Christopher Coker
FORCE FOR THE GOOD
Moral Combat: A History of World War II
By Michael Burleigh (HarperPress 652pp £30)
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As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones 'like candle drippings'. Berlin, he recalled, was not 'just one more beaten-up city: there the point had been reached where the victims were degraded beneath the reach of human sympathy'. When Malcolm Muggeridge arrived in the same city, he was astonished by what he found. By then the Russians had fought their way into the streets, house by house. The friezes and columns had been torn away from the Brandenburg Gate, from which the most warlike nation in Europe had once dispatched its armies in triumph. The trees along Unter Den Linden had been cut down for firewood or charcoal. The subway had been flooded on the order of Hitler himself, leaving people floating in black icy waters. The city presented a barren landscape permeated by the sour smell of rotting corpses and the occasional glimpse of the 50,000 or so orphans who'd been made deranged by both the bombing and the ferocity of the final ground attack. Did all this, Muggeridge asked, represent the triumph of good over evil?
The world both writers saw was born from some of the moral compromises the Western allies had to make to win the war. That Hitler had to be defeated and Nazism crushed was the one moral certainty that sustained them. Churchill, Michael Burleigh reminds us in this magisterial work, gave a talk at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce in Leeds in 1937 in which he told his audience that he had resolved never to visit the 'Arctic or Antarctic regions in geography or politics'. 'Give me the temperate zone. Give me London, or Paris, or New York. Let us keep to our faith and let us go somewhere and stay there where your breath is not frozen on your lips by the secret police.' Within three years he had to reverse this view, expressing a pragmatic willingness to sup with the devil in order to defeat Nazism - a figure of speech that reflects his abhorrence for the Soviet system. (The grim reality was that if the USSR had not been Stalinist, it might never have survived the war at all.)
The good war, Americans still call it. No war was so resonant with the language of morality. Hitler too claimed that it was a war of necessity. When he invaded Poland, he told the German people it was in order to save the ethnic Germans from persecution. 'To put an end to this lunacy, there remains no other recourse for me but to meet force with force.' For him, Operation Barbarossa was always a moral crusade, a Darwinian struggle for existence that permitted every act which the bourgeois world thought criminal - whether it was using Russian POWs to test the first gas chambers in Auschwitz, or taking their winter clothing when the German army stalled in front of Moscow in the winter of 1941.
It is of course Churchill's moral language that resonates still. From his first day as Prime Minister he recognised Nazism for the evil it was. As the American journalist Ed Murrow put it, he 'mobilised the English language and sent it into battle' in speeches that demarcate the moral high ground, which the Allies still hold - the bombing of Germany notwithstanding.
But the bombing too was one of the compromises demanded of the times, or certainly until the tide turned in 1943 and the campaign became, in Burleigh's word, 'promiscuous'. The British resorted to it out of necessity - they had to be seen (by the Americans as well as the Russians) to be doing something. 'You've no idea of the thrill and encouragement which RAF bombing has given us here,' Harry Hopkins wired back to President Roosevelt. And Bomber Harris gets a better press than is usual in Burleigh's account of the war. The author wisely squares up behind the former Bishop of Durham, who recognised from the first that if Hitler were to be victorious, little value would be attached to the 'sacred monuments of civilisation'. Ultimately the Nazi challenge was unlike anything the British or the other allies had confronted before - for the Nazis tried fundamentally to alter the moral understanding of humanity in ways that deviated from all the accepted norms of Western civilisation.
The Second World War was a global war, of course, and Burleigh here leaves us in no doubt about the scale of atrocities in the Pacific theatre. This was as close to a race war as any other. As they pursued the Japanese in New Guinea, the Australians encountered countless examples of sadism: the body of a native boy, his head incinerated with a flame thrower; a woman whose left breast had been cut off before she died; the body of a militiaman tied to a tree with bayonet wounds in both arms and a bayonet left rammed into his stomach. By the time the Australians found evidence of cannibalism, they had come to regard the enemy as something less than human.
Burleigh's account won't be the final word on the subject because, as he concludes himself, we will continue to use the Second World War as a moral reference point for all the other wars in which we find ourselves engaged. If the war taught only one lesson it is that the professional military cannot escape implication in the deeds of the politicians they serve. The Wehrmacht which once congratulated itself on quarantining itself from Nazi excesses comes out of this account particularly badly.
What's the moral of Michael Burleigh's book? It is that only by relating to other people can we remain moral beings. If we choose not to relate we will no doubt act immorally, whether we consciously elect to do so or not. There's nothing inside us - there is no built-in human solidarity to serve as a moral reference point. We are only moral beings in conversation with other people.
Kant's key insight was that we should respect our enemies if we want the peace that follows war to last. It was an insight rarely applied in the Second World War. Kant saw that the moment you externalise violence and project it on to the 'other', you may well fail to acknowledge the impulses within yourself that permit you to carry out indefensible acts. In the end, watching at a distance, you end up dismissing Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib as regrettable but inevitable. 'Stuff happens.'
Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of several books on international security.