Moral Combat is a remarkable feat; a history which examines the moral dilemmas of total warfare without moralising. In recognising that the moral reasoning of the combatants was “not as rigorous as professional philosophers” this book looks at the instant choices which had to be made under extreme circumstances, whether at the top of the government or at the bottom of a foxhole. Michael Burleigh draws only two lessons from his study of a war which claimed 55 million lives: don’t vote for extremist parties or invest hope in the rationality of mad dictators.
Unlike other revisionist histories, Winston Churchill fares well, beginning the war with a steely morality and a determination not to stoop to the random bestiality of his opponents. Pragmatism, pressure from other allied leaders and events meant he could not always maintain that moral resolve, particularly when it came to the bombing of German civilians, but at least he started with such a morality, in contrast to Hitler, Mussolini or the Japanese.
The Second World War was the first war in which public relations was seen as an essential weapon, which was why Churchill worked so hard on his speeches. As the legendary US broadcaster Ed Murrow put it: “Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.” He believed the right words were as important to the war effort as bombs and bullets which was why the ponderous Local Defence Volunteers became the Home Guard and Communal Feeding Centres were re-christened British Restaurants. “The striking names for British military operations derived,” says Michael Burleigh, “from his conviction that mothers would not appreciate their sons being killed during Operation Bunny Hug.” The BBC, transmitting 160,000 words each night in 23 different languages, had international credibility because it told the truth about Allied defeats whereas Goebbels’ broadcasters only ever trumpeted Axis victories.
Germany left the League of Nations in 1933, and Italy followed in 1937, deliberately putting themselves outside international law. The National Socialists courted war as a release from the “lingering disease of peace” which, Burleigh points out, is a condition to which most normal human beings aspire. In Hitler, a personality in arrested adolescence, they found the monstrous psychopath for whom they yearned. And one who could be almost comically insensitive. Hitler’s gift to a school for the blind, for instance, was a signed photograph of himself.
Burleigh is kinder to the appeaser Neville Chamberlain than many historians have been. We forget that for the political generation of this period the slaughter at Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme during the Great War was still fresh in the mind and war was a catastrophe to be avoided at almost any cost. There was also a fear of what mass bombing could do, akin to the horror felt about nuclear strikes during the Cold War. We forget also, because Stalin was on our side, that when comparing him to Hitler he was only marginally the lesser of two evils. He had been murdering his own people in the gulags throughout the 1930s. If the three month journey locked in cattle trucks or the holds of freighters did not kill you on the journey to Siberia, then temperatures of minus 60 degrees Celsius when you got there invariably would. Others who fell out of favour he just had shot.
We must also bear in mind that the Holocaust was more than just the product of ingrained and institutionalised anti-Semitism. Even ordinary Germans believed in their moral superiority and an absolute right to rule over, and dispose of, those they considered to be from lesser races. So there were always willing volunteers to commit the most appalling atrocities and, despite what the perpetrators said at war crimes trials later, there is no evidence that anyone was punished for refusing to take part.
As an indicator of the prevailing attitude a German civilian records that when he saw his Jewish best friend being arrested by the Gestapo for deportation he did not think how terrible it was to live in a country where Jews were being rounded up, but: “What a misfortune Heinz is Jewish.” SS monitoring of public opinion reveals that many Germans believed the carpet bombing of their towns and cities was Allied punishment for their treatment of the Jews, which shows just how aware ordinary Germans were of what was going on.
Collaboration with the Germans, especially in France, is a tricky moral area. Artists, musicians, journalists and writers are especially singled out if they gave succour to the enemy. But they were often just trying to survive, like so many others, and to get on with their creative work. Bureaucrats, police and bus drivers were also helping the occupiers. And what should be our moral judgement on the French railwayman who drove the train which took Jews to concentration camps?
Britain’s Special Operations Executive of spies and saboteurs made scrupulous efforts to minimise civilian casualties and savage reprisals, and on raids deliberately left behind items identifying the attackers as British. There was much moral soul searching, so an attack on a Norwegian ferry, for instance, could only take place on a Sunday when there were no children going to school. SOE went to great lengths to arrange for an engineer the Gestapo were sure to suspect of helping the British to have a healthy appendix removed in hospital to give him an alibi. But sometimes cruel calculations had to be made.
New Zealander Bill Jordan became a Roman Catholic priest after witnessing interrogations by the French Resistance as an SOE agent in 1944. Suspected informers were badly beaten and had red hot pokers inserted in their rectums, or pressed simultaneously to their backs and stomachs to simulate disemboweling.
What bothered Jordan was not only that the victims were sometimes young girls, but that the resistance fighter carrying out the torture seemed to enjoy his work. We are not told whether Jordan’s moral stand changed on learning that the man’s entire family had been killed by the Germans after he was betrayed.
And morality, or the lack of it, had little to do with dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The US could have continued with conventional bombing which had already done 30 times more damage than Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about to face. But General Eisenhower was by then sick of the killing and did not want to prolong it, while General MacArthur wanted his Marines to invade to provide his moment of glory.
Burleigh can occasionally be irritatingly smug when he shows off instead of wearing his considerable knowledge and literary ability lightly. But he has produced a serious and important work, so he has plenty to be smug about. What is evident throughout these pages is the distinct moral difference between Britain and her enemies. And although there are many fine and courageous examples of derring-do in this book, it is that, most of all, which should leave the reader feeling proud to be British. By the standard of the times we really were the good guys.
