In July 1940, Hitler issued what Nicholson Baker calls ‘a final appeal to reason’. ‘The continuation of this war,’ he said in a speech, ‘will only end with the complete destruction of one of the two warring parties . . . I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.’
‘It’s too tantalising, since there’s no shadow of a doubt we will reject any such suggestion,’ Frances Partridge wrote in her diary afterwards, adding the savagely deflating rider: ‘Now I suppose Churchill will again tell the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and then we shall proceed to do so.’
If this fascinating and upsetting book is the story of anything, it is above all the story of Winston Churchill telling the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and of people then doing so — and dying, too, in the forests and in the valleys, the ghettos and in the cities, in the air and in tunnels under the ground.
Human Smoke is not a conventional history. Rather, it is, as Simon Winchester describes it, ‘a meticulously curated catalogue of text’. Relying principally on primary sources — diaries, public speeches and documents, and newspaper reports — Baker has assembled a series of prose snapshots in chronological order. The first is from 1892, but the bulk deal with the beginning of the second world war, up to the end of 1941.
‘Was it a “good war”? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?’ Baker asks in his afterword. ‘Those were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.’ Many of this book’s readers will suspect that its author had a pretty good idea what answer he expected when first he sat down.
Baker ostentatiously smothers his usual sharp and puckish style in favour of neutral-sounding reportage: ‘Winston Churchill published a newspaper article. It was 8 February, 1920.’ But this book could scarcely be an angrier or more polemical argument for pacifism. It achieves its effects pointillistically. The editorialising is there in the selection and juxtaposition of facts, quotes and stories rather than in the author’s voice.
Comments
Werner
April 28th, 2008 7:42pm> ... we would all be speaking German,
Just imagine everybody speaking German!! Isn't that alone worth millions of killed civilians? Well, Germans.
Besides, Churchill made sure there was a referendum on Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam.
Compare that to today's politicians!
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John
April 27th, 2008 12:06pmIgnotant drivel reviewed by an ignorant idiot.
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Nicky Bird, RUSI, UK
April 27th, 2008 11:34amThis sort of book has become a sort of orthodoxy - publishers love perverse history, Hitler and Churchill, two sides of similar coin, that sort of nonsense...quoting Gandhi's dismissive comment on Churchill is quoting a biased source with a vested interest, and a man who delighted in obstructing Britain while Japan was on his doorstep. The piffle about Coventry and Pearl Harbour, that they were welcomed and encouraged by devious leaders, has been squashed - in Roosevelt's case the author confuses a determination not to strike the first blow with aiding and abetting the enemy to do so. As in WW1, the idea that Britain could look away from Germans on the Channel ports is absurd, just as it is morally absurd to blame the Holocaust on Churchill's 'aggression' or to equate the Allies' clumsy, retaliatory bombing with German aggressive aerial warfare. The notion that Churchill ordered the bombing of civilian targets in Germany in 1940 to prompt Hitler's London Blitz is just plain wrong. Polemics like this fall foul of logic and fact, but not of gullible publishers, and - regrettably - journalists and readers who love conspiracies and pointless 'what ifs'...
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Frank Pulley
April 27th, 2008 1:08amIf Leith were not such a twerp his rhetorical question would be treasonable; it is certainly a vile calumny on all those who gave - and risked - their lives so that prats like him can make a living writing such rubbish.
On the whole the German people of the mid to late 1930s displayed an ecstatic admiration for Hitler and his thugs. They really thought they could conquer the world with their Turd Reich. They got what they deserved and I think the current generation of Germans that has suffered the ignomony of that defeat would probably agree with me. Yet there are still pissing wet pacifists in this country who would attempt to persuade us that we should appease the Islamic jihadiata and 'accommodate their concerns'. "We must talk to the terrorists." Ha!
There is only one way to talk to terrorists. Like ... "Rat-a-tat-tat!" Or perhaps to update it, "Ssssssssssssssssssss..... BOOOM!"
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JR Holliday
April 26th, 2008 10:55pmPacifism deserves to be discussed sensibly, if for no other reason than to reveal its shortcomings as a practical policy. From the review, it appears that this book does not do this, but is simply a polemic. What would the effect have been if we had refused to fight in 1939? Would the Greater German Reich, of which we would have become a part, have developed into something superior to the EU, equally unwanted by most people in this country in its present form? Would standards of justice, right and wrong, all the things which we regard as our right and accept as normal, now exist in our country? Millions of lives were sacrificed in the belief that they would not. Those lives might have been saved by a policy of appeasement, but at what cost? Today's world is far from perfect but I count myself fortunate to be British and to live in a country where I am not afraid to express opinions which others disagree with,and where these others are unafraid to disagree with me.
On the subject of area bombing, yes it was a terrible thing to do. As I recall, there was a war on at the time and in war terrible things are done. The way to avoid these terrible things being done is to avoid war. How would the pacifists have avoided war when faced with Hitler's method of creating lebensraum?
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John Lea
April 26th, 2008 3:34pmA most interesting review - I look forward to reading the book itself. However, although I was but a child during WW2 I would need a lot of convincing that the allied cause was as bad as the Axis's. In any case, we had binding agreement with Poland, and it was Hitler's determination to make all of Europe (at least) a greater Reich that created the war situation. The only remaining question to me is how Hitler - a dangerous psychopath, by any definition - managed to lead the advanced society that was Germanyin the 1930s into so rash and violent a war.
Let us keep in mind Czechoslovakia and Poland, Russia and France, and of course before 1939 the Luftwaffe's attacks on Guernica in aid of Franco.
All war is absurd and brutal, and its first casualty (as Churchill himself said) is truth. Let us not be conned into the belief that Britain was as bad as the Third Reich.
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David
April 25th, 2008 11:34pmI'm pleased to see that this review has received the pasting it so richly deserves.
What is this reviewer doing on the payroll of the Telegraph and Spectator? What is going on?
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jon livesey
April 25th, 2008 8:37pmWe should not make the mistake of seeing pacifism as a principled position. Pacifism is just the public face of a deeper ideology which aims at disarming the West.
The real reason Churchill was hostile to pacifists was that he had seen the way that pacifism in the thirties had exploited the horrors of the First World War in order to deprive Britain of the military power to deter German revanchism.
The real reason that the Allies had to use such deadly force in defeating Nazi Germany was precisely that pacifism had deprived Britain of the military credibility to forestall Nazi Germany's push to conquer Europe.
Churchill won a war pacifists made inevitable.
We were all very lucky in the sixties that the US was led by politicians who were willing to threaten the USSR with destruction in order to deter it, and who were not deprived of the ability to make that threat stick. Had the nuclear disarmament movement succeeded, we would probably have been fated to fight a third conventional war to defend Europe in less than a century.
Military power has two purposes; one to deter war, and the other, failing deterrence, to win them.
Baker and Leith seem to be arguing that we should be deprived of the power to deter the aggressor, and then of the power to defeat the undeterred.
That's not pacifism so much as self-hatred and defeatism.
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Herbert Thornton
April 25th, 2008 6:11pmBob Wright and Dennis Hoines evince attitudes a great deal healthier than those who wring their hands over the past while ignoring the evils of the present: not just the barbarity of Mugabe's regime, but the far more significant genocide in Darfur, and the general failure of western civilisation to understand how rapidly it's blindness to the infiltration of Islam is leading it towards its own collapse.
Churchill was once reviled, and his prescience was not recognised until the 11th hour, yet the determination to ignore evil is even stronger today. How many of us for example have even considered reading Mark Steyn's book 'America Alone'? If voices like his continue to be derided and ignored, the outcome will be a 21st century that makes the 20th seem relatively benign.
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Dennis Hoines
April 25th, 2008 4:27pmSam Leith doesn't need to look at WWII for an example of appeasement and pacifism - Zimbabwe is right before his eyes, with Nazi genocide, thuggery and torture. The white minority like the jews in Germany have been raped, murdered, robbed of their possessions and kicked off their land while the world's goody-two-shoes atand and watch.
But then cowards never really have the guts to fight do they Sam???
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