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
Eoin Lynch
April 24th, 2008 3:52pmIt's quite a pity that a historian wasn't used to review this book.Sam Leith is out of his depth.Any undergraduate worth his salt can rubbish the claims in this book as they have been used before by the likes of David Irving.
The Nazis did not come to power in 1933 with the intention of murdering all of Europe's Jews.Their plan was to make life so unbearable through pogroms and legal oppression for German Jews to flee.However their plans for living space brought millions of Jews into their sphere and their plans became more radical with deportation to Poland,Madagascar and Russia were all offered for the solution to the 'Jewish question'.Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was not going to be defeated so easily the Nazis embarked on the Holocaust.
Churchill was not a war monger but foresaw that appeasing the Nazis was useless as Chamberlain and the arch appeaser Stalin found to their cost.Only Churchill could have bullied and directed every department of state for the goal of victory.
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DG Forbes
April 24th, 2008 12:00pmChurchill may have revelled in the war but he didn’t start it. It was begun by predessors whose patience snapped and who broke with a long policy of appeasement, deciding on the evidence that pacifism didn’t work with someone like Hitler and likely never would. Chamberlain then sided with Churchill in the cabinet struggle of May 1940 with Halifax over whether we should fight or surrender on Hitler’s terms (compare the fate of France shortly after). Of course, that was a choice but people at the time chose freely not to make it and they assumed the corollary that total war needed to be met by total war. Didn’t the same Miss Partridge say elsewhere that it was essential the war should be won to save the intellectuals? The facts are what you chose to make of them in a contest at this distance that’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind. For example, it’s an article of faith with moral absolutists that area bombing was not only a war crime but was ineffective as a weapon against the German economy. That’s not what Speer or Jodl said, according to the literature. The further the war recedes, the easier it becomes to distort what happened through the lens of contemporary moral fashion. As Leith said, Baker knew where he was going to arrive when he sat down to write. That’s okay; Leith’s own prevarications have a distinctly nastier smell. Incidentally, what would have been the ‘right’ thing to do if we had signed a deal with Hitler and he then went on to attack the Soviet Union?
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