How good was the Good War?
On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich
was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished
myths were born
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft | May 8, 2005
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or
saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that
the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P.
Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other
wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the
conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs
Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse
and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what
Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean
the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their
own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the
compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More
Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than
on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing
myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
Other myths about the war have grown up less deliberately. For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very
definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But
for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war. That was where the first and last American blood
was spilled, where America was engaged in combat the longest, and where Americans for most of the time watched
the war unfold.
Funnily enough, when President Bush says that the war on terror, like World War II, began with a surprise attack on
America, he is echoing that original perception. To say that the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7,
1941 (which is what he means) will come as a surprise to Europeans and especially the Poles, who have an idea it
began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded their country. And yet Bush is harking back unconsciously to
the days when the war for America meant ‘‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ rather than ‘‘Saving Private Ryan’’ and ‘‘Band of
Brothers.’’
The reason for the subtle shift in American perception is easy to see. If a purely evil regime ever existed, it was the
Third Reich, and if any war ever had a moral purpose it must have been the war fought to end its mad persecution. By
contrast the morality of the Pacific war was much less clear-cut. To be sure, Japan launched that surprise attack, and
Japanese troops behaved horribly to American, British, and Australian POWs and much worse to the Asian peoples
they conquered. Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to
surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.
Apart from the way it was fought, that war was pretty much a traditional contest for imperial hegemony. The Philippines
did not belong to Japan by right, nor to America. And while the Third Reich practiced a kind of evil different in kind even
from Japanese atrocities, the Germans were never demonized and dehumanized in American propaganda and popular
culture as the Japanese were a difference grimly reflected in the way Japanese-Americans were interned but GermanAmericans were not.
For my own country the first nourishing myth is that ‘‘we won the war.’’ It’s true that only the British, along with their
Commonwealth and Empire, took part in the war from its start in September 1939 to its end in August 1945; true too
that British defiance of Hitler in the year from June 1940 to June 1941 was absolutely crucial. But the British, as they
knew even at the time, could only play a negative partby not surrendering. They could not defeat Hitler on their own,
but had to wait for him to bring about his own doom, by invading Russia in June 1941 and declaring war on the United
States (rather than the other way round, be it remembered) in December.
Even then, others did the fighting. The best description of how Hitler was defeated was Stalin’s. The old monster said
that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.
Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the
German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign
from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the
combined British-Canadian armies. That sounds formidable, and indeed is by today’s standards, until you remember
that in the same 11-month period more than half a million Russians were killed on the Eastern Front. Leaving aside the
respective Allied casualties, to see how the war was won you need only compare two figures. In all the western
campaigns of the war against French, British, Americans, and troops of many other lands, some 200,000 German
soldiers died. Four million Germans died on the Eastern Front.
Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the
1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever
the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much
goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in
early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming
superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.
That is not a cause for shame. The British were haunted by memories of the Great War and its vast carnage. As much
to the point, Great Britain and the United States were democracies. Their soldiers were not brutalized peasants, or
even an ‘‘army of mercenaries,’’ as A.E. Housman called the 1914 British regular army. As the British military historian
Max Hastings puts it in his excellent recent book ‘‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45’’ (Pan), they were
citizens in uniform, and they could not be treated as German or Russian soldiers were.
For that fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven
by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least
15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.
And that went for the Russians even more so. A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of
millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but
Russian heroism also has to be qualified.
We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died
not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another
12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war
that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians
relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history
against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.
For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that
reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen
killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were
numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of
thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.
Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s
torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with
Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and
death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of
Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the
fighting.
Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological
concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are
no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’
Yalta casts its shadow 60 years on
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website
It is 60 years since the three major allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, met to
divide up the world in the old summer palace of the tsars in the Crimean resort of Yalta and the dark memories of that conference linger today.
It was at Yalta, between 4 and 11 February 1945, that the first shivers of the Cold War were felt,
as the alliance between democracy and communism began to give way to rivalry and hostility.
In their book Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing state: "The Yalta Conference
represented the high-water mark of Allied wartime collaboration."
But they add: "Yalta revealed cracks in the Grand Alliance. Only the common objective of
defeating Hitler had kept it together."
The Yalta Conference left an influence long after the
war
Still controversial
Only in the last few years has the legacy of Yalta finally been overcome, with the re-unification of Germany and the emergence of
countries in eastern and central Europe as members of the European Union.
The latest example of the cloak of history being shaken off has come with the recent elections in Ukraine, which now owns the Crimean
peninsula.
Even on the 60th anniversary, controversy remains.
A row has broken out over the installation in the palace of a sculpture of the three leaders.
Crimean Tartars have objected to the inclusion of Stalin, who deported them by the tens of
thousands for allegedly collaborating with the German invaders.
The Yalta talks, held at Stalin's insistence in the then Soviet Union and necessitating a long sea
and air journey by the ailing President Roosevelt, came as the Red Army had broken through on
the eastern front and the US, British and Canadian armies were still west of the Rhine.
Stalin therefore was in a strong position and he used it.
The sculpture: role of Josef Stalin still controversial
He was determined to ensure that whatever the post-war settlement in Europe, there should be no threat to the Soviet Union.
He intended to carry this out by placing sympathetic governments in a buffer zone between him and western Europe, especially
Germany.
Soviet influence
For his part, President Roosevelt had two main aims: to get agreement on the formation of the United Nations, and to get Russia to join
the war against Japan.
He was less worried about the future of Europe and felt that Stalin could be trusted. Winston Churchill felt that Roosevelt was naive
about Stalin. He tried to resist the imposition of punitive reparations on Germany and worked to restore the position of France as a
significant power to bolster that of Britain.
Above all, he tried to stop the extension of Soviet influence, especially in Poland. After all, the defence of Poland was why Britain and
France had declared war on Germany in the first place. But though Churchill spoke with a loud voice, Britain by then carried only a
relatively small stick.
Poland in the middle
A deal was done.
Stalin agreed to fight against Japan (acquiring in the process islands in Kurile chain near Japan) and he agreed to the UN, having first
ensured that the Soviet Union would have a veto in the proposed executive body, the Security Council.
In return, he insisted on covering the security of the Soviet Union.
And here he chose Poland, the most contentious issue in the summit, to make his point and to provide an example of what would
eventually happen right across the Soviet satellite states.
First, he ensured that Poland's borders were to his liking.
So, the Soviet Union acquired much of eastern Poland and Poland was given tracts of eastern and northern Germany in return. Vast
movements of populations took place.
One of the cities gained by Poland was Danzig, to be re-named Gdansk. The Baltic city provided another example of how fortunes can
change.
World War II started over Hitler's demands for access to Danzig, and it was in Gdansk that Poland's own modern freedom began, among
the shipyard workers led by Lech Walesa.
Stalin then won loose language to describe the future governance of Poland, which he intended to be of his choosing.
With the Red Army in a powerful position - and having stood by while the Polish nationalists were slaughtered in the Warsaw Uprising he had already installed a provisional government in Poland, ignoring the government-in-exile which had been operating throughout the
war in London.
The Yalta communique said only that this provisional government should be broadened:
"The Provisional government which is now functioning in Poland should therefore be reorganised on a broader democratic basis with
the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad."
'Fair deal'
Of course, neither the Americans nor the British could enforce this. It is true that, for a time, Stalin stuck to the agreement. The Polish
leader-in-exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, became deputy prime minister.
But the communists swept to full power in dubious elections in 1947, Mikolajczyk was accused
of being a foreign agent and had to flee into exile.
Churchill was only too aware of what might happen. After 16 Polish underground leaders
disappeared following a meeting with Red Army officers, Churchill wrote to Stalin and lamented
the way matters were developing.
Soviet armies controlled most of eastern
Europe, and the Western Allies had no
resource other than Stalin's good will
A J P Taylor, historian
"They [the British people] can never feel this war will have ended rightly unless Poland has a fair deal in the sense of sovereignty,
independence and freedom, on the basis of friendship with Russia. It was on this that I thought we agreed at Yalta," he wrote.
Poland, however, did not gain the sovereignty, independence and freedom for which the war had been declared until many years later.
The Cossacks are another people with bitter memories of Yalta. Some of them had been recruited to fight with the Germans and Stalin
got Allied agreement that all Soviet citizens should be returned home. Thousands of Cossacks were on the Western side of the lines and
their return in many cases meant their death.
Churchill, and particularly Roosevelt, were later criticised for giving way to Stalin. However, the historian A J P Taylor, in his Oxford
English History 1914-1945, was more understanding.
"Soviet armies controlled most of eastern Europe, and the Western Allies had no resource other than Stalin's good will," he wrote,
"unless they fell back belatedly on an alliance with Hitler - a course which no-one contemplated.”