the whereabouts of the innumerable small bands of Red Army stragglers and the first partisan detachments mobilized by the Party in the summer and autumn of 1941. This reflected the widespread dispersal of German security units, most of whom were typically deployed on the scale of one company to a single district. ‘Pacification’ and ‘cleansing’ were undertakings that radiated outwards from the district capitals into the hinterland. Patrols and detachments fanned out across the countryside, appointing starosti (village headmen), registering the population on lists and seeking out Ortsfremden (strangers).92 None of this could take place without the co-operation of at least part of the population. The interaction between German troops and the population continued in the form of frequent tip-offs concerning the location of partisan units. A brochure published in 1942 extolling the ‘war in the bush’ fought by the SS Cavalry Brigade in the summer of 1941 contained photographs showing this in action, captioned: ‘The peasants help us’ and ‘Many valuable reports come also from the population itself.’93 This was no Potemkin portrayal of an idealized situation, but conformed to a widespread reality. ‘The population of Liozno district is beginning to exclude the criminal elements,’ reported Wachbataillon (Guard Battalion) 721 in September 1941, describing how kolkhozniki (collective-farm workers) informed them of the presence of partisans.94 Ortskommandantur (Local Command Post) II/930 in Rudnia received so many reports fingering ‘Communists’ and ‘partisans’ in outlying villages that it could send out a company of military police to capture

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and execute them. When the military police arrived at the targeted villages, both starosti and ordinary villagers pointed out the suspects.95 Through such laborious means a German rifle company or town commandant assigned to security duty might identify and execute anything up to several hundred suspects across a single district in the space of a few months. By the end of 1941, Ortskommandantur II/930, stationed first in Rudnia and then in Olenin, had executed 627 suspects while also capturing or recapturing 815 Red Army stragglers, escaped prisoners of war and ‘unsafe elements’.96 Such a high level of attrition could not have come about without the assistance of the population. The willingness to inform persisted well into the occupation. In mid-1942 a detachment of German troops visited the Belorussian village of Strupen, only a few kilometres outside Borisov, responding to reports of partisan presence. After a short firefight, a small group of partisans were driven off.97 In the wake of the shooting the company interpreter was informed that the partisans had regularly sheltered in the house of Mrs Kuczinska and been given food by her 28-year-old daughter. ‘According to the statements of the peasants,’ the after-action report read, ‘K. was the terror of the village. This was confirmed by her complete unrepentance when confronted.’ The German lieutenant ordered her immediate public execution by hanging. The report concluded: ‘The peasants were for the most part thankful for the disappearance of K.’ Although it is impossible to determine the precise number, informing, fingering and denunciation undoubtedly cost many thousands of lives. One did not need to volunteer as an armed collaborator to contribute to the terror under German occupation. In effect, one part of Soviet society connived with the German occupiers in the destruction of another part. Vernichtungskrieg was therefore an interactive, social process.

CONCLUSION Soviet society in Russia and Belorussia under German military occupation constituted a unique hybrid. Even within its boundaries, the occupation society was quite literally polarized and divided. By mid-1943 close to half of the territory in the rear area of Army Group Centre was under the control of the Soviet partisan movement.98 The convoluted interplay of partisan zones, no-man’s-land and German-controlled territory meant that the occupation society resembled Swiss cheese. Around the same time the size of the local administration and police force exceeded 100,000 collaborators, not counting many tens of thousands more in the Ostbataillonen.99 This was an average of 400 officials and 300 police per district in the region. There were generally fewer officials but significantly more police than during the prewar Soviet period, reflecting the militarization of occupation society as a result of the partisan war. The armed collaborator force, meanwhile,


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was almost exactly the same size as the partisan movement at this time. Soviet society was not only subject to Nazi occupation, but also waged a bloody civil war. Throughout the occupation there was a significantly high level of purely Russian-on-Russian violence, as collaborators and partisans fought with each other entirely out of sight of the Germans, a phenomenon which has hitherto attracted much less attention than the major German-led anti-partisan operations, and which lies beyond the remit of this chapter.100 Within German-controlled territory the interplay between German military, Nazi, Soviet and Russian influences was just as complex. Nonetheless, the Sovietness of its rump society – perhaps three million inhabitants under relatively firm German control – is manifest. To the extent that occupation brought about a transformation of power relations, eliminating Bolsheviks while exalting a motley class of collaborators, yet failing through its brevity and evanescence to complete this transformation, the Soviet society of the Nazi occupation could perhaps be called a temporary social formation, a provisional hybrid of prewar and wartime relations. No matter how great an upheaval was effected by the withdrawal of the Soviet authorities, the chaos of the invasion and the destruction of communities by German policies, the remnants of the social order remained recognizably Soviet. Social attitudes and everyday behaviour continued, it would appear, much as before, albeit adapted to the significantly more extreme conditions of the occupation. German attempts to reorder Russian and Belorussian society along Nazi lines were far from insignificant, but in the end ran up against ingrained behaviours and responses which no amount of hectoring, propaganda or coercion could alter. Even the creation of a fascist public sphere through parades and festivals merely superimposed Nazi conventions on Soviet norms. The same convergence of behaviours can also be observed in the extensive social participation in Nazi terror through informing and denunciation. The roots of this participation must be traced back to prewar social tensions within Soviet society, both for the motivations to denounce and for the prevalence of the practice itself. In this respect, even when tearing itself apart, Soviet society remained in a paradoxical fashion true to itself.


PA R T I I I

War


9

Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939–45 Philip Sabin

Richard Overy tackles big topics. For nearly three decades we were at the same college as one another (first Queens’ College, Cambridge, and then King’s College, London), and in that time he produced several wide-ranging books on the Second World War. How can one do justice to such breadth of scholarship within a short chapter such as this? I have decided to focus on the aspects I know best, namely the area of overlap of two of my current undergraduate courses, one being ‘World War Two in Europe’, the other ‘Fighting in the Air’, in which we analyze contests for air supremacy throughout the past century. This has allowed me to construct a chapter title simply by running together the titles of two of Richard Overy’s most well-known books – The Air War 1939–1945 (1980) and Why the Allies Won (1995).1 My chosen angle also touches on some of Richard Overy’s other works, especially the short but insightful volume he published in 2000 on the Battle of Britain, so I should be able to give a real flavour of the contribution he has made.2 Richard Overy’s forté is analytical history, and he provides a clear interpretation of the dynamics underlying complex and tangled skeins of events. As A. J. P. Taylor wrote in his review of The Air War: ‘The result, as so often with sound scholarship, is the ruthless dispelling of myths.’3 I will deliberately focus my remarks below on areas of myth and controversy, so as to illustrate the value of Richard Overy’s clear-headed insights. Explaining ‘why the Allies won the air war’ was one of two overall objectives of The Air War (the other being ‘to show how important air power was to the achievement of overall victory’).4 Although my focus on the first of these two aims frees me from having to address the extensive discussions surrounding the efficacy of strategic bombing, air interdiction, close air support and maritime air power,5 it still leaves an enormous range of issues to be addressed in relation to the long-running ‘counter-air’ contest (as it is termed in modern air doctrine).6 Hence, unlike Richard Overy himself, who adopted a global perspective and analyzed the aerial defeat of the entire Axis coalition, I will concentrate just on that coalition’s most potent individual air element, namely Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

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I see three parts of the air war against Nazi Germany as being especially important and controversial, and so I shall focus on these below. They are the defeat of the German aerial offensive against Britain in 1940–41, the air war on the Eastern Front, and the winning of air superiority over the Reich itself in 1944. A fundamental debate which runs through all of these aspects of the European air war is whether (as Paul Kennedy and John Ellis have suggested) Axis defeat was all but inevitable because of the overwhelming economic and industrial advantages of the Allies, or whether, as Richard Overy himself argued strongly in Why the Allies Won, ‘There was nothing preordained about Allied success’ and ‘Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war.’7 This issue of the balance of determinants underlying Allied victory, and of how close-run that victory was, is fundamental to our understanding of the Second World War, and I shall return to it throughout my remarks, in the specific context of the air campaign.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN The Luftwaffe played a key role in Germany’s rapid conquest of Poland, Norway, the Low Countries and France in 1939–40,8 but had Britain in turn fallen to the German onslaught in 1940–41, the strategic consequences for the Allied cause would surely have been even more severe than those with which it had to contend. Not only would the reduction in Allied resource potential have been even greater than it already was, but also the Mediterranean and Middle East would almost certainly have been conquered in quick succession, and there would have been no remaining land base for an American air or amphibious counteroffensive. Germany’s failure against Britain was hence decisive for the outcome of the entire war, and the dominant role of the Luftwaffe in this campaign makes it of central importance for our current enquiry. The popular image of the Battle of Britain in the English-speaking world, as embodied in Harry Saltzman’s oft-screened 1969 film, is of a triumph ‘against the odds’ in which ‘The Few’ saw off overwhelming numbers through sheer British pluck.9 This image is not just a product of Churchillian ‘Finest Hour’ propaganda, but has a measure of scholarly support. Williamson Murray, for example, argued in 1990 that the main reason for the Luftwaffe’s failure was blundering overconfidence.10 Instances such as the delay in the initial German air onslaught, and the premature discontinuation of attacks on radar stations and airfields, have passed into legend.11 However, most scholars today take a broader view and argue that the real strategic situation was much more in the RAF’s favour than legend admits.12 Even if it had been better handled operationally, the Luftwaffe would have been very hard pressed to achieve anything like the objectives required.

W H Y T H E A L L I E S W O N T H E A I R WA R , 1 9 3 9 – 4 5

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For one thing, the overall balance of forces between the two sides was actually fairly even. Richard Overy points out that Fighter Command had slightly more single-engined fighters than the Luftwaffe, and he describes the idea of the few against the many as ‘one of the most enduring myths of the Battle’.13 Unlike in the earlier campaigns, the defending aircraft were not outclassed technologically, now that Fighter Command had been almost entirely re-equipped with fast monoplane Spitfires and Hurricanes. The German numerical advantage lay in bombers and twin-engined fighters, but these were no better than their RAF counterparts – the Me-110 and Ju-87 proved terribly vulnerable to British fighters, and the He-111, Do-17 and Ju-88 carried insufficient bomb loads to inflict enduring damage in the face of active air defences.14 The problem was compounded by poor target intelligence and by the limited vulnerability of the targets themselves – as Alfred Price points out, radar stations and fighter-control centres were difficult, pinpoint targets, and even if concrete runways were cratered, the summer weather allowed defending fighters to operate off makeshift grass strips, just like those the Luftwaffe itself was using in France.15 Dispersion and radar warning meant that only 44 Spitfires and Hurricanes were destroyed or badly damaged on the ground by German attack during the Battle.16 The second important consideration is that, despite the enduring stress in air doctrine on the idea that ‘attack is the best form of defence’,17 there was in fact a substantial ‘home advantage’ for the defending air force in this period. I have analyzed this phenomenon myself using the naval concept of ‘force gradients’, according to which the effectiveness of a force gradually diminishes the further it tries to operate from its land base.18 In 1940–41, the RAF obviously benefited from its radar and Observer Corps network and from its greater ability to recover downed aircraft and pilots, while the Luftwaffe suffered from anti-aircraft fire, poor intelligence on what was happening in the enemy’s backyard, and the limited range of its aircraft, especially the Me-109.19 In the initial clashes over the Channel in June and July, the situation was much more even, but when the locus of fighting shifted inland to London in September, the RAF’s ‘force gradient’ advantage became pronounced, and the kill ratio swung to 2:1 in Britain’s favour.20 The Luftwaffe had already paid heavily for its offensive stance in previous campaigns, with around 560 aircraft written off in Poland, 240 in Norway and 1,900 in France and the Low Countries, and these losses obviously reduced further the threat it could pose to the UK.21 The impact of force gradients may be offset by the attacker’s ability to seize the initiative and to concentrate superior forces at a point of his choosing. The Luftwaffe certainly did enjoy local numerical superiority over 11 Group in the south-east, and this could have been decisive had Lanchester been right when he theorized in 1916 that fighting power in air engagements would increase in proportion to the square of the friendly numbers engaged.22 Fortunately for

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the RAF, Lanchester was wrong. For one thing, he failed to consider the way in which large numbers of aircraft get in one another’s way and make it harder to identify the less numerous aircraft of the adversary. This had already been clearly demonstrated on the Western Front in World War One, when the German Air Service capitalized on its defensive stance to achieve kill ratios of up to 3:1, despite being outnumbered by roughly the same ratio.23 It was demonstrated again in 1941–42, when the remnants of the Luftwaffe left in the West inflicted more losses than they suffered during hit-and-run interceptions of the massive RAF ‘circuses’ over France.24 Hence, although the ‘Big Wings’ favoured by Bader and Leigh-Mallory in 1940 could certainly give German bomber formations a bloody nose if they got the chance, Park’s individual squadrons also did well, even when heavily outnumbered.25 A further nail in the Luftwaffe’s coffin was that Germany (unlike Britain) was hardly producing enough aircraft to replace its losses in a continuing attritional struggle. From July to September 1940, Germany had around 1,000 fighters and nearly 1,200 bombers destroyed or severely damaged, while its new production came to around only 920 fighters and 1,130 bombers.26 Britain, by contrast, had around 1,000 Hurricanes and Spitfires destroyed or seriously damaged but it produced 1,250 and repaired many others in that same three-month period.27 A key problem was that German intelligence consistently underestimated enemy air strength and production capacity, so that Germany’s own aircraft production and repair efforts were not given a sufficiently high priority.28 The RAF did run shorter of skilled pilots than it did of airframes, but the Luftwaffe faced similar aircrew shortages as the Battle continued.29 Hence, there was no prospect of Germany being able to grind Britain’s air defences down in a contest of attrition and exhaustion, since (as Alfred Price put it), ‘in trying to smash Fighter Command, the Luftwaffe was likely to smash itself also’.30 When the Luftwaffe belatedly followed the RAF’s own example and shifted its bombers to night attacks on British cities, German loss rates tumbled because of the very primitive nature of night air-defence techniques. In 1941, RAF night fighters became much more adept at making contact, but the bombers were still usually able to escape by taking evasive action in the gloom, and losses to enemy action averaged only around 1 per cent of sorties.31 However, accidents in the darkness claimed at least as many aircraft, and bombing accuracy also suffered severely, especially as British scientists countered German navigational radio beams in the ‘Wizard War’.32 Although considerable damage was caused (especially in Coventry on 15–16 November and London on 10–11 May), the Blitz was nothing like as destructive as that later visited on Germany itself, and so was even less likely to coerce the country into coming to terms.33 This highlights the biggest single obstacle to the success of Germany’s air offensive against Britain, namely that, unlike in all the previous campaigns in


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which the Luftwaffe had assailed enemy forces and civilians (as over Warsaw and Rotterdam), the English Channel precluded the usual accompaniment of an irresistible ground advance by the Wehrmacht. Even had it been possible for Goering to win air superiority in the very limited time before winter weather rendered a cross-Channel invasion unthinkable, the twin handicaps of British naval dominance and a total lack of dedicated amphibious shipping made Operation Sealion an essentially suicidal endeavour.34 It was probably lucky for the Germans that their frustration in the air saved them from having the cream of the Wehrmacht sunk or repulsed at sea (as happened to the invasion convoys bound for Crete in May 1941, despite complete German air superiority) or penned on a hostile shore and cut off from resupply or retreat (as happened to the Axis forces in Tunisia two years later).35 Richard Overy summarized the result of the Battle of Britain with the downbeat conclusion: ‘Neither side was defeated in any technical sense . . . Losses on both sides were soon made good. The outcome was technically a stalemate.’36 Stephen Bungay was less equivocal in hailing a British victory, and he wrote: Fighter Command was the best prepared fighter force in the world, by a considerable margin. In 1940 it was given the opportunity of fighting almost precisely the battle it had planned for . . . It did not need to improvise, there was very little muddle, and it all worked out much as expected.37

Although it is not perhaps inconceivable that a significantly better German performance might have spooked Britain into entering Vichy-style peace talks (after all, Norway, France and Crete all fell to the Germans in this period in defiance of conventional military wisdom),38 the Luftwaffe’s failure to achieve any meaningful success against the RAF in fact seems to have been determined by a multiplicity of strategic obstacles and not to have been just a result of Goering’s poor leadership. The idea that the Battle was a near-run thing seems to have stemmed originally from persistent German underestimation and British overestimation of enemy capabilities.39 With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see how the outcome could have been all that different from what actually occurred.

THE EASTERN FRONT The relative contributions of the USSR and the Western Allies to the defeat of Germany have been an issue of bitter contention ever since the conflict itself. Even now that the 40-year Cold War between the victors has abated, very different views on the subject continue to flourish. At one extreme, Norman Davies argued in 2006: ‘There is simply no comparison between the order of magnitude

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of the struggles in the East and of those elsewhere’, and hence: ‘All in all, the openminded observer will be tempted to view the war effort of the Western powers as something of a sideshow.’40 At the other extreme, Phillips O’Brien suggested in 2000: ‘For the whole of 1943, about 60 per cent of Germany’s war effort was directed against the British and Americans, a figure that would only increase markedly in 1944 and 1945’, and he went on to claim: ‘the Americans and British could probably have beaten the Germans without Soviet assistance. This could be possible without even relying on the atomic bomb.’41 I will now examine this vexed debate with specific regard to the air battle in the East. Not surprisingly, the controversy revolves around differing interpretations of the mass of complex statistics covering the many different aspects of the war. Not only do scholars differ fundamentally over the relative weighting of these various statistics but there are also serious differences regarding individual statistics themselves. Reliable figures for aircraft losses are especially hard to pin down, because of contrasting claims between the antagonists and because of differences over the inclusion of damaged aircraft and non-combat losses. John Ellis was so disheartened by this confusion that he concluded: ‘It is . . . not possible to give any sort of overall table of aircraft losses, even for the major belligerents.’42 The dearth of reliable statistics is particularly acute for the war in the East, because of the nature of the regimes and because the Soviet and German versions differ so markedly.43 I will do my best to chart a way through this statistical morass, but it must be constantly borne in mind that any figures scholars might cite need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. To give just one example, Richard Overy claimed in The Air War that 300 German aircraft were lost during the assault on Sevastopol in June 1942, while Joel Hayward and others have put the figure more recently at just 31!44 The Luftwaffe was grossly outnumbered, even according to its own optimistic estimates, when it took part in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Continuing low production levels, combined with commitments elsewhere and the strain of recent operations against Britain and in the Balkans, meant that only around 2,800 German aircraft took part in the onslaught – less than had attacked France just over a year earlier.45 David Glantz suggests that the USSR had around 15,600 combat aircraft, over 7,000 of which were in the Western military districts.46 However, unlike the RAF in 1940, the Red Air Force was tactically and technologically inferior and was caught completely by surprise. On the first day alone, the Germans claimed the destruction of 1,811 aircraft (mostly on the ground) for the loss of just a few dozen of their own, and even the Soviet official history admits that around 1,200 planes were destroyed.47 In Alfred Price’s words: ‘the Soviet Air Force losses represented by far the greatest number of aircraft ever destroyed in a single day’s fighting. It was also the most comprehensive defeat to be inflicted by one air force on another, in the long history of air warfare’48


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Opinions differ over the real impact of this initial blow, and of the further carnage that the remnants of the Red Air Force suffered in the succeeding days and weeks as they were shot out of the sky and as their airfields were overrun by marauding panzers.49 Edward R. Hooton suggests Russian air power did not recover until late in 1942, whereas Richard Overy argues: ‘The bulk of the very many Russian aircraft destroyed in June 1941 were . . . already obsolete, the Luftwaffe simply completing a job that was already being carried out by the Red Air Force itself.’50 What is not in dispute is that the Luftwaffe paid a very heavy price for its intensive sorties in the ensuing months to support the Wehrmacht’s continued advances across such a wide front. As in previous offensives, several hundred aircraft per month were destroyed or damaged on operations, and the serviceability of the remaining planes declined catastrophically as equipment wore out, supply lines stretched beyond breaking point, and mud and snow made improvised airfields unusable.51 By early September, only around 1,000 Luftwaffe aircraft were still serviceable, and by the time of the Soviet counteroffensive in December, German air power in the east had become a shadow of its former self, and the Red Air Force regained temporary superiority by default.52 Although Soviet air power never again suffered the rate of loss that it had in 1941, attrition remained very high owing to the Luftwaffe’s recovery with time and better weather, and to the increasingly offensive stance of the Red Air Force itself. Evan Mawdsley puts Soviet combat-aircraft losses in combat alone at 10,300 in 1941, 7,800 in 1942, 11,200 in 1943, 9,700 in 1944 and 4,100 in early 1945, and these numbers increase very substantially if accidents are included.53 What saved the USSR was its even higher levels of aircraft production. Output had already exceeded 10,000 aircraft per year in 1939 and 1940 (twice what the Germans believed), and thanks to the evacuation of factories to the Urals to escape the Wehrmacht’s advance, it rose to around 15,000 in 1941, 25,000 in 1942, 35,000 in 1943, and 40,000 in 1944.54 Lend-Lease aid provided another 18,000 or so aircraft, as well as vital aluminium and aviation fuel.55 Not only were the new aircraft much more of a technological match for the Luftwaffe, but they allowed the expansion of the Red Air Force’s front-line strength to over 13,000 planes by June 1944, fully half of which were concentrated in Belorussia to support the Bagration offensive on the third anniversary of Barbarossa.56 Meanwhile, Luftwaffe strength in the East was gradually declining from its initial (already inadequate) level, because German aircraft production remained low at first despite the failure to smash the USSR as quickly as had been hoped, and because the production increases which began in 1942 and accelerated in 1943 and 1944 were offset by the growing need to divert resources to other theatres.57 Total German aircraft output for all fronts was around 12,000 in 1941, 15,000 in 1942, 29,000 in 1943 and 40,000 in 1944, so it was always outstripped by the USSR alone.58 Alfred Price gives detailed snapshots of Luftwaffe deployment

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at yearly intervals, which show around 2,400 out of 3,400 serviceable German aircraft (71 per cent) in the East in June 1941, 1,700 out of 3,500 (49 per cent) in July 1942, 2,200 out of 4,600 (48 per cent) in May 1943 and 1,900 out of 4,900 (39 per cent) in May 1944.59 Edward R. Hooton gives a similar breakdown of the Luftwaffe’s Eastern strength alone, which he puts at 1,766 aircraft in March 1942, 2,690 in June, 2,324 in September, 1,501 in December, 1,993 in March 1943, 2,292 in June, 1,765 in September, 1,683 in December and 1,785 in March 1944.60 As I warned earlier, the statistics are hard to reconcile in detail, but the key points are the erosion of German strength in the winter (just like in 1941)61 and the fact that the Red Air Force had a large and growing numerical preponderance as time went on. The really important question is the degree of attrition the Luftwaffe suffered in the USSR. Andrew Brookes made an unreferenced claim that ‘total German aircraft losses in the East amounted to 77,000, which was 250 per cent greater than the losses on all other theatres’.62 If true, this would decisively support Norman Davies’s view that the war in the West was little more than a sideshow. However, other scholars paint a very different picture. Williamson Murray puts Luftwaffe losses in the East from June 1942 to November 1943 (including those suffered at Stalingrad and Kursk) at around 6,160 aircraft, compared with 10,710 German planes lost on other fronts over the same period.63 Edward R. Hooton suggests that fewer than 2,500 out of 342,000 Luftwaffe sorties on the Eastern Front in 1944 resulted in the complete loss of the aircraft, a rate of under 1 per cent.64 This latter claim surely neglects other causes of aircraft attrition, but the clear implication is that flying in the East was not as dangerous for German pilots as flying in the West, and that far more Soviet than German aircraft were downed throughout the campaign. Is this impression at all plausible, given the overwhelming numerical preponderance of the Red Air Force? I have already argued that simple Lanchestrian rules do not apply, and that there are plenty of instances of outnumbered but tactically proficient air arms giving significantly better than they got when on the operational defensive. Even when the Germans attacked, as at Kursk, they remained capable of achieving a very favourable exchange ratio. Soviet writers admitted that they lost nearly 1,000 planes while defending Kursk in July 1943, but most scholars reject their equally high kill claims, and instead go with the German records, which show only around 200 Luftwaffe aircraft lost during the 10 days of the offensive.65 It was primarily on the Eastern front that German fighter aces famously racked up kill claims in the hundreds (all after October 1942 for the leading ace, Erich Hartmann, with his 352 claims).66 There is an obvious suspicion of exaggeration given the difficulty of verification in this theatre, but there are also plenty of reports of Soviet aircraft effectively being sitting ducks – entirely understandable when one considers the constant need for new and


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inexperienced pilots to offset the high attrition rates.67 Soviet fighter tactics and technology did undoubtedly improve a great deal over time,68 but this was not all that mattered. Von Hardesty makes some very interesting points about the Red Air Force’s focus on direct ground support rather than counter-air operations per se: There was never a clear-cut, one-on-one air struggle between the VVS [Soviet Air Force] and the Luftwaffe. Rather than attempting to destroy the Luftwaffe as a fighting force, the VVS stayed close to the cutting edge of Soviet offensives. This fact allowed the Luftwaffe a curious reprieve in the east, the ability to maintain diverse air operations until the final weeks of the war. There were occasions after 1943 when a concentration of German air power, properly applied, could still assert temporary local air superiority.69

So where does all this leave us with regard to the USSR’s contribution to winning the air war and, beyond that, the European war as a whole? Norman Davies and Phillips O’Brien take such different views on this issue because Davies emphasises land-fighting and manpower casualties, whereas O’Brien stresses equipment and argues that ‘the Second World War in Europe was, economically speaking, an air war’ since over 40 per cent of German munitions production (in terms of man hours) was devoted to making aircraft.70 Both writers seem to be guilty of a significant degree of special pleading, and it is no surprise that most scholars take an intermediate view.71 The Eastern Front, with its enormous tracts of land, was very different from the Western and Mediterranean Fronts, where water obstacles hindered ground operations and advantaged air and naval power. It is therefore quite understandable that both Germany and the USSR adopted what Richard Overy termed a ‘limited’ air strategy focused on tactical co-operation with the army, since it was the army’s role in defending and seizing resource centres that ultimately decided the war in the East.72 The Red Air Force took this focus on army support even further than the Luftwaffe, and it is fascinating to see how it triumphed in the end through sheer omnipresent mass, whereas the German superiority in counter-air combat proved nugatory after a while because of chronic overstretch. Richard Overy argued that the German invasion of the USSR ‘gave the western allies a long breathing-space in the west to build up large air forces and deploy them more or less at will. From this perspective the Russian armed forces gave greater help in the execution of western strategy than the west gave in return.’73 The second half of this statement seems rather harsh, since (as I have shown) the drawing-off of an increasing proportion of the Luftwaffe, and the greater attritional losses it suffered in the West, do appear to have been key ingredients in the Red Air Force’s growing ability to win air superiority by default. However, the most important element by far in the Red Air Force’s triumph was surely

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the continuous mass production of new aircraft and aircrew, without which the heavy attrition of Soviet air assets would soon have proved fatal. If there was ever an air war that was won primarily in the factories and training schools, this was it.74

THE DEFENCE OF THE REICH Richard Overy gave rather short shrift to the air-superiority contest that was fought in 1944 and focused instead on the impact of Allied air power in this period on the broader war effort through tactical support and strategic bombing. He wrote that although ‘the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war’, Allied numerical superiority thereafter became overwhelming (especially in the air).75 ‘However many new aircraft were produced in 1944 – and some 40 per cent of Axis aircraft output was produced in that year – it was in effect reducing the odds from 4:1 to 3:1, and under either of those circumstances defeat was unavoidable.’76 The figures certainly seem to support this point of view, since American and British aircraft production (albeit for all fronts) rose from over 70,000 in 1942 to more than 110,000 in 1943 and more than 120,000 in 1944 – three times greater than even the peak of German output.77 By the end of 1943, the crowded airbases in England and southern Italy held more aircraft than the entire Red Air Force, giving the Western Allies the same numerical superiority over the Luftwaffe as the USSR had so painfully amassed.78 Goering was driven to rely on the supposed qualitative superiority of German personnel when he admitted in November 1943: In terms of numbers I cannot measure up to Russia and to the United States, which are working quite undisturbed . . . nor is it necessary to. We did not do so in the last world war . . . With us it is always the man that counts.79

However, the Luftwaffe did still have some more solid advantages to offset its numerical inferiority. In particular, Germany’s territorial holdings in France, the Low Countries, Italy, the Balkans and Eastern Europe gave it significant strategic depth, which meant that air attacks on the Nazi heartland suffered from even more severe force-gradient penalties than those the Luftwaffe itself had encountered against Britain in 1940. Only the largest Allied aircraft had the range to reach German targets, and the few hundred unescorted US bombers that attacked Schweinfurt in August and October 1943 suffered crippling attrition.80 RAF Bomber Command used its greater numbers and larger bomb loads to inflict severe damage on the Ruhr and Hamburg in mid-1943, but when it turned against the more distant target of Berlin in the winter of 1943–44, tactical


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and technological improvements in the German night defences inflicted a clear defeat, despite the cloak of darkness.81 Hence, although the increasing diversion of Luftwaffe resources to defend the Reich served to bolster Allied air superiority at the fighting fronts, control of the air over Germany itself, and with it the ability to shield or assail the belatedly burgeoning German war economy, remained very much in doubt.82 So what happened in 1944 to change this situation such that the Luftwaffe was decisively beaten even over its own homeland? At entirely the opposite extreme from the idea that the Germans were simply overwhelmed by superior numbers, popular explanations tend to focus on the impact of particular ‘decisive weapons’.83 The American P-51 Mustang is credited with solving the fighter-range problem and outclassing the Luftwaffe interceptors, while the belated introduction of the jet-powered Me-262 is seen as a classic ‘lost opportunity’ which could have turned the tide of the air war in Germany’s favour had it happened earlier.84 Anecdotes by Adolf Galland about being chased by Mustangs all the way to Berlin and about Hitler’s disastrous insistence on equipping the Me-262 as a bomber are quoted endlessly in support of these simplistic interpretations.85 Some writers focus instead on the impact of specific clashes, especially those during the US ‘Big Week’ raids in late February 1944.86 However, modern scholars have addressed this topic in considerable depth, and they have generally developed much more nuanced and multi-faceted explanations of the turning of the aerial tide over Germany as 1944 progressed.87 The advent of fighter escorts that could accompany US daylight bombers all the way to their targets was certainly a key development, but this was not simply a result of the introduction of the Mustang. The P-51 only became the dominant American escort fighter in the second half of 1944, and it equipped just 2 or 3 out of over 20 US fighter groups during the major air battles in February and March.88 More important was the employment of increasingly large drop tanks, which doubled the range of the existing P-47s and P-38s and allowed them to make up the bulk of the relay of escorts that accompanied each inbound and outbound raid, with the P-51s taking up the burden only near the target itself.89 This continuous wave of fighter escorts allowed air combat to become an integral element of US strategy. As John Ellis put it: ‘In 1944 . . . one of the daylight bombers’ main roles was to lure up the German fighters so that the long-range escorts could shoot them down.’90 In this regard, the deliberately provocative US attacks on Berlin in March 1944 are a direct reflection of the Luftwaffe’s daylight raids on London in September 1940, with the difference that in 1940 it was the attackers who found themselves unable to sustain the resulting aerial attrition.91 This difference stemmed not just from relative production rates, but also from significant strategic and tactical differences between the two cases. In 1940, the short range of the Me-109 meant that German attacks were concentrated on

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the fairly compact target of south-east England, whereas, in 1944, the Luftwaffe defenders were stretched much thinner to cover a far wider array of targets. The Allied airbases established in southern Italy at the end of 1943 played a key role in this enforced dispersion, since they completely avoided the usual ingress routes over the Low Countries and threatened a wide arc of targets from southern Germany to Romania.92 There were also important differences in tactical doctrine. Goering focused throughout on bombers as the key element, constraining his fighters in 1940 to use close escort tactics, and insisting in 1944 that they focus on downing enemy bombers, prompting one Luftwaffe commander to complain that ‘the safest flying that was ever possible was that of an American fighter over Germany’.93 By contrast, when General Doolittle took command of the US 8th Air Force in January 1944, he de-emphasized direct bomber protection and urged his fighters to range more widely and aggressively and to seek out the Luftwaffe, even strafing aircraft on the ground despite the resultant losses from flak.94 The result was that the German fighter force (which in 1943 had emphasized heavy armament rather than aircraft performance when engaging unescorted bombers) suffered crippling attrition, losing on average 44 per cent of its strength each month in the first half of 1944, not even counting damaged aircraft.95 Although the losses in materiel were offset by the significant rise in German aircraft production, the real shortage was in skilled fighter pilots to replace the 2,260 lost in the first five months of 1944 alone.96 Whereas Allied pilots received up to 400 hours of training and were actually in oversupply thanks to the manpower resources and secure global hinterland the Allies enjoyed, Luftwaffe training time fell from around 260 hours in the early years of the war to only some 110 hours by mid-1944.97 This shortfall created a very damaging vicious circle. For one thing, it exposed the Luftwaffe in the West to the same asymmetric combat losses it had long benefited from on the Eastern Front, and which its Japanese allies suffered in the ‘Marianas Turkey Shoot’ in 1944 due to similar growing problems of asymmetries in pilot skill.98 Moreover, it contributed to an increasing rate of accidents (which accounted for over half of the 17,500 or so Luftwaffe losses in early 1944), thereby further worsening the vicious downward spiral.99 The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: ‘the deterioration of quality of German pilots appears to be the most important single cause of the defeat of the German Air Force’.100 The direct contribution of bombing to the defeat of the Luftwaffe through attacks on aircraft production seems to have been limited. Although the ‘Big Week’ raids on aircraft factories did cause output to drop in February 1944, it soon rose to an even higher level, peaking at over 4,200 aircraft in July.101 However, bombing made a much bigger impact on the air war through attacks on oil production, which was always the Achilles’ heel of the German war effort.102 Raids from Italy on the Romanian oil complex at Ploesti reduced German imports from 565,000


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tons in the first three months of 1944 to 292,000 tons in the time that remained before the site was captured by the Red Army in August.103 Attacks on synthetic oil plants in the Reich itself had an even more dramatic impact, with fuel production for the Luftwaffe falling from 889,000 tons in the first half of 1944 to just 146,000 tons in the rest of the year.104 This obviously crippled both training and operational flying, and hindered any recovery from the traumas in the spring. The progressive destruction of Germany’s transport infrastructure by the bomber fleets further undermined the Luftwaffe’s ability to make use of its increasingly dispersed aircraft production, creating a widening gulf between paper strength and real combat potential.105 German night defences against RAF Bomber Command suffered a similar decline, after reaching their apogee in the disastrous raid on Nuremberg in March 1944.106 The growing pervasiveness of US fighters in German skies eroded Luftwaffe capabilities, especially since night fighters were sometimes used in desperation against American daylight raids despite being deeply unsuited for such a role.107 The RAF also regained the advantage in the intricate measure – countermeasure contest of electronic warfare, particularly after a stroke of good fortune when, in July 1944, one of the latest German night fighters lost its bearings and landed in Britain by mistake with all of its ‘black boxes’ intact.108 In addition, there was a night-time counterpart to the role of the US escort fighters in the form of the Mosquito squadrons fielded by 100 Group, which downed numerous German night fighters and caused others to crash as they blundered through the darkness at low level to escape detection.109 Increasing fuel shortages and the impossibility of replacing experienced night aces meant (in Gebhard Aders’ words): ‘By the end of 1944 only a few leading crews could still fly operationally, while the majority of crews sat around doing nothing for weeks on end.’110 In December 1944, the Luftwaffe’s night fighters achieved just 66 kills for the loss of 114 of their own aircraft, not even counting those destroyed on the ground.111 This vicious downward spiral in the day and night defence of the Reich could perhaps have been postponed for a while had the resources devoted to bombers and V-weapons been used instead for fighters.112 However, fighters already made up around 44 per cent of total German aircraft output in 1943 and 62 per cent in 1944, and (as I have shown) aircraft production was not the key choke point in any case.113 Only a very small proportion of the 1,400 Me-262s built ever went into action, and they destroyed no more than 150 Allied aircraft, for the loss of around 100 of the jets in air combat alone.114 Despite the wishful thinking of Galland and others about the earlier introduction of the Me-262, modern historians agree that it could not have been produced sooner because of problems with the turbines.115 There was, in any case, a larger problem with the idea of ruthless concentration on the air defence of the Reich, namely that this was not the only strategic threat Germany faced in 1944. The Allied advances on land from

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both East and West posed an even more inexorable challenge, and the liberation of France and Belgium in the late summer of 1944 further undermined the air defence of Germany itself. Luftwaffe losses in the West in 1944 were almost as high as those in the air battles over the Reich, and hundreds more German fighters and their precious pilots were lost in the ill-judged attack on Allied airfields on New Year’s Day 1945, but had the Luftwaffe simply abandoned the fighting fronts, the pressure on the beleaguered Wehrmacht would have been even more overwhelming than it already was.116 The Allied aerial victory over Germany in 1944 was not won without tremendous cost. Around 1,550 RAF and 1,730 8th Air Force heavy bombers were lost in the first half of 1944, and losses still stood at 750 and 1,370 respectively in the second half of the year and 480 and 820 in 1945.117 The significant decline in loss rates per sortie owed at least as much to the inexorable increase in the number of attacking aircraft as it did to the falling effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, for all its many travails. As John Ellis put it: Because they could now put so many planes in the air at any one time, the German home defences simply could not destroy enough of them, allowing American percentage casualties to fall to perfectly acceptable levels. In relative terms, therefore, the Germans were becoming increasingly weak . . . Such are the mathematics of attrition and such the ineluctable logic of brute force.118

As I have shown, the contest was not quite so brutally simple, and factors such as the advent of long-range fighters, the tactical choices of the two sides, the electronic duels in the ether and the vulnerability of German oil supplies all played significant roles. In the end, however, it was the Allies’ greater ability to replace their losses in aircraft and trained aircrew that most underpinned their victory, as it had in 1940.

CONCLUSION Richard Overy ascribed the Allied victory in the air war to two factors above all – Allied resource superiority, and the adoption by the British and Americans of a ‘general air strategy’ as opposed to the limited air strategy pursued by Germany (and the USSR). He defined ‘general air strategy’ as involving greater autonomy for air forces, the diversion of massive economic resources to the air effort, and the simultaneous pursuit of air defence, strategic bombing, aero-naval co-operation and air support for ground troops.119 The three aspects of the European air war on which I have focused in this chapter cast some very interesting light on Richard Overy’s claims. Britain would surely have been defeated


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in short order in 1940 had the Channel not blocked the Wehrmacht’s advance, but, as it was, the limited and short-range power of the Luftwaffe alone proved woefully insufficient to cripple British fighting ability. On the Eastern Front, co-operation between the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht was far more effective in 1941–42, and it was only the enormous strategic depth and production resources of the USSR that allowed it to endure the onslaught and to build up overwhelming ground and air forces despite continuing tactical weakness. In the West, the long-range air attacks by Britain and the US did eventually win real air superiority and pave the way for the cross-Channel invasion and the crippling of the German war economy, but only after a bitter struggle and through the application of massively greater resources. Was the Allied air victory a foregone conclusion? The one lesson which all three of my case studies highlight is that aerial victory in this era required both the will and the ability to endure and to replace dreadful attritional losses whose proportions have rightly been compared to those suffered on the Western Front in World War One.120 The Allies in West and East had the ability to do this thanks to their global hinterland, and they also demonstrated the necessary will and determination to pay the very heavy price required. Hitler’s Germany proved in 1944 that it was capable of similar mobilization for total war, and it is not inconceivable that, if it had demonstrated the same will and ability to mobilize its considerable resources a few years earlier, it might just have been able to coerce its opponents into a compromise peace before their own mobilization outstripped anything the Axis could match. Why Germany failed to mobilize fully until it was too late is a very complex issue on which Richard Overy has written extensively, but that discussion requires another chapter in its own right.121


10

Bearing the Load: A Fresh Approach to Bomber Command Nick Chapman

BOMBER COMMAND AND THE BATTLE OF BERLIN: AN INTRODUCTION ‘The load’ was what the Royal Air Force (RAF) called the physical and mental strain of operations carried by Bomber Command aircrews during the strategic bombing campaign against Germany.1 Although much has been written about Bomber Command and the campaign, little work has been done on what it was that kept the men going, bearing the load of dangerous raid after dangerous raid, until either they were shot down or, in the case of the fortunate, they completed their tour of operations. For the evidence clearly indicates that the vast majority of aircrew did keep going, in that only a very small percentage refused to fly or were permanently incapacitated by mental breakdown.2 There was never any major collapse in morale in Bomber Command – of the kind that would seriously affect operations – even during the severe losses of the winter of 1943–44 and the Battle of Berlin. In order to understand how it was the aircrews kept on fighting, and to reveal what it was that motivated and sustained them through their ordeal, researchers have had to take a fresh approach to the history of Bomber Command.3 This essay seeks to describe this approach, its context, and the scope and nature of the research it has entailed. In late August 1943 Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commandingin-Chief Bomber Command, began the first phase of a series of bombing raids on Berlin. The campaign was to last until March the following year. The opening phase commenced with a raid by a mixed force of Lancaster, Stirling and Halifax bombers on the night of 23 August, continued with a second raid on 31 August and ended with a third raid on 3 September. The Battle of Berlin – the appellation comes from the Official History – began in earnest on 18 November and continued until the final raid on the German capital on 24 March. Harris took as his mandate for Berlin the outcome of a meeting in Casablanca in January 1943 between President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and their Combined

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Chiefs of Staff. Their directive for the bomber offensive, which was to ‘govern the operations of the British and United States Bomber Commands in the United Kingdom’, stated: ‘Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’4 This was the green light for Harris and Bomber Command to press forward with an all-out offensive against German cities. Harris had decided that the war with Germany could be ended by bombing alone. There would be no need for an invasion of Western Europe with the attendant risk of huge ground casualties. The bombing would have to be area bombing, though, carried out in the darkness of night. The RAF did not have the capability for precision bombing at night, and its bombers were too vulnerable in daylight to the German defences, especially fighters. For Harris, precision bombing was not an issue; his objective was to destroy German cities and the German will and ability to continue the war. By November 1943 he was claiming in a minute to Churchill that as result of the bombing campaign 19 German cities had been completely destroyed and 19 seriously damaged. The Ruhr was ‘largely out,’ he wrote. ‘We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF [United States Army Air Forces] will come in on it. It will cost 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the War.’5 The USAAF did not come in on it, but, undeterred, Harris went ahead with his plans to destroy the German capital. The term ‘the Battle of Berlin’ is used to describe two simultaneous events. The first was Bomber Command’s determined assault on the capital. Berlin had been subject to RAF attack almost from the beginning of the war, but this latest offensive was a well-planned, long-term campaign designed to destroy the city. The first raid in late August involved 710 bombers, and the two following raids were of similar size. These late-summer forays were the prelude to the main assault, which began on 18 November. During the next four months there were 16 heavy attacks on the German capital and a total of 8,700 sorties, from which over 500 aircraft did not return. Of these sorties, 7,000 were made by Lancasters.6 During the same period there were raids on over a dozen other German cities and towns, including 19 major area attacks – a total of 11,000 sorties. Taken as a whole, the period from November 1943 to March 1944 saw 20,224 sorties in major area attacks on German population centres. Of these 14,652 were made by Lancasters, of which 681, or 4.6 per cent, failed to return.7

B E A R I N G T H E LOA D

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BAD WEATHER AND THE BATTLE In his account of the bombing campaign published shortly after the war, Sir Arthur Harris wrote: ‘The whole battle was fought in appalling weather and in conditions resembling those of no other in the history of warfare.’8 Weather, good and bad, had a considerable impact on operations and the experience of the aircrews. Good weather made for easier flying conditions and clear visibility over the target. Aircrews had a better opportunity to bomb more accurately and to see the results of their attack. An effective raid, with the main force of bombers hitting the target and with fires visible on the ground, generally had a positive impact on morale. Aircrews were able to see that they were getting the job done and doing it well. The consequences of bad weather, however, were considerable, and that winter the weather was especially bad. A study of the Operational Record Books (ORBs) of the No. 1 Group squadrons that flew operations for the duration of the Battle of Berlin reveals that aircraft were unable to fly on operations for long periods. The ORB of 12 Squadron, based at Wickenby, records for example that between one attack on Stuttgart on 1 March and another on 15 March the squadron was stood down because of bad weather.9 100 Squadron, based at RAF Station Grimsby, had a 13-day stand-down in December because of bad weather, followed by a period of full moon, when exposure to the German defences would have been too great. In February there were no operations because of the weather until the 15th, when Berlin was under 10/10 cloud cover. The ORB of 460 Squadron records how on the night of 18 October 19 aircraft were detailed for a raid on Hanover and that ‘this was a great relief after a spell of 10 days without operating’. This same squadron experienced the fatal impact of bad weather when, on 16 December, all 19 aircraft completed a mission to Berlin and returned to England unscathed only for four to crash on meeting atrocious conditions, one into a munitions dump at Ludford Magna air station. All the crews were killed.10

OPERATIONS: IN CONSTANT PERIL Flying in bad weather in winter, aircraft would ice up and become extra vulnerable to attack, which made the long trip to Berlin especially tiring and frightening. But the greatest and most consistent strain on aircrews was that they could never feel safe from the enemy. The German defences were formidable. By 1944 two million soldiers and civilians were engaged in ground anti-aircraft defence.11 The greatest threat, though, came from the German night-fighter force. In the three opening raids on Berlin in August and early September, of the 123 bombers lost

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at least 80 fell to night fighters. The long distance the bombers had to fly to reach Berlin and other cities deep in Germany meant that the night-fighter force had time to organize, concentrate and hit the bomber stream to good effect. German tactics became more effective as the battle went on, while the bombers could do little to improve their avoidance techniques. The Lancasters, although the best heavy bombers the RAF flew in the war, remained vulnerable to night-fighter attack. They were slow and heavy, flying at an average 180 knots with a full bomb load on the outward leg, and 211 knots on the leg home. Their .303 calibre guns were no match for the fighters’ cannons, they carried little armoured plating, and they could be located by the fighters through their exhaust flares and radar transmissions. With their loads of high explosive, aviation fuel and oxygen, all bombers were highly inflammable and unlikely to survive concentrated fire from a fighter attack or anti-aircraft flak.12 Although they might be mitigated by training, teamwork and painstaking attention to detail, losses could be alarmingly random. A veteran recalls: Casualties appeared to strike at random although many crews were lost in the first five or six trips. On the other hand, 15 October 1943 saw the loss of our Wing Commander – an experienced two tour man – and two nights later the acting CO [Commanding Officer] was lost – also a two tour man. Although experience was a great help to avoid defended areas en route and combating bad weather, it was just a matter of bad luck if a fighter was directed onto your aircraft or a shell exploded too close to the target area.13

The experience of bomber aircrews has been extensively recorded and published and there are many vivid accounts of the terror aircrew felt seeing other bombers shot blazing out of the night sky, or when under attack themselves, coned in the glare of searchlights.14 But flights could also be relatively uneventful, and aircrew were not always going out night after night in a continuous stream of attacks. If this was attrition, comparable to that of Passchendaele in the First World War,15 it was of a different nature.

THE BATTLE OF BERLIN: ATTRITION AND DEFEAT? Charles Webster and Noble Frankland argued that the Battle of Berlin ‘cost more and achieved less than the two earlier campaigns’ over the Ruhr and Hamburg.16 In the battle’s 35 major actions and 20,224 sorties, 5.2 per cent of all aircraft failed to return.17 By February, Bomber Command had been forced to move its attacks away from Berlin, where the German night-fighter forces were concentrated, and to disperse its efforts with attacks on towns in the south of Germany. This meant it incurred fewer casualties, but as the Official History baldly states: ‘The


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situation, in view of the fact that Berlin was by no means destroyed, meant that the Germans had already won the Battle of Berlin.’18 In the final attack on Berlin, on 24 March, the missing rate was a calamitous 9.1 per cent. For aircrew, the impact of losses would have been felt at squadron level. The squadron was the battle unit, its members were stationed together and the squadron leader was their commanding officer. What was the experience at this level? The ORBs of the squadrons in No.1 Group that flew throughout the Battle of Berlin and therefore felt its full impact paint a picture of how losses occurred and affected the survivors. This was no Passchendaele, with squadrons suffering calamitous casualties in a single attack. There are no accounts here of all the officers killed, wounded or missing and the rest of the battalion cut in half. Squadrons experienced both bad and good nights, with heavy losses on one occasion and few or none on another. The nature of attrition was usually a steady drip of casualties that mounted up over time. This attrition, plus the fact that the attacks on Berlin were inefficient and failed to inflict concentrated destruction, as had been done in the Ruhr, because of the size and distance of the target, and that ‘The Luftwaffe hurt Bomber Command more than Bomber Command hurt Berlin’19, caused problems. Air Vice-Marshal Bennett, commander of the Pathfinder Force, wrote to Bomber Command on 3 November 1944 complaining: There can be no doubt that a very large number of crews failed to carry out their attacks during the Battle of Berlin in their customary determined manner . . . many bombs were wasted en route in an effort to increase aircraft performance and that, unfortunately, the Command suffered from many ‘fringe merchants’ . . . great damage was done to Berlin but the effect of every individual raid decreases as time went on.20

This is the context in which the question of combat motivation has to be examined. The evidence is that operations during the Battle of Berlin were especially hazardous for the aircrews and an ordeal specific to them. For instance, a man could refuse to fly not on medical grounds but simply to avoid having to face further operations. The consequences of this were usually serious in that he would be designated Lack of Moral Fibre (LMF). Officers would be dishonourably discharged from the service, while non-commissioned officers would be reduced to the lowest rank to perform menial duties. If discharged, they were denied well-paid civilian work and could be sent to the Army or to work in the coal mines. Despite the humiliation and hardships of ‘going LMF’, however, the consequences were not draconian: no one was shot or sent to prison. For the truly terrified or deeply reluctant airman faced with the reality of combat, LMF would not have appeared such an awful alternative to flying. Despite the limited coercive

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effect, however, few chose to take this escape route. During the whole course of the war, 2,726 aircrew were designated LMF compared with 55,500 killed, while during the Battle of Berlin 0.4 per cent of aircrew were submitted as LMF by their commanders, half prior to operations during training.21 The evidence is that the overwhelming majority of aircrew kept going, either to be eventually shot down and lost or to survive their operational tour.

BOMBER COMMAND: THE LITERATURE AND THE DEBATES The historiography of RAF Bomber Command and the strategic bombing campaign in Europe is extensive. Many substantial narrative histories have been published and have found a wide audience, both academic and among the wider public.22 At the popular-history end of the publishing spectrum, there have been books that have anthologized the testimony of veteran aircrew.23 The debates about Bomber Command and the strategic bombing campaign, both at an academic and a public level, have centred around two main arguments. The first is whether Harris’s campaign of area bombing helped shorten the war and so justified its human, material and opportunity cost. The argument is made that although the area attacks on Germany’s cities didn’t shatter its ability to wage war, they were extremely disruptive and diverted massive resources of men and materiel from the Eastern Front.24 It is also argued that, until they could mount a major invasion of Western Europe in June 1944, Britain and America had no means of directly attacking Germany other than with such a bombing campaign, which, in addition, helped to keep the Soviet Union in the war. The argument then moves on to whether the Allies should have concentrated their resources on the development of technology for precision bombing and long-range fighters to protect the daylight raids necessary for attacks on specific strategic targets such as aircraft factories. The other major argument has been about the morality and legality of the Allied bombing campaign, as exemplified by two recent books25 that argue that, in the context of the totality of the morality of the combatants’ actions in the Second World War, the effects of the Allies’ bombing campaign are comparable to Nazi or Japanese war atrocities. In targeting civilians and causing massive casualties in cities like Hamburg and Berlin, it is argued, the Allies acted both immorally and illegally, committing war atrocities on a civilian population. It has been suggested that one of the authors, Friedrich Jorg, refers to Britain’s actions as genocide.26


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COMBAT MOTIVATION AND BOMBER COMMAND While the debate has tended to concentrate on these aspects of the campaign, little has been written specifically about combat motivation in Bomber Command and what sustained the aircrews through their ordeal. References are made to morale, and the consensus is that it was never seriously affected. The Official History claims that ‘there was not at the end of March 1944, even on the day after the Nuremburg operation, any sense of defeat in Bomber Command squadrons’.27 There is one important study, by Mark Wells, that examines ‘the full human dimension’ of the bombing campaign. It is based on a thorough analysis of primary sources and provides a very useful and insightful comparison of the American and British bomber forces.28 It examines the controversial subject of LMF, as have several journal articles. From their analysis a key point emerges: that the designation LMF, although intended to stigmatize aircrew who refused to fly, was essentially an administrative function designed to differentiate these cases from those with psychiatric diagnoses such as flying stress, aeroneurosis and aviation neurasthenia.29 The intention of the LMF policy, it is argued, was to ensure that aircrew could not easily withdraw from flying duties, and to avoid the use of psychiatric diagnostic terms that might encourage aircrew to expect psychological symptoms. There is also the argument that LMF represented a harsh and unsympathetic approach, as suggested, for example, in one popular history of Bomber Command.30 Overall, the question of what sustained aircrew through their ordeal – and it seems clear that by any measure the winter campaign of 1943–44 was an ordeal – has not been examined in any detail by historians of Bomber Command and the air war. Books written for the general market based on interviews with surviving veterans do touch on morale and motivation, and it would be wrong to doubt the sincerity of those who have provided the testimony for these books, but it has to be recognized that what is being recorded here as history is the selective memorializing of events, formed over the years since the war, rather than necessarily what the aircrew were actually thinking at the time. If research on combat motivation in the strategic bombing campaign has been limited, there has been since the end of the Second World War an extensive general debate about combat motivation and behaviour in battle. A recent special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History neatly summarizes this debate and makes a number of interesting new contributions to it,31 as does Joanna Bourke’s recent study.32 In the examination of why soldiers fight, the idea that ‘men fight for their mates’ has dominated since the 1950s.33 The notion that ideology might be a greater motivation than group cohesion is met with the argument that while ideology is important in getting the soldier to the front it dissolves in combat and is replaced by other factors. Training, the primary group

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and the excitement of killing are debated as the prime motivators,34 although also included in the debate is evidence that in combat only a minority do the actual shooting and killing.35 All these studies, however, concentrate primarily on the infantry soldier’s experience of combat. This is perhaps understandable, for it is the infantryman who faces the fearsome challenge of firing at another human being in close proximity while often being shot at or shelled himself. But it means there is little or no reference to the combat motivation necessary to keep Bomber Command aircrews engaged in a debilitating battle of attrition. This is a significant gap given that Bomber Command played a major part in the Allied war effort, and that strategic bombing continued to have an important role in several wars after 1945 and remains a powerful military doctrine.

WHAT SUSTAINED AND MOTIVATED AIRCREW THROUGH THE BATTLE OF BERLIN? NEW APPROACHES AND INTERPRETATIONS How best, then, to approach the subject? What should be most meaningful is what people thought at the time, whether personally or officially. Interviewing veterans does not necessarily reveal this. And veterans are the survivors, the minority who, through luck and ability, completed their two tours of operations or had not flown the full two tours of, first, 30 operations, and then, after a break as an instructor, another 20 operations, before the war ended. What we cannot access are the memories of the majority who perished on operations. Diaries and letters were left behind, abruptly and poignantly coming to an end as their authors failed to return, but the supply of these in the principal archives is limited. Then there is the question of why diaries were kept and by whom. Some appear to show an earnest self-consciousness. A Flight Sergeant M.G. Smith, for example, kept a diary from 12 November 1943 until his death, when he was shot down on an operation to Friedrichshafen in 1944. From 10 March 1944 he was stationed with 101 Squadron, No. 1 Group, at Ludford Magna. What sustained him is clear: his personal interests in art and literature, religion, and what he describes as ‘long talks into the night with like minded people’. Nowhere is there a mention of patriotism, of fighting evil or of sticking together to see it though.36 How representative was such an apparently sensitive and spiritual person of the thousands of volunteer aircrew serving with Bomber Command at the time? Another source available from the archives is the many memoirs and personal accounts written by aircrew after the war had ended. The closer the time of writing to the end of the war the more useful these accounts should be, although there is then the question of whether certain events – those that could reflect badly on fellow aircrew, for example – have been glossed over or omitted. How much


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such an account truly reflects what the author was feeling at the time is difficult to judge. It may be that any survivor would be reluctant to admit to wanting to quit operations, while it also has to be recognized that aircrew were part of a stoical culture, reluctant to reveal their fears and feelings. These accounts, some written long after the events they describe, are of course a useful source, alongside interviews with veterans, in the attempt to inform an emerging picture, but other approaches are needed to understand what it was that kept aircrew flying operations. Once in the air, aircrew had to fight: for a sortie to count as an operation, the crew had to bomb their target and record this with their cameras. They could not hide from combat as infantrymen might try to do, or run away or surrender. Desertion by flying to neutral Sweden was an option but there is no record of this being taken up. What emerges from the research both of contemporary accounts and of veterans’ testimony is that aircrew were diverse, many coming from the Dominions, and that their behaviour and attitudes differed widely.37 For some, group cohesion was paramount; others could not wait to get away from their flying companions and found respite elsewhere. There is no evidence of a uniform conformity to the popular image of the crew as a tightly knit bunch of chums, together on the ground as much as in the air, although for some that was indeed the case, as evidenced by bonds that endured after the war. What motivated men to volunteer as aircrew – and all Bomber Command aircrew were volunteers – was often very different from what sustained them once they started to endure the dangers of operations. Men volunteered to avoid the Army with its attendant square bashing, because they were attracted by the glamour of the RAF and flying, to get at the Germans, to revenge the Blitz or to serve their country. The conviction that the war must be fought and won must have been in everyone’s mind, but that would not necessarily have kept them going through the strain of operations. Aircrew frequently developed coping mechanisms to deal with the fear of flying operations. Superstition, personal rituals, denial, bravado and fear of showing fear played a part for some, as for others did the sense of taking control through meticulous preparation of themselves and their aircraft. Lucky mascots, stuffed toys, girlfriends’ scarves and so on were commonplace. But some talismans were more unusual. Rusty Waughman, a pilot with 101 Squadron, was given a baby’s caul by his father, who had kept it as his talisman in the Navy in the First World War. In addition, on his first operation he wore long johns, and he subsequently wore the same pair, unlaundered, on every following operation. Waughman’s rear gunner, meanwhile, followed a little ritual: on every operation he would throw two empty beer bottles out of the aeroplane as they took off. He forgot them once but fortunately the Group Captain noticed this and quickly brought two full bottles out to the plane.38 What also emerges from the evidence of the aircrew and their commanders is

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that an aircraft’s pilot and captain was perceived to be a pivotal figure and that a steady, competent pilot who remained calm in a crisis would inspire confidence in the rest of the crew. This attribute of ‘steadiness’ and of being ‘steadfast’ appears often in veterans’ testimony and in contemporary accounts as important for survival. Oswald Fry, who survived 28 operations with 103 Squadron, believed himself fortunate to have as his pilot a man in his thirties, an English volunteer from Argentina, who he thought was steadier than the average pilot because he was older.39 William Kondra served as a bomb-aimer with 100 Squadron, the only Canadian in his crew. He remembers his pilot, Tommy Heyes, as ‘a most skilled and courageous pilot. His calm manner rubbed off on us during our missions and greatly enhanced our success in completing our mission.’40

THE HIGH COMMAND’S PERSPECTIVE: AN UNDERCURRENT OF DOUBT Given its limitations, the evidence of aircrew alone is insufficient to provide an understanding of what sustained and motivated aircrew. Other sources need to be brought to bear. If the historiography of the bombing campaign does not consider the study of morale to be very important, that was certainly not the view of the RAF high command, the Air Staff. A study of the Air Ministry archives shows that there was a consistent preoccupation at the highest level with the ability of the volunteer aircrew in particular to withstand the burden of operations in Bomber Command. In examining the high command’s perspective on combat motivation, one must understand that its primary motivation was the need to achieve its strategic and operational war aims. To do this, Harris claimed to have built by January 1943 a front-line Bomber Command capability of 50 squadrons with 1,050 pilots,41 and the priority was to keep these squadrons in the air, with their expensively trained aircrews, attacking Germany. To do this, the high command needed to ensure that aircrews maintained the highest level of what it described as ‘fighting spirit’, by which it essentially meant a positive attitude towards flying operations and a determination to press home attacks. This, the high command believed, required discipline. In its view there was a link between service discipline and fighting spirit, and a recurrent concern was what it perceived as a lack of service discipline among the huge influx into Bomber Command of volunteer aircrew from civilian life and the danger that civilian or factory attitudes would contaminate service order. The Inspector General of the RAF wrote to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff in 1943: ‘The greatest danger to service morale is the importation into the service of the factory spirit with its suspicions, selfishness and distrust of authority.’42


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There was an entrenched belief that in order to fight well, and to continue fighting well over time, aircrew needed to be instilled with the values of traditional service discipline and to take on the hierarchical responsibilities of leadership. For the high command, there appeared to be much evidence that discipline was lacking among aircrews. There were reports of drunkenness and insubordination at personnel despatch centres on the part of non-commissioned aircrew, and of ‘the performing of childish and ridiculous tricks by aircrew personnel’.43 On air stations things were no better. A memo by the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (ACAS) explains the problem: Every RAF station and in particular heavy bomber stations is lousy with Sergeants – or rather with men with three stripes on their sleeves, because every member of aircrew has that rank. A great many of them are completely undisciplined . . . They are gallant chaps and do their job in the air well but they are not Sergeants except in name and have no idea of the disciplinary implications of their rank.44

Although the high command saw a link between service discipline, morale and combat motivation, it also recognized that another major factor in maintaining combat motivation was dealing with what was commonly described as ‘flying stress’. As early as 1942 the RAF established a series of investigations into the incidence and causes of this phenomenon. As a result, H. E. Whittingham, the Director General of Medical Services, tasked Group Captain C. F. Symonds, an RAF consultant in Neurology, and Squadron Leader Dennis Williams, with undertaking a study of the matter.45 This was the beginning of what became the Flying Personnel Research Committee (FRPC), which was to produce a series of reports on the occurrence of neurosis in aircrew. The attitude of the high command to the study’s findings was that aircrews needed to be encouraged to overcome what Symonds and Williams described as ‘the load of mental and physical strain’.46 It was the job of station medical officers and commanding officers to spot flying stress in aircrews and where possible deal with it. It was important to implement measures to keep men fit for operations through exercise, sleep, good living conditions and a healthy diet, along with the provision of leave and suitable diversions, such as organized games. Where necessary, aircrew should be referred to special treatment centres, which would restore them to duty, often with no more than plenty of rest and good food. For Harris the need to ensure that the maximum number of men stayed in combat was clear. In early 1943 he wrote: It is inevitable that the best are the keenest to go back to operations and they are the ones who, when they get there, hit the target. There are perhaps 20–25 in each 100 who can be classed as the best and the remaining 75–80 direct the enemy effort from the

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destruction of the best, and receive a certain number of casualties so saving the best from being picked off by the enemy.47

Keeping those men in the air and over the target was an imperative. The use of the designation LMF for those aircrew who refused to fly was not the ultimate deterrent for those who were determined to stop, but was probably effective in keeping some waiverers in the air. But LMF does illustrate the high command’s perspective on aircrew and combat motivation. These senior officers represented the culture and views of the prewar regular RAF. Courage was essentially a product of character, and character came from social background. In the early years of the war public-school men were sought as being of ‘the right type’, of having acquired the correct qualities of leadership and sportsmanship.48 As the supply of public-school men ran out, the recurring fear was that the huge intake of volunteer aircrew necessary to fight the strategic bombing campaign would lack the necessary character and military qualities to see through the ordeal of operations. Society was partly to blame. In a report to Air Staff members, the RAF’s Inspector General explained how the reason for this lack of military qualities lay in the majority of recruits having been brought up in conditions of security by a benevolent government. ‘We therefore,’ he asserts, ‘start our military education with an unpromising material. Natural leadership, idealism – that form that will give up life itself for a cause – and the will to resist to the last, are all lacking in greater or lesser degree.’49 For the RAF these men did not have officer qualities; 65 per cent of Bomber Command aircraft were piloted by non-commissioned officers, and there was always an undercurrent of doubt in the Air Ministry regarding the discipline and morale of their aircrew. It was this doubt about aircrews’ military qualities that fed the high command’s other great fear: that LMF on a station would be contagious, that if one man allowed his fear to overcome his sense of duty, others could not be relied on not to follow his example. Hence the standing order that any aircrew designated LMF by their commanding officer be immediately removed from the station.

COMMANDING OFFICERS: MAINTAINING A ‘FIGHTING SPIRIT’ The day-to-day responsibility for Bomber Command operations lay with a chain of command that ran from Harris to the group commanders and his squadron and station commanders. The officers whose primary task was to ensure that the bombers achieved their operational objectives were the squadron and station commanders. It was their perspectives on morale and combat motivation that had the potential to influence the aircrews under their direct command.


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Although produced in August 1942, prior to the Battle of Berlin, Symonds and Williams’ investigation into psychological disorders in Bomber Command provides valuable insights into the attitudes of squadron and station commanders, because their report is based on interviews with these men and their medical officers.50 What is clear from the report is that although there were martinets among the commanders, they were the exception. Most commanding officers took the pragmatic view that their aircrews did more than enough when on operations to justify some laxity on the ground and that attempts to impose strict service discipline would be counter-productive. Another important source of local commanders’ thinking about how to maintain the ‘fighting spirit’ of their aircrew is the squadron ORBs. An analysis of the squadrons of No.1 Bomber Group, which experienced the highest level of casualties during the Battle of Berlin, provides some revealing insights into how commanders sought to maintain morale. From the perspective of the local commanders, confidence was a key factor. If aircrews had confidence in the ability of their commanders to lead them, they would be better motivated and more effective than if such confidence was lacking. Commanders needed to demonstrate courage and determination and to be prepared on occasion to share the risks their men took. Good leadership meant providing aircrews with clarity of purpose – explaining why specific targets were chosen, what their strategic importance was – and inspiring them to be positive, press ahead and do a good, efficient job. To maintain morale most commanders considered it important to keep their men occupied and entertained. The key point for them was what would help their aircrews last. It was the squadron and station commanders’ job to keep the aircrews effective. Service conditions – accommodation, food, leave – were seen by most commanders as potentially positive or negative in effect. Many sought to ensure they were positive, although there were concerns that leave with family might undermine aircrews’ resolve, hence a determination to keep wives away from air stations.

CONCLUSION: A MATTER OF CONFIDENCE If most commanders at an operational level appear to have done all they could to support and sustain the confidence of their aircrews, the irony is that the high command lacked confidence in the wartime volunteer aircrew. Its perspective on Bomber Command’s aircrews’ combat motivation was characterized by doubt. The evidence is the high command was aware of the mental and physical ‘load’ the aircrew had increasingly to carry as they went through their tour of operations, and sought to find ways to mitigate that load so that aircrews would remain effective. But underlying its concerns about the psychological strain on aircrews

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was a fundamental doubt about the aircrews’ ability to withstand the strain of operations. This doubt was rooted in the belief that courage was a function of character, which in turn was a product of social background. Although such aspects of air-force life as service conditions mattered, what primarily sustained aircrew through the ordeal of the Berlin campaign was confidence – confidence in their leadership but especially confidence in themselves. By examining the contrasting perspectives of aircrew and their commanders through a range of sources, one can build a picture of where the aircrew derived that confidence from. An analysis of the different perspectives of those involved – Air Staff, operational commanders, aircrews – helps to develop an understanding of what they were thinking at the time about how ‘to get the job done’ and how to ‘keep going’ in the face of that winter, so harsh in every respect, of 1943–44. Understanding what sustained these men through such an ordeal, what enabled them to bear ‘the load’ of operations when the prospects of survival were so low and the strain of operations was so intense, has to be an integral part of the history of the strategic bombing campaign if it is to be captured in its entirety.

11

The British Army as a Social Institution, 1939–45 Jeremy A. Crang*

On the eve of the Second World War Britain’s small, peacetime regular army of some 220,000 men was still, in many ways, a very traditional, conservative social institution. Certainly, under Leslie Hore-Belisha (who became Secretary of State for War in May 1937) efforts were made to improve the daily lot of the soldier. Faced with a recruiting crisis which was conceived of as being in large part due to the archaic nature of military life, measures were taken, for example, to provide better barrack accommodation, raise the standard of army cooking and enhance pay and promotion prospects.1 Yet despite these changes the army remained an essentially inward-looking organization that shared few of the values of the civilian society it served.2 ‘The present-day army,’ observed one new recruit in the early months of the war, ‘lacks every single one of those characteristics that make a democratic army.’3 During the Second World War, and for the second time in the century, this institution was forced to absorb a generation of civilians into its ranks. With the threat of war looming, in May 1939 the Military Training Act was introduced, requiring all men of 20 years of age to undergo six months training in the armed forces. On the outbreak of war in September this was superseded by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, which imposed a liability to military service on all males between 18 and 41 for the duration of the emergency.4 While voluntary recruitment continued to play an important subsidiary role in filling the ranks, during the course of the war the army absorbed nearly three million men, threequarters of whom were conscripts.5 Drawn from all occupational groups and social backgrounds, this mass army of civilians had to be moulded by the military authorities into an effective fighting force. The aim of this essay is to assess the impact of this process of integration on the army as a social institution. To do this, it will examine several aspects of the * This essay first appeared in H. Strachan (ed.), The British Army: Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century (London, 2000). I am grateful to Professor Strachan, and to Taylor & Francis, for allowing me to reproduce it here with minor modifications.

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army’s social organization: other rank selection, officer selection, officer – man relations, army welfare and army education. First it will examine the problems the army faced in these areas and the solutions it adopted. It will then briefly evaluate the extent of social change in the wartime army. It should be noted that this investigation is largely into the army at home, since that was where the bulk of it was stationed for most of the war. Indeed, it was not until after D-Day that the majority of the army was overseas, and even at the end of the war about a third of soldiers were still serving at home.6 One problem the army faced as a result of its great wartime expansion related to the selection of soldiers for the wide variety of occupations within a modern technological force. These included, for instance, such diverse roles as a rifleman in the infantry, a gun-layer in the Royal Artillery, a tank-driver in the Royal Armoured Corps and a skilled tradesman in the Royal Engineers. It was a question of placing the right man, as far as possible, in the right job. At the beginning of the war the procedure for selecting new recruits for particular roles in the army was largely ad hoc. Men liable to be called up for military service under the National Service Act were obliged to register at one of the local offices of the Ministry of Labour and National Service. There, each man was required to provide certain personal information, such as date of birth, occupation and employer, in order to assist in placing him with one of the three services. He was also able to express a preference for the service he wished to join although no guarantees could be given that he would be posted to his chosen service. After the initial sorting of registration, men were summoned to a local recruiting centre. Each was medically examined and then interviewed by the recruiting officer of the service he hoped, or was destined, to join. If a man was interviewed for the army, the recruiting officer recommended him for a particular arm, taking into account his age, medical condition, civilian experience and preferences. The recruiting officer’s recommendations were then forwarded to the regional offices of the Ministry of Labour and National Service, which endeavoured to allocate men to corps (or regiments) in accordance with the War Office’s manpower requirements and, whenever possible, with regard to a recruit’s family or territorial claims on service in a particular corps. In the first instance new recruits were posted to corps training units, before being sent on to a battalion or equivalent unit. Under this system, a man’s future role in the army was, to a large extent, decided by a recruiting officer after a short meeting with him.7 It was crucial, particularly in view of the competing claims on wartime manpower and the pressing time factor that came to dominate every military task, that the army used the manpower resources it had at its disposal efficiently. During the early years of the war, however, the selection system came to be seen as increasingly inadequate. First, there was no detailed record of the range of employments within the army and the aptitudes and temperamental characteristics necessary

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to carry them out satisfactorily – a problem compounded by the fact that few military occupations had a direct civilian equivalent. Second, there was no comprehensive assessment of how a man could most efficiently be employed within the army. The recruiting officer’s interview could only partially reveal a man’s abilities, personality traits and capacity to learn. Moreover, these officers were untrained in interview techniques and there were no guidelines to ensure uniformity across the system. Third, there were difficulties with the way in which new recruits were enlisted into the army. Under the existing procedure, recruits were allocated directly to corps. There was, however, a wide range of jobs to be undertaken in each corps. The Royal Engineers, for example, needed not only skilled mechanical tradesmen, but also drivers, storekeepers, clerks and domestic staff. To allocate a man to a corps was thus to make no recommendation as to the type of work he should undertake. What was more, if a man was misplaced, the machinery of transfer was complicated. The loyalty both of men and of commanding officers was often, in the first instance, to their particular corps or regiment, and with their strong local associations and sectional interests this could make the process of transfer difficult.8 Unease among the military authorities grew as evidence began to accumulate of how inefficiently the army was using its manpower resources. On the basis of tests conducted in Northern Command during 1940, it was estimated that 4 per cent of all intakes were useless for training as soldiers; 20 per cent of every infantry intake and 50 per cent of every Royal Armoured Corps intake did not have the intelligence for full efficiency in the corps to which they had been allocated; and 20 per cent of every infantry intake and 50 per cent of every Pioneer Corps intake were capable of efficient service in a more skilled arm.9 This misplacement had obvious implications not only for operational efficiency but also for soldiers’ morale, since men often became maladjusted through being employed either above or below their capacity. This resulted, on occasion, in recruits suffering psychiatric breakdowns.10 Furthermore, there was growing public disquiet about the arbitrary methods employed by the army, and in the summer of 1941 the government appointed Sir William Beveridge to inquire into the use of skilled men in the services. His committee’s report, which was completed in the autumn, revealed that after two years of war less than half of the engineers joining the army had been mustered in any engineering trade. The committee could cite, among others, a sheet-metal worker in the infantry sweeping barracks, and an electrical and mechanical engineer working as a cook for the military police.11 Clearly, action had to be taken. As a result of these concerns, in the summer of 1941 a new Directorate for the Selection of Personnel (DSP) was established in the War Office. Following a number of trials, a general service selection scheme was introduced a year later. Under the scheme, new recruits to the army were enlisted in the first instance not

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into individual corps but into a General Service Corps and posted to primary training centres. There they underwent six weeks of basic training and completed a battery of intelligence and aptitude tests. Each recruit was interviewed by a specially trained personnel selection officer who made ‘training recommendations’ for broad types of work (such as ‘driving’, ‘signalling’, ‘combatant’ or ‘clerical’) taking into account a man’s wishes, civilian experience, medical category, temperamental characteristics and test scores, the minimum test scores for each recommendation having been devised after job analyses of all army employments. Recruits with very low test scores, or who for some other reason were regarded as unstable, were referred to army psychiatrists, who could recommend special employment or discharge. The ‘training recommendations’ were then forwarded to the War Office, which allocated men to corps (or regiments) on the basis of their individual recommendations, and ensured that each arm received a distribution of men by general intelligence. Account was also taken, where possible, of a recruit’s family or territorial links with a particular corps. Recruits were then sent to corps training units accompanied by an agreed ‘training recommendation’ and a suggestion as to a specific job within that recommendation.12 The general service selection scheme represented a significant advance on any previous other rank selection system and brought with it the recognition that recruits had different individual capabilities, temperaments and job needs, and that quality was as important as quantity. There was considerable evidence to indicate that the new scheme led to a more efficient use of the army’s manpower. Although it was difficult to compare directly the new methods with the old – adequate records for the period before the summer of 1942 were not available, and training failure rates were not strictly comparable over time because they tended to vary in accordance with the demand for and supply of manpower for the various arms – several follow-up studies nevertheless revealed that from the beginning of their army careers men were being more suitably employed than before. As examples, the training failure rate for tradesmen fell from 17–27 per cent to 9 per cent, and for drivers from 16–20 per cent to 3 per cent. Other studies revealed that under the new system the training failure rate for signallers was 7 per cent, storemen 3 per cent and clerks 2 per cent. In 1944 a study of over 8,000 army recruits, in several representative arms, found that the training failure rates averaged less than 5 per cent.13 ‘There is ample evidence,’ commented the DSP, ‘that the proportion of men succeeding in each army occupation has been markedly increased since the introduction of the new system.’14 There were also signs of an improvement in morale. One army commander observed: Although their tests at first sight seem gibberish, one point stands out – the men themselves believe in it. Previously, if a man fancied himself as a clerk, nothing would persuade him that he really ought to be a mechanic, but if the DSP tells him so he seems willing


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to admit that he must have been wrong. This has, of course, an enormous psychological effect in making men contented and keen at their work.15

While the military authorities tackled the problem of other rank selection, they were also faced with the question of officer selection. At the beginning of the war candidates for commissions were selected for officer training, after a period in the ranks, by a senior regular officer on the basis of a short interview. Successful candidates were then sent to Officer Cadet Training Units (OCTUs).16 It was vital, in view of the scope and demands of the officer’s role in modern technological warfare, that competent men be selected for commissioned rank in sufficient numbers. As the war progressed, however, the officer selection system came to be seen as increasingly inadequate. Unlike other rank selection, which was largely concerned with measuring mental abilities, officer selection was more a matter of appraising personality. Yet no matter how shrewd the senior officer appointed to select potential officers, a proper judgement could not be made on the basis of a short interview; and, in contrast to the previous war, there was less opportunity for selection on the basis of performance in battle. Furthermore, since these senior officers were untrained and appointed on an ad hoc basis, there was no way of knowing where the line was normally drawn between acceptance and rejection.17 In the summer of 1940 the War Office tried to solve this problem by replacing the senior officer’s interview with an interview before a command interview board. Each board was headed by a permanent president – a full colonel drawn from the reserve – who was assisted by commanding officers seconded from local units. Presidents were chosen for their good judgement, and by being permanent, it was hoped, they would inject greater expertise and uniformity into the system. The establishment of the boards, however, did little to improve matters. Not only was there scant attempt to bring the presidents together to ensure common standards, but also the boards did not ameliorate the inherent weaknesses in the interview technique.18 In short, a candidate still stood or fell by the first impression he created. ‘An awesome business,’ related one candidate, ‘not improved by the thought that one’s entire future may be dependent upon the state of another man’s liver.’19 It became evident, moreover, that as the demand for officers outstripped the traditional public-school sources, so the boards were poorly placed to assess candidates from a wider cross section of the nation, since the interviewing officers were confronted with men from social backgrounds of which they knew little. Unsurprisingly, the boards came to assume something of a reputation for allowing social bias to colour their judgements.20 ‘I was made to feel that my residence at a couple of English universities,’ wrote one puzzled interviewee, ‘doesn’t quite make up for the fact that my old headmaster didn’t attend the Headmasters’ Conference.’21

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The military authorities grew increasingly anxious. By the middle of 1941 a quarter of cadets were failing their officer training. Not only did this high failure rate have operational implications, since it created a shortfall of new officers, but it also undermined morale, since candidates were oppressed by the knowledge that a significant number of them would fail their officer training.22 Furthermore, the cumulative effects of poor selection were evident in the number of officers who proved unable to shoulder the burdens of leadership and suffered psychiatric breakdowns.23 Unease within the War Office was set against a backdrop of growing public disquiet over the question of officer selection.24 Plainly, steps needed to be taken to improve matters. In order to overcome these difficulties, in the spring of 1942 the military authorities introduced new War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs), which operated under the control of the DSP. The staff of each board included a president (a senior regular officer), military testing officers (who were line officers of some experience), a psychiatrist and psychologist (assisted by sergeant-testers trained in psychological techniques). Under the new system an officer candidate reported to a board, which was usually ensconced in a large country house, for a threeday selection process. Those attending boards were required to conceal their badges of rank and were known only as numbers. During their stay candidates completed a series of psychological tests designed to assess their powers of leadership. These included ‘leaderless group’ tests, during which leaderless groups of candidates were observed as they completed designated tasks. Candidates were also interviewed by the psychiatrist, who attempted to detect any unrecognized potential or underlying instability. At the end of the selection process, the board convened in order to assess the candidates. Those who satisfied the boards were sent on to officer training.25 The WOSBs introduced a more meritocratic system of officer selection than hitherto and seemed to give practical expression to the notion that every soldier had a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and that ability, rather than wealth and the correct educational background, was the sole prerequisite for commissioned rank. There was certainly significant evidence to suggest that the new procedure improved the efficiency of officer selection. During the summer of 1942, while the old and the new boards were working simultaneously, the opportunity was taken to compare the two systems by following up potential officers at OCTUs. Of those selected by the old methods, 22 per cent were rated above average and 37 per cent below average (13 per cent of these being markedly below average). Despite passing as great a proportion of the total candidates as the old boards, the corresponding figures for those selected by the WOSBs were 35 per cent above average and 25 per cent below average (8 per cent of these being markedly below average).26 There was also affirmation that the new methods created greater confidence in the officer selection process. Anonymous questionnaires


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revealed that an overwhelming proportion of both successful and unsuccessful candidates were satisfied with the procedure; complaints from those rejected by the boards tended to come mainly from public-school candidates.27 Overall, between 1943 and 1945 (when it was generally conceded that the quality of army intakes declined) the failure rate during officer training fell to 8 per cent.28 The quality of officers seemed acceptable too. Although it was not possible to make a strict comparison with those selected under the old procedure, in follow-up studies of officers selected by WOSBs who were serving in the Mediterranean campaign, and in infantry units in north-west Europe, 76 per cent proved to be giving completely satisfactory service in the opinion of their commanding officers.29 The War Office also had to review the issue of officer – man relations. The establishment of a close and comradely relationship between officers and men was of vital importance to the morale and fighting efficiency of the army. As the war developed, however, it became clear that relations left a lot to be desired. The wartime conscript soldiers were more class-conscious and generally better educated than their predecessors and were to look much more sceptically on the privileges of rank and the autocratic style of leadership that characterized the army. In this respect, the military authorities faced two particular problems. First, while the privileges accorded to officers were generally accepted if they were borne of military necessity, those for which there seemed to be little justification, apart from the assumption that gentility was concomitant with an officer’s status, were resented by many of the soldiers. In the summer of 1942 it was reported that: The morale and fighting spirit of the Army as a whole would be enhanced if the ordinary soldier could be reassured that differentiations due to social tradition and the subordination involved in military discipline do not imply a fundamental conflict of interests. Anything, on the other hand, that strengthens his belief in the existence of a fundamental gulf or barrier between himself and his leaders has an immediate and marked adverse effect on morale.30

The second, and more pressing, problem was the poor standard of manmanagement on the part of junior officers. While most soldiers were prepared to concede the necessity of officers leading a somewhat detached life from their own, and of following even the worst leader, it was clear that they were going to require tactful and sympathetic handling if their willing co-operation was to be maintained. But while it might have been thought that the new wartime officers, nearly all of whom had spent a period in the ranks, would bring a new degree of sympathy and understanding to their relations with their men, it was ironic that many of them seemed to go to great lengths to distance themselves from

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their subordinates. One soldier wrote of ‘beardless young OCTU products, who are much too delighted with their new uniforms seriously to bother about such trivial matters as morale’.31 The result was a worrying gulf between officers and men that threatened to undermine the solidarity of the army. ‘The problem,’ noted one War Office report at the end of 1942, ‘is largely one of officering: the troops are ready enough to feel friendliness, respect, and admiration for the right type of officer . . . The troops’ letters show, however, that such a relationship is far from universal.’32 The military authorities took steps to try to improve matters. Mindful of the readiness of Parliament and the press to attack the army for perpetuating an outdated class system, some of the privileges of rank were restricted. Officers, it was instructed, were no longer permitted to reserve hotel bars and lounges for their exclusive use;33 their utilization of military transport for recreational purposes was limited;34 their access to private medicine, if they could afford it, was no longer to be their sole preserve;35 and attempts were made to equalize the living conditions on troopships, which were a particular source of grievance to the rank and file.36 Meanwhile, measures were taken to improve man-management. The WOSB procedure included tests designed to assess a candidate’s capacity to manage his men;37 the syllabuses of OCTUs were modified to incorporate more training in man-management;38 and commanding officers were encouraged to improve man-management practices in their units.39 Furthermore, efforts were made to promote a more enlightened style of leadership. These measures were embodied in two pamphlets issued to officers: The Soldier’s Welfare (1941) and Comrades in Arms (1942). While in former times the soldier’s place might have been ‘not to reason why but to do or die’, officers were now instructed that recruits would come into the army suspicious and resentful of authority and it would be necessary to explain the reasons for orders to maintain their full co-operation. They were advised that they had a duty to seek out the men’s views on most matters affecting their welfare and that such action strengthened discipline and was not a sign of weakness. They were even encouraged to have ‘free for all’ discussions with their men over particularly controversial matters as a means of defusing discontent and getting to know each other’s mind and temperament.40 Underpinning this, in 1943 a system of weekly ‘request hours’ was instituted, when men could approach officers informally over any matter that was troubling them.41 The wartime military authorities thus made efforts not only to reduce some of the more indefensible inequalities between officers and men, but also to inspire a more democratic style of leadership, which, in the view of one soldier, ‘set the seal of approval upon the fullest human associations in place of the formal’.42 Together these initiatives seemed like a blueprint for the breaking down of the old feudal relationship between officers and men. As the war went on there were


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signs of an improvement in the relationship between the ranks. By the beginning of 1945 it was reported that commanders generally were ‘well satisfied with the relations between officers and men’.43 A measure of solidarity seemed to have returned to the army. Welfare provision was another aspect of army life that came under scrutiny in the War Office. At the beginning of the war the welfare of the soldier was regarded first and foremost as a matter for units and regimental officers. No official welfare organization existed within the army, and what central services were provided were limited to a few basic amenities such as the NAAFI. Little or nothing, for instance, was provided to help a soldier cope with personal or domestic concerns.44 It soon became clear, however, that this was insufficient. The wartime soldiers brought with them a number of pressing welfare problems. The lack of amenities and recreational facilities was one issue that played on their minds. ‘Ask any bachelor soldier what he most dislikes about army life,’ commented one officer, ‘and I think he will tell you that it is the lack of any home comfort, the dreariness and lack of colour.’45 A further problem was the enforced separation from families, which often brought with it a host of pressing home worries. ‘It is surprising to hear the chaps when they talk about their homes,’ confided another soldier. ‘Many are married and have young children and even the toughest is full of concern for his wife and family.’46 Indeed, the ‘anxious soldier’ was to become a recognizable character of the war.47 It was clear that these matters needed to be addressed if the morale and fighting efficiency of the army were to be maintained. It was soon apparent that the efforts of regimental officers alone would not be sufficient to cater for these welfare needs. Not only were they considered fully occupied in training the new troops, and thus pressed for time to devote to welfare matters, but also some of the welfare problems that they had to deal with were outside the experience of the average junior officer.48 Various voluntary organizations provided welfare support where they could but the service was patchy and unco-ordinated.49 It was in these circumstances that, at the end of 1939, a network of voluntary army welfare officers was set up across the country, and in the summer of 1940 a new Directorate of Welfare was established in the War Office to oversee welfare matters, a process expedited by Parliament’s desire to see proper provision made for the forces.50 Under the auspices of the welfare organization, a wide spectrum of services was built up. For a start, a range of amenities and recreational facilities was laid on for the soldiers: a network of canteens was organized; a hobby gardening scheme was devised; film shows were arranged; a central pool of artistes (or ‘stars in battledress’ as it became known) was formed to provide live entertainment; a broadcasting section was established to develop wireless programmes for the troops; and a host of army newspapers was published around the world – from the Orkney Blast to Eighth

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Army News.51 Various gifts were also distributed. According to one officer, the public’s eagerness to ensure the comfort of servicemen led to the donation of some unusual items: One amazing parcel from friends in America included thick flannel night gowns evidently cut for giants and buttoning down the back from neck to heel, but our sincerest thanks go to the well-wisher who presented a pair of [ra]coon-skin underpants with the fur inside. One day we may hear from the soldier who wears them – probably a Provost Sergeant in Libya.52

In addition, assistance was provided for soldiers with personal and domestic worries. For troops concerned about the fate of their loved ones under the bombing, an air-raid enquiry scheme was set up to provide prompt information about families in affected areas. A reconciliation scheme was instituted to help patch up differences between husband and wife before a family was broken up without good cause. An army legal-aid scheme was also launched to tender advice to soldiers on a range of civil matters. By the end of the conflict 175,000 cases of all types had been dealt with under the scheme.53 A new welfare organization was thus established in the wartime army and a vast gamut of welfare services laid on for the troops. What the war seemed to demonstrate was that if a soldier was to function with full efficiency, proper provision needed to be made both for his recreation and for the relief of his anxieties about personal matters. There was a good deal of evidence to indicate that army welfare contributed to the well-being of the troops. Not only did War Office reports draw attention to a widespread appreciation of the welfare efforts made on their behalf, but one senior officer described the welfare organization as ‘an indispensable factor in maintaining morale, and that without it the modern soldier cannot be enabled to reproduce in his Army life conditions which, in his estimation, are sufficiently civilised to be tolerable’.54 Alongside welfare provision, educational provision also came under examination. In the early months of the war official army education virtually ceased and the bulk of the Army Educational Corps (AEC) was assigned to cipher duties. Education, it was believed, had no place in a wartime army under active service conditions.55 During the course of 1940, however, the military authorities were forced to reconsider their position. Not only was there a demand for educational provision from among conscript soldiers deprived of their normal peacetime studies, but there was also a good deal of agitation in the press for suitable facilities to be provided. It was believed, moreover, that education could be used to sustain the morale of the troops while many of them sat around in Britain taking little active part in the war effort, a problem compounded by the withdrawal from Dunkirk.56 Thus, in the autumn of 1940 a new scheme of education


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was introduced. Under the scheme, which was to be voluntary and take place in off-duty hours, a range of subjects was to be made available, including the humanities, utilities and hobby interests. The providers of education were to be serving teachers and lecturers, local education authorities and various universities and voluntary bodies. The AEC was to return to educational work to match demand with supply, and a new Directorate of Education was established in the War Office to oversee the scheme.57 Although these activities were to continue throughout the war years, it soon became apparent that the voluntary scheme was not as effective as had been envisaged. The majority of soldiers had little interest in participating in voluntary education classes in their spare time on what were perceived to be mainly scholarly subjects, and the irregular duty hours, the movement of units around the country and the call-up of civilian tutors made it difficult to organize systematic education even for those who wanted it. By the spring of 1941 it was estimated that 80 per cent of troops remained untouched by educational provision. In the meantime, news of defeats in the Middle East and the prospect of a continued sedentary existence for many soldiers in Britain raised fresh concerns over morale.58 It was in these circumstances that in the summer the military authorities announced an additional scheme of education for the army. Under this scheme, which was to be compulsory and take place in training time, junior officers were to conduct weekly discussions with their men on current events, the aim being to inspire the troops by persuading them of the objectives for which Britain was fighting. A new Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) was set up in the War Office to administer the scheme, and ABCA was to supply officers with two pamphlets on which discussions could be based: War and Current Affairs. The AEC was to act as ABCA’s local agent and give officers any assistance required. During 1941–45 soldiers were encouraged to discuss a wide range of subjects under the ABCA scheme, including such issues as the nation’s health, education and social security.59 By the summer of 1942 it was evident that there was still room for expansion in the field of army education. The military situation was still depressing, with news of further defeats in the Middle East and Far East, and it was considered that something more needed to be done to sustain morale. Moreover, the ABCA scheme revealed just how ignorant of the country’s history and institutions the average soldier was, and it was evident that some instruction in these matters was needed if current affairs discussions were to work effectively.60 With these considerations in mind, a further education scheme was set out in the autumn of 1942. Three extra hours of compulsory education were to be carried out each week over the coming winter alongside the ABCA discussions. One hour was to be devoted to military-related subjects such as map-reading, a second to hobbies or study for professional qualifications, and a third to a discussion of the British

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Empire and the British way of life. This third hour, it was hoped, would provide a systematic course of civic instruction against which current affairs could be placed and would further motivate the troops by focusing on aspects of a Britain worth fighting for. The scheme was to be run by the Directorate of Education, which was to supply reading material for the third hour in the form of a booklet entitled British Way and Purpose (BWP). Every effort was to be made to find instructors for the scheme from units themselves, but arrangements were put in hand for civilian education organizations and the AEC to help out where required. The winter scheme, as it became known, was put into operation over the winter of 1942–43 and was repeated in 1943–44. The BWP hour, however, was to continue throughout the year and remained part of the training programme for the rest of the war. From 1942 to 1945 troops were invited to debate a wide spectrum of matters related to British democratic, social and economic institutions during this discussion period.61 An impressive array of wartime educational schemes was therefore instituted for the troops. These were a marked advance on anything previously available to the army and represented an attempt by the military authorities to educate a generation of soldiers in current affairs and citizenship. What the experience of the conflict seemed to illustrate was that the modern soldier would no longer be motivated simply by appeals to duty or patriotism, but that as an intelligent being he needed to be persuaded of the positive objectives for which he was fighting. There was evidence to signify that the ABCA and BWP hours assisted in improving the morale of the army. War Office reports noted that these discussions helped to bolster the troops’ faith in the war effort, and one commander concluded that they were ‘a necessary part, in the broadest sense, of the armoury of the efficient solder’.62 The foregoing survey of some of the major aspects of army life indicates that a good deal of social change took place in the army during the Second World War. It became an institution seemingly more careful of human values, more responsive to the needs and aspirations of the ordinary soldier and more democratic in spirit. ‘The changes that have been made in the British Army in the past four years are very great,’ observed the same soldier who had decried the undemocratic nature of the army in the early months of the war. ‘It is difficult now to remember how backward our Army was in 1939.’63 In accounting for these developments, one can identify several factors that seem to have been influential. First and foremost was the influx of civilians into the army and the need to create from them a fighting force of high morale and efficiency to take on the Axis powers. It was no surprise that the bulk of reforms took place between 1940 and 1942, when Britain’s military prospects were bleakest and, as a consequence, new methods were more readily employed than before. Public pressure


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also seems to have played its part, with all aspects of army administration subject to close scrutiny in Parliament and the press. The role of personalities was important too, and none more so than that of the Adjutant-General, General Sir Ronald Adam, who oversaw the implementation of many of the reforms. He emerges as a man with a deep understanding of the wartime citizen army and as one of the most notable army reformers of his generation. Finally, it should be noted that change did not occur within a vacuum. Parallel developments took place outside the army, such as the adoption of scientific management techniques in industry, the establishment of joint production committees of managers and workers, and the extension of welfare provision in the workplace. In this sense, the army mirrored civilian society. Questions, however, do have to be asked about just how profound this social change was. Taking, for example, the new other rank selection methods, it was clear that some of the more traditionalist elements within the army remained unconvinced by the general service selection scheme. No doubt partly owing to the fact that selection was conducted in isolation from the bulk of the army and thus assumed an air of mystery, the view was still held that dull men made the best soldiers and that psychological tests placed unintelligent men who would make good fighters in non-fighting jobs. The involvement of the psychiatrist, meanwhile, was seen as a convenient escape route for malingerers determined to evade military service.64 Furthermore, the new methods were regarded by some as undermining the regimental system. It was said that by posting a recruit in the first instance to the General Service Corps, harm was caused by not exposing him from day one in the army to the esprit de corps of individual corps and regiments. What was more, the extent to which recruits were posted in accordance with their territorial connections was not always deemed satisfactory, particularly to the infantry.65 In 1948 the army dispensed with the general service selection scheme. Instead, the bulk of the procedure was to be carried out after recruits had been allocated to corps, which, one officer noted, was like ‘putting the cart before the horse’.66 The new officer selection methods also evoked a good deal of suspicion. In particular, the role of the psychiatrist at the WOSBs was singled out for special criticism. It was argued that the psychiatric interview upset officer candidates by encroaching on matters of a personal nature, and that psychiatrists were dominating the selection procedure by virtue of their technical knowledge and ability to present evidence. Some of them, it was contended, had little experience of army life and traditions, and candidates were being rejected who would otherwise make suitable officers.67 Given the strength of feeling on the issue, instructions were issued in 1943 that psychiatrists should interview no more than half of the candidates and that no questions on sex or religion would be asked.68 In 1946 the decision was taken to withdraw psychiatrists and psychologists altogether from

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the WOSBs and limit their staffs to the purely military assessors, a step described by one officer as putting the clock back to ‘the Lewis gun age’.69 In relation to officer – man relations, doubts have to be raised about the extent to which the gulf between officers and men was truly bridged. Although some of the inequalities between the ranks might have been revised, officers continued to be granted the right to a separate mess, to be valeted by batmen, and to a better general standard of day-to-day living than the soldiers. Moreover, despite efforts to improve matters, the standard of man-management on the part of junior officers continued to give cause for concern.70 Of particular importance in this respect was the example set by commanding officers of units. It was not only said that some COs did not realize how much more attention the wartime soldier required than his peacetime counterpart, but also that others were simply not interested in their men and therefore did not ensure that their junior officers took an interest in them either.71 A few officers clearly resented the new style of leadership that the War Office was trying to promote. One wrote of ‘gutter inspired ideologies’ which decried those qualities in a man that raised him above his fellows.72 Despite reassurances that the subject of man-management was fully covered in the post-war army, one former subaltern wrote of officer training as continuing to create an elite class, naturally designed to impose its will on all inferior classes, and of a fellow officer who likened his men to ‘pets’ that needed to be humoured with sugar and whipped when disobedient.73 Some questions have to be broached too about the effectiveness of army welfare. Besides the inherent difficulties in organizing comprehensive welfare provision for all units scattered across the country, a number of commanding officers regarded the welfare organization as a ‘spoon-feeding’ establishment that interfered with their more important tasks and undermined the traditional responsibility of regimental officers for the care of the men.74 Without positive encouragement from COs, it was evident that some junior officers either chose not to utilize the welfare assistance available to them or simply remained ignorant of it. ‘I am convinced,’ reported one commander, ‘that many officers know little of the value and purpose of Welfare Officers, and therefore it follows that few of the men even know of their existence.’75 Even when units were better informed, this could sometimes lead to a decline in the standard of welfare, since it was recorded that ‘the existence of a Welfare Department in the Army has led some officers to suppose that their obligation to do “welfare work” for their men has ceased’.76 In 1948 the welfare directorate was dissolved as a separate and distinctive entity within the War Office, and the following year the voluntary army welfare officers across the country were stood down. This ensured that responsibility for the day-to-day welfare of the soldier would continue to lie first and foremost with regimental officers. ‘The wheel,’ observed one officer, ‘had come full circle.’77 As for army education, there is uncertainty about how conscientiously the


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ABCA and BWP discussions were conducted across the army. In the case of ABCA, not only did many junior officers regard the task of leading discussions on current affairs as an unwelcome chore, sometimes merely reciting the discussion pamphlets as if they were army regulations and doing little to encourage debate, but also a good number of commanding officers regarded the pamphlets either as having little relevance to the war effort or as positively seditious, and did little to ensure that sessions were properly carried out.78 If one applies this picture of indifference to the BWP discussions as well – bearing in mind that they were more difficult to organize because there was a shortage of competent unit instructors to conduct them, and that the manpower resources of the AEC and the civilian educational organizations were limited – it does seem that the provision of education was patchy at best.79 Indeed, while the War Office estimated that by 1943 60 per cent of units were successfully holding the ABCA and BWP discussions, an unofficial assessment put the figure as low as 10 per cent.80 In the late 1940s it was decided to tailor the education syllabus more to the practical aspects of soldiering. The discussion of domestic political issues in current affairs periods was phased out and the emphasis placed instead on matters relating to the army.81 Thus, in the same way that some historians have raised doubts about the radicalizing effects of the war on civilian society, so we can conclude that what social change took place in the army was perhaps not quite as profound as it appears at first sight. In relation to this, two points are worth highlighting. First, the army continued to be controlled by regular officers who filled the majority of the posts of lieutenant-colonel and above. Well schooled in the values of the prewar army, a number of them half-heartedly carried out reforms they did not like or simply ignored them.82 Second, the military authorities had no really effective means, beyond the testimony of the officers themselves, of ensuring that reforms had been carried out. One soldier summed up the state of affairs thus: The situation is that of a well-meaning Army Council distributing sensible plans which are never sufficiently well disseminated to become operative; and of their having no means whatever, beyond the word of the CO passed up through the usual channels, of finding out whether or not their schemes are being put into operation.83

In these circumstances, and bearing in mind that in a number of respects the army put the clock back in the post-war years, there are grounds for being cautious about the extent of change. The army might have become, in terms of its personnel and institutional values, more a part of the nation, but in many ways it remained a nation apart.


12

The British Security Forces and the Jews in Palestine, 1945–48 David Cesarani

During the armed struggle waged against the British in Palestine by the Zionist movement during 1945–48, the propaganda of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) and their supporters abroad routinely depicted the British security forces as anti-Semitic. Much Jewish memoir literature from the period records casual anti-Semitism among the civil administration of Palestine and the security forces, and there were, indeed, several well-documented instances of blatant prejudice and indiscriminate violence against the Jewish population. Consequently, the first historians who dealt with the end of the mandate tended to accept the contention that anti-Semitism was widespread among the British civil and military personnel. They merely differed in their explanation of what caused it. Many later historians have tended to accept this verdict to a greater or lesser degree.1 However, there has never been any systematic research into the attitude of British personnel in Palestine. This is surprising given the wealth of oral histories and memoir literature from the time of the conflict, as well as letters and diaries deposited in various collections by men and women who served there, from across the spectrum of ranks and units, operational locations and stages of the mandate. This essay draws on the rich archive of contemporary documents and reminiscences to illustrate the wide range of attitudes, some of them surprising, and attempts to explain why servicemen and women of different ages, backgrounds, ranks and experience came to see the Jews in the way they did. Of course, the period and the subject matter were and remain the focus of strong emotions and clashing interpretations. The very absence of previous research in this area may result from a willingness on all sides to accept the version construed at the time and perpetuated thereafter: in short, the Zionists waged a merciless, effective terrorist campaign against the British, and with good reason the British came to loathe them for it. However, one of the most valuable things that Richard Overy taught me in the course of history tutorials at Cambridge in the mid-1970s, reinforced during many sociable encounters since then, is

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always to question the received wisdom. Follow your hunches and go back to the sources; let the past speak to you and be prepared for surprises. Above all – and this is something that I came to appreciate more clearly from reading Richard’s staggering output over the last three decades – be sensitive to the experiences of ordinary men and women. When the Zionist leadership in Palestine led the Jewish community, the Yishuv, into an insurrection against British rule in the autumn of 1945, propaganda was a vital weapon in its armoury. This propaganda had multiple functions: it was aimed at undermining the legitimacy of British rule and subverting the morale of the security forces; it buttressed the unity and resolution of the Jews in the Yishuv; and it fomented support for them in the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish communities of the United States of America were a prime target. At a time when American Jews were learning about the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the European Jews during the Second World War, the charge of anti-Semitism carried unprecedented weight.2 When Palestinian Jews confronted the British security forces during demonstrations or cordon-and-search operations, they routinely chanted ‘Gestapo’ at them (as well as the more picturesque but less highly charged ‘English bastards’). Flyers, wall posters and broadcasts by the Irgun consistently referred to the ‘NaziBritish occupation forces’. Here is a typical sample: Yes Britain – a gigantic swastika today covers you, just as the hatred which it represents has filled your heart. You have accepted a mission: to finish what your teacher Hitler did not manage to finish . . . But you will not fulfil your plans. Just as the Nazo-German swastika was smashed, so will the Nazo-British [sic] swastika be smashed.3

Although the anti-British effusions of the Jewish Agency were more moderate, they did not balk at the charge of anti-Semitism. A widely distributed booklet explaining the ideology and actions of the Jewish underground drew on extensive contemporary sources to verify the claim that ‘British troops in Palestine are heavily contaminated by anti-Semitism, which is to a considerable extent inspired and cultivated by the highest commanding officers.’4 Such criticism was echoed by ostensibly uncommitted observers such as the writer and journalist Arthur Koestler. He travelled to Palestine in June 1948, soon after the State of Israel had declared its independence, to cover subsequent events for several newspapers. His reports and the diary he kept were turned into one of the first books about the creation of Israel: Promise and Fulfilment. It was a best-seller in the USA during 1949 and helped define the genre. Koestler maintained that in the course of suppressing the Jewish insurgency, ‘the police no longer felt compelled to hide its anti-Jewish feelings; each week brought new tales of third-degrees of Jews and new public insults’. British troops ‘heiled Hitler

THE BRITISH SECURITY FORCES AND THE JEWS

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in Jewish settlements and desecrated synagogue walls with swastikas’.5 The impression that Jews faced an anti-Semitic onslaught was cultivated in the memoirs of underground fighters. One of the earliest was Memoirs of an Assassin by ‘Avner’, published in 1959. ‘Avner’ was a member of the Lohamei b’Herut b’Yisrael, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, better known as Lehi or the Stern Gang. In the course of explaining why the Jewish underground was relatively immune to informants, ‘Avner’ asserted: The anti-Semitism of the soldiers was discouraging cooperation on the part of the Jewish population. Nothing was more repellent or provoking than the shouts of “Dirty Jews!” which came from the back of army lorries passing through the streets of Tel Aviv.

Ya’acov Eliav, a bomb-maker for Lehi, was withering when he recalled the Jewish Section of the CID of the Palestine Police Force (PPF). According to him, ‘the main criterion for their selection was hatred of Jews’.6 There were certainly some occasions when senior officers in Palestine emitted statements about the Jews that were prejudicial in nature or stereotypical in content. One of the most infamous was the letter composed by the General Officer Commanding the British Army in Palestine, Lieutenant General Sir Evelyn Barker, for distribution to officers in the wake of the devastating attack on the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946. Ninety-one people were killed that day when a bomb planted by the Irgun destroyed the wing housing the Secretariat of the Palestine Administration along with offices of the security forces. Barker and the High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, asked the Colonial Office in London to punish the Jewish population with a collective fine, but they were overruled. On his own initiative Barker then proposed that British personnel should boycott Jewish businesses: No British soldier will have contact with any Jew, and duty contacts will be made as short as possible and will be limited to the duty concerned. I understand that these measures will create difficulties for the troops, but I am certain that if my reasons are explained to them, they will understand their duty and will punish the Jews in the manner this race dislikes most; by hitting them in the pocket, which will demonstrate our disgust for them.

Within days the text of the letter had leaked and was broadcast around the world by the Zionist organizations. There were calls for Barker to be sacked, and he was publicly rebuked by the government in London. But the newly incumbent Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery, defended Barker to the hilt and he remained in his post for several months longer.7

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On another notorious occasion, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Webb, the commanding officer of 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, let rip after two of his men were killed and several more badly wounded in a bomb attack in central Jerusalem. Having drunk rather too much than was good for him, Webb called a press conference at the battalion’s quarters and detained the assembled members of the international press corps for two hours while he harangued them. ‘These bloody Jews,’ he declaimed, ‘we saved their skins in Alamein and other places and then they do this to us.’ They were a ‘despicable race’. The American press had a field day with this story. As Nicholas Bethell observed, it succeeded in ‘convincing many Americans of the incurable anti-Semitism of the British army and administration’. Unlike Barker, Webb was quickly removed from his command and sent back to England in disgrace.8 But did these sentiments reflect the outlook of the generality of officers and other ranks in the army and the PPF? As we will see, they certainly did evoke a response, but sometimes not the sort that confirms what pressmen claimed at the time or historians have assumed as fact since then.9 Many accounts by those who arrived in Palestine at the outset of the conflict describe the ignorance, naiveté or neutrality of the British troops. Some had a visceral sympathy for the Jews based on what they had seen or learned about their suffering under the Nazis. Others had an equally emotive attitude towards the Arabs derived from previous encounters with them or representations of ‘Araby’. Like plans for battle, few of these preconceptions survived contact with reality. In Cordon and Search, a campaign history of 6th Airborne published in 1949, Major Richard ‘Dare’ Wilson wrote: ‘on the troopships coming out from home it was noticeable how open-minded – ignorant might be more truthful – were the troops on the Palestine Question’. Wilson continued: ‘They were quite prepared to take things as they found them. As far as their sympathies went at the time, these probably lay in favour of the Jews, as a result of what these troops had seen in North-West Europe earlier in that year.’ However, ‘this attitude was put severely to the test during the following two and a half years, and in the majority of cases failed to stand up to the strain’.10 Junior officers were expected to familiarize themselves with the theatre before arrival. John Graham recalled that on the ship from the UK with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the air-landing element of 6th Airborne, he got lectures on conditions in Palestine and read Duties in Aid of the Civil Power. This was the 1937 officer’s manual for peacekeeping in a British imperial context, based heavily on the army’s experience in Palestine during the early stages of the Arab revolt of 1936–39. ‘Every one of us got off that boat exceedingly well informed about the Palestine situation.’ In terms of choosing between Arabs and Jews, ‘we were, when we set foot in that country, wholly without bias or prejudice. This did not last.’11 Lieutenant Colin Mitchell, later to achieve fame as Colonel ‘Mad Mitch’


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in Aden, shipped out to Palestine with the 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in July 1945. He recalled: Our feelings in the Argylls were as confused as the political situation itself. On the one hand we had the greatest sympathy for the Jews because of their recent suffering in Europe, and we were anxious to help them towards the future. On the other, we had absurdly romantic ideas about the Arabs – passed on to us by my boyhood hero Lawrence of Arabia and the desert explorers of the nineteenth century – and the illusion that because we like the Arabs we thought the Arabs liked us.12

Another young junior officer, E. J. Rooke-Matthews of 9th Battalion Parachute Regiment, noted that by the time he arrived most of the other ranks were new drafts, while few officers, commissioned (COs) or non-commissioned (NCOs), had served in Europe. ‘I’m sure I was not alone in having little knowledge of, or understanding of the problems of Palestine or the Jewish claims for a homeland,’ he wrote in a memoir in 1990. Nevertheless, the veterans and no doubt the newsreels had a profound effect on shaping early attitudes. ‘We had helped to liberate many Jews from the concentration camps and some of our comrades had seen for themselves the evidence of their ill-treatment by the Germans.’13 Those who volunteered for the PPF were trained to maintain professional detachment. Walter Sendell, the son of a Welsh miner, enlisted in the PPF in London in 1936 after half a decade as a clerk in a textile business. He went out in January 1937 and spent three months training at the police depot on Mt Scopus in Jerusalem. ‘I was unbiased,’ he told an interviewer for the Imperial War Museum in 1986. ‘I didn’t know enough about the Arab or the Jewish mentality. So I had an open mind.’14 Frederick Gardiner was another Welshman, although his father was a decorator and he attended a grammar school before starting work aged 16. He joined the PPF in 1939 and reached Palestine in February 1940. He remembered that everything he saw was new: the ‘extraordinary thing’ was that other than Bible stories and ‘visions of Arab sheiks’ he ‘had no idea of Palestine’. He knew ‘only vaguely’ about the disturbed situation and Arab – Jewish antagonism. But he thought the training at the Mt Scopus police depot was very good and equipped him well for what was to come.15 Michael Burke came from the West coast of Ireland and joined the PPF in 1945 after a wartime career in the Royal Navy. He liked the idea of becoming a policeman and upholding the law, and he believed the PPF offered good job security. But he knew little about the country. ‘My information about Palestine was mainly from the 1936 troubles.’ However, he had met Arabs in North Africa while he was in the navy and liked their ‘simplicity’; he felt much in common with them, especially the Bedouin. By contrast he was ignorant about the Jewish immigrants.16

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Some members of the security forces were predisposed to favour the Arabs. In 1946 Richard Catling was the Assistant Inspector General of the PPF and second in command of the CID. Forty years later he agreed with the proposition put to him by an interviewer that ‘British personnel serving in Palestine tended to find it more easy to sympathise with the Arabs rather than the Jews’: Yes, I think that is fair. I think the majority of us did because the problems we had to deal with as police officers stemming from the Arab population were not as difficult in most respects as were those presented to us from the Jewish population. The Arab, of course, with his love of sport, his love of hospitality, the sort of Lawrence of Arabia connotation, I suppose, attracted a lot of us more than the undoubted qualities of the Jewish population.

Nevertheless, Catling added: ‘One admired the Jewish intelligence and excellence in art and medicine and music.’ He loved the Palestine Symphony Orchestra: ‘One gave them full credit for this.’17 After a short while in the country with 6th Airborne, John Graham found his own sympathies and those of his men undergoing a transformation. Yet his astringent remarks hint at a latent disposition. ‘It soon became apparent that the Jocks, and to a lesser extent the officers, were developing a dislike of the Jews, but for the Arabs a tolerant affection such as a parent for an incorrigibly naughty child.’ The Arab population was responsible for nothing more than endless, irritating, but harmless petty thieving. According to Graham: The Jews, however, seemed to be totally without humour or consideration for the rights of others. And the ultra-devoted with their black raiments, long beards and skins pallid from lack of healthy exercise and fresh air appeared to many of us like creatures from an underworld: repellent.

He realised that the victims of Nazi persecution had been through a terrible time, but their arrogance and self pity dampened the sympathy we felt towards those survivors of the Holocaust. This initial sympathy was transformed into contempt when terrorists acting in the Zionist cause started to murder our people, men and women, civilian and military; the same British who had expended so much blood and treasure to bring about the destruction of Nazi Germany which alone saved European Jewry from extinction.18

Corporal Leslie Roker, 1st Battalion Highland Light Infantry, had been called up, aged 18, in 1942 and wounded twice in north-west Europe. He was posted


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with his unit to Palestine in October 1945. Nearly 40 years later he wrote up his wartime experiences based on the diary he kept at the time. This shows that he had firm views about both sides of the conflict. ‘We had been sent to troubled Palestine because the Jews were trying to “gate crash” into the country, to the anger of the Arabs. Jewish terrorists were using bombs and guns to kill police and soldiers.’ By 1946, events appeared to confirm his initial conceptions and he commented: The Jewish population was violently anti-British and supported the terrorist organisations. Despite the sympathy we had for the victims of the Nazi concentration camps, it was difficult for us to sympathise with the Jews.19

A significant proportion of the officers and men arrived without any sympathy for the Jews or were prone to see the Jewish population through stereotypical lenses. Even senior officers like Major C. R. W. Norman, who were supposed to be well informed and objective, were prone to these distortions. In mid-1946, Norman replaced Martin Charteris as head of military intelligence in Palestine. In a briefing to newly arrived personnel on 18 July 1947 he described the Jewish settlements as ‘a political racket’. He attributed the difficulty of finding informants among the Jewish population to fear and also to a ghetto mentality typified by ‘a very strongly developed sense of loyalty, to family and race’. The Irgun and Lehi were ‘potty’. He saw in Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist Zionists, ‘a very great similarity between them and the Hitlerjugend. In fact, the similarity between the criminal organisations and Nazi organisations is very striking.’ The Stern Gang comprised ‘thugs of the lowest type’. ‘Most of the Stern Gang are born criminals.’20 Norman’s letters to his mother in England allow us to see how he let his personal prejudices colour his intelligence appraisals. On 5 July 1946, following a major arms find, he wrote to her: What the people in England don’t realise is that the Jews we get here come from Eastern Europe and it is quite the lowest form of criminal life. None of them compare to the English Jews and very few of them have any religion at all. In some of the settlements there is no such thing as private property or money or marriage. Even women are public property and when a child is born, he or she is at once removed to a communal clinic and nursery and will probably never know who is [sic] parents were.21

Norman was aware of his prejudices and knew when it was prudent not to express them. In a letter home written on 3 November 1946, soon after he had seen the Jerusalem railway station blown up, he told his mother that he took great care when he briefed journalists about the situation. ‘They are a crafty lot of so-and-

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sos and I have to be terribly careful what I say, and strictly impartial.’22 The letters written by Lieutenant General Sir Napier Crookendon, CO of 9th Battalion Parachute Regiment, 3rd Parachute Brigade, are similarly revealing. On 16 October 1945 he remarked: ‘The Jews are being verbally truculent to the men on pass in Tel Aviv, except when trying to sell anything.’ He routinely referred to Jews as ‘Yids’ and ‘skids’. Unsurprisingly he wholeheartedly supported General Barker’s offensive epistle to the troops after the King David Hotel atrocity. The letter ‘was a very good one, expressing the loathing and contempt felt by all ranks for the Jewish Race in Palestine’.23 Given that senior officers set the tone in the mess, it is not surprising to find junior officers expressing casual prejudice. Lieutenant Raymond Hodges, 7/73 Company Royal Army Service Corps, recounted to his pal ‘Stinger’, in Tunbridge Wells, how he and his men came under fire from the ‘Jew boys’. In his memoirs of service in Palestine, L. R. Alexander, 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, differentiated between the Jews who had lived for many years in Palestine, who were very friendly, and the more recent arrivals, who he dubbed ‘Yanky Jews’. He encountered the latter in their cars when they were stopped at roadblocks, implying that they were not only American but also wealthy.24 Policemen were no different from troops. Denis Payne, who fought in the Commandos in 1944–45 and had a brush with Bergen-Belsen at the war’s end, served in the PPF from 1946 to 1948. He remembered that while he got on ‘very well indeed’ with the Arabs, he could not relax with Jews. There was ‘an element of hate in their make up’. ‘I thought that you could never trust them; they smiled, you could talk to them, but an element of hate.’ William Pilkington was convinced he could spot illegal immigrants because they ‘had a lot of money and no job’.25 For these men attacks on the security forces confirmed and hardened their prejudices. In other cases, terrorist incidents eroded friendly feeling towards the Jews or reinforced a predisposition to favour the Arabs. The first major assault occurred on 31 October 1945, when the Hagana, the Irgun and Lehi acted as one under the umbrella of the United Resistance Movement. The Hagana cut railways in over 150 places and destroyed two police launches used to intercept illegal immigrants’ ships. The Irgun destroyed rolling stock and locomotives at Lydda rail-yards. Lehi struck the Haifa oil refinery. Six British police and soldiers were killed. This was a heavy loss of life, but it occurred in the context of an impressively co-ordinated military operation.26 By contrast, the killing of seven paratroopers in a Lehi raid on a 6th Airborne Division vehicle park in Tel Aviv on 25 April 1946 bore more resemblance to a massacre. Four of the men in the guard detail were shot as they lay on camp beds inside their tents. Private Peter Faggetter, Parachute Regiment, testifies to the impact of the attack on the rank and file of the division. Like many of the paratroopers he was aware of the concentration camps and proud of the role British


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troops had played at places like Bergen-Belsen. ‘As a result, the airborne soldiers had arrived in Palestine fully prepared to like and support the Jewish community, but the Stern Gang attack and the murders of 25 April 1946 changed all that.’27 The incident led to the widespread breakdown of military morale and discipline. When the news reached the army camps near Netanya, between 20 and 40 soldiers entered the town and smashed shop windows; they also assaulted two Jews who they happened to come across during the rampage. In a more serious reprisal an entire battalion from 3rd Parachute Brigade based at Qastina descended on the Jewish settlement of Beer Tuvya in southern Palestine and broke the windows of houses. Enflamed paratroopers ransacked one property and badly injured two Jews. The febrile state of the troops shocked and worried senior commanders. They began to bombard General Barker with calls for a stout reaction lest they lose control of their men.28 Letters written by Lieutenant General Crookendon vividly confirm the impact of the attacks. Crookendon’s early communications with home are jocular, though not without telltale stereotypes. On 16 October 1945 he wrote to his mother and father, ‘I except the balloon will ascend shortly.’ The following month he wrote, ‘we are being fearfully good tempered and restrained’. However, two days after the Tel Aviv shootings he wrote: ‘The Jews are as unpleasant as ever, having two days ago murdered seven of our men from 5th Battalion in cold blood . . .’ He was having a hard job keeping his men under control, especially as he was constantly losing good junior officers: The feeling in the Battalion against the Jews is high and we all hope that the latest wanton murder of sleeping men will get the publicity and the vigorous action which it warrants. We all came out here genuinely impartial, but Julius Streicher could have a company in the Battalion any time now, and we all look forward to the much foretold major bust-up.

On 5 May he admitted to his parents that the ‘tremendous feeling aroused by the murders’ had steadied slightly, and we were once more in full control of all Battalions. At one time it looked as if one Battalion was out of hand – NOT mine – but all is well now. Last weekend was very trying and I do not like to think of the consequences of any further outrage by the Jews.29

Further outrages were not long in coming. On the night of 16–17 June 1946, the Hagana blew up eight bridges, temporarily cutting off Palestine from neighbouring countries. On 17 June Lehi raided the Haifa railway workshops, at great cost to the attackers. The following day Irgun fighters stormed into an officers’ club

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in a Tel Aviv hotel and kidnapped one army and one RAF officer, who were held hostage against the lives of captured Irgun men facing the death sentence.30 These incidents strengthened the hand of the new CIGS. To Montgomery’s delight the government in London gave the army the chance to strike back. On 29 June over 14,000 personnel were deployed for Operation Agatha. Army units swooped on the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem, bagging a clutch of prominent politicians and several Hagana chiefs. Around 3,000 Jews were rounded up in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and interned. They included hundreds of members of the Palmach. Units of 1st Division and 6th Airborne also mounted cordon-and search-operations against Jewish settlements. At Kibbutz Yagur men of 1st Division discovered a huge arms cache. The operation had been intended to catch people, not to find weapons, but this haul seemed to provide ample justification for the immense effort.31 Yet the success was illusory. The Irgun and Lehi were buried so deep inside Palestine’s urban population that Operation Agatha merely skimmed the surface. Moreover, because they worked independently of the Hagana and the Jewish Agency, they were unaffected by the detention of the political leadership. This was made cruelly apparent on 22 July 1946, when the Irgun blew up the wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem housing sections of the civil administration and the offices of the General Officer Commanding Middle East Forces in Palestine.32 The devastation of the King David Hotel stunned the British garrison. Several high-ranking officers in the army and the police, as well as top civil servants, had narrow escapes or lost friends. Richard Catling escaped serious injury or worse because he had gone outside to investigate a diversionary blast. The man he was supposed to be visiting was killed. Many years later he could not forget or forgive the actions of the Jewish underground ‘whatever their national aspirations were. That is murder and nothing else, on a large scale.’33 General Crookendon was unashamed in his desire for revenge. On the eve of a massive cordon-and-search operation the following week he wrote to his mother and father: ‘We all hope like mad that they [the Jews] will be as tough as they can, so we can really get moving. I feel very much like striking a small enough skid myself.’ He later recounted that he had had ‘a very amusing time’ during Operation Shark. Over several days his men had detained 28,000 people and interrogated them all. ‘The men were excellent in their handling of the skids and my four-phase treatment, which was the order in the Brigade, worked very well.’ If a suspect refused to obey an order, a serviceman was obliged to repeat the order but was then permitted to hit him, if he was within reach, ‘on the rear’ and, next, on the head, and finally to open fire. He was pleased that ‘the men showed a judicious balance between plenty of firmness but no brutality’. Crookendon felt that a big haul of arms found under the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv vindicated


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the operation and exposed the ‘cold-blooded and cynical hypocrisy’ of the Jewish population. He ended with a rather double-edged comment: ‘Tel Aviv was a lucky city – 13,000 troops in it for four days and not a sign of any reprisals by the men.’34 The reasons for Crookendon’s earlier lament over the loss of experienced junior officers are well illustrated by the memoir of Captain Ridley Hugh Clark, 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, attached to 6th Airborne, a decorated veteran of the campaign in north-west Europe. In March 1946 his battalion was assigned to the Alamein Camp, near Bethlehem, where it was charged with guard duties in and around Jerusalem. On the day of the explosion his company was on duty and was sent to form a cordon around the stricken hotel. For seven days the men camped in the grounds of the YMCA, across the road, and watched rescue teams drag out the bodies of the dead. In his memoir he recalled: The first night curfew, the Company Sergeant-Major was so mad and worked up by the killing of innocent civilians that I took charge of his pistol for the night as I was sure he was going to shoot someone.

Confronted by a belligerent NCO a less confident officer might have lost control. In several places, notably the Airborne Division camps around Netanya, some did.35 By the autumn 1946, there were renewed signs that the constant toll of casualties was eroding morale. On 17 November a roadside bomb planted by the Irgun near Sarona destroyed a police vehicle, killing three British constables and a sergeant in the RAF. Irgun fighters fired on the survivors as they attempted to get clear of the flaming wreck. Anthony Wright, a former bank clerk from Tavistock who opted for the PPF for his national service, recorded in his diary that it was ‘a hideous act of deliberate slaughter. It becomes more difficult to maintain a sane and level headed attitude towards the Jews.’ Wright, who was a thoughtful and sensitive young man, retained his composure and continued to behave correctly; others did not. Afterwards, troops and police manning checkpoints insulted and manhandled Jews who had to pass through. In central Tel Aviv off-duty police officers rampaged along Hayarkon Street and wrecked a Jewish-owned cafe. A dozen enraged soldiers forced their way into a hotel and smashed up the ground floor. Over 30 cases of assault involving members of the security forces were reported. As a precaution further patrols in Jewish districts were cancelled. Wright struggled with the dilemmas of a law officer but understood why his fellows cracked: The Jews complain that as policemen we should not use such ‘jungle law’; they are of

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course correct. The long and strong arm of the law should be sufficient. When, as here, it is not, patience is lost, as is reasonable. What else can be expected when terrorism reaches such heights without being crushed?36

Attacks on the police and army reached a climax in the last two months of 1946 and the first weeks of the New Year. For many troops the last straw was the abduction and flogging of a popular officer in 2nd Parachute Brigade, Brigade Major ‘Paddy’ Brett, and three NCOs on 29 December 1946. It did not matter that the indignity was inflicted by the Irgun as a reprisal for the caning of one of their men. Hundreds of paratroopers based at Camp 21, near Netanya, poured out of the gates and down the road into Netanya, where they ‘turned that town upside down’. Alfred Weatherley, a 24-year-old red beret who was a veteran of many operations, recalled: ‘I myself went down and kicked in a couple of windows.’ He saw ‘houses ransacked, shop windows kicked in, cars turned over’. The rioting went on until military police intervened; but once the men were herded back to camp their commanders took no further action.37 A few days later, paratroopers again rioted after an Irgun attack on the HQ of 1st Parachute Battalion in Citrus House, in Tel Aviv. According to the New York Herald Tribune, they ‘rounded up some sixty or seventy men from the Montefiore district, took them to the Sarona police compound and made them run the gauntlet between lines of soldiers and police who beat them with sticks and rifle butts’. Twenty-nine Jews were injured and seven hospitalized.38 It was at this moment that Montgomery finally won cabinet approval for a further military crackdown. To prepare the ground British civilians and nonessential personnel were evacuated, while civil servants, police and army units were pulled back into heavily fortified cantonments. Barker, soon to be succeeded by Lieutenant General G. H. A. MacMillan, launched the diminished garrison into a series of cordon-and-search operations, snap checks on roads and in cafes, patrols, and ambushes.39 However, these more aggressive tactics worked no better than previous efforts to suppress the Irgun and Lehi. March 1947 began with a devastating Irgun attack on the British officers club in Jerusalem and a cafe in Haifa, leaving 20 dead. The High Commissioner responded by imposing martial law on Tel Aviv and parts of Jerusalem. Operation Elephant involved the suspension of normal life, including commerce, and inflicted considerable discomfort on the Jewish population. But the Irgun continued to mount attacks. On 17 March martial law was suspended because the army could not sustain the operation any longer without reinforcements. As if to signal the bankruptcy of military tactics, at the end of the month Lehi blasted the Haifa oil refinery.40 Morale was further undermined by the knowledge that the commitment of the government to remain in Palestine was slipping. In February 1947, Foreign


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Secretary Ernst Bevin announced that Britain was handing the future of Palestine to the United Nations to decide. The possibility remained that Britain could be called upon to stay in some capacity or other, but the end of the mandate was in sight. It was perhaps the fear of being the last to die, or the bitterness at seeing comrades perish for no good reason, that relations between the security forces and the Jewish population now commenced a downward spiral of violence and reprisal. The event that came to epitomize this mutual enmity was the kidnapping and hanging of two sergeants from the intelligence corps in July 1947. Sergeants Marvyn Paice and Clifford Martin were seized by the Irgun in Netanya. They were held for over two weeks as hostages against the lives of two captured Irgun fighters who had been sentenced to death. Despite an immense search operation by men of 1st Infantry Division they could not be found. When the authorities, in the new spirit of resolution, carried out the death sentence, the two sergeants were hanged. Their bodies were later strung up from the branches of a eucalyptus tree in countryside outside the town. The ground beneath the corpses was mined so that when a search party found the site on 31 July an explosion injured more troops.41 The hanging of the two sergeants led to a weekend of riots against Jewishowned properties and synagogues around Britain. In Palestine it provoked an orgy of revenge violence. John Graham remembered that ‘among the Jocks any lingering sympathy for the Jewish cause was now extinguished. All ranks were determined to insist that the punitive measures imposed on the population were complied with to the letter.’ Denis Edwards was a veteran of the drop at Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, but despite his experience of warfare even he was shocked. ‘There was a lot of bad feeling about that. The soldiers were very angry and you cannot blame them.’ Many years later Alfred Weatherley told an interviewer without a hint of shame that paratroopers took in a number of Jews for minor offences and gave them ‘a good beating up’.42 On the evening of 31 July, mobs of soldiers and police trashed shops in downtown Tel Aviv, overturned cars and smashed buses, and beat up any Jew they met on the streets. At around 9 p.m. several armoured cars from the Airborne Division base at Citrus House roared into the city centre and indiscriminately sprayed machine-gun fire into passing buses, cafes and restaurants. By the time order was restored five innocent Jews had been killed and many more wounded. Not a single serviceman faced disciplinary proceedings as a result of these blatant, arbitrary reprisals.43 Yet, despite the appalling tactics of the Irgun and Lehi, such sentiments did not infect the whole of the security forces and, perhaps even more remarkably, a significant portion remained not just immune to anti-Jewish feeling but pro-Jewish. This persistent and resilient philo-Semitism is one of the most underexplored aspects of the British presence in Palestine during the fag end of the mandate. Too often it is simply assumed to have been a consequence of the Nazi persecution of

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the Jews and a reaction to the ghastly revelations when the concentration camps were liberated. However, by 1946–47 a high proportion of men who had served in north-west Europe had been demobbed or rotated back to the UK. They were replaced by national servicemen for whom the newsreels of Belsen and reports of the Nuremberg trials were one to two years distant. Consequently, few officers or other ranks were predisposed to look sympathetically on the Jews as Jews. Rather, their positive feelings were inspired by their encounter with the Zionist enterprise and the favourable contrast between the Jewish sector, with its modern urban settlements and advanced agriculture, and the overwhelmingly traditional Arab society. Major Victor Dove, 8th Battalion 3rd Parachute Brigade, had served in North Africa during the war, but when he arrived in Palestine he was impressed by the ‘thriving oasis of industry and success in the middle of a sand-swept wilderness’. Colin Mitchell could not restrain his admiration for what he saw even when conducting cordon-and-search operations on kibbutzim: ‘These were honest, hard working farmers and labourers and we could not use force against them.’ Another young subaltern, Ian Wilson, 23rd Field Company Royal Engineers, attached to 1st Guards Brigade, arrived in Palestine in December 1945, when the country was still relatively peaceful. He had time to explore the scenery, visiting kibbutzim and Bedouin encampments. ‘I soon came to admire the enterprise, industry and contentment in the Jewish settlements.’44 Roy Hammerton was a 19-year-old trooper in the 3rd King’s Own Hussars when his unit was posted to Palestine in October 1945 and attached to 6th Airborne as a reconnaissance regiment. In this role the men were decked out with red berets, which meant they often attracted unwelcome attention from the Jewish population. Even so, his preferences were clear: Both Arab and Jewish communities were initially hospitable and friendly to everyone, but this veneer was to vanish between the two races over the years. There was a fundamental difference in their approach to life. Jewry is enterprising, efficient; the Arab content to preserve today as it is.45

John Kenneally, a faux Irishman who won the VC in Tunisia as a corporal in the Irish Guards in 1943, arrived in Palestine with the Guards Parachute Battalion. He had a complicated background and was actually half-Jewish, which may have predisposed him to favour the Jews. ‘In my considered opinion’, he wrote in his memoirs: the establishment were pro-Arab but the ordinary soldier could not care less one way or the other. In fact, towards the end of the mandate, the majority of the soldiers favoured the Jews. They had suffered so much in Europe; we saw the hardships and misery they


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went through in Palestine and they were outnumbered ten to one. The ordinary Britisher will always favour the underdog.

Kenneally developed another reason for favouring the Jews: he fell in love with a girl on a kibbutz. Indeed, several men in his unit developed liaisons with Jewish women. The accessibility and allure of these European women, as against the remoteness of Arab women, played no small part in influencing soldierly opinion.46 For some men, dislike of Arabs led them to prefer Jews for negative reasons. In his diary, police constable Anthony Wright routinely referred to Arabs as ‘wogs’ and Arab districts as ‘wogland’. In contrast to this dismissive and racist attitude, his reaction to the arms find at Yagur was to note the ‘great ingenuity shown by Jews’. Wright sympathized with ‘the suffering Jews seeking their Biblical Homeland now the war is over’. However, he noted that ‘the Promised Land is not at present unoccupied’. He read about the Zionist movement and evidently enjoyed the modern conveniences it had created, although he strove to remain neutral.47 John Wells Watson, on the other hand, made no pretence of neutrality. A well-educated young man, he was called up for national service in the RAF and posted to Unit Signals RAF HQ, Cairo. In October 1946 he transferred to the Forces Broadcasting Station in Haifa, which he considered much more congenial. He told his father: ‘the Jews are politer than the “wogs” of the Cairo backstreets – more politic – I think’. In addition to their better manners, Watson appreciated their suffering and admired their cultural accomplishments. He explained that ‘when you hear about the refugee ship conditions, and the German concentration camps, and then our treatment of them in more concentration camps, I don’t really blame them for getting a bit bitter.’ Paradoxically, his sympathy was partly the result of his prejudices: Either they settle down or the Jews will be once more a people without a country. A great mistake for all as they are very cultured and intelligent, and are much better on themselves, not all over the world causing Communism by their unscrupulous finance.48

Watson regularly counselled his parents in England to discount or ignore reports of Jewish atrocities against the security forces. He tried to persuade them that this was merely propaganda devised by the government to engender support for British rule: I hope you realise this and discredit the socialist Government’s intense anti-Semitic propaganda. Personally, this three months in Palestine has made me more pro-Jewish than I have been for years. The Palestine Jews, on the whole, are the ones who want a

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country of their own, and not the ones who bleed the money from the capitals of Europe and the US (or are supposed to). Here on the whole they are a vigorous and progressive – if a bit rough – people and really very sensitive.49

Increasingly, Watson defined Jewish virtues against not just the Arabs but also his fellow countrymen, who he regarded as ignorant and boorish. ‘The Jews however are a European, civilised, well-educated (more cultured on the average than we are) and generally decent people. Of course, there are many exceptions (like Irgun Zwei Leumi), and they have their faults as everyone has, including an overdue emphasis on the value of money.’ The British troops, however, had developed in his eyes ‘a dreadfully Deutsch kind of Herrenvolk attitude over here’. The Arabs were ‘much less educated and barbarious [sic]’. He was disgusted that British troops whistled in cinemas when girls appeared on the screen and noted that Jews queued up to see the art-house film Les Enfants du Paradis.50 Aside from this rather ridiculous snobbery, the aspect of the British presence that disturbed him most was the treatment of the refugee ships. The other day when one of these ships came in, I couldn’t help sympathising with the poor wretches, who had travelled so far; and do you blame the local population for siding with their own people, who are deported to Cyprus, as soon as they arrive . . . How ashamed to be in the British uniform.51

In this he was far from unique. Ironically, the policy that the security forces were there to enforce was the one most calculated to generate a visceral sympathy for the Jewish cause among those very same personnel. Captain Michael Reynolds was a Royal Marine on board HMS Phoebe, based at Haifa from 1946 to 1948. On one occasion he was responsible for removing ‘illegal immigrants’ from an intercepted ship and handing them over to the airborne troops on land, who would convey them to internment camps in Palestine or on Cyprus. Years later he reflected: We all felt sorry for these people and secretly admired them; I remember one old lady dressed in a beautiful coat, the wife of a distinguished brain surgeon whom I carried off a boat in my arms. The boats and ships they travelled in were often in a terrible state, overcrowded and uncomfortable, some far from seaworthy; it must have been almost unbearable to be caught and turned back in sight of the Palestine shore.52

E. J. Rooke-Matthews found the task of handling the immigrants to be harrowing. ‘After losing comrades in liberating the victims of the concentration camps we were now described in terms applied to the oppressors in Germany – indeed we were now the oppressors.’ Sapper Ian Wilson was appalled by the filth and lack of


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sanitation on the ships. But the removals were worse. ‘It was a distasteful task to greet people similar to those we had helped to liberate from Belsen in 1945 and send them off to other camps. It was moving to see the fanaticism shown and the hardship endured.’ At the same time, he was angry with the Jewish Agency and Hagana for organizing what he considered publicity stunts. Roy Hammerton lamented: ‘There were few of us who were not sympathetic to their desires to enter “The Promised Land”, after all the horrors that the Jews had endured in Europe over the war years. But rules had to be implemented . . .’53 Policemen were not immune to such feelings, either. Joseph Adolph was a former army officer who entered the PPF in 1944. Two years later he was posted to Haifa as second in command of the police district, in which capacity he had to oversee the reception of refugee boats. ‘I was sorry for them,’ he remembered decades later. ‘I didn’t like the job in the sense that one could not be anything else but sorry for these people because they’d had a hell of a hard time and a lot of them were in very poor condition.’ However, Adolph was in a distinct minority among the police, perhaps because others had not seen the horrors of liberated Europe in 1944–45.54 Indeed, the pathetic image of the refugee boats could have a negative impact on those who started from an antagonistic point of view. Colonel Norman wrote to his mother: A ship came in last Sunday with 600 odd Jewish illegal immigrants on board and after lunch I decided to go down to Haifa to watch the trans-shipment, which I’d never done before. I got there at 6 p.m. and stayed on the quay till 10 p.m. I’ve never seen such a revolting set of people – behaving like animals and the stench was quite indescribable. You could smell it 100 yards off.

Again, Norman translated his personal feelings into an authoritative intelligence briefing for officers. In a lecture on 18 July 1947 he opined: the Jews are very like the Germans in some respects. Both races are very easily susceptible to mass hysteria, and you can generally see the tail end of this at any trans-shipment operation in Haifa, where the spectacle of this almost bestial hysteria is really disgusting.

Norman considered illegal immigration to be a ‘racket’ with ‘one object: to obtain a Jewish majority in Palestine, and in order to achieve this, like the Nazis, they will go to any lengths’.55 Fortunately, perhaps, such extreme opinions did not seem to penetrate very deeply among the officers. In fact, far from seeing the Jewish settlers as a ruthless enemy, quite a few expressed discomfort even when it came to search operations. Captain Ridley Hugh Clark recalled that in October 1946 his unit was sent out

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to search Jewish villages for weapons dumps. ‘It was a rotten job having to search right through someone’s home looking in cupboards and sometimes having to lift the floorboards.’ However, the frequency with which arms caches were discovered provided a rationale that had no equivalent in the case of handling refugees.56 Some professional fighting men developed an admiration for the Jews precisely because they were such effective opponents and, in some cases, in recognition of their motivation. Major Gregory-Hood, 1st Guards Brigade, who was one of the last to leave Palestine when the British forces were evacuated, recalled: ‘The Arabs were delightful, rather inefficient but extraordinarily nice. But it was the Jews whom I admired; they were extremely hard-headed and very efficient.’ Captain Masters of the Royal Engineers, attached to 6th Airborne, told the historian Robin Neillands: ‘there was a large measure of respect for the Hagana among the soldiery in those days; I think we understood their desire for freedom better than the politicians’.57 Colin Mitchell’s respect for the opposition was actually increased rather than decreased by the murderous Lehi attack on the Airborne vehicle park in Tel Aviv: We now realized that the men we were up against were . . . hard men experienced in the pitiless sophisticated techniques of clandestine warfare learned under German occupation in Europe. They were zealots combining the toughness of the East European with the intelligence of the Jews, and the cause for which they fought was, as they saw it, that of the very survival of their race in a nation of their own. In their patriotic fervour, forged in the fires of Europe, they now transferred the hatred they felt for the Germans to the British, who were thwarting their ambitions and, they believed, abetting their rivals for Palestine, the Arabs. They were a formidable enemy.58

Although Michell Raper, HQ Platoon, 40/42 Company Royal Army Service Corps, was stationed at Camp 21, near Netanya, which had seen serious disturbances after the hanging of the two sergeants, he too had a sneaking admiration for the Hagana. They were ‘pretty good guys by all accounts. They know the country and they are picked men. We are strangers and are most emphatically not picked men.’59 Like many servicemen, John Watson explained Jewish martial prowess by referring to their struggle against the Germans – although in reality only a handful of former partisans and ghetto fighters reached Palestine before 1948. More pertinently, the analogy reflected badly on the British. Watson told his parents: They’re efficient, very brave, and also used to fighting against the people who rule their countries, who shut them in camps in Europe; and here they continue fighting their


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aggressors . . . in fact the terrorists are doing to us what they tried to do to the Germans in Warsaw.

Watson was even inclined to excuse the murder of Paice and Martin on related grounds: ‘I admit it was an atrocity. But what is it in comparison to the atrocities committed by Germans or Russians, where the victims were counted by the thousands, not one single unit.’60 Denis Payne differentiated the Hagana, who he thought were ex-Jewish Brigade and ‘not bad blokes’, from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang, who did the ‘dirty work’. Another policeman, Thomas Baxendale, who joined the PPF from the army in 1940 and served in the Jewish Section of the CID from 1944, recalled that ‘nine times out of ten they [the Hagana] were on our side’. They were ‘quite well organised’ and they were ‘fighting for what they believed to be a just cause’.61 With just a few exceptions, the conduct of the British security forces gave the lie to the propaganda of the Zionist movement. Indeed, the very same men and women who accused the British of anti-Semitism knew that they were not facing an enemy driven by hatred of Jews as Jews. Whatever the personal feelings of the average officer, trooper or constable, Jewish leaders were well aware that there was no systematic policy of discrimination or violence based exclusively on ‘race’, religion, ethnicity or nationality. By 1946 Palestine might have become a ‘police state with a conscience’, but that was a world away from the regimes under which Jews had suffered in Europe over the previous century.62 Samuel Katz, an Irgun organizer and publicist, observed in his memoir of the struggle: ‘Of course, the British could physically crush the Jewish population of Palestine. But we knew something far more important: that there were limits of oppression beyond which the British Government dared not go.’ Katz, who visited England on clandestine Irgun work several times during this period, sensed that the public would not accept harsh tactics. ‘Only a deep and violent hatred could tolerate the kind of war their government would have to wage in order to crush the Jews. No such hatred existed.’63 Perhaps the last word should go to the senior officers who presided over operations and who, for the most part, never let their feelings or those of their men get out of control. General Gale summed up his professional detachment succinctly: I was not a Jew and never a Zionist. I was, however, impressed by two facts. The Jews were in Palestine and they were under our mandate. Likes or dislikes must not blur judgment; but this was not always as easy as it sounds, for the acts of the terrorists were such that feeling was bound to run high.

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Nevertheless, his men continued to behave with extraordinary restraint. ‘I do not know what their views on illegal immigration were, but I have seen British troops handling aged Jews and children with the utmost consideration and many a Jew appreciates this.’64 Major ‘Dare’ Wilson, historian of 6th Airborne in Palestine, reflected that the assignment from September 1945 to April 1948 was ‘in many respects more unpleasant and difficult to carry out than any it had had in wartime’. Yet the Division could look back on its record with pride and satisfaction because of the efficient, humane, and tolerant manner in which a distasteful duty was discharged. Such was the provocation that few forces in the world other than the British Army would have had either the discipline or the patience to restrain themselves from counterviolence.65

Contrary to Zionist propaganda of the time, echoed in much of the subsequent historiography, British rule in Palestine did not end in an orgy of anti-Semitic abuse and violence. Indeed, quite the reverse occurred. While the minority initially inclined to dislike Jews had all their prejudices confirmed, and those who were pro-Jewish (largely because of what they had learned about the Nazi persecution of the Jews) tended to find much in the new Jewish society to sustain their sympathy, the vast majority of service personnel remained neutral and did their duty under extraordinarily trying circumstances. For a significant number the tasks they had to perform actually modified their attitude in favour of the Jewish population. It was nearly impossible to handle the refugees from the immigrant ships without feeling compassion or to raid neat Jewish villages that radiated hard work and modesty without wondering who was on the right side and who was in the wrong. Few who served in Palestine were immune to its charms. It is of course common for men and women posted overseas to relish the exotic and, especially in later life, to romanticize postings abroad. But countless letters home, diaries, memoirs and interviews testify to the seductive magic of the Holy Land. For very many servicemen and women, it was one of the best experiences of their life in uniform. General Gale ‘made many friends’ there and left ‘with much sadness’. One Grenadier Guards company commander ‘regarded the tour as easily the best soldiering he had ever had’. It was easy to see why: ‘Excellent climate, lovely wild flowers, a spice of danger, but lots of fun – riding, shooting and trips to Jerusalem and the Holy Places.’66

13

Air Power Lessons Learnt and Not Learnt: The Royal Air Force and the Gulf War, 1990–91 Sebastian Ritchie

In The Air War 1939–1945 Richard Overy argues that the success with which the Western Allies exploited air power was based on their employment of a general air strategy, which he compared favourably with the more limited air strategy pursued by the Axis powers. The general air strategy was underpinned by four doctrinal pillars, simultaneously pursued; these were air defence, strategic bombing, and air support for both land and maritime forces. Other distinctive features of the general air strategy included strategic-level prioritization, the high degree of autonomy afforded by the Allies to their air forces, and the commitment of economic resources to air power on a colossal scale. Yet considered in detail The Air War contains many other important explanations for the Allied victory in the air, including leadership and organizational factors. Specifically, Overy identifies a higher degree of institutional flexibility within the British Air Staff than existed in the other armed services, and which manifested itself particularly in the RAF’s capacity to exploit past experience. In Overy’s words: ‘the air staff was able to make a significant contribution to war planning on the basis of past training and the lessons of recent combat’.1 This can be illustrated in a number of ways, the most obvious being the revolutionary improvement of strategic-bombing capabilities during the course of the war. The transformation of tactical air power also resulted to a considerable extent from the systematic study of early operations, such as the Battle of France in 1940, which demonstrated that entirely new approaches would be required in order to bring air power to bear effectively in the support of ground forces. This willingness to exploit past experience likewise played a large part in the dramatic enhancement of air support for maritime operations, so vital to the Allies’ ultimate victory during the Battle of the Atlantic. In short, the successful identification and exploitation of both operational and tactical lessons became central to the effective employment of air power. During the Cold War British defence policy continued to be heavily reliant on air power, and the lessons process remained important to the RAF’s capacity

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to respond to the many and varied requirements of UK air strategy. But whereas in an era of total war political and resource constraints rarely blocked the path towards modernization and change, peacetime conditions were inevitably accompanied by tighter budgets, which became even more restrictive as the UK’s post-war economic problems mounted. Nevertheless, in proportional terms the UK remained one of the world’s biggest defence spenders, and the RAF retained the adaptability that had become such an important part of its organizational culture. Hence the search for lessons continued as a matter of routine in the aftermath of virtually all operations and exercises. However, the post-Cold War period confronted the RAF with an infinitely greater challenge, as it faced not only further drastic defence cuts but also rapidly intensifying operational demands. The aim of this essay is to examine how successfully the RAF retained its long-standing ability to identify and implement lessons in this environment. After summarizing some of the main features of RAF operations in the first Gulf War, focusing particularly on fast jet operations, it considers the principal lessons the RAF identified from the conflict before examining how far these were actually exploited. In so doing it also seeks to identify some of the factors that have historically determined whether or not post-conflict lessons are successfully applied by the military. Between the winter of 1989 and the spring of 1990 the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The Cold War came abruptly to an end, and the world began enthusiastically anticipating a new era of peace and a substantial peace dividend derived from cuts in defence expenditure. The RAF, like the other UK armed services, nervously waited for the axe to fall. Then, out of the blue, it became embroiled in its largest live operation since the Suez crisis – the First Gulf War, or, to use the British codename, Operation Granby. At the height of the Gulf campaign some 157 RAF aircraft were deployed. They included 49 Tornado GR1 and 12 Jaguar attack and reconnaissance aircraft, 18 Tornado F3 interceptor fighters, Nimrod maritime patrol and electronic intelligence aircraft, C130 Hercules transport aircraft, air-to-air refuelling tankers and support helicopters. During Operation Desert Storm alone they flew 6,108 sorties; during the Gulf operation as a whole they of course flew many more. In addition to the aircraft, there were two RAF Regiment Wing Headquarters, two surface-to-air missile squadrons and four RAF Regiment Light Armoured Squadrons and Field Squadrons. At the peak of operations some 7,000 RAF personnel were deployed in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Cyprus.2 Needless to say, the Gulf War was not the operation the RAF had been preparing for since the UK’s withdrawal from empire in the 1960s and ’70s, and it was to prove a difficult and arduous campaign. During the conflict the RAF’s basic offensive doctrine was fundamentally challenged, it lost a number of its most modern aircraft and several aircrew in combat, and it was confronted by a range

AIR POWER LESSONS LEARNT AND NOT LEARNT

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of problems arising from equipment, weaponry and tactics which periodically limited its operational contribution. From the 1970s onwards, RAF training and equipment was very largely fashioned for the requirements of the anticipated conflict with the Warsaw Pact on the Central Front. The principal air defence aircraft, the Tornado F3, was procured for the highly specialized role of low – medium altitude beyond-visual-range interception of Soviet long-range bombers operating against the UK through the Greenland – Iceland – UK gap. When it was ordered, the F3 was not suited to air-to-air combat with contemporary Warsaw Pact fighters, for both performance and agility above 10,000 ft were poor, and by 1990 its inferiority in this respect was becoming even more pronounced as advanced Soviet fighters like the MiG 29 appeared. Furthermore, as the RAF expected to operate the F3 in the United Kingdom Air Defence Region, the aircraft was equipped with only a limited self-defence capability, which restricted its capacity to fly over hostile territory.3 In the attack role, the Tornado GR1 and Jaguar designs were similarly influenced by the requirements of the NATO area. From the RAF’s perspective the Warsaw Pact air defence system was sufficiently strong and sophisticated to make medium-or high-altitude operations over Eastern Europe extremely hazardous. The RAF prepared instead to penetrate hostile airspace at very low altitude, using speed and terrain to mask aircraft from detection and attack. Consequently its offensive aircraft were optimized for low-level flying and incurred a significant performance penalty at higher altitudes; moreover, they were predominantly equipped with weapons designed for low-level release, either while flying over the target or by means of the toss manoeuvre known as lofting. Most aircrew training was conducted at low level, and critical self-defence capabilities were also optimized for low-altitude environments.4 Both the Tornado F3 and GR1 were also technically complex aircraft and their logistical and maintenance support arrangements assumed that they would be flown from well-established main operating bases in the UK or north-west Europe. Deployment out of area wasn’t envisaged for either aircraft before 1990. Older and simpler platforms like the Jaguar were still earmarked for overseas deployments and were very much better prepared for them, but the Jaguar was otherwise operationally inferior to the Tornado GR1 in almost every respect.5 The Gulf operation can be divided into three phases: first, the preliminary deployment phase, in immediate response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait; second, the strengthening of Coalition defences prior to Operation Desert Storm; and third, Desert Storm itself. Initially, the primary objective in the Gulf was to establish a basic defensive line beyond which the Iraqis could not venture without engaging in hostilities against Coalition countries. It is now known that Iraq had no immediate plans to move south from Kuwait into Saudi Arabia in 1990 but this was not clear at the time; moreover, the absence of any Western response

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to Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait might well have encouraged Saddam Hussein to threaten other Gulf states. From a Western perspective, then, it seemed vital to establish a military presence in the Gulf as quickly as possible. But in London the government was at first anxious to demonstrate that British involvement was defensive; as a result, the first British deployment to the Gulf involved a Tornado F3 detachment that had been in Cyprus when the crisis erupted. The F3s reached Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on 11 August 1990, and began theatre familiarization flying immediately. They flew their first operational combat air patrols six days later.6 They were followed on 13 August by a detachment of Jaguars. Although the Jaguar was inferior to the Tornado GR1, which was very much the RAF’s weapon of first choice, its dedicated mobile role meant it could be dispatched to the Gulf more quickly and easily than the GR1. Yet the Jaguar detachment was deployed to Oman, well away from the potential combat area; in other words, this was very much a symbolic deployment designed partly for deterrence but primarily for bolstering Arab support for the nascent US-led coalition. There was no intention of fighting from so far behind the likely area of operations.7 These early deployments, which were of course accompanied by the dispatch of very much larger American forces, achieved their chief aim by rapidly drawing what President George Bush (Senior) called ‘a line in the sand’. They did not establish a very robust fighting force in the Gulf, nor were they intended to do so. By late August the RAF was maintaining in the front line a detachment of F3s which the detachment commander himself later described as ‘blatantly below the minimum requirement’ and ‘manifestly non-operational’.8 The Jaguar detachment was too far away from the likely theatre of operations to be of any practical use, and in any case the RAF’s preference was to conduct offensive operations with the Tornado GR1. At the time, however, these were secondary considerations. The key objective was to establish a presence in the Gulf as quickly as possible, and that is precisely what was achieved.9 In the second phase, between the end of August 1990 and the beginning of Operation Desert Storm on 16 January 1991, measures were taken to strengthen the RAF’s operational capability in the Gulf. An extensive programme of enhancements was applied to the Tornado F3, including environmental adaptations and improvements to the aircraft’s weapons system, engine, electronic warfare capability and armament.10 There is no doubt that these modifications greatly improved the F3’s performance but they could never compensate for basic weaknesses stemming from its original specification. Moreover, implemented with minimal warning and at breakneck speed, the enhancement programme was never likely to be an unqualified success. The evaluation and trial of the various upgrades were compressed into a far shorter time than was desirable, increasing the probability of error. In such circumstances defective equipment


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may sometimes be allowed to enter service, equipment may be procured that does not match requirements, and equipment may be installed in such a way that it is hard to employ in an operational environment. It may also be very difficult for aircrew and ground crew in theatre to accommodate numerous changes during a major operation. Meanwhile, the decision was taken to send the Tornado GR1 to the Gulf. The first detachments reached Bahrain in August 1990; in October GR1s were also stationed at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia, and a further18 aircraft were dispatched to Dhahran in December. At the same time the Jaguars were moved forward to Bahrain.11 By January 1991, therefore, the RAF had more than 60 attack aircraft deployed forward to participate in Operation Desert Storm. But the question naturally arose: what role would they play in the campaign to liberate Kuwait? The Tornado GR1 had been designed, as we have seen, to fulfil a specialized low-level attack role on NATO’s Central Front. Specifically, it was to mount counter-air attacks against Warsaw Pact airfields using the JP233 runwaycratering munition, which was designed for delivery by low-level high-speed overflight of the target. In the Gulf the US-led Coalition forces lacked a specialized airfield-denial capability and the American Air Component Commander therefore welcomed early British proposals to deploy the GR1 in this role.12 By contrast the Jaguars were not built so rigidly into the Coalition air plan. It was broadly envisaged that they would operate in the ground-attack role, striking Iraqi army units in Kuwait with free-fall 1,000 lb bombs and BL755 cluster bombs, which were again designed for low-level release. In October 1990, however, the British Joint Headquarters expressed concern over the potential vulnerability of Jaguars engaged in such missions and raised the possibility that they might fly at higher altitude. Their only high-level weapon, the free-fall 1,000 lb bomb, was considered to be inaccurate against small and dispersed ground targets and so, at the end of November, the Jaguar detachment commander proposed employing the American CBU87 cluster bomb, which was designed for high-level release and which was available in theatre.13 Why were the risks of low-level flying in the Gulf addressed more urgently in relation to the Jaguars than to the GR1s? There are several reasons. First, the GR1 obtained some protection from flying at night, whereas the Jaguar was limited to daytime operations. Second, it was anticipated that the risk posed by air defences to GR1s flying against airfields in Iraq could be reduced by evasive routing and the use of electronic countermeasures. By contrast the Jaguars were likely to operate in the more restricted airspace over Kuwait, where the Iraqis had positioned a formidable barrier of ground-based air defence systems, including dense anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and infrared surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Third, the JP233 capability, which the RAF had actively ‘sold’ to American commanders, effectively tied the GR1s to low-altitude operations. Nevertheless, a move to

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higher-level flying was also considered for the GR1s once air superiority had been established. It was proposed that they should fly in the interdiction role using laser-guided bombs (LGBs), and the USAF offered to provide laser-designating aircraft in the form of F15s.14 The RAF commenced operational flying in the Gulf long before the beginning of Desert Storm. In fact the F3 detachment was effectively operational from the moment it was ordered to the Gulf. In total the F3s flew more than 2,000 combat air patrol sorties from August 1990 to March 1991. But their inherent performance and self-defence limitations ensured that the detachment could only play, at best, a supporting role to the main Coalition air defence effort during Desert Storm itself. Specifically, they were tasked with mounting rear combat air patrols protecting vulnerable high-value assets like command and control aircraft, and they flew well behind a forward layer of American and Saudi fighters and SAMs, which proved more than capable of intercepting the few Iraqi aircraft that took to the air. Nor could the F3s participate in offensive air operations against the Iraqi Air Force. The best that can be said is that, without their contribution, fighter aircraft with the escort or sweep capability that the F3 lacked might have been diverted to rear combat air patrol duties, weakening the offensive effort. The F3s had no opportunity to intercept any Iraqi aircraft, and on only one occasion did they come close to combat.15 The Tornado GR1s experienced perhaps the most difficult baptism of fire of any air force element contributing to the Coalition in January 1991. Their JP233 attacks unquestionably helped to disrupt Iraqi flying during the first week of Desert Storm but this was the full extent of their contribution, for the offensive counter-air campaign so effectively targeted the Iraqi Air Force that it was compelled to cede air superiority to the Coalition in a matter of days. During this phase of the operation the RAF lost four Tornado GR1s; four aircrew were killed, while four became POWs and were paraded, bruised and battered by their captors, before Iraqi television cameras. One aircraft was lost on a JP233 mission, but it is not certain that enemy action was responsible. The other three fell victim to SAMs while engaged in low-level bombing missions against Iraqi airfields with conventional free-fall bombs.16 With the threat from the Iraqi Air Force eliminated and low-level flying proving extremely hazardous, the UK Air Commander decided to move the GR1s up to higher altitude. But their only effective high-level attack capability involved the use of Paveway LGBs, for which laser-designating aircraft were required. Unfortunately the USAF F15s that were expected to undertake this role were instead assigned to the hunt for Iraqi Scud missiles, and the RAF had therefore to deploy a detachment of ageing Buccaneers from the UK as third-party designators, together with two experimental Thermal Imaging Airborne Laser Designating (TIALD) pods, which allowed the GR1s to designate for themselves.


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A laser-designating capability for the GR1s was not established in the Gulf until early February, and in the meantime they were compelled to fly higher-level missions using free-fall 1,000 lb bombs. Their crews were not trained to operate in this way and the aircraft was not optimized to do so either, so it is hardly surprising that these attacks proved very inaccurate.17 One aircraft was lost through self-damage due to the premature explosion of munitions during this phase of GR1 operations; the crew ejected and were taken prisoner.18 When laser-guided bombing started in February, however, the GR1s enjoyed far greater success in a wide variety of interdiction operations and achieved what was, at the time, probably the most accurate bombing in the RAF’s history. With the TIALD pod alone they hit some 229 pinpoint targets within 18 days – an unprecedented success rate.19 A single GR1 was lost to an Iraqi SAM on 14 February during one of these missions, but this phase of GR1 operations was otherwise conducted without further casualties.20 In the meantime the Jaguar detachment found itself approaching Desert Storm with tactics that were still improperly defined. The acquisition of CBU87 cluster bombs suitable for higher-level release had still not been fully approved and yet, as the countdown to Desert Storm continued, concern mounted over the dangers involved in operating over Kuwait at low altitude in daylight. With media attention focusing on the GR1s and with no very firm line being taken by the RAF command chain, the final decision on Jaguar tactics was delegated right down to the detachment commander. He decided that higher-level flying would pose less threat to his aircraft than the low-level option. Although the Jaguars might still be vulnerable to radar-guided SAMs and Iraqi air defence aircraft at higher altitudes, they would enjoy the protection of Coalition assets tasked with the suppression of enemy air defences, such as USAF Wild Weasels, EF111 Ravens and air superiority fighters. The Jaguars’ first sorties (during which they dropped free-fall 1,000 lb bombs) revealed that Iraqi AAA was extremely heavy across the area of operations and persuaded the detachment commander to continue flying at higher altitude. At the end of January the Jaguars were cleared to carry the CBU87 cluster bomb, which increased the range of potential targets. But its effectiveness was unfortunately reduced by software and carriage problems, which resulted from the fact that it had been procured only shortly before hostilities began. The 1,000 lb bomb therefore remained the preferred weapon until the last week of the air campaign. In total the Jaguars completed more than 600 sorties during Desert Storm without losing a single aircraft, and during interdiction missions released a high proportion of their munitions into their target areas, albeit without the pinpoint accuracy associated with precision-guided weapons. As well as fulfilling the interdiction task, they were employed in an anti-shipping role against Iraqi fast

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patrol boats, employing both conventional cannon and the CRV7 rocket, which had been procured for this specific purpose. Again, however, the rocket proved inaccurate until computed weapon aiming was introduced in the final stages of the air campaign. Thereafter the CRV7 was used very effectively against Iraqi ground targets.21 It is important not to draw excessively negative conclusions about the RAF’s performance in the Gulf. It had spent two decades preparing almost exclusively for a war inside the NATO area, which it expected to conduct from its British and European main operating bases. RAF personnel demonstrated considerable flexibility and resourcefulness in deploying and sustaining a large number of aircraft outside Europe, and in conducting operations from unknown and sometimes poorly prepared airfields in the Gulf states. The logistical difficulties were formidable: as one RAF supplier put it: ‘we had shown that we could effectively project air power, but the cost had been exorbitant: we had taken too much equipment, we had not used it at all well, and we had lost far too much’.22 Yet the problems were ultimately overcome, albeit with American and Saudi assistance.23 The air transport fleet, the tankers, the support helicopters and the Nimrods all performed very well in their assigned roles, while the Tornado GR1s and Jaguars proved highly effective reconnaissance platforms, providing important targeting and battle damage intelligence. It was the RAF’s front-line combat capability that was to some extent found wanting. The RAF had become too heavily committed to a narrow range of tasks and tactics designed for its anticipated role in NATO. It was only possible to break out of this operational straitjacket by rushing new equipment and weapons into service and by last-minute on-the-job training for the aircrew involved. Inevitably this approach was only partially successful. The RAF benefited from the fact that it was supported by a large engineering, supply and industrial infrastructure and manned by aircrew of exceptionally high quality. But in the time available there was never any realistic prospect of rectifying some of the more fundamental shortcomings that the Gulf War exposed in its doctrine, training and equipment.24 After the war the British armed services began their usual lessons-learnt process, with identified lessons being compiled at unit level and then staffed up the command chain.25 Ultimately they were assembled into overall lessonslearnt papers, which were endorsed by the high command and subsequently the Ministry of Defence. The RAF’s outlook after the Gulf War might have been particularly defensive for a number of reasons. First, the British media had targeted the RAF to a greater extent than the other armed services during Desert Storm. It had of course operated continuously throughout the campaign, whereas the Army was involved only during the last few days and the Royal Navy’s role was peripheral. Some of


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the media coverage had inevitably become very negative during the first week of operations because of the casualties suffered by the Tornado force. Second, following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, cuts in defence spending were imminent. As deployed units in the Gulf were executing their missions against Iraq, back in London the Ministry of Defence was simultaneously planning the drawdown. Senior RAF commanders, like their counterparts in the other armed services, were acutely conscious of the impending economies and reasoned that an impressive demonstration of war-fighting capabilities in the Gulf might help to stave off the most far-reaching proposals for force reduction. It might thus have been expected that after the war they would seek to present the RAF’s performance in a favourable light. Third, the Gulf War had in fact raised some very serious questions indeed about the RAF’s operational posture. It cast doubt on the efficacy of low-level flying against targets protected by modern ground-based air defence systems, and at the same time demonstrated the enormous potential of precision-guided munitions designed for higher-level release. The Iraqis’ capacity to threaten aircraft operating at medium – high altitudes had largely been eliminated by America’s advanced suppression of enemy air defence capability. In short the Gulf War suggested very strongly that in future the RAF might be compelled to operate at higher level, yet its front-line combat squadrons were all very largely committed to low-level tactics, and even if doctrine and training were radically altered its principal combat aircraft were not due for replacement for some years. It would therefore have been understandable if the RAF had proved reluctant to admit that some very far-reaching changes might be required. Taking all these factors into consideration, the RAF’s Gulf War lessons-learnt study was a surprisingly honest and wide-ranging document. It admitted that the war had exposed some important gaps in the RAF’s war-fighting preparedness and capability. Better communications, navigation and self-defence equipment was required across the front-line aircraft fleet, and there was a need to improve interoperability with Coalition partners and to rebuild a logistical and maintenance capability for deployed operations outside the NATO area. Enhanced air-to-air refuelling provisions were needed to increase the range of aircraft operating away from main or forward operating bases, while air transport capacity had proved insufficient and the Coalition as a whole had been too dependent on the United States for the suppression of enemy air defences. There was also a need to improve mission support, and offensive operations would have benefited from more timely and accurate battle damage assessment information. Part of the study was also surprisingly direct in its criticism of the Tornado F3. There was, however, a very good reason for this. By 1991 there was no great secret about the F3’s shortcomings and the RAF was optimistically expecting the aircraft to be replaced altogether by Eurofighter at the end of the decade. It was

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therefore possible to argue that the F3 had performed adequately in the role for which it was designed, that the limitations of the aircraft were well understood, and that steps had already been taken through the Eurofighter project to provide a vastly superior air defence capability in the future. It was chiefly when offensive air warfare was considered that the RAF’s assessment of the Gulf War’s lessons was more muted. The RAF did acknowledge the important role that precision-guided bombs had played in the conflict and emphasized its intention to employ more such munitions in future, including specialized anti-armour systems and stand-off weapons that might limit the Tornado’s exposure to enemy ground-based air defences. The need to train and equip aircrew to operate at higher altitudes was also stressed. But most of these issues were only addressed in broad terms while at the same time the existing commitment to low-level tactics was reiterated. Hence, while the RAF now accepted the need for greater tactical flexibility it was reluctant to contemplate a general reorientation towards higher-level flying. The Gulf War was not immediately viewed as an important tactical watershed.26 The RAF sought to implement the lessons of the Gulf War in a particularly challenging financial environment. The 1990s witnessed a succession of defence reviews, beginning with the so-called Options for Change review at the start of the decade and culminating in the Blair government’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998. Defence spending fell in real terms by more than 20 per cent between 1990 and 2002, and was reduced from around 4 per cent of GDP to about 2.5 per cent in the same period. The RAF’s front-line force, which numbered 63 squadrons in 1990, had shrunk to 43 squadrons by 2002, while the number of enlisted personnel declined from 88,000 to 53,000.27 There were some compensating factors. The substantial reduction in the size of the force left some limited scope for improving the quality of equipment. ‘Smaller but better’ was the phrase coined by one Conservative Defence Secretary in the early 1990s.28 Yet the margin for doing so was very narrow, and finance inevitably impeded the implementation of many Gulf lessons. It is probably true to say that in the early 1990s the Ministry of Defence attached considerably greater importance to the management of the drawdown, which was accompanied by major organizational changes, than to implementing the lessons of the Gulf War. The financial pressures were increased by the intensity of operations in the 1990s. The northern and southern no-fly zones were established over Iraq, and NATO forces were committed to the former Yugoslavia. Operation Deliberate Force was launched against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, the UNSCOM (United Nation Special Commission) crisis with Iraq culminated in Operation Desert Fox in 1998, and hostilities erupted over Kosovo in 1999. In all of these operations the RAF was the British government’s weapon of first choice; in the decade after 1991 it was almost continuously engaged in live – or potentially live – operations,


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which had to be conducted from a shrinking resource base. Yet it is possible to argue that this simple truth was not recognized in British defence policy or in defence expenditure plans. A few Gulf War lessons were implemented with relative ease. The requirement for improved mission support quickly led to the establishment of a new organization known as the Air Warfare Centre (AWC), responsible for developing and implementing operational and tactical doctrine and for providing integrated mission support to RAF operational units in peace and war. Apart from formulating operational-level doctrine, the AWC’s functions would embrace air warfare training, electronic warfare, air intelligence, equipment evaluation and operational analysis.29 These activities were not new to the RAF, but they had previously been undertaken by a number of entirely separate departments; after the Gulf War these organizations were amalgamated into the AWC. This also meant, of course, that the financial implications of the AWC’s creation were not especially significant. The RAF’s renewed commitment to strategic mobility and deployed operations was reflected in investment in the air transport fleet in the 1990s, including the acquisition of new support helicopters, a C130 upgrade programme and ultimately the leasing of C17 strategic transport aircraft from the United States.30 Reductions in the number of front-line combat squadrons during the early 1990s lowered the potential demand for air-to-air refuelling capacity to levels that could be satisfied by existing provisions,31 but the RAF did place a greater emphasis on mobility and overseas deployments in their logistical training and organization, and a number of dedicated mobile units such as the Tactical Communications Wing were augmented in a period when the rest of the service was contracting.32 Basic air-portable spares packages known as Priming Equipment Packs were also prepared to ease the task of deploying the Tornado overseas.33 Consequently, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the RAF probably improved its capacity to operate limited numbers of aircraft from relatively austere foreign bases. Yet it could be argued that much of this new investment was driven by a general need for enhanced mobility in the post-Cold War strategic environment, rather than by any specific attempt to implement the lessons of the Gulf War. Given the orientation of British defence policy towards regions beyond the NATO area in the 1990s, a substantial expenditure on the air transport fleet and on mobile support units would have been necessary under any circumstances. Moreover, the principal deployments in this period – in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – did not test the RAF’s support capability to the extent that it was tested in 1990. Instead they turned into long-term commitments sustained by a substantial logistical and maintenance effort from the UK and also by some vital assistance from host nations. Even then the technical sophistication of the Tornado ensured that it remained a difficult aircraft to operate overseas. From 1999 to 2003 it was

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necessary for the RAF to maintain six F3s in Saudi Arabia to fly a combat air patrol that required just two aircraft. This was despite the fact that the deployed F3s received priority in the allocation of spare parts and held twice the volume of some critical spares as was held by F3 squadrons in the UK.34 In 1998 the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review frankly admitted that the UK’s military logistics structure could not sustain prolonged or simultaneous overseas operations. The review proposed ‘enhancing the ability of the Royal Air Force to conduct operations from remote locations with little or no infrastructure by providing logistic support needed for deployed operating bases’.35 Almost identical aspirations had been expressed in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Particular equipment deficiencies identified during the Gulf War led directly to a range of important aircraft enhancements. Many of the aircraft deployed to the Gulf in 1990 had at first lacked effective self-defence capabilities and had to be modified during the operation;36 most of those employed in subsequent conflicts were from the outset fitted with such equipment as chaff and flare dispensers, radar warning receivers, electronic counter-measures, missile advance-warning systems and towed radar decoys.37 But other recommendations proved impossible to implement at a time when defence expenditure was being drastically cut. In the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 the Ministry of Defence’s published lessons-learnt report identified RAF requirements for secure (i.e. encrypted) air-to-air communications, for better anti-armour weapons and for improved electronic warfare equipment. The RAF’s near-total dependence on the United States for the suppression of enemy air defences was also noted, as was the inadequacy of timely battle damage assessment information.38 All of these lessons had been identified eight years earlier following the Gulf War, but while some had been addressed by specific measures, important capability gaps clearly remained.39 The RAF’s capacity to implement the air combat lessons of the Gulf was inevitably restricted by the basic design and performance characteristics of its principal aircraft. While the RAF could provide the Tornado F3 with a better selfdefence capability, for example, it could not greatly improve its higher-altitude performance or turn it into an accomplished dogfighter; for this it depended on the Eurofighter project. Unfortunately, however, the Eurofighter suffered repeated setbacks, which extended its in-service date to 2006. The delay compelled the RAF to initiate an upgrade programme for the F3 in the late 1990s and to equip the aircraft with both advanced short-range air-to-air missiles and advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles.40 Equally, although the Tornado GR1 was upgraded to the GR4 standard, the aircraft’s performance and operating parameters continued to reflect the fact that it had originally been procured for low-level operations. The stand-off weapons ordered during the 1990s certainly


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promised to compensate for the GR4’s inherent vulnerability at higher level but were only designed for use against a limited range of targets.41 Yet in one important respect, perhaps, the most fundamental RAF air combat lesson of the Gulf War was learnt. Although the official lessons report did not appear to herald a far-reaching tactical reorientation in 1991, virtually all the RAF’s subsequent combat operations were flown at higher level and the Paveway LGB was employed in preference to any other weapon. This was the case over Bosnia in 1995, over Iraq from 1998 onwards and over Kosovo in 1999. Indeed, Paveway proved so effective that its use was extended across the RAF’s offensive aircraft fleet – from the Tornado to the Jaguar and the Harrier.42 This transition resulted in dramatic improvements in the accuracy of bombing compared with the standards associated with non-precision-guided munitions. But this reorientation – one of the most pronounced tactical developments in British defence policy since the Gulf War – was also hampered by the financial environment of the early – mid-1990s. After the Buccaneer and the Pavespike laser designator were withdrawn from service, the RAF came to depend entirely on the TIALD pod for laser designation. Subsequently, the limited number of pods originally procured for the Tornado were spread across the Jaguar and Harrier fleets as well, and were then largely allocated to aircraft engaged in operational deployments in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, leaving few available for training. In the year 2000, a decade after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the head of the UK Defence Procurement Executive publicly admitted to a cumulative purchase of just 23 TIALD pods for all three aircraft fleets. As the pod was not widely exported its unit cost remained stubbornly high (£2.7 million per pod for development and production in 2000), so inhibiting a very much larger British purchase.43 After the Kosovo conflict the RAF released figures showing that there had been no improvement in the accuracy of its laser-guided bombing since the Gulf War, when few Tornado aircrew had had any experience with LGBs. And while officially the problems over Kosovo and Serbia were blamed on poor weather, some aircrew claimed that they had received inadequate training.44 In short, this key lesson of the Gulf conflict was only implemented by stretching resources to their maximum possible extent. Moreover, it could also be argued that the shift towards higher-level flying with LGBs resulted in part from the precise circumstances of the various postGulf War conflicts rather than from a readiness to learn the lessons of the Gulf – from the need to operate in accordance with American doctrine, and from perceptions of the threat posed to low-flying aircraft over Yugoslavia and Iraq. The RAF’s initial reluctance to embrace higher-level tactics wholeheartedly after the Gulf War was reflected in the fact that a new Paveway LGB, Paveway 3, was originally procured in the early 1990s as a low-level weapon, although it has only ever been deployed operationally from higher altitudes.45 Finally, the RAF was

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subjected to strong political pressure to change its offensive tactics. Higher-level flying was dictated in part by the political requirement to avoid casualties, while in each of the post-Gulf War operations British politicians favoured the use of precision-guided munitions because they could be publicly presented as clean and accurate and unlikely to cause civilian casualties.46

CONCLUSION It would be wrong to suggest that the principal air lessons for the UK from the Gulf War were ignored. The RAF’s post-war lessons-learnt investigations were wide-ranging and thorough, and unquestionably helped to shape the service’s operational posture in subsequent years. In 1990–91 it received an abrupt and sometimes painful introduction to the problems of post-Cold War operations, and there can be no doubting that there was a service-wide determination to learn from the experience. A decade later the RAF was far better prepared for such operations in terms of deployability, general war-fighting capability, and capacity to mount offensive attacks from higher altitudes using precision-guided munitions. To that extent, therefore, the RAF continued to exploit lessons in much the same way as it had in the past. The institutional flexibility that Richard Overy identified in The Air War remained an important part of its service ethos as well as its heritage. Clearly, however, the lessons-learnt process was not entirely successful. Some lessons were only applied in response to the operational requirements of the mid – late 1990s, some were only partially implemented and others were largely forgotten. To explain why military organizations are sometimes unable to exploit post-conflict lessons it is essential first of all to consider how their lessons reports are prepared. Although the need to act on lessons may be generally acknowledged and a well-rehearsed and systematic lessons-learnt process put in place, the armed services are often unwilling to identify too many serious deficiencies in these studies. To do so can draw public criticism as well as censure from other quarters of the defence community, and at the same time antagonize the senior officers and politicians responsible for implementing remedial action, usually within tight budgetary constraints. Bearing this in mind the RAF’s post-Gulf War lessons-learnt study must be deemed quite a pragmatic paper. But it might have addressed in considerably more detail what was probably the most fundamental lesson of the conflict – the need to embrace higher-level tactics and the employment of more precision-guided weapons. The report’s failure to do so resulted in part from a genuine concern that other mistakes of the past should not be repeated: the RAF should not change from being a low-level-only air force to being a high-level-only air force. It also reflected constraints imposed by aircraft


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technology. Any sweeping proposals for reorienting tactics towards higher-level flying in the early 1990s would have been open to the legitimate objection that all of the UK’s offensive aircraft were optimized for low-level operations. But there was also, nonetheless, some reluctance within the RAF high command to acknowledge that low-level tactics had proved fundamentally flawed in the precise circumstances of the Gulf War. Historically, the most influential lessons studies have been honest; but they have also been focused. If too many minor lessons are identified, the reforming impetus that exists in the immediate aftermath of hostilities may be dissipated over too many different initiatives. It is far more effective to identify a manageable range of achievable objectives, which are subsequently accepted as priorities across the organization concerned. The unevenness with which the RAF implemented the lessons of the Gulf War may to some extent reflect insufficient prioritization. Certainly, in later years, some RAF officers felt that the Gulf War lessons report had identified too many lessons without isolating those that were of most importance.47 But even if the RAF’s post-Gulf War lessons report had been a more forthright and critical document, even if it had been more narrowly focused on a few key lessons, and even if there had been more scope for improving aircraft like the Tornado, the service would still have faced a series of insuperable political and financial obstacles in the 1990s. In this period the defence policies of consecutive governments attached primary importance to the implementation of post-Cold War defence cuts and to accompanying organizational changes in the UK’s defence structure. The drawdown coincided with a series of major operations. Consequently there was no option but to attach top priority to issues of day-to-day management, partly to conform to government spending plans and structural reforms and partly to fulfil almost continuous overseas commitments. In these circumstances it was probably inevitable that at least some important air lessons from the Gulf War would not be fully implemented.


Notes

Notes to Chapter 1: History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy 1 This interview took place in Leicester on 21 January 2009. Richard Overy did not see any of my questions beforehand and answered extempore. The text is based on transcripts made by Lorenzo Cladi, to whom I would like to express my gratitude. C.-C. W. S. 2 The Air War 1939–1945 (London: Europa, 1980; 2nd edn, London: Papermac, 1987; 3rd edn, London: Potomac Books, 2005); The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932–1938 (London: Macmillan, 1982; 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); (with Peter Pagnamenta) All Our Working Lives (London: BBC, 1984); Goering: The Iron Man (London: Routledge, 1984; 2nd edn, London: Phoenix Press, 2000; German translation: Hermann Göring. Machtgier und Eitelkeit, Munich: Heyne, 1986); The Origins of the Second World War (Harlow: Longman, 1987; 2nd edn, Harlow: Longman, 1998; 3rd edn, Harlow: Longman, 2008); (with Andrew Wheatcroft) The Road to War (London: Macmillan, 1989; 2nd edn, London: Penguin, 1999; 3rd edn, London: Pimlico, 2009); War and Economy in the ‘Third Reich’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); The Inter-War Crisis 1919–39 (Harlow: Longman, 1994; 2nd edn, Harlow: Longman, 2007); Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995; New York: W.W. Norton, 1996; 2nd edn, London: Pimlico, 2006; German translation: Die Wurzeln des Sieges. Warum die Alliierten den Zweiten Weltkrieg gewannen, Hamburg: Reinbeck & Partner, 2002); The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 1996); Russia’s War (London: Allen Lane, 1997; German translation: Russlands Krieg. 1941–1945, Hamburg: Reinbeck, 2003); Bomber Command 1939–1945 (London: Harper Collins, 1997); (with Gerhard Otto and Johannes Houwink ten Cate), Nationalsozialistische Besatzungspolitik in Europe 1939–1945: Die “Neuordnung” Europas: NS-Wirtschaftspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten: Vol. 3 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1997); The Battle of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2000; 2nd edn, London: Penguin Books, 2004); Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands (London: Penguin Books, 2001; German translation: Verhöre: Die NS-Elite in den Händen der Alliierten 1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2002); The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004; new edn, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006; German translation: Die Diktatoren: Hitlers Deutschland, Stalins Russland, Munich: Dt. Verl.Anst, 2005); The IWM Second World War Experience, Vol. 1: Blitzkrieg 1939–41 (London: Carlton Books Ltd, 2008); The IWM Second World War Experience, Vol. 2: Axis Ascendant 1941–42 (London: Carlton Books Ltd, 2008); The IWM Second World War Experience, Vol. 3: Turning of the Tide 1942–44 (London: Carlton Books Ltd, 2009); The IWM Second World War Experience, Vol. 4: Struggle for Victory 1944–45 (London: Carlton Books Ltd, 2009); The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009); 1939: Countdown to War (London: Allen Lane, 2009). Books by Richard J. Overy that go beyond 1914–45 are: William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (London: Europa Publications, 1976); The Times History of the

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3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13

14

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20th Century (London: Harper Collins, 1996; 2nd edn, London: Harper Collins, 1996; new edn, London: Harper Collins, 2003); (with Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, eds), Germany Since 1800: A New Social and Economic History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003); The Times History of the World (5th edn, London: Harper Collins, 1999; 6th edn, London: Harper Collins, 2004; 7th edn, London: Harper Collins, 2007; German translation: Knaurs Historischer Weltatlas (6. Auflage, München: Weltbild, 2002). The Road to War (1989), 297; Why the Allies Won (1995), 325. Origins of the Second World War (1987), 1; Why the Allies Won (1995), 17, 317ff. F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967). A. J .P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961). See the chapter by Jeremy Black in this book. See footnote 2 for atlases published by Richard J. Overy. The Road To War (BBC series, 1989); People’s Century (BBC series, 1994); Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow (TV series, 1997); Göring (ZDF, 2004); Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (BBC series, 2005); Hitler und Stalin. Porträt einer Feindschaft (ZDF, 2009). I. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998) and Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (London, 2000); H.-U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vierter Band: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten, 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003). See Mark Roseman, ‘Call for Papers: Beyond the Racial State – Bloomington, Indiana, USA 10/09’, at ‹http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=9506›. Downfall (orig. German title: Der Untergang), directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (2004); The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry (2008); Sophie’s Choice, directed by Alan J. Pakula (1982). The Road to War (1989), 20, 88f. K. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York, 2006); E. Wolfrum, Die Geglückte Demokratie. Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2006). A. C. Grayling, Among The Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? (London, 2006); J. Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York, 2007).

Notes to Chapter 2: Mapping the World: Richard Overy and The Times Atlas of World History 1 Richard Overy was subsequently given the opportunity to check the accuracy of my notes. I have benefited from the comments of Alex Johnson and Richard Overy on an earlier draft. 2 Information provided by Barry Winkelman of Times Books. 3 J. Black, Maps and History (New Haven, 1997), 43–6. 4 G. Barraclough (ed.), The Times Atlas of World History (London, 1978), 13. 5 J. Cole, Geography of World Affairs (London, 1966), 19. 6 Barraclough, Times Atlas, 13. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 146f, 170f. 9 Barraclough, Times Atlas, 128f. 10 Ibid., 94f. 11 Information provided by Thomas Cussans of Times Books.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 3 1 – 4 1

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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Letter Jones to Black, 22.8.2003. J. Black, ‘Mapping early Modern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 25 (1995), 433. J. Keegan (ed.), The Times Atlas of the Second World War (London, 1989). Letter Cussans to Black, 15.3.1999. For an example of this technique see M. Edney, ‘John Mitchell’s map of North America, 1755’, Imago Mundi, 60 (2008), 63–85. Historical Atlas of Canada (3 vols, Toronto, 1987–93); J. Winearls (ed.), Editing Early and Historical Atlases (Toronto, 1975). R. J. Overy (ed.), The Times Complete History of the World (7th. edn, 2007), 147. Ibid., 130. P. Harvey, ‘The medievalist’s atlas’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 30 (1986), 117. Overy, Times Complete History (7th. edn), 224f. B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early Modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, 40 (1988), 70.

Notes to Chapter 3: Martin Spahn, Hilaire Belloc and the Rise of Fascism: Fellow Travellers of a New ‘Political Religion’? 1 J. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Indiana, 2002), 6, 82; K. Morris, ‘Fascism and British Catholic writers, 1924–39. Part I’, The New Blackfriars, 80 (1999), 32–45. 2 G. Clemens, Martin Spahn und der Rechtskatholizismus in der Weimarer Republik (Mainz, 1983), 172f. 3 R. J. Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London, 2004); I. Kershaw, ‘War and violence in twentieth century Europe’, Contemporary European History, 14 (1) (2005), 107–23. 4 A. Koestler, Als Zeugen der Zeit. Das Abenteuer meines Lebens (Frankfurt/Main, 1986), 38; K. Mann, Kind dieser Zeit (1932 orig., Hamburg, 2nd edn, 2005), 123. 5 See H. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Frankfurt/Main, 1955), 51. 6 On the revival of ‘political religion’ see U. Ehret, ‘Understanding the popular appeal of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism: the revival of totalitarianism theory and political religion’, History Compass, 5/4 (2007), 1236–67; E. Gentile, ‘Totalitarianism and political religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (2/3) (1990), 229–51, here 247–8. 7 R. Eatwell: ‘The nature of fascism: or essentialism by another name?’, in R. Griffin, Fascism Past and Present (London, 1991), 104–10, here 108. 8 G. Eley, ‘Hitler’s silent majority: conformity and resistance under the Third Reich. Part II’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 17 (3) (2003), 550–83. 9 D. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt/Main, 1987), 25–30. 10 Corrin, Intellectuals, 103; A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (Harmondsworth, 1986), 60. 11 Corrin, Intellectuals, 103. 12 Belloc grew up in a literary and radical liberal family. His mother, Bessie Parkes Belloc, daughter of Joseph Parkes, a campaigner for electoral reform and founder of the Liberal Party’s Reform Club, had campaigned for women’s suffrage and employment (a passion Belloc never adopted). Wilson, Belloc, 21f. 13 Corrin, Intellectuals, 101; Wilson, Belloc, 24. 14 Corrin, Intellectuals, 203–05.

230 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 1 – 4 8

Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London, 1957), 381. Wilson, Belloc, 252f. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 253. Corrin, Intellectuals, 103. Wilson, Belloc, 27. Corrin, Intellectuals, 190. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 4. Ibid, 104. Cited from Spahn’s autobiography in W. Ferber, ‘Der Weg Martin Spahns. Zur Ideengeschichte des politischen Rechtskatholizismus’, Hochland (1970), 218–29, here 218. Clemens, Spahn, 11. Spahn cited in Ferber, ‘Spahn’, 224. Felder, Spahn, 224. Wilson, Belloc, 60–5. Corrin, Intellectuals, 108. H. Belloc, ‘Anti-Catholic history: how it is written’, Catholic Truth Society Pamphlet (London, 1914), 2. Corrin, Intellectuals, 112. A. Lunn, Yet so New (London 1958), 64, cited in Wilson, Belloc, 13. Corrin, Intellectuals, 112. Ibid., 109. B. Stuchtey, ‘Literature, liberty and life of the nation: British historiography from Macaulay to Trevelyan’, in S. Berger et al. (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999), 30–47, here 41. Corrin, Intellectuals, 313. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 305f. Ibid., 307f. Clemens, Spahn, 13. Ferber, ‘Spahn’, 219. The author’s translation. Telegraph, 17.10.1901, quoted in R. Morsey, ‘Zwei Denkschriften zum Fall Martin Spahn, 1901’, in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 38 (1956), 244–57, here 246. Ferber, ‘Spahn’, 219. Clemens, Spahn, 54. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15f. Wilson, Belloc, 226. H. Belloc, ‘Introduction’, in C. Chesterton, The Party System (London, 1911), 17–20. H. Belloc, Europe and the Faith (London, 1920). Ibid., 12. Corrin, Intellectuals, 106–9. In H. Belloc, The Crisis of Our Civilisation (London, 1937). Corrin, Intellectuals, 186, 212. Letter to Mrs Reginald Balfour, 28.6.1922, in R. Speaight (ed.), Letters from Hilaire Belloc (London, 1958), 122.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 8 – 5 6

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

80

81 82

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Corrin, Intellectuals, 212. Ibid., 87. Clemens, Spahn, 57. Ibid., 67. Ibid. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 69f. Ibid., 56–60. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 68, 65, 69. Clemens, Spahn, 71, 74. Ibid., 73. L. E. Jones, ‘Catholics on the right: the Reich Catholic Committee of the German National People’s Party, 1920–33’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 126 (2006), 221–67. Clemens, Spahn, 8–84. Ibid., 77–79. New Witness, 16.7.1920, 206. Belloc in GK’s Weekly, 9.11.1929, cited in J. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (London, 1981), 175. Corrin, Intellectuals, 208. Belloc in reply to Lunn’s letter of 21.5.1938 asking for Belloc’s views on the French Revolution, as he intended to write a book on communism. Burns Library, Belloc Papers. Belloc had joined Paul Deroulede’s Lique de Patriotes in order to attack the defenders of Dreyfus, and at about roughly the same time he wrote for the National League for Clean Government. Corrin, Intellectuals, 104. Letter Spahn to Susanne Thomas, 13.6.1925. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), N1324, 115. Letter Spahn to Ring deutscher Katholiken, 2.2.1925. BAK, N1324, 185. Letter Reich Catholic Committee to Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli (nd, most likely 1920). Archiv des Westfälisch-Lippischen Landwirtschaftsverband, Münster, Nachlass Schorlemer. Spahn, Nationale Erziehung (1912), cited in B. Petzinna, ‘Das Politische Kolleg. Konzept, Politik und Praxis einer konservativen Bildungsstätte in der Weimarer Republik’, in P. Ciupke (ed.), Die Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen. Völkische und nationalkonservative Erwachsenenbildung in der Weimarer Republik (Essen, 2007), 101–19, here 105. Clemens, Spahn, 76. Petzinna, ‘Kolleg’, 111.

Notes to Chapter 4: Regional History, Nazism and the Holocaust 1 R. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (London, 1993). I would like to express my gratitude to Andy Schofield for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 D. Pohl, Verfolgung und Massenmord in der NS-Zeit 1933–1945 (Darmstadt, 2003), 154f. 3 D. Cesarani and P. A. Levine (eds), “Bystanders” of the Holocaust: A Re-evalution (London, 2002). 4 D. Bloxham and T. Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester, 2005), 6f, 213f.

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5 What follows is an abbreviated and updated translation of my chapter ‘Die Bedeutung der Regionalgeschichte für die Erforschung des Nationalsozialismus und des Holocausts’, in O. Hartung and K. Köhr (eds), Geschichte und Geschichtsvermittlung (Bielefeld, 2008), 85–103. 6 For a detailed analysis and further reading see C.-C. W. Szejnmann, ‘Verwässerung oder Systemstabilisierung? Nationalsozialismus in Regionen des Deutschen Reichs’, Neue Politische Literatur, 48 (2) (2003), 208–50. 7 R. Heberle, Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus. Eine soziologische Untersuchung der politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918 bis 1932 (Stuttgart, 1963); W. S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945 (New York, 1965). 8 M. Broszat (ed.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 5 Vols. (Munich, 1977–83). 9 M. Broszat, ‘Alltagsgeschichte in der NS-Zeit’, in H. Graml and K.-D. Henke (eds), Nach Hitler – Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer Geschichte. Beiträge von Martin Broszat (Munich, 1987), 131–9, here 138. 10 A. Ruppert and H. Riechert, Herrschaft und Akzeptanz. Der Nationalsozialismus in Lippe während der Kriegsjahre. Analyse und Dokumentation (Opladen, 1998), 11. 11 See M. R. Lepsius, ‘Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur. Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der Deutschen’, in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Die deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Cologne, 1973), 56–80. 12 C.-C. W. Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red’ Saxony (Oxford, 1999); N. Fasse, Katholiken und NS-Herrschaft im Münsterland. Das Amt VelenRamsdorf 1918–1945 (Bielefeld, 1996); D. Schmiechen-Ackermann, Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitermilieus. Der nationalsozialistische Angriff auf die proletarischen Wohnquartiere und die Reaktion in den sozialistischen Vereinen (Bonn, 1998). 13 D. Ohr, Nationalsozialistische Propaganda und Weimarer Wahlen. Empirische Analysen zur Wirkung von NSDAP-Versammlungen (Wiesbaden, 1997); R. Probst, Die NSDAP im Bayerischen Landtag 1924–1933 (Frankfurt/Main 1998); F. Heine, Der nationale Kandidat heißt Hitler. Die Goslarsche Zeitung und der Aufstieg der NSDAP 1928 bis 1933 (Bielefeld, 1998); C.-W. Reibel, Das Fundament der Diktatur. Die NSDAP-Ortsgruppen 1932–1945 (Paderborn, 2002). 14 G. Paul, ‘Ganz normale Akademiker. Eine Fallstudie zur regionalen staatspolizeilichen Funktionselite’, in G. Paul and K.-M. Mallmann (eds), Die Gestapo – Mythos und Realität (Darmstadt, 1995), 236–54; C. Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der württembergischen NSDAP. Funktion, Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen NS-Elite 1920–1960 (Munich, 1998); Ruppert/Riechert, Herrschaft und Akzeptanz; M. Kißener and J. Scholtyseck (eds), Die Führer der Provinz. NS-Biographien aus Baden und Württemberg (Konstanz, 1999). 15 I. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), quoted from back cover; The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 257. 16 J. Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis (New York, 2006). 17 Ruppert/Riechert, Herrschaft und Akzeptanz. 18 G. Aly (ed.), Volkes Stimme. Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus (Bonn, 2006). 19 R. Fleiter, ‘Kommunen und NS-Verfolgungspolitik’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (14–15) (2007), 35–40; B. Gotto, Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik. Administrative Normalität und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung (Munich, 2006); S. Mecking and A. Wirsching (eds), Stadtverwaltung im Nationalsozialismus. Systemstabilisierende Dimensionen kommunaler Herrschaft (Paderborn, 2005).

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20 S. Mecking and A. Wirsching, ‘Stadtverwaltung als Systemstabilisierung? Tätigkeitsfelder und Handlungsspielräume kommunaler Herrschaft im Nationalsozialismus’, in Mecking/ Wirsching, Stadtverwaltung, 1–19. 21 Fleiter, ‘Kommunen’, 35. 22 W. Gruner,‘Die NS-Judenverfolgung und die Kommunen. Zur wechselseitigen Dynamisierung von zentraler und lokaler Politik 1933–1941’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 48 (2000), 75–126, here 123. See also W. Gruner, Öffentliche Wohlfahrt und Judenverfolgung. Wechselwirkung lokaler und zentraler Politik im NS-Staat (1933–1942) (Munich, 2002). 23 Most importantly, Gotto, Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik; Fleiter, Stadtverwaltung im Dritten Reich: Verfolgungspolitik auf kommunaler Ebene am Beispiel Hannovers (Hanover, 2006). 24 F. Bajohr, ‘Arisierung’ in Hamburg. Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–45 (Hamburg, 1997). 25 For this and the following quotations see Mecking/Wirsching, ‘Systemstabilisierung?’, 10–16. 26 Andreas Wirsching: Rezension zu: R. Fleiter, Stadtverwaltung im Dritten Reich. Verfolgungspolitik auf kommunaler Ebene am Beispiel Hannovers (Hannover 2006). In H-Sozu-Kult, 01.09.2006, . 27 Gotto, Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik, 422. 28 For more detail and further literature see C.-C. W. Szejnmann, ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust: A Historiography’, in O. Jensen and C.-C. W. Szejnmann (eds), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2008), 25–54; G. Paul, ‘Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ganz gewöhnlichen Deutschen. Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung’, in G. Paul (ed.), Die Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Göttingen, 2003), 13–90. 29 Paul, ‘Psychopathen’, 20ff. 30 D. Garbe, ‘Die Täter. Kommentierende Bemerkungen’, in U. Herbert et al. (eds), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur, Vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1998), 822–38, here 823f. 31 H. Krasnick and H.-H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschaungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppe der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 (Stuttgart, 1981); E. Klee, ‘Euthanasie’ im NSStaat: Die Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’ (Frankfurt/Main, 1983); H.-W. Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie. Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’, 1890–1945 (Göttingen, 1987); G. Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen, 1986); B. Müller-Hill, Tödliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeunern und Geisteskranken, 1933–1945 (Reinbeck, 1984). 32 C. Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart, 1978); U. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin 1985). See also T. Kühne, ‘Der nationalsozialistische Vernichtungskrieg und die “ganz normalen” Deutschen. Forschungsprobleme und Forschungstendenzen der Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Erster Teil’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 39 (1999), 580–662, here 596f. 33 Kühne, ‘Vernichtungskrieg’, 597f. 34 B. Ulrich (ed.), Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944: Zur Rezeption der Ausstellung ‘Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944’ (Hamburg, 1999); D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996); R. R. Shandley, Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (London, 1998). 35 Kühne, ‘Vernichtungskrieg’, 594. 36 For one of the most influential traditional interpretations, see G. L. Mosse, Die

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Nationalisierung der Massen. Politische Symbolik und Massenbewegungen in Deutschland von den Napoleonischen Kriegen bis zum Dritten Reich (Frankfurt/Main, 1976). A. Kauders, German Politics and the Jews: Düsseldorf and Nuremberg, 1910–1933 (Oxford, 1996). See also D. Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1999). C. Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2003); Walter, Antisemitische Gewalt, 254ff. E. G. Reichmann, Flucht in den Haß. Die Ursache der Judenkatastrophe (Frankfurt/Main 1956); M. Zimmermann, Die deutschen Juden 1914–1945 (Munich, 1996); I. Kershaw, ‘The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 26 (1981), 261–89, here 264. See e.g. F. Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main, 2003). O. D. Kulka and E. Jäckel (eds), Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf, 2004). For a first analysis of this see P. Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 2006). Kulka/Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte. C. R. Browning, ‘German killers: orders from above, initiative from below, and the scope of local autonomy – the case of Brest-Litovsk’, in C. R. Browning (ed.), Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge, 2000), 116–42, here 117. C. R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992). S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, 1974); Philip Zimbardo et al., ‘Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison’, International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1 (1973), 69–97. D. Pohl, Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernments 1939–1944 (Frankfurt/Main, 1993); D. Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (Munich, 1996); T. Sandkühler, ‘Endlösung’ in Galizien: Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz, 1941–1944 (Bonn, 1996); C. Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1998); C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: die deutsche Wirtschaftsund Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1999); B. Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement. Eine Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin 1939–1944 (Wiesbaden, 1999). Kühne, ‘Vernichtungskrieg’, 599. For utilitarian motivations see esp. G. Aly and S. Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg, 1991); G. Aly, ‘Endlösung’. Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt/Main, 1995). Kühne, ‘Vernichtungskrieg’, 600. M. Dean, ‘Schutzmannschaften in Ukraine and Belarus: profiles of local police collaboration’, in D. Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Holocaust in International Perspective, Vol. VII (Evanston/Illinois, 2006), 219–32; R. B. Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland 1941–1944. Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten (Paderborn, 2006); B. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front. Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998). Chiari, Weißrußland 1941–1944, 600f. M. Steber, ‘Fragiles Gleichgewicht. Die Kulturarbeit der Gaue zwischen Regionalismus und Zentralismus’, in J. John et al. (eds), Die NS-Gaue. Regionale Mittelinstanzen im zentralistischen ‘Führerstaat’ (Munich, 2007), 141–58; A.-K. Hanke, Die niedersächsische

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Heimatbewegung im ideologisch-politischen Kräftespiel zwischen 1920 und 1945 (Hanover, 2004); T. Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: sächsische Heimatbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/DDR (Cologne, 2004); C. Herkommer, ‘Women under National Socialism: women’s scope for action and the issue of gender’, in Jensen/Szejnmann, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers, 99–119; E. Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, 2003); H. Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie (Freiburg, 1993); V. Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’ in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreußen und Warthelandgau 1939/40 (Frankfurt/Main, 1995); Herbert, Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur, Vol. 2; K. Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1999); W. Benz et al. (eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der Nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, 9 vol. f. (Munich, 2005f). Browning, ‘German killers’, 118. Ibid., 118, 142. P. Longerich, ‘Tendenzen und Perspektiven der Täterforschung’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (14–15) (2.4.2007), 3–7, here 3. For a discussion of the possibilities and dangers of everyday-life history, see Broszat, ‘Alltagsgeschichte’; K. Tenfelde, ‘Schwierigkeiten mit dem Alltag’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 10 (1984), 376–94. M. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002). S. Friedländer, ‘Eine integrierte Geschichte des Holocaust’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (14–15) (2.4.2007), 7–14, here 9. See also S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany & The Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London, 1997); Nazi Germany & The Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939–45 (London, 2007). For this and the following see C.-C. W. Szejnmann, ‘Theoretisch-methodische Chancen und Probleme regionalgeschichtlicher Forschungen zur NS-Zeit’, in M. Ruck and K. H. Pohl (eds), Regionen im Nationalsozialismus (Bielefeld, 2003), 43–57; Szejnmann, ‘Verwässerung oder Systemstabilisierung?’

Notes to Chapter 5: Defining ‘Human Security’: Roads to War and Peace, 1918–45 1 Human Security Now, United Nations Commission on Human Security 2003, available for download at , accessed 2.1.2008; Tutu quoted by the Human Security Centre available at , accessed 27.11.2008. 2 Human Security Now, 2–4. 3 An outstanding example is C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004). On the ‘interconnectedness of things’, see G. Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005). 4 R. J. Overy with A. Wheatcroft, The Road to War (London, 1989), xiii. 5 R. J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1995), 17; War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1994). 6 League of Nations, The Development of International Co-operation in Economic and Social Affairs: Report of the Special Committee (Geneva, Aug. 1939), 11 (my italics). 7 Ibid., 2. 8 For an overview of the historiography of the organization and the League as a whole, see

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P. Clavin and J.-W. Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the world of its economic and financial organisation’, Contemporary European History, 14 (4) (2005), 421–39; P. Clavin, ‘The League of Nations and Europe’, in R. Gerwarth (ed.), Twisted Paths: Europe, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2007), 521–70; S. Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112 (4) (Oct. 2007), 1091–117. M. Flandreau (ed.), Money Doctors: The Experience of Financial Advising, 1850–2000 (London, 2003). J. March and J. Olsen, ‘The institutional dynamics of international political orders’, International Organization, 52 (1998), 943–69; M. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, 1996). For its origins, see Y. Decorzant, ‘La Société des Nations et la naisannce d’une conception de la regulation économique internationale’ (2 vols), unpublished PhD thesis (University of Geneva, 2008). A. Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law 1918–1935 (London, 1939), 320 ff; M. Dubin, ‘Transgovernmental processes in the League of Nations’, International Organization, 37 (3) (1983), 485–9. Flandreau’s distinction between an ‘economist’ who advises national governments and a ‘money doctor’ who counsels those overseas loses its meaning here, in an international space where both roles merged into one. Flandreau, Money Doctors, 1–10. Koopmans met his mentor Jan Tinbergen in Geneva while working for EFO. For others, of course, it meant that effective internationalism and peace was best by promoting a federal structure for world relations. R. B. Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations. From the Files of Raymond B. Fosdick (Princeton NJ, 1966), 116. The contracting parties of the League agreed ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve international security . . . by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations’. See the Covenant of the League of Nations, available through the Avalon Project, Yale University: <www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/leagcov.htm>, accessed 6.6.2008. Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations, 116. Ibid., 6. Archive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (hereafter FRBNY), C798/1st File/1927– Dec. 1929 – League of Nations, memorandum by George Harrison, 26.2.1929. See also K. Mouré, The Gold Standard Illusion: France, the Bank of France, and the International Gold Standard, 1914–1939 (Oxford, 2002), 175. See, for example, the inclusion of the minority report in The League of Nations, Report of the Gold Delegation (Geneva, 1932). For the history behind it, see P. Clavin and J.-W. Wessels, ‘Another golden idol?: the League of Nations’ Gold Delegation and the Great Depression, 1929–1932’, International History Review, XXVI (4) (2004), 765–95. M. Kohlrausch and D. Beyrau (eds), ‘Technological innovation and transnational networks: Europe between the wars’, special issue of Journal of Modern European History, 6 (2) (2008); C. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical and Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987), 19–70. Pirelli, a former president of the International Chamber of Commerce and managing director of Pirelli and Co. in Milan, was an internationalist who had his fingers in many League pies. He was also nominated as Italy’s representative to the Gold Delegation Committee in 1929. See Archive of the League of Nations, United Nations Library, Geneva (hereafter LN), Box R2963, File 10E/5196/5196, Salter to Strakosch, 15.1.1929, and Rist to Salter, 28.12.1928.

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23 G. Myrdal, ‘Increasing interdependence between states about the failure of international co-operation’, from The Essential Gunnar Myrdal cited in J. Schot and V. Lagendijk, ‘Technocratic internationalism in the interwar years: building Europe on motorways and electrical networks’, Journal of Modern European History, 6 (2) (2008), 196–217. 24 See M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995). 25 A. Loveday, Reflections on International Administration (London, 1958), 1. 26 National Archives 2, Washington DC, Record Group 59 (hereafter NARA RG 59), 59.3.8, Economic Committee, 1940–46, Box 49, Reparation Memo 11, Subcommittee 3, ‘The reparation problem: experience after World War 1’, 28.2.1944, 21. 27 See, for example, League of Nations, Selected Documents on the Distribution of Gold Submitted to the Gold Delegation of the Financial Committee (Geneva, 1931). 28 See, for example, L. Pauly, ‘The League of Nations and the foreshadowing of the International Monetary Fund’, in Essays in International Finance, No. 201, December 1996, 1–5; N. de Marchi, ‘League of Nations economists and the ideal of peaceful change in the decade of the “Thirties”’, in C. Goodwin (ed.), Economics and National Security: A History of Their Interaction. Annual Supplement to Volume 23, History of Political Economy (London, 1991), 143–78; and the, in places, confused, A. Endres and G. Fleming, International Organisations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950 (Cambridge, 2002). 29 I am as guilty of this oversight as others. See P. Clavin, The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, France and the United States, 1931–1936 (London, 1996). Barry Eichengreen also says little about EFO but draws extensively on the statistical materials it generated. See B. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1992). 30 Memorandum by Rogers, 30.6.1934, NARA, RG59, Decimal File 1930–39, Box 2532, File 1, 500.C1100/129. 31 The minority view in the Gold Delegation report meant that EFO became the first international body to discuss the need for an active monetary policy to raise and stabilize prices, and, after September 1931, it went as far as to suggest a general devaluation and inflationary measures for gold-standard countries to foster economic recovery. The views expressed by the minority group were an important step towards a gradual move away from an orthodox and passive approach to monetary policy to a heightened awareness of the increasing necessity for policies promoting economic growth. See Report of the Gold Delegation, 69–73; Clavin/Wessels, ‘Another golden idol?’ 32 For an exploration of the utility of this term, see T. Cayet et al., ‘Comment les organismes internationaux rivalisent: sante et securite au travail au BIT, une diplomatie de l’expertise’, Journal of Modern European History (forthcoming). 33 League of Nations, The Development of International Co-operation. 34 M. Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report: the economic and social programs of the League of Nations in the Avenol era’, Graduate Institute of International Studies (ed.), The League of Nations in Retrospect: Proceedings of the Symposium Organized by the United Nations Library and the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva, 1983), 42–72. 35 League of Nations, The Development of International Co-operation, 9; memorandum by Bruce, ‘Visit to Washington: December 19 to December 23, 1938’, undated, NARA RG59, SD 500.C1191nutrition, 144 ½, Box 2515. 36 <www.ochaonline.un.irg/humansecurity>, Areas and activities of the UNTFHS, section 2, Target people and situations, 3, accessed 10.8.2007; S. N. Macfarlane and Y. Foong Khong, Human Security and the UN: A Critical History (Indiana, 2006). 37 Avenol had begun the process of examining the work of the League’s committees in 1934,

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and this report was taken up by the Secretariat committee chaired by Deputy Secretary General Massimo Pilotti in Dec./Jan. 1934/35, but this interest subsequently dwindled until it revived in 1939. Dubin, ‘Toward the Bruce Report’, 44f. For the French view, see, for example, the note by Arnal, 30.1.1940, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris (hereafter Quai d’Orsay), Carton 81, dossier 1, 1937–1940. For the British perspective, see, for example, Leith-Ross to Makins, 1.4.1940, Records of the Board of Trade, The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA BT), 1254. J. Barros, Betrayal From Within: Joseph Avenol Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 1933–1940 (New Haven, 1969), 224f; Livingston (Geneva) to Halifax, 21.6.1940, Records of the General Correspondence of the Foreign Office, The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA FO371), /24440, C7931/6953/98. For details of the rows between Loveday and Avenol, see minute by Makins, 25.6.1940, TNA FO371/24440, C7391/6953/98. Kisch to Makins, 12.8.1940, TNA FO371/24441, C8566/6953/98. M. Bordo and H. James, ‘The Adam Klug Memorial Lecture: Haberler versus Nurkse: the case for floating exchange rates as an alternative to Bretton Woods?’, National Bureau for Economic Research, Working Paper No. W8545; Clavin/Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations’; P. Clavin and K. Patel, ‘The role of international organisations in Europeanisation: the case of the League of Nations and the European Economic Community’, in M. Conway and K. Patel (eds), The Problem of Europe: Europeanisation in Historical Perspective (London, forthcoming 2009). T. Besley, ‘The new political economy’, Keynes Lecture, British Academy, 13.10.2004. Text available at: , downloaded 24.9.2007. Jan Tinbergen, for example, was a founding trustee of the organization that became ‘Economists for Allied Arms Reduction’ renamed rebranding itself ‘Economists for Peace and Security’ in 2005. The new name was chosen to ‘reflect the full range of concerns of its members and program, and the increasingly complex interrelationships among disarmament, development, security, conflict, war and peace’. See its website, , accessed 10.5.2008. These words could have come directly from an EFO publication.

Notes to Chapter 6: Napoleon’s France: A Forerunner of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Dictatorships? 1 A. Cobban, Dictatorship (London, 1939); P. Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven, CT, 1949); D. Seward, Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (London, 1988). For an overview of this literature, see R. S. Alexander, Napoleon (London, 2001), 104–14. 2 Alexander, Napoleon, 112. 3 Napoleon to Fouché, 1.6.1805. Letters of Napoleon, selected, translated and edited by J. M. Thompson (Oxford, 1934), 119. 4 Napoleon’s note on the proposed inscriptions for the Arc de Triomphe, 3.10.1809; ibid., 251. 5 M. Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), 154–6. 6 N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1983). 7 R. Briley, ‘Sergei Eisenstein: the artist in service of the Revolution’, The History Teacher 29 (4) (1996), 525–36.

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8 D. Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (3rd edn, London, 2007), 116. 9 For Franco’s regalian pretensions, see P. Preston, Franco: A Biography (London, 1993), here 189, 224f, 273f, 289–91, 324, 326, 329, 344, 346, 562, 631, 718, 733, 736. 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Atatürk’s own view on Napoleon was decidedly negative: ‘I don’t like Napoleon at all. He intruded his person into everything. He fought not for a cause, but for himself. That’s why he came to a bad end. It’s inevitable for such people.’ Quoted from A. Mango, Atatürk (London, 1999), 111. 12 A. Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War (2nd edn, Oxford, 2003), 46. 13 I. Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2) (2004), 239–54, here 247. 14 N. Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, Vol. 2: The Establishment of the New Order (New York, 1974). 15 G. L. Mosse, ‘Fascism and the French Revolution’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1) (1989), 5–26. 16 M. Price, ‘The Dutch Affair and the fall of the Ancien Régime, 1784–1787’, The Historical Journal, 38 (4) (1995), 875–905; T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford, 2002), 406–27. 17 P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 53–99. 18 S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1977), ch. 4; T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983), 278–81. 19 T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London, 1996), 100f. 20 Mosse, ‘Fascism’, 6f. 21 D. Bell, ‘Nation-building and cultural particularism in eighteenth-century France: the case of Alsace’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 21 (4) (1987–88), 472–90. 22 Ibid., 489. 23 Y. Marec, ‘Autour des résistance au système métrique’, in B. Garnier and Jean-Claude Hocquet (eds), Genèse et Diffusion du Système Métrique (Caen, 1990), 135–44, here 144. 24 Blanning, Revolutionary, 273. 25 M. Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815 (London, 1996), 134, 200f, 263–5. 26 S. Woolf, ‘French civilization and ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire’, Past & Present, 124 (1) (1989), 96–120, here 96f, 106. 27 T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (London, 1994), 67–70. 28 R. Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution. Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848 (Stuttgart, 1967). 29 Woolf, ‘French Civilization’, 112f. 30 Ibid., 115–18. 31 Preston, Franco, 736. 32 For a warning against exaggerating the supposedly benign nature of Mussolini’s Italy, see P. Corner, ‘Italian Fascism: whatever happened to dictatorship?’, The Journal of Modern History, 74 (2) (2002), 325–51. 33 M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons (London, 1964), 154. 34 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited with Introduction and Notes by L. G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1999). 35 For a broader chronological perspective – one that includes the Directory (1795–99) as well as Napoleon’s regime – of the struggle by the French state to establish law and order, see

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H. G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville, 2006). P. Preston, Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (London, 2005), 508. Kershaw, ‘Hitler’, 244. J. Arch Getty, ‘State and society under Stalin: constitutions and elections in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 50 (1) (1991), 18–35. I. Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (London, 1994). For military conscription specifically, see A. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society During the Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1989). M. Broers, ‘Centre and periphery in Napoleonic Italy: the nature of French rule in the departments réunis, 1800–1814’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Basingstoke, 2003), 55–73. J. Arch Getty, ‘Excesses are not permitted: mass terror and Stalinist governance in the late 1930s’, Russian Review, 61 (1) (2002), 113–38, here 113f. I. Woloch, Napoleon and His Collaborator: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York, 2001), 191–7. Corner, ‘Italian Fascism’, 335. Austria already had a system of political police. W. C. Langsam, ‘Emperor Francis II and the Austrian “Jacobins,” 1792–1796’, The American Historical Review, 50 (3) (1945), 471–90. I. Collins, Napoleon and his Parliaments, 1800–1815 (London, 1979). H. Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich. Mit ausgewählten Quellen zur nationalsozialistischen Beamtenpolitik (Stuttgart, 1966). Getty, ‘State and Society’, 34. M. Crook, ‘Confidence from below?: collaboration and resistance in the Napoleonic plebiscites’, in Rowe, Collaboration and Resistance, 19–36. J. Holland Rose, ‘The censorship under Napoleon I’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, New Series, 18 (1) (1918), 58–65. Rowe, Reich, 125, 127, 129f. This was true of even relatively small states, like Bavaria. W. Piereth, Bayerns Pressepolitik und die Neuordnung Deutschlands nach den Befreiungskriegen (Munich, 1999). J. Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, translated from the French by K. Kellen and J. Lerner and with an introduction by K. Kellen (New York, 1968). M. Rowe, ‘Forging “New-Frenchmen”: state propaganda in the Rhineland, 1794–1814’, in B. Taithe and T. Thornton (eds), Propaganda (Stroud, 1999), 115–30. R. Holtman, Napoleonic Propaganda (Baton Rouge, 1950). Rowe, Reich, 139–42. P. Mansel, The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon I and his Court (London, 1987); D. O’Brien, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon (University Park, PA, 2006); Royal Academy of Arts, Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution 1760–1830 (London, 2007). R. Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London, 2005), 394. See esp. Mommsen, Beamtentum. For a more recent appraisal of the Führer’s position, see Kershaw, ‘Hitler’. R. J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1996), 255. Ibid., 274–7. J. Harris, ‘Was Stalin a weak dictator’, The Journal of Modern History, 75 (2) (2003), 375–86. Overy, Allies, 246, 256–9, 271.

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63 The best account of Napoleon’s military campaigns remains D. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 1966). 64 Though J.-L. David’s Napoleon in His Study (1812), now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, does celebrate Napoleon as a tireless administrator; someone who had just worked through the night composing the Napoleonic Code. 65 R. Pawly, Napoleon’s Imperial Headquarters, Vol. 1: Organization & Personnel (Oxford, 2004). 66 For the concept ‘working towards the Führer’, see Kershaw, ‘Hitler’, 239–54, 245–7.

Notes to Chapter 7: Captured by the Nazis: ‘Reciprocity’ and ‘National Conservatism’ in German Policy towards British POWs 1 O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke, 2001), 107–18; J. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986). 2 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel quoted in A. Streim, ‘International law and Soviet prisoners of war’, in B. Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939–1941 (Oxford, 1997), 293–308, here 298. The seminal work on the subject remains C. Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart, 1978), but see also C. Streit, ‘The army and the policies of genocide’, in G. Hirschfeld (ed.), The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (London, 1986), 1–14; K. J. Arnold, Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion. Kriegsführung und Radikalisierung im Unternehmen Barbarossa (Berlin, 2002), 326–412. 3 R. Overmans, ‘Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1939 bis 1945’, in J. Echternkamp (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Band 9/2 Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945 (Munich, 2005), 729–875, here 871. 4 Y. Gelber, ‘Palestinian POWs in German captivity’, Yad Vashem Studies, 14 (1981), 89–138; G. J. Douds, ‘The men who never were: Indian POWs in the Second World War’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, XXVII (2) (2004), esp. 183–216, here 186–94. 5 J. Nicols and T. Rennell, The Last Escape: The Untold Story of Allied Prisoners of War in Germany, 1944–45 (London, 2002), esp. 314–36; G. Romilly and M. Alexander, The Privileged Nightmare (London, 1954). 6 M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (London, 2nd edn, 1992), 207. 7 For the importance of reciprocity, see G. Parker, ‘Early Modern Europe’, in M. Howard et al. (eds), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, 1994), 40–58, here 55. For reprisals, see Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 207–16; F. Kalshoven, Belligerent Reprisals (Leyden, 1971). 8 The German War Book: Being ‘The Usages of War on Land’ Issued by the Great General Staff of the German Army (London, 1915; German original 1902). 9 G. Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflict (London, 1983), 173–4. 10 J. Horne and A. Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, 2001); L. Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York, 2004); I.V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War in Imperial Germany (London, 2005).

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11 C. Meurer, Die Haager Friedenskonferenz (Munich, 1907), 14, cited in I. V. Hull, ‘Detainees in colonial conflicts: the German case’, in S. Scheipers (ed.), Prisoners in War: Norms, Military Cultures and Reciprocity in Armed Conflict (Oxford, forthcoming 2009). 12 Best, Humanity in Warfare, 179. 13 U. Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg. Kriegsgefangenschaft in Deutschland 1914–1921 (Essen, 2006), 317. 14 Report by Field Marshal Ludendorff for Chancellor Graf von Herling, 11.12.1917, cited in J. Oltmer, ‘Unentbehrliche Arbeitskräfte. Kriegsgefangene in Deutschland 1914–1918’, in J. Oltmer (ed.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn, 2005), 67–96, here 95. 15 H. Jones, ‘The Enemy Disarmed. POWs and the victims of wartime: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920’, unpublished PhD thesis (Trinity College, Dublin, 2005), 144, 152. 16 On this subject, see H. Jones, ‘The final logic of sacrifice?: violence in German prisoner of war labor companies in 1918’, The Historian, 68 (4) (2006), 770–91. 17 This despite attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross and others to ban them. See A. Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre. Populations occupiées, deportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris, 1998), 279–92. 18 For this episode, see J. F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremburg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals after the First World War (Westport, 1982), 17–22. 19 Jones, ‘The Enemy Disarmed’, 185; H. L. Jones, ‘The German spring reprisals of 1917: prisoners of war and the violence of the Western Front’, German History, 26 (3) (2008), 335–56. 20 N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 1999), 367–94; T. Cook, ‘The politics of surrender: Canadian soldiers and the killing of prisoners in the Great War’, Journal of Military History, 70 (3) (2006), 637–66. 21 Jones, ‘The Enemy Disarmed’, 410–28; R. Pöppinghege, ‘“Kriegsteilnehmer zweiter Klasse”? Die Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener 1919–1933’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 64 (2005), 391–423. 22 N. Wylie, ‘The 1929 POW convention and the building of the inter-war POW regime’, in Scheipers, Prisoners in War. 23 G. Hankel, Die Leipziger Prozesse: Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und Ihre Strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 2003), 228–59. 24 For German ratification, see Overmans, ‘Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches’, 729f. 25 E. E. Dwinger, Die Armee hinter Stacheldraht: das sibirische Tagebuch (Jena, 1929). 26 OKW, Kriegsgefangene 1914–1918. Auf Grund der Kriegsakten bearbeitet beim OKW (Berlin, 1939). See also V. Vourkoutiotis, Prisoners of War and the German High Command: The British and American Experience (Basingstoke, 2003), 25–9. 27 See figures given in Vourkoutiotis, Prisoners of War and the German High Command, 34–6. 28 Russian POWs were employed in labour companies on the Western Front from mid-1915, but the measure was only extended to British and French POWs the following year. See Jones, ‘The Enemy Disarmed’, 148–55. 29 Ibid., 208–12. 30 For decision-making structures, see Overmans, ‘Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches’, 738–41; Vourkoutiotis, Prisoners of War and the German High Command, 29–31. 31 M. Junod, Warrior without Weapons (Geneva, 1982), 156–67. 32 For these episodes, see S. P. Mackenzie, The Colditz Myth: British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2004), 243–9; ‘The shackling crisis: a case-study

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in the dynamics of prisoner-of-war diplomacy in the Second World War’, International History Review, XVII (I) (Feb. 1995), 78–98; B. Moore, ‘The last phase of the gentleman’s war: British handling of German prisoners of war on board HMT Pasteur, March 1942’, War & Society, 17 (1) (1999), 41–55; D. Rolf, ‘Blind bureaucracy: the British government and POWs in German captivity, 1939–45’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford, 1996), 47–67; J. F. Vance, ‘Men in manacles: the shackling of prisoners of war, 1942–1943’, Journal of Military History, 59 (3) (1995), 483–504; A. J. Kochavi, Confronting Captivity: Britain and the United States and their POWs in Nazi Germany (London, 2005), 40–53. Furniture and mattresses were removed from a number of camps in mid-January 1945, in reprisal for poor camp facilities for German POWs in Egypt, but the measure petered out after a matter of days. Ausl. VI a K.T.B. 10.3.1941. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Bresgau (BA-MA). RW5/319. A. de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945 (Lincoln, 1989), 154–61. Though reprisals were instigated against Cretan civilians, no action was taken against British POWs. R. Marti to ICRC, 17.10.1941. International Committee of the Red Cross Archive, Geneva (ICRC). G14 carton 413. Field Marshal W. Keitel (Head, OKW) to J. von Ribbentrop (Foreign Minster), 5.1.1945. BA-MA. RW4/905. Breyer (OKW, POW Department) to Wehrmachtsführungsstab Abt L, 11.11.1941. BA-MA. RW5/319. R. Overmans, ‘Das Schicksal der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in R. D. Müller (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Band 10/2: Die Folgen des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Munich, 2008), 379–507, esp. 384–91. Graevenitz (OKW, POW Department) to Auswärtiges Amt (AA), 28.9.1942. BA-MA. RW5 319. Announcement made to British officer POWs, Oflag IX A/H, Spangenberg, 30.9.1942. BA-MA. RW5 319. If prisoners’ diaries are anything to go by, it appears that the prisoners found the whole episode rather amusing: ‘spirits are very high and everyone is getting very proud of his beard’. Original emphasis. Diary of Maj. A. T. Casdagli, 38 (12.10.1942), Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, P463. For German views of British detention practices and the reprisal measures, see Breyer (OKW, POW Department) to WFSt. Abt L. 11.11.1941; Graevenitz (OKW, POW Department) to AA. 12.9.1942. BA-MA. RW5 319. P. Stauffer, Sechs furchtbare Jahre . . . Auf den Spuren Carl J. Burckhardts durch den Zweiten Weltkrieg (Zurich, 1998), 222–4. Moore, ‘The last phase of the gentleman’s war’, 52. Remarks by Walter Preiswerk recorded in George Ignatieff (Canada House, London) to Morley Scott (Department of External Affairs, Ottawa) 20.7.1943. Library and Archive of Canada (LAC), RG2 Privy Council – Series B2 vol. 20; Minute by W. St. C. Roberts (FO), 17.6.1942. The National Archive, U.K. FO916/262; Note by Gesandter E. Sethe (Rechtsabteilung, AA) 22.6.1942. Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin (PA-AA) R40787. T. Bridgland, Waves of Hate: Naval Atrocities of the Second World War (Barnsley, 2002), 63–90; K. Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days (New York, 1997), 255–64. It was for this reason that the British Government refused to back down before German blandishments.

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48 W. Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939–1945 (Novaro, CA, 1964), 247, 253, note 16. 49 H. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table-Talk: Hitler’s Conversations Recorded by Martin Bormann (Oxford, 1988), 696ff (entry for 6.9.1942). 50 Ribbentrop to Ott (German ambassador, Tokyo), 9.10.1942. PA-AA. Büro des Staatssekretärs. R29824. Fiche 1490. 51 E. Frölich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Josef Goebbels. Teil II, Band 6 (Munich, 1996) (hereafter TBJG II 6), 162 (entry for 22.10.1942). 52 Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table-Talk, 696–7 (6.9.1942). 53 Ibid. 54 V.O.Ausland bei WFSt. 12.9.1942, 1715hrs. BA-MA. RW5 Vol. 333. 55 TBJG II 6, 94 (10.10.1942). 56 Ibid., 89 (8.10.1942). 57 Ibid., 85 (7.10.1942). 58 Ambassador Karl Ritter, note, 9.10.1942. PA AA. Büro des Staatssekretärs R29824 Fiche 1490. 59 TBJG II 6, 103 (11.10.1942). 60 ‘Enemy violations of International Law during the German engagement in Crete’, de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 154. 61 TBJG II 6, 151, 162, 169, 175 (19, 22, 23, 24.10.1942). 62 TBJG II 6, 426 (11.11.1942). 63 N. Wylie, The Politics of Prisoners of War: Britain, Germany and POW Diplomacy, 1939–1945 (Oxford, forthcoming 2009), ch. 6. 64 Ibid., ch. 9. 65 Wehrmachtführungsstab Ausland. 20.2.1945 ‘Kündigung völkerrechtlicher Abkommen’. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. MA240 folio 5519329. 66 Hitler is quoted as saying that ‘the British have always waged war against foreigners, and as a consequence have no conception of chivalry’. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table-Talk, 696 (6.9.1942). 67 J. Förster, ‘New wine in old skins?: the Wehrmacht and the war of ‘Weltanschauungen’, 1941’, in W. Deist (ed.), The German Military in the Age of Total War (Oxford, 1985), 304–23, here 321. 68 H. Forwick, ‘Zur Behandlung alliierter Kriegsgenfangener im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Anweisung des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht über Besuche ausländischer Kommissionen in Kriegsgefangenenlagern’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 2 (1967), 119–34. 69 R. Keohane, ‘Reciprocity in international relations’, International Organization, 40 (1) (1986), 1–27. 70 Overmans, ‘Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches’, 738. 71 Draft of Jodl’s report for A. Hitler, 21.2.1945, printed in Trials of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremburg, vol. xxxv Documents and other Material in Evidence (Nuremburg, 1949), Document D606. 72 De Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 3–10.

Notes to Chapter 8: How Soviet was Russian Society under Nazi Occupation? 1 For a comprehensive overview of both older and recent literature essaying comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, see M. Geyer and S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction: after totalitarianism – Stalinism and Nazism compared’, in M. Geyer and

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S. Fitzpatrick (eds), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, 2008), 1–37. R. J. Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London, 2004; New York, 2006), xxxi; M. Mann, ‘The contradictions of continuous revolution’, in I. Kershaw and M. Lewin (eds), Nazism and Stalinism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 2007), 135. For examples culled virtually at random, see ‘Two dictatorships’, The Times, 7.8.1935, 11; ‘Two ideologies – similarities between them – Communism and Nazism in sympathy’, letter by Frank Newnes to The Times, 31.8.1939, 9. Despite the outpouring of reflections on totalitarianism, to my knowledge no detailed study of contemporary comparisons between Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and other dictatorships of the 1930s and 1940s has to date been written. The literature on the Russo-German War is vast. For an explicitly comparative summary, see M. Edele and M. Geyer, ‘States of exception: the Nazi–Soviet War as a system of violence, 1939–1945’, in Geyer/Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 345–95. See also R. J. Overy, Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow (New York, 1997). Despite the routine invocation of this comparison, the literature explicitly comparing the extent of violence under both dictatorships is remarkably small, a product largely of the lack of source material available to students of Stalinism until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For an early synthesis, see S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings, 1930–1945’, Europe–Asia Studies, 48 (8) (1996), 1319–53. More recent ‘comparisons of barbarism’ can be found above all in the field of genocide studies and the work of its critics. See e.g. M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2004); C. Gerlach, ‘Extremely violent societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 9 (2) (2007), 455–71. A. Rabinbach, ‘Moments of totalitarianism’, History & Theory, 45 (2) (2006), 74. See N. Terry, ‘The German Army Group Centre and the Soviet Civilian Population 1942–1944: Forced Labour, Hunger and Population Displacement on the Eastern Front’, unpublished PhD thesis (King’s College, London, 2006); D. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. Deutsche Militärbesetzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich, 2008). Cf. A. Dallin, German Rule in Russia (2nd edn, London, 1981); G. Aly and S. Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutsche Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt/Main, 1991); A. J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (Oxford, 2006). C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Hamburg, 1999). See, however, B. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front. Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998); L. Cohen, ‘Germans in Smolensk: Everyday Life under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1943’, unpublished PhD thesis (Vienna University, 2002); K. C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (London, 2004). C. Gerlach and N. Werth, ‘State violence – violent societies’, in Geyer/Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 133–79. For the influence of agricultural experts on Nazi occupation policy, see Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. P. Polian, Against Their Will, 65ff. For German theories of agricultural overpopulation, see M. Hoffmann, Die agrarische Überbevölkerung Russlands (Berlin, 1932); T. Oberländer, Die agrarische Überbevölkerung Polens (Berlin, 1935).

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14 O. Schiller, ‘Kollektive Umsiedlung in der Sowjetunion. Bericht über die Neuordnung des agrarischen Siedlungswesens in der Sowjetunion’, Osteuropa, 13 (7) (1937/38), 456–68, esp. 466. 15 V. N. Zemskov, ‘Sud’ba ‘kulatskoi ssylki’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1 (1994), 118–47, esp. 119; Polian, Against Their Will, 70–84. On collectivization in the Smolensk region, see D. R. Brower, ‘Collectivised agriculture in Smolensk: the Party, the peasantry and the crisis of 1932’, Russian Review, 36 (1977), 151–66. 16 A. P. Brublevskii and T. S. Prot’ko, Iz istorii repressii protiv Belorusskogo krest’ianstva 1929–134gg (Minsk, 1991), 32. 17 See the data for 1921–1940 at , accessed 31.3.2009. On the background to this purge, see T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001), esp. 260ff; U. Adamuschka, Palitytschnya represii 20ch-50-ch hadouna Belarusi (Minsk, 1994), 9ff. 18 L. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivisation and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford, 1996), esp. 138f. 19 This uprising is alluded to in the work of the Belorussian émigré I. S. Lubachko, Belorussia under Soviet Rule 1917–1957 (Lexington, KY, 1972), 47. Few precise details are, however, known. 20 See , accessed 31.3.2009. 21 This has already been made clear by Adamuschka, Palitytschnya represii; for specific accounts of the ‘Polish operation’, see N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, ‘Polskaia operatsiia NKVD 1937–1938gg’, in A. E. Gurianov (ed.), Repressii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997); also published in translation in B. McLoughlin and K. McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (Basingstoke, 2003), 153–72. 22 See R. Binner and M. Junge, ‘Wie der Terror “Gross” wurde: Massenmord und Lagerhaft nach Befehl 00447’, Cahiers du monde russe, 4 (1) (2001), 557–614. For the overall balance between the ‘national operations’ and the ‘kulak operation’, see also T. Martin, ‘The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, 70 (1998), 813–61. Figure for executions in the Belorussian SSR taken from the document collection Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo. Fevral’ 1956- nachalo 80-kh godov (Moscow, 2003). Already during ‘dekulakization’, Polish peasants had been targeted for priority deportation from Belorussia and Ukraine. See Polian, Against Their Will, 327–33; A. J. Rieber, ‘Civil wars in the Soviet Union’, Kritika, 4 (2003), 129–62, here 140. 23 Einsatzgruppe B, Tätigkeits- und Lagebericht für die Zeit vom 1–15.9.42, National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (hereafter NARB), 655-1-3, 150–1 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, hereafter USHMM, RG53.001M/5). 24 Panzerarmeeoberkommando (hereafter PzAOK) 3 OQu/VII (Mil.-Verw.), Lagebericht August 1943, 3.9.43, National Archives (hereafter NA), T313/305/8581898 (district chief in Liozno, Lamprecht). 25 On Kaminski, see A. Dallin, ‘The Kaminsky Brigade: a case study in Soviet disaffection’, in A. Rabinovitch and J. Rabinovitch (eds), Revolution and Politics in Russia (London, 1972), 243–80. 26 See A. Dallin, ‘Portrait of a collaborator: Oktan’, Soviet Survey, 35 (1) (1961), 116f; R. E. Herzstein, ‘Anti-Jewish propaganda in the Orel region of Great Russia, 1942–1943: the German army and its Russian collaborators’, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 6 (1989), 33–55. 27 102.Inf.Div.Ia, Divisions-Befehl Nr 15, 27.7.41, NA T315/1232/488; cf. Amtschef IV an die Einsatzgruppen A, B, C und D, 16.7.41, Rossiiski Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv (hereafter RGVA), 500-1-25, 401 (USHMM RG11.001M.01/183). For an account of one committee’s

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formation, see Y. Maletski, Pad Znakam Pagoni (Toronto, 1976), available online from , accessed 31.3.2009. Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr 21, 13.7.41, NA T175/233/2721490-2. On the activities of Belorussian émigrés and collaboration, see also A. K. Solov’ev, Belorusskaia tsentral’naia rada: Sozdanie, deiatelnost’, krakh (Minsk, 1995). XXIII. AK, Zusammensetzung und Ausrüstung der Partisanenbekämpfungsabteilung Vtorow, 9.4.42, NA T314/683/20. Successful attempts were also made to transfer, sotto voce, Russian officers trained in the Yugoslav Army to central Russia. Kriegstagebuch (hereafter KTB) Berück Mitte Ia, 18.5.42, NA T501/15/1373. Propaganda-Abteilung W, Zur Tätigkeit russischer Emigranten in Stadt und Gebiet Smolensk, 10.3.42; Über die Tätigkeit des ‘Nationalen Arbeiter-Bundes’ im besetzten russischen Sprachgebiet, 10.3.42, NA T77/1005/2469253-4, 2469260. See also A. V. Okorokov, Fashizm i russkaia emigratsiia (1920–1945gg) (Moscow, 2001). Wirtschaftskommando (hereafter WiKdo) Sytschewka, Lagebericht Gruppe BB v. 1.8.42 bis 25.8.42, NA T77/1144/1044. V. I. Kuz’menko, Sovetskaia intelligentsia v partizanskom dvizhenie Belorussii 1941–1944 (Minsk, 1991). Materialy o chislennom sostave i dvizhenii partorganisatsii KP(B) Belorussii, 1.1.45, NARB 4-29-869, p. 97 (Yad Vashem Archives microfilm M41/252, USHMM Acc.1996/13). S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivisation (Oxford, 1994), esp. 177. Pohl, Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 119, estimates that up to 10 per cent of the population may have been affected directly or indirectly by repression. Counting relatives and acquaintances of the repressed, this figure is not unreasonable. Bericht über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsrats der Reichskreditkassen am 13.8.41, Bundesarchiv (hereafter BA), R29/2, 56. Wirtschaftsinspektion (hereafter WiIn) Mitte, Chefgruppe Arbeit, Grundlagen der Arbeitseinsatzplanung, 31.12.42, NA T77/1099/706. On the scale of Soviet evacuations, see G. Kumanev, ‘Evakuatsiia naseleniya SSSR: dostignutye resul’taty i poteri’, Liudskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny (St Petersburg, 1995), 137–46. Ob’iavlenie, n.d, NARB Mogilev 260-1-15, 150 (USHMM RG53.005/2). Berück Mitte Abt VII/Kr.Verw., Verwaltungsanordnungen Nr 16, 10.3.42, NA T501/15/1163. For these regulations, see the compilation of ordinances in Heeresgruppe Mitte OQu/VII, Militärverwaltungsanordnungen Nr 1, Stand 1.12.42, NA T311/233. For banks, see also WiKdo Schweidnitz Abt W Allg W, Bankgründungen, 28.10.41 (Abschrift), BA R29/110. For the initial retention of collective farms and requisitioning organizations, see Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 240, 342ff. Lagebericht Sicherungsdivision. 203 Abt VII/Kr.Verw. August, 1.9.42, NA T315/1586/155. Korück 559 Qu, Meldewesen der Kommandanturen – Monatsbericht, 28.2.43, NA T501/89/977-8. S. Fitzpatrick, ‘After NEP: The fate of NEP entrepreneurs, small traders and artisans in the “Socialist Russia” of the 1930s’, Russian History, 13 (2–3) (1986), 187–233; Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), 44f. Hptm Dipl.Ing Schwarz, Erfahrungen als Wirtschafts-Kommandeur in Borissow, 15.9.43, NA T84/73/1359743; Sicherungsbrigade 201 Abt VII, Lagebericht 15.2–14.3.42, T315/1583/275; KTB WiKdo FK 181, 30.9.42, T77/1145/511 (Lepel); KTB WiKdo Bobruisk, 1.1–30.4.42, T77/1145/31.

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45 KTB WiKdo Roslawl, April 1942, NA T77/1147/1097; KTB WiKdo Klimowitschi, 7.11.42, T77/1147/618; Berück Mitte Abt VII/Kr.Verw., Verwaltungsanordnugnen Nr 25, 2.8.42, T501/27/686-9. 46 See in particular Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism; E. Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (London, 2001). 47 See Terry, ‘The German Army Group Centre’, 175–84. 48 M. Lewin, The Soviet Century (London, 2005), 71. 49 For Soviet measures against beggars and tramps, see Gerlach/Werth, ‘State violence – violent societies’, 141f; for German measures, see Terry, ‘The German Army Group Centre’, 128–31, 183f. 50 Tätigkeits- und Lagebericht Armeewirtschaftsführer AOK 4, 16.3–15.4.43, NA T77/1112/ 802-3. 51 J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985); J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). 52 WiKdo Mogilew, Lage- und Tätigkeitsbericht Nr 13, 18.1.43, NA T77/1147/251. 53 On the Orthodox Church under Nazi occupation, see M. V. Shkarovskii, Natsistakaia Germaniia i Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ (Moscow, 2002); Pohl, Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 139–41. 54 The most obvious exception to this rule, Kaminski’s National Socialist Worker’s Party of Russia, was founded only at the start of 1942, by which time the willingness of the German authorities to introduce Nazism into the occupied territories had dramatically increased since the heyday of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. 55 Dieter Pohl has described the German occupation in Eastern Europe as a ‘totalitarian colonial administration.’ As the military zone was in a state of limbo regarding Nazi colonial plans, the full applicability of this term to the war zone is to be doubted, yet it retains a heuristic value. See Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (Munich, 1996), 119. 56 See Herzstein, ‘Anti-Jewish propaganda’; V. Dubson, ‘Natsistskaia antisemitskaia propaganda v tsentral’noi Rossii (1941–1943)’ and L.F. Volovik, ‘Antisemitskaia propaganda v Orle’ (1941–1997)’ in Ten’ Kholokosta. Materialy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma ‘Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaia Rossiia’ (Moscow, 1998), 133–6, 137–40. On the occupation press in Belorussia, see in general S. Zhumar, Okkupatsionaia periodicheskaia pechat’ Territorii Belarussii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Minsk, 1996). Mikhail Oktan, the editor of Rech, founded a ‘Fighting League against Bolshevism’ in the region of 9th Army during 1944. Erfahrungsbericht Militärverwaltung Mitte, NA T311/233/458. 57 D. Romanovskii, ‘Otnosheniia mezhdu evreiami i okruzhaioushchim neevreiskim naseleniem v Vostochnoi Belorussii v period Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny: k postanovke problemy’, Evrei Belarusi: Istoriia i kultura, 6 (2000), 93–127. 58 AOK 2 Ic/Vertreter des Auswärtigen Amtes, Bericht Nr 21, 24.9.41, NA T312/1139/79. German interrogators came across other instances of Russians who claimed to have been imprisoned for expressing anti-Semitic views. 221. Division Ic, Überläufer aus dem SüdAbschnitt, 27.5.42, NA T315/1677/736. 59 Iuri Vitsbich, ‘Zhidy v Vitebske’, Novy Put’ (Vitebsk), 19.5.42. See also M. S. Ryvkin, ‘Tema Kholokosta v okkupatsionnoi presse Vitebska’, in Ten’ Kholokosta, 120–5. Vitsbich, a Belorussian nationalist, escaped to the West and in the 1950s wrote an account, only published much later, of anti-Soviet uprisings and resistance during the Civil War. See Antybal’shavitskiia paustan’ni i partyzanskaia barats’ba na Belarusi (New York, 1996).

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60 Heeresgruppenwirtschaftsführer Mitte, Lagebericht für Mai 1944, 5.6.44, NA T77/ 1102/566. 61 See the reports of Berück Mitte Ic and Ic/Prop for 1941 in NA T501/1/649-674; Prop.Abt. W, Lage- und Tätigkeitsbericht, 1.11.41, T77/1036/6568523. 62 Sondergruppe BB, Arbeitsbericht für das zweite Halbjahr 1941, T77/1086/316ff; WiIn Mitte Chefgr BB, Stellenbesetzung Stand 30.6.43, T77/1101/392-4. 63 WiIn Mitte Stab I/Id, Protokoll der Kommandeurbesprechung bei WiIn Mitte am 11. u. 12.10.42, NA T77/1099/560. 64 S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (London, 1995), 198–37. 65 WiIn Mitte, Lagebericht Nr 10, 22.12.41, NA T77/1102/1036; Lagebericht Nr 15, 7.3.42, T77/1098/1150-1; Leitende WiKdo Orscha, Lagebericht Nr 9, 27.8.42, T77/1141/851-2. 66 HeWiFü Mitte Abt BB, KTB- Beitrag 31.1–6.2.44; KTB- Rückblick 1.1–31.3.44, NA T77/1102/141, 155–6. 67 KTB WiKdo Orel, 9.10–27.12.42, NA T77/1142/667-81. 68 WiKdo Orel (PzAOK 2), Lagebericht Nr 9, 25.8.42, Nr 11, 20.10.42, Nr 12, 21.11.42, Nr 13, 23.112.42, NA T77/1142/610-1, 687, 712, 779. 69 WiKdo Orel (PzAOK 2), Lagebericht Nr 15, 23.3.43; WiKdo 201 (Orel), Lagebericht April, 27.4.43, Mai, 22.5.43, NA T77/1142/847-8, 936–7, 959–62. For regulations concerning the Easter holiday, see also Berück Mitte Abt VII/Kr.Verw., Verwaltungsanordnungen Nr 21, 26.5.42, T501/15/1216. 70 KTB WiIn Mitte, 4.10.42, NA T77/1099/430; KTB WiKdo Ljubun, 4.10.42; KTB WiKdo Orel, 4.10.42, T77/1142/331, 665; KTB WiKdo Roslawl, 4.10.42, T77/1147/1126; LVI Pz.K. Ic, Tätigkeitsbericht, 4.10.42, T314/1419/871. 71 Monatsbericht Berück Mitte Abt VII/Mil.Verw. November, 5.12.42; Dezember 1942, 9.1.43, NA T501/27/995-6, 978, 981; FK 581 Abt VII Kr.Verw, Lagebericht 26.10–25.11.42, T315/1586/455. 72 KTB WiKdo 206 (Witebsk), 1.5.43, NA T77/1141/16; Tätigkeitsbericht PzAOK 3 OQu/ Qu.2, 1.5.43, T313/278/8551099; KTB WiKdo 211 (Orscha), 1.5.43, T77/1141/1171; WiIn Mitte, Lagebericht Nr 30, 1.6.43, T77/1100/395-6; c.f. KTB WiKdo 204 (Roslawl), 1.5.43, T77/1147/1167. 73 AWiFü AOK 9/WiKdo 208 (Bobruisk), Lagebericht Nr 5/44, 25.5.44, NA T77/1083/ 1122-3. 74 KTB WiIn Mitte, 1.5.42 (Auszug persönliches Tagebuchs Weigand), NA T77/1098/942. 75 KTB WiKdo 210 Nebenstelle Gomel, 22.6.43, NA T77/1159/577; 221.Sich.Div. Ia, Monatsbericht 1–30.6.43, T315/1683/240. 76 S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and citizens: public letter-writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 55 (1996), 78–105, reprinted in S. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 155–81. 77 FK 550 Kr.Verwaltungsgruppe, Lage- und Tätigkeitsbericht 24.9–24.10.42, 25.10–22.11.42, NA T315/1586/295, 329. 78 Gospodiny polevomy komendanty ot upravleniia goroda Bobruiska, Dokladnaia zapiska, n.d [2.1942], NARB Mogilev 858-1-40, 128–31 (USHMM RG53.006M/5). 79 On bab’y bunty see L. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivisation and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford, 1996), 181–204. 80 KTB Sich.Div. 286 Ib, 10.12.42, NA T315/1885/496; WiKdo i.Ber.d. FK 181, Monatsbericht Dezember 1942, T77/1145/565; WiKdo 212, Lagebericht August 1943, 23.8.43, T77/1147/495. 81 KTB WiKdo Klimowitschi, Rückblick 1–15.1.43, NA T77/1147/639.

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82 Gruppe Geheime Feldpolizei 570, Einsatzplan, 6.2.42, 8.2.42, 22.2.43, 25.3.43, NA T312/1347/248, 237, T312/1353/1290, 1274. 83 Gruppe GFP 570, Einsatzplan, 12.4.43, NA T312/1355/670; Sich. Div. 203 Abt VII/Kr.Verw., Lagebericht September 42 (25.8–25.9), T315/1586/167. 84 Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 54–8, notes a similar pattern for the Ukraine. 85 On denunciation in general, see S. Fitzpatrick and R. Gellately (eds), Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History 1789–1989 (Chicago, 1997). 86 Gruppe GFP 570, Einsatzplan 10–16.1.43 (11.1.43), NA T312/1353/1319-20. 87 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 286–312. 88 Gruppe GFP 570, Einsatzplan 15–1.2.42, NA T312/1347/233. 89 Gruppe GFP 570, Einsatzplan 10–16.1.43 (11.1.43), NA T312/1353/1319-20. 90 PzAOK 2 Ic/AO an S.D.Kdo 107b, 2.9.42, NA T313/149/7401741; 216. Inf.Div Ic, Tätigkeitsbericht, 1.10.42, NA T315/1642/4. 91 Recalculated from V. E. Lobanok et al. (eds), Natsistskaia politika genozida i ‘vyzhzhennoi zemli’ 1941–1944 (Minsk, 1984), 48–210. 92 C.f. Inf.Rgt. 472 Ia, Schriftliche Tagesmeldung über den Verlauf der Durchsuchung am 15.8.41, NA T315/1748/249 (Marina Gorka district). 93 H. Bielstein, SS-Kavallerie im Osten, Braunchsweig, 1942, 50. 94 Wachbataillon 721 an Korück 582, 12.9.41, NA T501/52/701. 95 Ortskommandantur (OK) II/930, Meldung, 25.8.41, NA T501/52/753; OK II/930, Tätigkeitsberichte, 29.9.41, T501/51/1180-1. 96 OK II/930, Partisanenbekämpfung, 1.1.42, NA T501/65/1226-1231. 97 Bericht über Partisanenunternehmen am 18./19.7.42, NA T77/11099/79-80. 98 WiIn Mitte, Bericht über die Auswirkungen der Bandenlage, 17.5.43, NA T77/1100/262-76. 99 Statistischer Arbeitsausschuss der WiIn Mitte, Statistischer Bericht Nr1, 30.7.43, NA T77/1100/896. 100 For a summary of research into anti-partisan warfare, see Pohl, Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 283–304.

Notes to Chapter 9: Why the Allies Won the Air War, 1939–45 1 R. J. Overy, The Air War 1939–1945 (paperback edn, London, 1987); R. J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1995). 2 R. J. Overy, The Battle (London, 2000). 3 Overy, Air War, front cover (quoted from a review in the Observer). 4 Ibid., xi. 5 For a taste of these wider discussions, see A. J. Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (London, 1992); R. H. Kohn and J. P. Harahan (eds), Air Interdiction in World War II, Korea and Vietnam (Washington DC, 1986); P. Deichmann, Spearhead for Blitzkrieg (London, 1996); I. Gooderson, Air Power at the Battlefront (London, 1998); A. Price, Aircraft versus Submarine (London, 1973); C. M. Goulter, A Forgotten Offensive (London, 1995); A. R. A. Claasen, Hitler’s Northern War (Lawrence, KA, 2001). 6 See Ministry of Defence, British Air Power Doctrine, AP 3000 (London, 2nd edn, 1999), ch. 5. 7 P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), chs 6f; J. Ellis, Brute Force (London, 1990); Overy, Why the Allies Won, 1, 325.

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8 See E. R. Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant (London, 1994), chs 7–9. 9 H. Saltzman, Battle of Britain (MGM, 1969); L. Mosley, The Battle of Britain: The Making of a Film (London, 1969); P. Addison and J. A. Crang (eds), The Burning Blue (London, 2000), pt 5. 10 W. Murray, ‘The Battle of Britain: How did “The Few” win?’, Military History Quarterly, 2 (4) (Summer 1990), 8–21. 11 See, for instance, P. Townsend, Duel of Eagles (London, 1970), esp. 393. 12 See e.g. S. Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy (London, 2001), ch. 31; Addison/Crang, Burning Blue, pts 1f. 13 Overy, Battle, 35. 14 W. Green, Aircraft of the Battle of Britain (London, 1969); D. Wood and D. Dempster, The Narrow Margin (London, 1961), app. 1. 15 A. Price, Battle of Britain: The Hardest Day, 18 August 1940 (London, 1979), ch. 7. 16 T. C. G. James, The Battle of Britain (London, 2000), app. 34. 17 See P. S. Meilinger (ed.), The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Maxwell, AL, 1997). 18 P. A. G. Sabin, ‘The counter-air contest’, in A. Lambert and A. C. Williamson (eds), The Dynamics of Air Power (Bracknell, 1996), 18–39. 19 R. Hough and D. Richards, The Battle of Britain (London, 1990). 20 Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy, 371; F. K. Mason, Battle over Britain (London, 1969), chs 6–8. 21 Overy, Air War, 28f; C. Becker, The Luftwaffe War Diaries (London, 1967), app. 2; W. Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933–1945 (Maxwell, AL, 1983), 40. 22 F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare (London, 1916), chs 5–6. 23 See J. Morrow, The Great War in the Air (Shrewsbury, 1993), esp. 215f, 302–4. 24 M. Spick, Fighter Pilot Tactics (Cambridge, 1983), 73–7. 25 J. Ray, The Battle of Britain: New Perspectives (London, 1994); J. F. Turner, The Bader Wing (Shrewsbury, 1999); Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy, chs 25–30. 26 Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 53; F. A. Vadja and P. Dancey, German Aircraft Industry and Production, 1933–1945 (Shrewsbury, 1998), 145. 27 Mason, Battle over Britain, 598; Wood/Dempster, Narrow Margin, app. 6. 28 Overy, Air War, 22f, 32f; K.A. Maier et al. (eds), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. II (Oxford, 1991), 39–59, 380–405. 29 Overy, Battle, 124f, 162; Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy, 369–74. 30 Price, Battle of Britain, 168. 31 K. Delve, Nightfighter (London, 2000), chs 3f; B. Gunston, Night Fighters (Cambridge, 1976), ch. 4; E. R. Hooton, Eagle in Flames (London, 1999), 31–8. 32 Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 54f; R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London, 1978), chs 11–24. 33 J. Ray, The Night Blitz, 1940–1941 (London, 1996); A. Price, Blitz on Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 1977), 89–125; B. Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom (London, 1957), chs 16f. 34 E. Kiesler, Hitler on the Doorstep (London, 1997); P. Schenk, Invasion of England 1940 (London, 1990); D. Robinson, Invasion, 1940 (London, 2005). 35 D. A. Thomas, Crete 1941: The Battle at Sea (London, 1972), chs 8–11; D. Rolf, The Bloody Road to Tunis (London, 2001). In 1975, a Sandhurst war game involving commanders of the time, such as Galland and Ruge, resulted in the latter outcome; see J. Bloom, ‘Britain invaded . . . again’, Moves, 81 (July–August 1994), 29–38. 36 Overy, Battle, 128.

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37 Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy, 391. 38 F. Kersaudy, Norway 1940 (London, 1990); E. R. May, Strange Victory (London, 2000); A. Beevor, Crete (London, 1991). 39 Overy, Air War, 22–5; F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1 (London, 1979), 60f, 159–90. 40 N. Davies, Europe at War (London, 2006), 24f. 41 P. P. O’Brien, ‘East versus West in the defeat of Nazi Germany’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 23 (2) (Jun. 2000), 89–113, here 107, 110. 42 J. Ellis, The World War II Databook (London, 1995), 258. 43 Compare, for example, the Soviet official history, translated by L. Fetzer as The Soviet Air Force in World War II (London, 1974), with R. Muller, The German Air War in Russia (Baltimore, 1992). 44 Overy, Air War, 55; J. S. A. Hayward, Stopped at Stalingrad (Lawrence, KA, 1998), 117; Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 175; A. Brookes, Air War over Russia (Hersham, 2003), 82. 45 Air Ministry, The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, 1933–1945 (Kew, 2001), 66, 165f; Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 80f; Brookes, Air War over Russia, 37f; R. J. Overy, Russia’s War (London, 1997), 89. 46 D. M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus (Lawrence, KA, 1998), 187, 204. Cf. E. Mawdsley, Thunder in the East (London, 2005), 42f. 47 Brookes, Air War over Russia, 26; Fetzer, Soviet Air Force, 35. 48 A. Price, Sky Battles, Sky Warriors (London, 1998), pt 2, 51. 49 For personal perspectives on this nightmare period, see A. Drabkin, Barbarossa & the Retreat to Moscow (Barnsley, 2007). 50 Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 95f; Overy, Air War, 49. 51 The Wehrmacht ‘victored itself to death’ in a similar way; see R. J. Kershaw, War without Garlands (Shepperton, 2004). 52 Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 88–97; Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 95–104; Overy, Air War, 49–54; V. Hardesty, Red Phoenix (London, 1982), ch. 3. 53 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 58f, 201–3. 54 Overy, Air War, 48f; A. Boyd, The Soviet Air Force Since 1918 (London, 1977), ch. 12; Overy, Russia’s War, 155; Ellis, World War II Databook, 278f. 55 A. Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941–1945 (New York, 1971), app. A; Fetzer, Soviet Air Force, app. 2; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 200–2. 56 Hardesty, Red Phoenix, 189–96; D. M. Glantz and H. S. Orenstein (eds), Belorussia 1944 (London, 2001). 57 On the fatal delay in increasing production, see Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 96–107. 58 Vadja/Dancey, German Aircraft Industry, 138f; Overy, Russia’s War, 155. 59 A. Price, Luftwaffe Data Book (London, 1997), chs 5–8. The proportions can only be indicative, because of frequent redeployments and the problem of classifying formations such as Luftflotte 5 in Norway. 60 Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 171. All the figures refer to the end of the month in question. 61 This process is exhaustively analyzed in Hayward, Stopped at Stalingrad, in the context of the Stalingrad campaign in 1942–43. 62 Brookes, Air War over Russia, 148. 63 Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 114, 148. 64 Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 205. This is in line with the 1.16 per cent loss rate per sortie for German fighters in the East in 1944 noted in H. Boog et al. (eds), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. VII (Oxford, 2006), 304.

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65 N. Zetterling and A. Frankson, Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis (London, 2000), ch. 5. 66 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 202; R. F. Toliver and T. J. Constable, Horrido! (London, 1968); R. F. Toliver and T. J. Constable, The Blond Knight of Germany (New York, 1970). 67 H. Morgan and J. Seibel, Combat Kill (Sparkford, 1997), chs 2, 6; M. Spick, Luftwaffe Fighter Aces (London, 1996), chs 3, 10; N. Hanning, Luftwaffe Fighter Ace (London, 2004), chs 3, 5. 68 B. Gunston, Combat Aircraft of World War II (London, 1978), 174–97; Hardesty, Red Phoenix, 25–30, 83–8, 126, 139–47. 69 Hardesty, Red Phoenix, 219. 70 Davies, Europe at War, 20–42; O’Brien, ‘East versus West’, esp. 92–4. 71 O’Brien, ‘East versus West’, 89–92. 72 Overy, Air War, 82–4, 203–5; D. M. Glantz and J. M. House, When Titans Clashed (Lawrence, KA, 1995). 73 Overy, Air War, 82. 74 B. F. Cooling (ed.), Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority (Washington, DC, 1994), 193–213. 75 Overy, Russia’s War, 325. 76 Overy, Air War, 184. 77 Ellis, World War II Databook, 278f. 78 H. Wynn and S. Young, Prelude to Overlord (Shrewsbury, 1983), 15–18; A. Brookes, Air War over Italy (Shepperton, 2000), ch. 6. 79 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 267–9. 80 R. A. Freeman, The Mighty Eighth (London, 1970); M. Middlebrook, The Schweinfurt– Regensburg Mission (London, 1983); T. M. Coffey, Decision over Schweinfurt (New York, 1977). 81 G. Aders, History of the German Night Fighter Force, 1917–1945 (London, 1979), chs 5f; A. Cooper, Air Battle of the Ruhr (Shrewsbury, 2000); Bombers over Berlin (London, 1985); M. Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg (London, 1980); The Berlin Raids (London, 1988). 82 A. Price, Battle over the Reich (Shepperton, 1973), chs 3–5; Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 9–102, 159–274. 83 M. Davidson and A. Levy, Decisive Weapons (London, 1996), ch. 4. 84 J. E. Johnson, The Story of Air Fighting (London, 1985), chs 21, 23. 85 A. Galland, The First and the Last (Glasgow, 1970), 203f, 258–73. See also A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London, 1970), 362–4. 86 G. Infield, Big Week (Los Angeles, 1974); C. Shores, Duel for the Sky (London, 1985), ch. 9. 87 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, pt I; Levine, Strategic Bombing, ch. 7; S. L. Mcfarland and W. P. Newton, To Command the Sky (Washington, DC, 1991). 88 Shores, Duel for the Sky, 178; J. L. Ethell and A. Price, Target Berlin (London, 1981), 9–13; K. Delve, The Mustang Story (London, 1999), 96. 89 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 86–8; Ethell/Price, Target Berlin, 30f; R. A. Freeman, The Mighty Eighth War Manual (London, 2001), 218–21. 90 Ellis, Brute Force, 200. 91 Ethell/Price, Target Berlin; McFarland/Newton, Command the Sky, ch. 6; A. Price, Battle of Britain Day (London, 1990). 92 Shores, Duel for the Sky, ch. 9; K. C. Rust, Fifteenth Air Force Story (Temple City, CA, 1976).

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93 Galland, First and the Last, 38f, 211f; Air Ministry, Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, 296. 94 S. L. McFarland, ‘The evolution of the American strategic fighter in Europe, 1942–44’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 10 (2) (Jun. 1987), 189–208. 95 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 125–9; Murray, Strategy for Defeat, ch. 6. 96 Vadja/Dancey, German Aircraft Industry, 140f; Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 240. 97 Overy, Air War, 138–45; Ellis, Brute Force, 200–7; Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 126–8. 98 Shores, Duel for the Sky, ch. 10; Price, Sky Battles, pt 2, ch. 7. 99 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 128f. 100 Ellis, Brute Force, 203–7. See also McFarland/Newton, Command the Sky. 101 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 114–19; Galland, First and the Last, 209–12. 102 R. C. Cooke and R. C. Nesbit, Target: Hitler’s Oil (London, 1985). 103 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 144f; C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, Vol. IV (London, 1961), 516. 104 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, 517. 105 Ellis, Brute Force, 206–10; A. Price, The Last Year of the Luftwaffe (London, 1991); A. C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944–1945 (London, 1988). 106 M. Middlebrook, The Nuremberg Raid (London, 1973). 107 Ethell/Price, Target Berlin, 61f, 71, 89f, 105–8. 108 A. Price, Instruments of Darkness (London, 1977), chs 8, 10. 109 M. Streetly, Confound & Destroy (London, 1978). 110 Aders, History of the German Night Fighter Force, 167. 111 Ibid, 205. 112 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 257–91, 357–458; R. Irons, Hitler’s Terror Weapons (London, 2002). 113 Vadja/Dancey, German Aircraft Industry, 133, 138f, 146f. 114 J. Ethell and A. Price, World War II Fighting Jets (Shrewsbury, 1994), 50. 115 Boog, Germany and the Second World War, 338–46; Price, Sky Battles, pt 1, ch. 12. 116 Hooton, Eagle in Flames, 282–5; Price, Last Year of the Luftwaffe; N. Franks, The Battle of the Airfields (London, 1994). 117 Ellis, Brute Force, tab. 43. 118 Ibid., 200. 119 Overy, Air War, 204f. 120 Ellis, Brute Force, 220f. 121 R.J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1994); B. Kroener et al. (eds), Germany and the Second World War, Vol. V (Oxford, 2000); A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (New York, 2007).

Notes to Chapter 10: Bearing the Load: A Fresh Approach to Bomber Command 1 See Air Commodore Symonds and Wing Commander Williams, ‘Investigation into psychological disorders in air personnel’, National Archive (hereafter NA), AIR2/6252; ‘Flying fatigue and stress, NA, AIR20/0727; D. Stafford-Clark, ‘An investigation into the reactions of bomber crews to the stresses of operational flying with results and conclusions’, MS, 26.2.1945, Imperial War Museum, London (hereafter IWM), Documents, Dr D. StaffordClark, 67/136/1, 20772.

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2 For data on Lack of Moral Fibre (LMF) cases in Bomber Command, see e.g. Wing Commander Lawson, ‘The Lawson Report’, Royal Air Force Air Historical Branch Archive, Bentley Priory, Stanmore. 3 N. Chapman, ‘Combat Motivation in RAF Bomber Command 1943–1944: What Motivated and Sustained Aircrew in the Battle of Berlin?’, unpublished MA thesis (University of Exeter, 2007). 4 C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, Vol. II (London, 1961), 4. 5 Minute from Harris to Churchill, 3.11.1943, in Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 47. 6 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 190. 7 Ibid., 191. 8 A. Harris, Bomber Offensive (London, 1947), 186. 9 NA, AIR27/167-168. 10 NA, AIR27/1908-1909. 11 R. J. Overy, The Air War 1939–1945 (London, 1980), 122. 12 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 201. 13 M. K. Wells, Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War (London, 1995), 34. 14 Notably M. Middlebrook, The Berlin Raids (London, 1988); J. Taylor and M. Davidson, Survivors of Bomber Command Tell Their Own Story (London, 2004); Kevin Wilson, Bomber Boys: The RAF Offensive in 1943 (London, 2005). 15 J. Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1945 (London, 1985), 552. 16 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 195. 17 Ibid., 194. 18 Ibid., 206. 19 Middlebrook, Berlin Raids, 325. 20 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 195. 21 Lawson, ‘The Lawson Report’, 23. 22 See especially Overy, Air War. An example of a well-researched narrative account that found a general readership is Terraine, Right of the Line. M. Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1975) enjoyed considerable success with a wide readership, although some of the author’s arguments have been questioned by historians. Martin Middlebrook’s pioneering and detailed research of Second World War bombing raids commands much respect; see esp. The Berlin Raid. 23 For a recent example, see J. Taylor and M. Davidson, Bomber Crew Survivors of Bomber Command Tell Their Own Story (London, 2004). 24 See e.g. Overy, Air War, 122. 25 A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? (London, 2006); F. Jorg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945 (New York, 2007). The original German edition of the latter, Der Brand, sold over 500,000 copies. 26 R. J. Overy, ‘Are We Beasts?’, Literary Review (March 2007), 4. 27 Webster/Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, Vol. II, 197. 28 Wells, Courage. 29 See e.g. E. Jones, ‘“LMF”: the use of psychiatric stigma in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War’, Journal of Military History, 70 (2) (2006), 440. 30 Hastings, Bomber Command.

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31 Journal of Contemporary History, ‘Special Issue: Culture and Combat Motivation’, 41 (2) (2006), 203–46. 32 J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London, 1999). 33 C. Merridale, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Contemporary History, ‘Special Issue: Culture and Combat Motivation’, 41 (2) (2006), 204–8. 34 H. Strachan, ‘Training, morale and modern war’, ibid., 211–27. 35 Bourke, History of Killing, 74–6. 36 M. G. Smith, ‘Diary of Sergeant M. G. Smith 12 November 1943–27 April 1944’, handwritten ink diary in maroon booklet, IWM, B2205. 37 Contemporary accounts accessed for this research came from: the private papers/documents archives of the Imperial War Museum, London; the Department of Research and Information Services, RAF Museum, Hendon; and The Second World War Experience Centre, Hosforth, Leeds. In addition, surviving veterans of the Battle of Berlin period were invited to come forward through the Bomber Command Association Newsletter, and, as a result, eight were interviewed and two were corresponded with. 38 Rusty Waughman, correspondence with author. 39 Peggy Fry in interview with author, 23.4.2007, describing her late husband’s service. Oswald Fry died in his eighties but throughout his life suffered from nervous complaints and breakdowns. 40 William Kondra, correspondence with author. 41 Letter Harris to Chief of Air Staff, 28.1.1943, NA, AIR20/2860. 42 Letter Inspector General RAF to Air Vice Marshall D. Collyer, 6.1943, NA, AIR20/4583. 43 Note from Air Council to senior officers, NA, AIR20/3082. 44 Memorandum from ACAS, 26.7.1942, NA, AIR20/4583. 45 Minute from DGMS to AMP, 4.4.1942, NA, AIR2/6252. 46 Symonds and Williams, FRPC 412 (f), s. 4, pt. 2, 14. 47 Letter Sir Arthur Harris to Sir Charles Portal CAS, 26.1.1943, NA, AIR20/2860. 48 Wells, Courage, 12. 49 ‘Note by Inspector General II on discipline and the fighting spirit in the Royal Air Force’, addressed to Chief of Air Staff, Vice Chief of Air Staff, Air Member for Parliament, Air Member for Personnel, Air Member for Training, 14.5.1943, NA, AIR20/3082. 50 Symonds and Williams, FPRC 412 (f), ‘Introduction’.

Notes to Chapter 11: The British Army as a Social Institution, 1939–45 1 The National Archives, Public Record Office, War Office papers (hereafter PRO WO), 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, War Office monograph compiled by Maj. Gen. A. J. K. Piggot, 1949, 79; R. J. Minney, The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha (London, 1960), 39f, 46f, 95, 179f. 2 B. Bond, British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1980), 35, 71. 3 Captain X, A Soldier Looks Ahead (London, 1944), 8. 4 PRO WO 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, 7, 12; H. M. D. Parker, Manpower: A Study of Wartime Policy and Administration (London, 1957), 54f; Ministry of Labour and National Service: Report for the Years 1939–1946, Cmd. 7225 (1947), 8f. 5 PRO WO 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, 80. 6 PRO WO 163/48, War Office progress report, AE 59, Sep. 1940; PRO WO 163/50, War Office progress report, AC/P(41)28, May 1941; PRO WO 163/51, War Office progress report,

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7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26

257

AC/G(42)12, Mar. 1942; PRO WO 163/52, War Office progress report, AC/G(43)11, Mar. 1943; PRO WO 163/53, War Office progress report, AC/G(44) 16, Mar. 1944; PRO WO 163/45, War Office progress report, AC/G(45)6, Mar. 1945. Ministry of Labour, 12, 21, 26; Parker, Manpower, 150–3; Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th series, vol. 355 (1939–40), col. 432. PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, War Office monograph compiled by Col. B. Ungerson, 1953, 4–8, 10, 12, 28f; War Office Directorate for Selection of Personnel (DSP), ‘Personnel selection in the British army’, Proceedings of the Eighth International Management Congress, 1 (Stockholm, 1947), 451f, 455. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (hereafter LHC), King’s College, London, Adam papers, viii, ‘Various administrative aspects of the Second World War’, 1960, ch. 2, 1f. Lt Col. J. D. Sutherland and Maj. G. A. Fitzpatrick, ‘Some approaches to group problems in the British army’, in Group Psychotherapy (New York, 1945), 206. Committee on Skilled Men in the Services: Second Report and a Memorandum by the War Office, Cmd. 6339 (1942), 14, 56f. DSP, ‘Personnel’, 453–7; PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 13, 27–45; P. E. Vernon and J. B. Parry, Personnel Selection in the British Forces (London, 1949), 43–6; R. H. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War (London, 1958), 41f; Privy Council Office, Report of an Expert Committee on the Work of Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Services (London: HMSO, 1947), 10; PRO WO 216/87A, AG to CIGS, 25 Aug. 1942. PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 48f; DSP, ‘Personnel’, 457f; Vernon/Parry, Personnel, 119f. DSP, ‘Personnel’, 458. PRO WO 163/161, morale report, Nov. 1942–Jan. 1943, MC/P(43)2, 12 Mar. 1943, 7. PRO WO 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, 30. PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 55; Vernon/Parry, Personnel, 53; PRO WO 199/1644, A.E. Percival (43rd Div.) to Brig. F. B. Hurndall (Southern Command), 21 Mar. 1940. PRO WO 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, 30f; PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 55; Brig. F. H. Vinden, ‘The introduction of War Office Selection Boards in the British army: a personal recollection’, in B. Bond and I. Roy (eds), War and Society: A Yearbook of Military History, Vol. 2 (London, 1977), 120f; DSP, ‘Personnel’, 458. H. Longhurst, I Wouldn’t Have Missed It (London, 1945), 34. J. R. Rees, The Shaping of Psychiatry by War (London, 1945), 64. Gunner, RA, letter to the editor, New Statesman and Nation, 22 (1941), 377. Vinden, ‘The Introduction’, 120; LHC, Adam, viii, ‘Administrative aspects’, 1960, ch. 2, 7. Rees, The Shaping, 64. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th series, vol. 367 (1940–41), cols 433–4; vol. 69 (1940–41), col. 1056; vol. 70 (1940–41), cols 96–7; B. S. Morris, ‘Officer selection in the British army 1942–1945’, Occupational Psychology, 23 (1949), 220. LHC, Adam, viii, ‘Administrative aspects’, ch. 2, 8; DSP, ‘Personnel’, 459f; Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry, 58, 60–3; Vernon/Parry, Personnel, 53–63; S. W. Gillman, ‘Methods of officer selection in the army’, Journal of Mental Science, 93 (1947), 103–8; PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 58–61. The National Archives, Public Record Office, Cabinet papers (hereafter PRO CAB), 98/28, ‘Follow-up of WOSB cadets at OCTU: progress report June 1943’, RTC technical memorandum no. 4, PP(SC)(43)36, 19 Aug. 1943; Morris, ‘Officer selection’, 226–8; Vernon/Parry, Personnel, 123f; DSP, ‘Personnel’, 461.

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27 Morris, ‘Officer selection’, 226; PRO CAB 98/26, minutes of a meeting of the Expert Committee on the Work of Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Services, PP(43) 14th meeting, 14 Aug. 1943. 28 Morris, ‘Officer selection’, 225; PRO WO 277/12, ‘Manpower problems’, 31. It should be noted that in the summer of 1942 pre-OCTUs were introduced to which cadets were sent before being passed on to OCTUs. It is not entirely clear whether the figure of 8 per cent refers to the failure rate at pre-OCTUs, OCTUs or the two taken together. It is assumed to refer to the last of these. It should also be recorded that in 1942 instructions were issued (in view of the introduction of the WOSBs and pre-OCTUs) that OCTUs should only fail cadets on grounds of ‘misconduct’ or ‘indolence’. It is not known how fully these instructions were implemented, or for how long they were in force, but they might well have had a distorting effect on failure rates at the OCTU stage. 29 Morris, ‘Officer Selection’, 224f; B. Ungerson, ‘Mr Morris on officer selection’, Occupational Psychology, 24 (1950), 55; B. S. Morris, ‘A reply to Colonel Ungerson’, Occupational Psychology, 24 (1950), 59; Vernon/Parry, Personnel, 124f. 30 PRO WO 163/161, morale report, May–July 1942, MC/P(42)1, 11 Sept. 1942, 2. 31 Socialist Subaltern, letter to the editor, New Statesman and Nation, 21 (1941), 240. 32 PRO WO 163/161, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1942, MC/P(42)3, 15 Dec. 1942, 1. For a fuller discussion of officer–man relations, see J. A. Crang, ‘The British soldier on the home front: army morale reports 1940–45’, in P. Addison and A. Calder (eds), Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West 1939–1945 (London, 1997). 33 PRO WO 163/89, ‘Use of hotels: segregation of officers and other ranks’, memorandum by AG, ECAC/P(42)136, 13 Oct. 1942; PRO WO 163/51, ‘Use of hotels: segregation of officers and other ranks’, note by the joint secretaries, AC/P(42)11, 23 Oct. 1942; PRO WO 163/51, minutes of the 16th meeting of the Army Council, AC/M(42)5, 28 Oct. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 90th meeting of the Executive Committee of the Army Council, ECAC/M(42)51, 18 Dec. 1942. 34 Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th series, vol. 379 (1941–42), cols 1221–2; PRO WO 163/161, minutes of the 13th meeting of the Morale Committee, 26 Mar. 1943. 35 PRO WO 163/89, ‘Medical arrangements: officers and other ranks’, memorandum by FCB, ECAC/P(42) 137, 14 Oct. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 82nd meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(42)43, 23 Oct. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, ‘Medical arrangements: officers and other ranks’, memorandum by AG, ECAC/P(42) 146, 16 Nov. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 86th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(42)47, 20 Nov. 1942; PRO WO 163/90, minutes of the 95th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(43)5, 29 Jan. 1943. 36 PRO WO 163/161, morale report, Nov. 1942–Jan. 1943, 7. 37 H. Harris, The Group Approach to Leadership Testing (London, 1949), 123–47. 38 PRO WO 163/51, morale report, Feb.–May 1942, AC/G(42)24, 10 July 1942, 3. 39 LHC, Adam, v/iii, ‘Administration of discipline’, letter from AG to Corps District, Divisional, AA Group, District and Area Commanders, Mar. 1943, 3–4; PRO WO 163/162, minutes of the 24th meeting of the MC, MC/M(44)2, 25 Feb. 1942. 40 T. Harrisson, ‘The British soldier: changing attitudes and ideas’, British Journal of Psychology, 35 (1945), 35f; Maj. R. A. C. Radcliffe, ‘Officer–man relationships’, Army Quarterly, 46 (1943), 117f; War Office, The Soldier’s Welfare (1941), 4. 41 PRO WO 32/9487, AG to S of S, 12 Nov. 1943; PRO WO 32/9487, ‘Request hours’, ACI 47/43, nd [1943]; LHC, Adam, v/iii, ‘Administration of discipline’, 5–7; PRO WO 277/16, ‘Morale’, War Office monograph compiled by Lt Col. J. H. A. Sparrow, 1949, 33f. 42 T. Harrisson, ‘The British Soldier’, 35f.

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43 PRO WO 163/54, morale report, Nov. 1944–Jan. 1945, AC/G(45)12, 4 July 1945, 6. 44 PRO WO 32/14569, Future of Army Welfare Services: Twenty-First Report of the Standing Committee on Army Post-War Problems, APWP/P(46)4, 16 Jan. 1946; PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, War Office monograph compiled by Brig. M. C. Morgan, 1953, 1–5, 10. 45 Captain X, A Soldier, 156. 46 Tom Harrisson Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex (hereafter MOA), TC 29/2/E, 1 Sept. 1940. 47 Radcliffe, ‘Officer–man’, 121. 48 PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 178. 49 Ibid., 6. 50 Ibid., 7f, 21, 23, 176–80; A Local Army Welfare Officer (hereafter LAWO), ‘Six years of army welfare’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 91 (1946), 52. 51 PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 11f, 25, 50–6, 110–12, 127–31; Maj. Gen. H. Willans, ‘Army welfare and education’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 86 (1941), 253f; LAWO, ‘Six Years’, 54; War Office, The Soldier’s Welfare (1941), 36; R. Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh: Entertaining the British and American Forces 1939–1946 (London, 1978), 39–50. 52 Its Co, ‘The Depot at War’, Army Quarterly, 45 (1942), 95; WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 13–15; LAWO, ‘Six Years’, 54. 53 PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 25, 34–8; Willans, ‘Army welfare’, 249f; War Office, The Soldier’s Welfare (1943), 48–56, 73–6. 54 PRO WO 32/14569, ‘The army welfare services after the war’, memorandum by DAG(A), 16 Jun. 1945; PRO WO 163/54, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1944, AC/G(45)2, 17 Feb. 1945, 2f; PRO WO 163/54 morale report, Nov. 1944–Jan. 1945, AC/G(45)12, 4 Jul. 1945, 7; PRO WO 163/54, 1945, morale report, Feb.–Apr. 1945, AC/G(45)15, 20 Aug. 1945, 2. 55 PRO WO 32/4725, ‘Role of the AEC in war’, paper by DRO, nd [Feb. 1940]; Prince Consort’s Army Library, W. E. Williams, The History of Army Education (1939–1945) (1949), 5f; Maj. T. H. Hawkins and L. J. F. Brimble, Adult Education: The Record of the British Army (London, 1947), 91f. 56 Hawkins/Brimble, Adult Education, 97–100; Lord Gorell, letter to the editor, Times, 18 Jan. 1940, 7; H. A. L. Fisher, letter to the editor, Times, 18 Jan. 1940; A. D. Lindsay, letter to the editor, Times, 9 Feb. 1940; Maj. Gen. C. Lloyd, Services Education (London, 1957), 15f; P. Summerfield, ‘Education and politics in the British armed forces in the Second World War’, International Review of Social History, 26 (1981), 135–7. 57 PRO WO 163/412, Report of the Committee on Educational, Welfare and Recreational Needs of the Army, 7 May 1940, 4–19, 30f; PRO WO 32/9429, ‘Education in the wartime army’, Sep. 1940, summarized in ACI 1415, Nov. 1940; Williams, Army Education, 8f; Hawkins/Brimble, Adult Education, 100–5. 58 Williams, Army Education, 10–11; W. E. Williams. ‘Education in the army’, Political Quarterly, 13 (1942), 252–4; N. Scarlyn Wilson, Education in the Forces 1939–46: The Civilian Contribution (London, 1948), 28–9; Col. A. C. T. White, The Story of Army Education 1643–1963 (London, 1963), 88f, 95f; LHC, Adam, viii, ‘Administrative aspects’, ch. 6, 3; Summerfield, ‘Education and politics’, 138. 59 LHC, Adam, viii, ‘Administrative aspects’, ch. 6, 3f; LHC, Adam, xii/iii, notes on ABCA, nd; PRO WO 163/84, ‘Education in the wartime army’, memorandum by DGWE, ECAC/P(41)37, 5 Jun. 1941; PRO WO 163/84, minutes of the 16th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(41)16, 9 Jun. 1941; PRO WO 163/50, ‘Maintenance of morale in the wartime army by means of instruction given to unit officers’, note by the secretariat, ACP(41)38, 12 Jun. 1941; PRO WO 163/50, minutes of the 8th meeting of the AC, AC/M(41)8, 17 Jun. 1941; PRO WO 32/9735,

260

60 61

62

63 64 65

66

67

68 69

70

71

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 8 5 – 1 8 8

‘Current affairs in the army: the outline of a new plan’, Aug. 1941; Williams, Army Education, 14, 49; White, The Story, 97f. Summerfield, ‘Education and politics’, 145; Williams, Army Education, 16. PRO WO 163/89, ‘Education in the army during winter 1942/1943’, memorandum by AG, ECAC/P(42)101, 21 Jul. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 69th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(42)30, 24 Jul. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, ‘Education in the army during 1942/43’, memorandum by DGWE, ECAC/P(42)113, 18 Aug. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 73rd meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(42)34, 21 Aug. 1942; PRO WO 163/89, minutes of the 74th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(42)35, 28 Aug. 1942; PRO WO 32/10455, ‘The winter scheme of education’, memorandum by DAE, 7 Sep. 1942; Williams, Army Education, 16; PRO WO 163/89, ‘Education in the army during the winter 1942/3’’, memorandum by AG, ECAC/P(42)161, 28 Dec. 1942; PRO WO 163/90, minutes of the 96th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(43)6, 5 Feb. 1943; PRO WO 163/92, ‘Education in the army during the Winter 1943/44’, memorandum by AG, ECAC/P(43)99, 6 Sep. 1943; PRO WO 163/92, minutes of the 127th meeting of the ECAC, ECAC/M(43)37, 10 Sep. 1943; Wilson, Education in the Forces, 58f; Directorate of Army Education, The British Way and Purpose: The Consolidated Edition of BWP Booklets 1–18 (War Office, 1944). PRO WO 163/161, morale report, May–Jul. 1942, 8; PRO WO 163/161, morale report, Nov. 1942–Jan. 1943, 5f; PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1943, MC/P(43)13, 22 Dec. 1943, 7. For a fuller discussion of the development of wartime army education, see S. P. MacKenzie, Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992). For a discussion of the debate over the influence of army education on the 1945 general election result, see J. A. Crang, ‘Politics on parade: army education and the 1945 general election’, History, 81 (1996). Captain X, A Soldier, 7. PRO CAB 98/25, papers of the Expert Committee on the Work of Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Services, PP(42)2, 17 Sep. 1942. PRO WO 277/19, ‘Personnel selection’, 50; PRO WO 32/11519, ‘Further notes on GS postings and infantry regimental connections’, 28 May 1945; Jack Davies, letter to the author, Aug. 1988. PRO WO 32/11185, ‘Retention of the General Service Corps’, no author [DMP], 23 Apr. 1944; PRO WO 32/12454, ‘New procedure for the allocation of national servicemen to corps’, memorandum by DMP, 16 Dec. 1947. PRO CAB 98/29, minutes of a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on the Work of Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Services, PP(43)1st meeting, 15 Jul. 1943; PRO CAB 98/26, minutes of a meeting of the Expert Committee on the Work of Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Services, PP(43)16th meeting, 11 Sep. 1943; PRO CAB 98/26, ‘Criticism of the psychiatrists at War Office Selection Boards’, memorandum by Brig. H. A. Sandiford in consultation with Brig. J. R. Rees and Brig. A. D. Buchanan Smith, PP(43)39, 7 Oct. 1943. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry, 64. PRO WO 32/12134, Report by the Committee of Enquiry on the System of Selection of Officers for Emergency Commissions, 23 Sep. 1946; PRO WO 32/12134, D of A Psych. to DSP, 10 Oct. 1946. PRO WO 163/161, morale report, May–July 1943, MC/P(43)11, 18 Sep. 1943, 4; PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1943, 2; PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Nov. 1943–Jan. 1944, MC/P(44)1, 24 Mar. 1944, 1. PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Nov. 1943–Jan. 1944, 2; PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1943, 3.

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72 Maj. M. J. P. M. Corbally, ‘The officer-producing class’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 91 (1946), 205. 73 PRO WO 163/515, Final Report. Army Manpower Committee, Jan. 1949; S. Raven, ‘Perish by the sword: a memoir of the military establishment’, Encounter, 12 (1959), 46f. It should also be noted that a survey of the Sandhurst syllabus in 1960 found that only 14 hours, spread over two years, were devoted to instruction in leadership, which half of the cadets found of ‘little use’ or ‘useless’; see J. E. Adair, ‘New trends in leadership and management training’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 112 (1967), 317. 74 PRO WO, 199/1658, ‘The responsibility of the unit commander’, memorandum by Brig. S. Collingwood, Southern Command, 25 Mar. 1942; PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 1, 27. 75 PRO WO 163/162, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1943, app. A. 76 Democritus, What’s Wrong with the Army (London, 1942), 60. 77 PRO WO 277/4, ‘Army welfare’, 175. 78 PRO WO 163/161, morale report, Nov. 1942–Jan. 1943, 6; MOA, FR 948, ‘Report on ABCA’, 3 Nov. 1941, 17; Lt Col. W. R. H. Charley (retd), letter to the author, Sep. 1988; Maj. F. C. MacMahon (retd), letter to the author, Oct. 1988; Rev. D. D. Caldwell, letter to the author, Nov. 1988; MacKenzie, Politics, 96–9, 179–80; PRO WO 32/9735, Grigg to Cripps, Sep. 1942; PRO WO 277/16, ‘Morale’, 18; LHC, Adam, v/iv, Adam to commanders, Sep. 1943, 3; MOA, FR 1485, ‘Basis of political trends in the army’, 12 Nov. 1942, 27f; ‘Notes of the Week’, Economist, 141 (1941), 748; Maj. B. Dobree, ‘ABCA gets going’, Spectator, 168 (1942), 55; ‘A Frustrated Army’, Tribune, 271 (1942), 10; G. Raybould, ‘The commanding officer and army education’, Highway, 35 (1942), 10; Infantry Subaltern, Home Forces, letter to the editor, New Statesman and Nation, 25 (1943), 256f; C. E. M. Joad, ‘The tide of opportunity’, New Statesman and Nation, 30 (1945), 122; White, The Story, 99f; Lloyd, Services, 19; Hawkins/ Brimble, Adult Education, 295–8; Summerfield, ‘Education and politics’, 151f. 79 Williams, Army Education, 17; A Correspondent, ‘Army education’, Journal of Education, 75 (1943), 549. 80 PRO WO 163/53, morale report, Aug.–Oct. 1943, AC/G(44)4, 11 Jan. 1944, app. B; Williams, Army Education, 18; H. Ross, ‘Army education’, Fabian Quarterly, 38 (1943), 24f. 81 White, The Story, 184f; MacKenzie, Politics, 219f. 82 At the end of 1942 it was reported that three-quarters of officers holding the rank of lieutenant colonel and above were regular or regular reserve officers. At the end of the war it was calculated that nine out of ten officers who had held the rank of brigadier and above had been regulars or regular reservists (these latter figures referring to officers ‘otherwise than in Anti-Aircraft Command’). See Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th series, vol. 383 (1942–43), col. 2235, vol. 427 (1945–46), col. 9. 83 MOA, FR 937, ‘Memo from an army officer’, 31 Oct. 1941, 5.

Notes to Chapter 12: The British Security Forces and the Jews in Palestine, 1945–48 1 J. C. Hurwitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York, 1950), 282, 292; J. Kimche, Seven Fallen Pillars: The Middle East, 1915–1950 (London, 1950), 168–71, 178–9; H. Sacher, Israel: The Establishment of a State (London, 1952), 60–3; J. and D. Kimche, Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (London, 1960), 34–6; R. Crossman, Palestine Mission (London, 1947), 132f, 141f, 158f; R. M. Graves, Experiment in Anarchy (London, 1949), 106f; H. Levin, Jerusalem Embattled: A Diary of the City Under Siege, March 25th to July 18th, 1948 (London, 1950), 15f but cf. 87.

262

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 9 2 – 1 9 9

2 On the genesis of the insurrection, see Y. Bauer, trans. Alton Winters, From Diplomacy to Resistance: A History of Jewish Palestine 1939–1945 (New York, 1970); M. J. Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1982). On the propaganda war, see D. Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945–47 (London, 1989), 65–83. 3 E. Tavin and Y. Alexander (eds), Psychological Warfare and Propaganda: Irgun Documentation (Wilmington, 1982), 79. 4 J. Borisov, The Jewish Underground (New York, 1947), 64. 5 A. Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment (New York, 1949), 95, 134. 6 B. Partridge (trans. and ed.), Avner: The Memoirs of a Terrorist (London, 1959), 83; Y. Eliav, trans. M. Schreiber, Wanted (New York, 1984), 39. 7 Lord Russell of Liverpool, If I Forget Thee: The Story of a Nation’s Rebirth (London, 1960), 177f; N. Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle Between the British, the Jews and the Arabs, 1935–1948 (London, 1979), 267f; Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 94f. 8 C. Mitchell, Having Been a Soldier (London, 1969), 59f; Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 280f; T. Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (London, 2000), 480f. 9 For details of the garrison’s composition and duties, see G. Blaxland, The Regiments Depart: A History of the British Army 1954–1970 (London, 1971), 27–59; Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine. 10 R. D. Wilson, Cordon and Search with the Sixth Airborne Division in Palestine, 1945–1948 (Aldershot, 1949), 15. 11 J. Graham, Ponder Anew (London, 1999), 103f. 12 Mitchell, Having Been a Soldier, 54, 58. 13 E. J. Rooke-Matthews, ‘One third of my life’, Imperial War Museum Written Archive (hereafter IWM WA), 92/37/1, np. 14 Walter Sendell, Palestine Police Force, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive (hereafter IWM SA), 12614. 15 Frederick Gardiner, Palestine Police Force, IWM SA, 16638. 16 Michael Burke, Palestine Police Force, IWM SA, 10125. 17 Interview with Sir Richard Catling, Palestine Police Force, IWM SA, 10392/92, transcript, 25f. 18 Graham, Ponder Anew, 104. 19 Corporal Leslie F. Roker, IWM WA, 99/16/1. 20 Papers of C. R. W. Norman, IWM WA 87/57/1 and 87/57/2. In an intelligence briefing delivered a few days later Norman dismissed Lehi as ‘essentially an assassin group’ the majority of whom were ‘the lowest types of humanity’. In a subsequent lecture he described the Hagana as ‘the Jewish Wehrmacht’. 21 Norman to mother, 5.7.1946, Norman papers, IWM WA 87/57/2. 22 Norman to mother, 3.11.1946, Norman papers, IWM WA 87/57/2. 23 Crookendon to mother and father, 16.10.1945, 4.7.1946, 6.7.1946, 29.7.1946, Correspondence of Lt Gen. Sir Napier Crookendon, IWM WA, GB62. 24 Hodges to Stinger, 22.5.1947, Letters of Lieutenant Raymond Hodges, IWM WA 87/14/1; Memoir of L. R. Alexander, IWM WA, 04/15/1, np. 25 Interview with Denis Payne, IWM SA, 1073; Interview with William Pilkington, IWM SA, 16854. 26 Wilson, Cordon and Search, 23f. 27 Ibid., 45–8; Private Peter Faggetter, in R. Neillands, A Fighting Retreat: British Empire, 1947–1997 (London, 1997), 125.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 9 9 – 2 0 7

263

28 Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 233. 29 Crookendon to mother and father, 16.10.1945, 2.11.1945, 27.4.1946, 5.5.1946, Crookendon Papers, IWM WA, GB62. 30 Interview with Denis Payne, IWM SA 1073; Interview with William Pilkington, IWM SA 16854. 31 General Sir R. Gale, Call To Arms: An Autobiography (London, 1968), 168f; Wilson, Cordon and Search, 56–62; Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 117f. 32 B. Hoffman (ed.), The Failure of British Military Strategy Within Palestine 1939–1947 (Jerusalem, 1983), 22; T. Clarke, By Blood and Fire: The Attack on the King David Hotel (London, 1981). 33 Sir Richard Catling, IWM SA, 10392/92, transcript, 21f. 34 Crookendon to mother and father, 29.7.1946, 6.8.1946, Crookendon Papers, IWM WA, GB62. 35 Captain Ridley Hugh Clark, Memoir (2006), IWM WA, 06/38/1, 27–9. Despite the shortage of officers Clark was himself desperate to go home. He left Palestine, with immense relief, in March 1947. 36 M. Long (ed.), One Man in His Time: The Diary of Anthony Wright (London, 1997), 17–18.11.1946, 44–6; Sir Alan Cunningham to Arthur Creech Jones, 19.11.1946, Cunningham Papers, Box 1, File 3, Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford; News Chronicle, 19.11.1946. 37 Interview with Alfred Weatherley, IWM SA, 10133/5; Wilson, Cordon and Search, 87f. 38 New York Herald Tribune, 8.1.1947; Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 293. 39 Wilson, Cordon and Search, 102–105; N. Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine (London, 1999), 228–33; A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (London, 1997), 190–206. 40 Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 238f; Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 121–3; Hoffman, The Failure of Military Strategy Within Palestine, 29–32; Wilson, Cordon and Search, 116–19. 41 For the diplomatic background, see Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 203–22; Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 323f, 336–40. 42 Graham, Ponder Anew, 112; Denis Edwards, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, in Neillands, A Fighting Retreat, 132f, 134; Alfred Weatherley, IWM SA, 10133/5. 43 Wilson, Cordon and Search, 131–4; Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 339f. 44 Major V. Dover, The Silken Canopy (London, 1979), 129; Mitchell, Having Been a Soldier, 54f; Ian Wilson in Neillands, A Fighting Retreat, 120–22. 45 Roy Hammerton, ‘Cliff and I (memoirs of army service from 1944–1948)’, IWM WA, 05/45/1, 15f. 46 J. Kenneally, The Honour and the Shame (London, 2007), 1–29, 110–12, 206–14. 47 Diary of Anthony Wright, 22.6.1946, 5–7.7.1946, 26.8.1946, 25.9.1946, 14–18, 22, 31, 37. 48 Watson to father, 24.12.1946, John Wells Watson Papers, IWM WA, 94/25/2. 49 Watson to mother, 1.1.1947; Watson to family, 18.2.1947, Watson Papers, IWM WA, 94/25/2. 50 Watson to family, 8.4.1947, 3.6.1947, Watson Papers, IWM WA, 94/25/2. 51 Watson to family, 10.3.1947, Watson Papers, IWM WA, 94/25/2. 52 Captain Michael Reynolds, RM, in Neillands, A Fighting Retreat, 122–4. 53 Rooke-Matthews, ‘One third of my life’, IWM WA, 92/37/1, np; Ian Wilson in Neillands, A Fighting Retreat, 121f; Hammerton, ‘Cliff and I’, IWM WA, 05/45/1, 18. See also Kenneally, The Honour and the Shame, 203–305.

264

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 7 – 2 1 7

54 Interview with Joseph Adolph, IWM SA, 12208. 55 Norman to mother, 6.2.1947; intelligence briefing, 18.7.1947, Norman Papers, IWM WA 87/57/2. 56 Ridley Hugh Clark, Memoir, IWM WA, 06/38/1, 29f. 57 Major Gregory-Hood in O. Lindsay, Once a Grenadier . . . The Grenadier Guards 1945–1995 (London, 1996), 29. 58 Mitchell, Having Been a Soldier, 56f. 59 Michell Raper, IWM WA, 86/258/1, np. 60 Watson to parents, 8.4.1947, 6.8.1947, Watson Papers, IWM WA, 94/25/2. 61 Interview with Denis Payne, IWM SA, 1073; Interview with Thomas Baxendale, IWM SA, 11447. 62 Graves, Experiment in Anarchy, 69f. 63 N. and H. Bentwich, Mandate Memories: 1918–1948 (London, 1965), 117; S. Katz, Days of Fire (London, 1968), 110. See also comments by G. Meir, My Life (London, 1975), 165. 64 Gale, Call To Arms, 164. 65 Wilson, Cordon and Search, xiii–xiv. See also B. Fergusson, The Trumpet in the Hall (London, 1970), 50f. 66 Gale, Call to Arms, 177f; Lindsay, Once a Grenadier, 27.

Notes to Chapter 13: Air Power Lessons Learnt and Not Learnt: The Royal Air Force and the Gulf War, 1990–91 1 R. J. Overy, The Air War 1939–1945 (New York, 1981), 173. 2 Group Captain Andrew Vallance, ‘Air power in the Gulf War: the RAF contribution’, Air Clues, July 1991, 251–4, here 251; RAF press release, ‘Operation Granby – Fact Sheet’, 9 May 1991, 2f (held at Air Historical Branch (AHB)). 3 J. Lake, ‘Panavia Tornado variant briefing part two, air defence variant’, World Air Power Journal, Autumn 1997, 114–17; ‘Tornado variant briefing part three, Tornado operators’, World Air Power Journal, Spring 1998, 118. 4 Flight Lieutenant L. Williams, ‘Some thoughts on platform protection since the Gulf War’, Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, 28 (2003), 92–103, here 94–8; CM (standard prefix for British government publication) 1981, Statement on the Defence Estimates (SODE) (HMSO: London, 1992), 74. 5 S. Cox and S. Ritchie, ‘The Gulf War and UK air power’, in S. Cox and P. Gray (eds), Air Power History: Turning Points from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo (London, 2002), 287–300, here 288. 6 Ibid., 290. 7 Ibid., 291. 8 Air Publication 3040, 5th Edition, 3 (held at AHB). 9 Cox/Ritchie, ‘Gulf War and UK air power’, 290f. 10 Lake, ‘Panavia Tornado variant briefing part two’, 126. 11 RAF press release, ‘Operation Granby’, 1f. 12 Cox/Ritchie, ‘Gulf War and UK air power’, 292–4. 13 Ibid., 295. 14 Ibid., 295, 297. 15 Ibid., 290–2; CM 1559, SODE (HMSO: London, 1991), 18. 16 CM 1981, 75. 17 Cox/Ritchie, ‘Gulf War and UK air power’, 297f.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 7 – 2 2 3

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42

43 44

265

CM 1981, 75. TIALD: The Gulf War (GEC Ferranti corporate publication, 1991), 48. CM 1981, 75. Cox/Ritchie, ‘Gulf War and UK air power’, 295–7; L. Peacock, ‘Cats in action: Jaguars in the Gulf ’, RAF Yearbook Special: Air War in the Gulf (Gloucester, 1991), 27–31, 28. Group Captain R. Springett, ‘Logistics in the post Cold War era’, Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, 19 (1999), 105–12, here 105. Air Commodore P. Crotty, ‘Logistics support in the Gulf War’, Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, 19 (1999), 93–104, here 103f. Cox/Ritchie, ‘Gulf War and UK air power’, 299f. CM 1559, 26. S. Ritchie, Operation Granby: Jaguar Operations (unpublished Air Historical Branch monograph), app. B. <www.dasa.mod.uk/natstats/ukds/2002>, tabs 2.8 and 3.3, accessed 10.10.2008. CM 1981, 32. <www.raf.mod.uk/rafwaddington/aboutus/airwarfarecentre.cfm>; <www.raf.mod.uk/ rafwaddington/aboutus/otherunits.cfm>; accessed 10.10.2008. CM 2550, SODE (HMSO: London, 1994), 59f; CM 3999, Strategic Defence Review (The Stationery Office: London, 1998), 25. CM 4724, Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis (The Stationery Office: London, 2000), ch. 7, par. 7.45. S. McLaughlin, ‘Ubique loquimur – tactical communications wing’, RAF PR Magazine, 1998, 15–17, here 16. S. Ritchie, ‘The decline of mobility: the RAF and deployed operations since 1945’, Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, 19 (1999), 72–83, here 72; Springett, ‘Logistics in the post Cold War Era’, 105f. <www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk>, Select Committee on Defence Thirteenth Report, 26 July 2000; Select Committee on Defence Sixteenth Special Report, ANNEX. Strategic Defence Review: Supporting Essays (The Stationery Office: London, 1998), essay 6, 5f, par. 19. RAF press release, ‘Operation Granby’, 10. See e.g. Lake, ‘Panavia Tornado variant briefing part two’, 127. CM 4724, Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis, ch. 7. For example, the Brimstone anti-armour munition project, which dated back to the 1980s, was revived after the Gulf War. However, the weapon was not ready for service in 1999, and subsequent protracted delays finally resulted in the purchase of American Maverick antiarmour missiles in 2001 to provide a stopgap capability. CM 3223, SODE (HMSO: London, 1996), 61. CM 4446, Defence White Paper (The Stationery Office: London, 1999), 26. Although the Storm Shadow stand-off munition was used during the second Gulf War (March–April 2003), the vast majority of GR4 offensive missions employed Paveway 2 laser-guided bombs and involved flying over the target. <www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk>, 11.2.2000, Column, 344W, John Howe, Chief Executive of the Defence Procurement Agency, to Mr Menzies Campbell MP, 11.2.2000. Ibid. <www.harrier.org.uk>, RAF’s Kosovo Performance Revealed, August 2000, accessed 10.10.2008.

266

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 2 3 – 2 2 5

45 CM 2270, SODE (HMSO: London 1993), 70. 46 See e.g. CM 4724, Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis, ch. 7, pars 7.8–7.14. In this official report on the Kosovo conflict produced by the British Government, the accuracy of bombing was primarily measured in terms of the minimization of collateral damage. The report also emphasized the link between higher-altitude flying and casualty limitation. 47 Author’s conversation with the Kosovo Lessons Team, 6.9.1999.

Index Abyssinia 90–1 Adam, Ronald 187 Aden 195 Adenauer, Konrad 49 Aders, Gebhard 157 Adolph, Joseph 207 Adowa 90 Africa 18, 28–9, 117, 195, 204 Alexander, L.R. 198 Alexander the Great 29 Alsace-Lorraine 46, 48–9 Aly, Götz 59 America 39, 166 Aniskin, Ivan 138 Annan, Kofi 69 Antoinette, Marie, Queen of France 91 Ardor, Gustav 72 Arendt, Hannah 39 Argyll 194 Asia 28, 33, 107 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 90 Augsburg 60 Auschwitz 60 Austria 74, 88, 91 Avenol, Joseph 82 Avner, Gruszow 193 Baden 58 Bahrain 212, 215 Bajohr, Frank 59 Balkans 20, 28, 33, 150, 154 Barker, Evelyn 193–94, 198–99, 202 Barraclough, Geoffrey 27–9 Baxendale, Thomas 209 Beer Tuvya 199 Beitz, Berthold 63 Belgium 158 Belloc, Hilaire 39–48, 51–4 Belloc, Louis 40

Belorussia 61, 64, 127, 130, 139, 140, 151 Belzec 64 Bengal 28 Bennett, Donald Clifford T. 165 Bergen-Belsen 198–99, 204, 207 Berlin 44, 51, 64, 91, 108–118, 120–24, 154–55, 161–66, 168, 173–74 Besley, Tim 83 Best, Geoffrey 109 Betar 197 Bethell, Nicholas 194 Bethlehem 201 Beveridge, William 177 Bevin, Ernst 203 Bialystok 129 Billig, Michael 77 Bismarck, Otto von 46, 89 Black, Jeremy x–xi, 27 Blair, Tony 220 Bobruisk 131, 136–37 Borisov 136, 140 Bosnia 20, 223 Brett, ‘Paddy’ 202 Breyer, Hans-Joachim 115–16 Britain 2, 12, 17–18, 21, 39, 42, 47, 54, 80, 91, 108, 110, 113–19, 121–22, 124, 145–46, 148–50, 154, 157–59, 166, 175, 184–86, 192, 203 Brookes, Andrew 152 Broszat, Martin 57 Brown, Gordon 21 Browning, Christopher R. 63–5 Bruce, Stanley 70 Brussels 72 Bryansk 129 Bungay, Stephen 149 Burke Edmund 97 Burke, Joanna 167

268 Burke, Michael 195 Bush, George Helbert Walker 214 Caesar, Julius 88 Cairo 205 Cambridge 2, 145, 191 Canada 33, 116 Capetians 88 Caporetto 90 Carolingians 88 Casablanca 161 Cassel, Gustav 72 Catalonia 94 Catling, Richard 196, 200 Caucasus 33 Cesarani, David xi, 191 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 54 Channel Islands 114 Chapman, Nick xi–xii, 161 Charlemagne 88 Charles V, King of Spain 89 Charteris, Martin 197 Chesterton, Cecil 47, 52 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 42, 48, 51 Chiari, Bernard 64 China 16, 18, 29, 34, 36 Churchill, Winston 161–62 Churid Empire 34 Clark, Hugh 201, 207 Clavin, Patricia xii, 69 Cobban, Alfred 87 Cole, John 28 Cologne 44, 49 Columbus, Christopher 32 Corner, Paul 100 Corsica 35, 93 Cosgrove, Denis 35 Coventry 148 Crang, Jeremy A. xii, 175 Cranmer, Thomas 45 Crete 115, 121–22, 149 Croatia 56 Cromwell, Oliver 45 Crookendon, Napier 198–201 Cunningham, Alan 193 Cussans, Thomas 32 Cyprus 206, 212, 214

INDEX

Danton, Georges Jacques 45 Danzig 8, 40 Davies, Norman 149, 152–53 Dhahran 214 Dieppe 114, 117–20 Dönitz, Karl 118 Doolittle, Jimmy 156 Dove, Victor 204 Dresden 117, 122 Dreyfus, Alfred 52 Duc d’Enghien 99 Dühring, Eugen Karl 54 Dunkirk 184 Durban 114, 116 Dwinger, Edwin 111–12 Eatwell, Roger 40 Edwards, Denis 203 Egypt 1 Ehret, Ulrike xii–xiii, 39 Eichmann, Adolf 60 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 89 El Alamein 118, 194 Eley, Geoff 40 Ellis, John 146, 150, 155, 158 Engels, Friedrich 89 England 41, 44–5, 82, 116, 154, 156, 163, 194, 197, 205, 209 Estonia 64, 74 Europe 3, 7, 8, 12–14, 16, 21, 28–9, 31, 34–5, 42, 46–7, 52, 71, 74, 87, 94, 96, 98, 102, 106, 117, 123, 126, 145, 153–54, 162, 166, 181, 194–96, 201, 204, 206–209, 218 Faggetter, Peter 198 Fasse, Norbert 57 Fischer, Fritz 8 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 130, 137 Flandreau, Marc 72 Fleiter, Rüdiger 60 Förster, Jürgen 123 Fort Henry 113–15 Foucault, Michel 8–9 Fouché, Joseph 98 France 17–18, 31, 37, 47, 49, 52, 80, 82, 88, 91–5, 97–102, 105, 110–11, 146–50, 158, 211 Franco, Francisco 39, 45, 47–8, 89, 90, 92, 96, 98–9, 105–106

INDEX

Frankfurt 69 Frankland, Noble 164 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia 87, 89, 94 Freiburg 107 Friedländer, Saul 66 Friedrichshafen 168 Fry, Oswald 170 Gale, Richard 209–10 Galicia 63–4 Galland, Adolf 155, 157 Gardiner, Frederick 195 Geneva 75, 82, 109, 111, 121–22 Gentile, Emilio 39–40 George IV of the United Kingdom 103 Gerlach, Christian 63, 126 Germany 8, 14–22, 28, 40, 43, 46, 48–50, 53–5, 60–2, 70, 74, 80, 82, 87, 90, 94–6, 98, 103–104, 107–13, 116, 118–27, 139, 146, 148, 150, 153–59, 161–62, 164, 166, 170, 196, 206 Gessler, Otto 51 Geyl, Pieter 87 Glantz, David 150 Glasgow 4 Gleichen, Heinrich von 53 Goebbels, Joseph 92, 120–23 Goering, Hermann W. 59, 104, 149, 154, 156 Görres, Joseph J. von 50 Goldhagen, Daniel 61–2 Gomel 136 Gotto, Bernhard 60 Graham, John 194, 196, 203 Gravenhorst, Lieutenant-Colonel 132 Greece 115 Greenland 213 Gregory-Hood, Major 208 Griffin, Roger 40 Grimsby 163 Gruner, Wolf 59 Haberler, Gottfried 74 Hague Regulations 109 Haifa 199–200, 202, 205–207 Halifax 161 Hamburg 60, 63, 94, 154, 164, 166 Hammerton, Roy 204, 207

269

Hanover 60, 163 Hardesty, Von 153 Harley, Brian 35 Harris, Arthur 161–63, 166, 170–72 Harrison, George 75 Hartmann, Erich 152 Hayward, Joel 150 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2–3 Henry IV, King of England 88 Henry VIII, King of England 12 Herbert, Ulrich 61 Heydrich, Reinhard 56 Heyes, Tommy 170 Hilberg, Raul 63 Himmler, Heinrich 56 Hinz, Ute 110 Hitler, Adolf 3, 7–8, 13–14, 16–17, 21–2, 39, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, 61, 67, 87, 89–92, 103–106, 115, 119–24, 135, 145, 155, 159, 192 Hodges, Raymond 198 Höss, Rudolf 60 Hohenlohe-Langenburg 46 Hollywood 17 Hooton, Edward R. 151–52 Hore-Belisha, Leslie 175 Hugenberg, Alfred 51 Hungary 35 Hussein, Saddam 214 Iceland 213 Illyria 94 India 34, 115 Iran 113, 115 Iraq 6, 213–14, 219–20, 223 Ireland 42, 98 Isle of Man 114 Isle of Sark 118–21 Israel 192–93 Italy 17–18, 29, 82, 90, 92, 95–6, 100, 120, 154, 156 Jäckel, Eberhard 62 James II, King of England 45 Japan 17–18, 20, 90, 120 Jerusalem 194, 197, 200–202 Jodl, Alfred 121–24 Jones, Colin 31 Jones, Heather 111

270 Jorg, Friedrich 166 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 94 Kalinin 127–28 Kaminski, Bronislav 129, 139 Katz, Samuel 209 Kazakhstan 128 Keegan, John 10, 32 Kenneally, John 204–205 Kennedy, Paul 146 Kershaw, Ian 14, 58, 62, 104 Ketteler, Wilhelm Emanuel von 50 Keynes, John Maynard 83 Khwarizm Empire 34 Klintsy 133 Knox, Ronald 42 Koestler, Arthur 39, 192 Kohlrausch, Martin 76 Kondra, William 170 Koopmans, Tjalling 74 Korea 20, 33, 36 Kosovo 20, 220, 222–23 Kotkin, Stephen 134 Kuczinska, Mrs. 140 Kulka, Otto 62 Kurdistan 33 Kursk 152 Kuwait 213–15, 217, 221, 223 Kuz’menko, Vladimir 130 Laconia 118 Lagarde, Paul A. de 54 Lancaster 161 Lanchester, Frederick William 147–48 Langbehn, Julius 54 Latrun 114, 116–18 Lawrence of Arabia 195–96 Lebanon 33 Lefebvre, George 31 Leigh-Mallory, Trafford 148 Leipzig 111 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 16, 89 Lenz, Max 43 Leo XIII, Pope 41 Lewin, Moshe 132 Libya 184 Liozno 139 Lisbon 29

INDEX

Lithuania 64 Lokot 129 London 42, 45, 69, 82, 112, 114–15, 117–22, 124, 145, 147–48, 193, 195, 200, 214, 219 Louis XIV, King of France 37 Louis XVI, King of France 89, 91 Louis XVIII, King of France 88, 105 Loveday, Alexander 73, 82 Ludendorff, Erich F. W. 110 Ludford Magna air station 163, 168 Mackenzie, Simon 112 MacMillan, Gordon Holmes Alexander 202 Mainz 91 Mann, Klaus 39 Manning, Henry Edward 41–3 Mao, Zedong 16 Marienburg 40, 42–3 Martin, Clifford 203, 209 Marx, Karl H. 2, 52, 89 Mawdsley, Evan 151 Merovingians 88 Mexico 33 Middle East 18, 33, 185, 200 Milan 29 Minsk 129 Mitchell, Colin 194, 204, 208 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur 53 Mogilev 131, 137 Mommsen, Hans 101 Mommsen, Theodor 46 Montgomery, Bernard 193, 200, 202 Moore, Bob 117 Morgan, John Pierpont 72 Morocco 28, 111, 117 Moscow 45, 89, 127 Müller, Fred 135 Murray, Williamson 146, 152 Musial, Bogdan 63 Mussolini, Benito 39, 47–8, 54, 87, 90–2, 96, 98, 100, 105 Myrdal, Gunnar 76 Napoleon, Emperor of France 36, 45, 87–90, 93–7, 99–106 Napoleon III, Emperor of France 100, 106 Nassau 42 Neillands, Robin 208

INDEX

Netanya 199, 201–203, 208 Netherlands 18, 74, 91 New York 75, 202 New Zealand 33, 36 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia 90 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 3 Nootka Sound 91 Norman, Major C.R.W. 197, 207 Norway 146–47, 149 Novo-Dugino 129 Nuremberg 11, 60, 123, 157, 167, 204 Nurkse, Ragnar 74, 82 O’Brien, Phillips 150, 153 Oktan, Mikhail 129, 135 Olenin 140 Oman 212 Ontario 113 Orel 127–29, 135–36 Orsha 136 Otranto 28 Ottawa 119, 122 Overmans, Rüdiger 107–109 Overy, Richard J. ix–x, xiii, 1, 27, 32–3, 35–7, 69–70, 104, 145–47, 149–51, 153–54, 158–59, 191–92, 211 Oxford 41, 44 Paice, Marvyn 203, 209 Palestine 114, 191–200, 202–10 Park, Keith 148 Parker, Elisabeth 40 Parker, Geoffrey 27, 29 Paris 29, 40, 82, 87, 91, 101, 105 Passchendaele 164–65 Payne, Denis 198, 209 Persia 29 Philip II, King of Spain 89 Philip of Orleans 47 Pilkington, William 198 Pilsudski, Jozef K. 87 Pirelli, Alberto 76 Ploesti 156 Pohl, Dieter 63–4 Poland 8, 62–3, 87, 91, 114, 125, 130, 146–47 Polynesia 33 Port Said 114

271

Price, Alfred 147–48, 150–51 Prussia 44, 46, 87–8, 91, 113, 115 Qara-Khitan Empire 34 Qara Qoyunlu Empire 34 Raper, Michell 208 Reichmann, Eva Gabriele 62 Reventlow, Count Erich von 54 Reynolds, Michael 206 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 120 Riechert, Hansjörg 58 Rio de Janeiro 29 Ritchie, Sebastian xiii, 211 Robespierre, Maximilien 45, 92, 97 Roker, Leslie 196 Romania 56, 156 Rome 89, 94 Rommel, Erwin 116–17 Rooke-Matthews, E.J. 195, 206 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 79, 161 Roslavl 131, 138 Rotterdam 148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 44 Rowe, Michael xiii–xiv, 87 Rudnia 139–40 Ruppert, Andreas 58 Russia 9, 11, 14–16, 88–90, 105, 119, 127–28, 130–32, 139–40, 154 Sabin, Philip x, xiv, 145 Salter, Arthur 73 Saltzman, Harry 146 Sandkühler, Thomas 63 Sarona 201–202 Saudi-Arabia 212–15, 221–22 Schacht, Hjalmar 72 Schiller, Otto 127 Schmiechen-Ackermann, Detlef 58 Schmoller, Gustav 43 Schweinfurt 154 Seeckt, Hans von 51 Seljuk Empire 34 Sendell, Walter 195 Serbia 223 Sevastopol 150 Seward, Desmond 87 Skorzova, Sofie 138

272

INDEX

Smith, M.G. 168 Smolensk 127–29, 136 Somerset 2 Soviet Union 15–18, 61, 74, 90, 92, 94, 99, 101, 107, 125–28, 130, 149–53, 158–59, 166 Spahn, Martin 39–46, 48–54 Spahn, Peter 42 Spain 32, 45, 89–92, 98 Spangenberg 114 Stadtler, Edward 48 Stalin, Joseph 15–16, 87, 89–90, 92, 96, 99, 101, 103–106 Stalingrad 152 St Cloud 40 Stegerwald, Adam 49, 51 Stephenson, Jill 58 Stinnes, Hugo 51 Stirling 161 Stone, Norman 27 Stoppani, Pietro 73 Strasbourg 44, 46, 48 Streicher, Julius 199 Streit, Christian 61 Strong, Benjamin 72, 75 Strupen 140 Sweden 169 Symonds, C.F. 171, 173 Szejnmann, Claus-Christian W. x, xiv, 55, 57 Tabuk 215 Taylor, Alan John Percival 8, 145 Tel Aviv 198–203, 208 Terry, Nicholas xiv–xv, 125 Tinbergen, Jan 74 Tobruk 118 Tokyo 120 Toscanelli, Paolo 32 Treitschke, Heinrich G. von 44 Tunbridge Wells 198 Tunisia 149, 204 Turkey 36, 90, 156 Tutu, Desmond 69

Ukraine 64, 127–28 United Kingdom 147, 162, 194, 204, 211–13, 216, 221–22, 224–25 United States of America 12, 17, 28, 36, 74–5, 80–1, 90, 115, 154, 159, 162, 192, 206, 214–15, 219, 221–22 Vassar-Smith, Richard V. 72 Vatican 50 Versailles 67 Vienna 91 Vietnam 20 Vilna 129 Viola, Lynne 137 Vitebsk 133, 136 Vyasma 129 Warsaw 129, 149, 209, 212–13, 215, 219 Washington 75, 82, 122 Watson, John Wells 205–206, 208–209 Waughman, Rusty 169 Weatherley, Alfred 202–203 Webb, Richard 194 Webster, Charles 164 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 14 Weimar 62 Wells, Mark 167 Werth, Nicolas 126 Wessel, Horst 59 White, Dexter Harry 83 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany 13, 46 Williams, Dennis 171, 173 Wilson, Andrew Norma 42 Wilson, Ian 204, 206 Wilson, Richard ‘Dare’ 194, 210 Wilson, Woodrow 70 Wright, Anthony 201, 205 Wylie, Neville xv, 107 Yugoslavia 220, 223 Zimmermann, Michael 62

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