Roberts produces fascinating information on topics unrelated to the central issues. He is scathing about the French, quoting Jean Cocteau’s aphorism, ‘Long live the shameful peace’. Up to 400,000 French enrolled in various German military organisations. In 1941 it required only 30,000 German troops to hold down France. Vichy implemented anti-Jewish measures before it was even requested to do so by Berlin. When 600 boxes of files captured from the Abwehr were opened in 1999 it became clear that several thousand French volunteered to spy on their own countrymen for pitifully small amounts of money. The cruelty of the Vichy police was horrible: Roberts gives examples. Yet he tells us that when Pétain visited Paris in April 1944, bigger crowds turned out to cheer him than welcomed De Gaulle three months later. And I did not know that Vichy aircraft actually bombed Gibraltar.
Roberts also points out some shocking facts about the Soviets. Between Hitler’s invasion in June 1941 and October, Stalin had 26,000 Russians arrested, of whom 10,000 were shot. He still had 4 million in the Gulag even in 1942. During the Battle of Stalingard, the NKVD shot 13,500 Russian soldiers. The men were ordered to undress before execution so that their uniforms could be reissued ‘without too many discouraging bullet-holes’. Altogether, says Roberts, Stalin had 135,000 of his own soldiers shot, the equivalent of 12 divisions. A further 400,000 were in ‘punishment battalions’.
Roberts also has some sharp pen- portraits of leading war commanders, notably ‘Bomber’ Harris. He aroused much criticism, and when in 1994 the Queen Mother unveiled a statue to him outside St Clement Danes, there were angry demonstrations. His boss, Lord Portal, told the BBC correspondent, Chester Wilmot, in 1948: ‘The trouble with Harris was — off the record — that he was a cad, and would not hesitate to go behind your back to get something he wanted.’ Portal called him ‘a limelighter’, ‘a troublemaker’, ‘his own worst enemy’. Roberts says he was a loving father and ‘kind to his bull terrier Rastus’. He was loved by his men. I can confirm he was popular with the public, who liked him not least because he lacked humbug. He believed he could make a decisive contribution to winning the war with his heavy bombers. He said openly, ‘Kill the Boche, terrify the Boche’. If he met a civil servant, he would ask: ‘What are you doing to retard the war effort today?’ He had a huge Packard, which he drove at high speed to his HQ at High Wycombe. I heard the story that he was once stopped by a policeman, who warned: ‘Please be careful, Sir. You might kill someone.’ ‘Young man,’ said Harris, ‘I kill thousands every night.’ Yet even Harris admitted, two days after VE day, that he had been ‘borne down by the frightful inhumanities of war’. Roberts’s book is a powerful, well-documented sermon on these inhumanities. Engrossing to read. But will it do any good?
