Human Smoke | Nicholson Baker | Review by The Spectator

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.

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johnmorrissey

March 30th, 2009 11:42pm

Alternative histories are always interesting but the real history of WW2 may never be told.There is only one grand force behind the history of the twentieth century that explains all the horror and death of WW2.Consider that from 1920 till 1989 the worlds leaders and peoples were manipulated by the Master Puppeteers in the Kremlin.Lenin and then Stalin were driven by a dream of wiping out the existing order to establish a proletariat of the people enforced by the Red Army.Hitlers rise was only possible by the support of so many Germans frightened by the murderous depradations of the Bolsheviks wherever Communism ruled.Stalin had no interest in peace anywhere outside of the USSR, and peace in the USSR only under conditions where every inhabitant owed his job,the food on his table, his home and his life to the whims of the Party.Stalin was a master at getting others to do all his dirty work.When Hitler devastated Europe he was doing Stalins work for him,and wiping out any civil structure or population that might someday resist Communism and Soviet rule.His deepest fear was that he would be attacked from the East, where victorious Japanese armies were on his borders.His agents in Tokyo and in Washington had orders to get the Japanese to engage in a massive war against the US to take the Eastern threat away, and they were successful. There is no other possible explanation for FDR s ultimatums to the Japanese government.When the US chased the German armies out of Italy, his agents(Hopkins in the US and Philby in Britain) fought hard for a second front to keep the American Armies from heading thru Austria to Berlin.The last thing Stalin wanted was an American-Anglo Army at the borders to Poland, and a Western Europe still partially intact.The totally unnecessary invasions of Normandy the devastation of France and the lowlands, the enormous loss of life and the war weariness of the Allies were all bonuses to Stalin.The American conquest of Japan gave Stalin huge amounts of territory including North Korea without having to fire a shot.He also managed to murder much of Japans Imperial Armies when they became war prizes and were either executed or worked to death. Very few of the millions of Japanese soldiers, civilians and their families ever returned alive after the surrender of the Japanese.We were all at the mercy of a homicidal maniac and his followers, and didn t know it.Stalins legacy includes the miserable life his victims everywhere led, and the mass murders his followers committed. Hitler was a piker.

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Tom Dewis

September 23rd, 2008 9:52am

Discarding his support of pacifism, which I disagree with, Baker includes some very interesting, illuminating paragraphs about the bombardment of German cities by Great Britain, just as W.G Sebald did in his book "A Natural History of Destruction". It is certainly worth reading, but you have to read a lot of other books before you come to any conclusions about the Second World War.

John Richardson

May 5th, 2008 9:59am

I have never read such utter rubbish. A pact with Hitler would have meant appeasement, nothing else would have satisfied him, and we would now be part of the 'Glorios Third Reich'. As to wether Russia would have managed alone is another story. Bye the way water fails against fire more ofter than fire!

TDK

May 1st, 2008 2:27pm

Can I respond to 'son of a warsaw uprising survivor'.

My wife is the descendant of Jews who left Poland to escape antisemitism. There is plenty of evidence that many Poles practiced antisemitism before during and after the war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/books/review/23margolick.html
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewsh14.htm

Poland joined Germany in invading Czechoslovakia in 1939

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie

No country is free from sin especially in warfare but it is a leap to state "the allies ... betrayed those who stood up to evil from day one, namely the Poles". Britain elected to remain in a war that technically it had lost. Is that betrayal? Do you propose that having exhausted itself after six years of war Britain could have moved straight to fighting Stalin?

Son of a Warsaw Uprising survivor

April 30th, 2008 6:08pm

As I will never purchase this book my comments are based solely on the review. Yes, the allies did not always act honorably, especially in that they, in the end, betrayed those who stood up to evil from day one, namely the Poles who fought to protect and/or liberate western europe with the fourth largest standing allied army (even though their country was occupied). They also failed to make the slightest feasible effort to help the Jews in spite of adequate information provided to them by the Polish underground about the annihilation of the Poles, Polish Jews and the Jews of other European countries (three million murdered each). The author appears to ignore all evidence that Hitler and his movement was inherently evil and could only be stopped with force and violence. The notion that non violence or appeasement could have somehow stopped the organised murder of millions of people perpetrated by the German Nazis is so naive and silly that it is surprising to read. It appears that the author is forgetting the failure of the German people to prevent the emergence of Hitler's democratically elected regime and that many of the perhaps unnecessary violence towards german civilians was in part due to the understandably strong outrage at the unprovoked criminal conduct of the German nation as a whole towards the nations they occupied. Let us not forget, for example, how the German army enthusiastically followed Hitler's orders to "kill without pity or mercy all men, women or children of Polish descent or language,"

Alberto Lupi

April 30th, 2008 10:24am

Sirs,
I hope you allow me little comment of Sam Leith’s review of Nicholson Baker’s book ‘Human Smoke’ ( in the 26 April issue), avoiding the “Is it really a good idea to get an idiot to review a book by another idiot?” attitude.
As of Italian nationality and background I always had been surprised of this British and (North) American attitude of self devaluation.
The only thing I can point out is that ALL the totalitarian regimes are criminal.
And there is very few other to say.

Werner

April 29th, 2008 2:54pm

> ... accepted history ...

I wonder what part "accepted history" played in the Srebrenica massacre?!

Hans Slobbe

April 29th, 2008 1:20pm

Rewriting of accepted history is something some people seem to like very much. However, if a state invades another country, that is a declaration of war. If another state declares war to the first state in response, well that means war. And war is a dirty business. There is not something as a clean war. And I think the Germans were very good in fighting dirty wars. So any response to this is ok. No way the Germans would have stopped what they were doing, neither for talks or war.

Bart J. Roozendaal

April 29th, 2008 8:36am

Dear Sir,

Allow me utter a standard squawk of protest at Sam Leith’s review of Nicholson Baker’s book ‘Human Smoke’ (26 April issue).

First off, as World War II is gently gliding into the distant past, the fiction that Nazis rather than Germans started the war is increasingly popular among Euro-mandarins and revisionist historians. Bad Nazis, good Germans, appears to become the received opinion.
Nobody in their right mind would maintain that the allied side was exclusively made up of American democrats, British conservatives or Russian communists. Likewise, the now inconvenient truth is that it was Germany in whose name Poland was invaded, half of Europe turned into rubble and six million Jews murdered.
By allowing this to happen, the Germans had effectively placed themselves beyond the pale of acceptable human behaviour.

Secondly, there never was a refugee problem in Holland during the war, and in 1941 there certainly was no starvation. Widespread hunger only came about in the so-called hunger winter of 1944, when the Germans began emptying the northern part of Holland of livestock, foodstuff and other useful materials. To blame Churchill for this would be grotesque.

Thirdly, calling allied strategy a racist war of extermination is not drawing a moral comparison, but just a cheap slur on the memory of those who gave their lives for the liberation of Europe and Asia.
Germans do not constitute a race, and inflicting maximum damage on a nation that voted Hitler to power and helped fuelling his murder machine is in a different moral category altogether than killing people whose surnames did not fit political doctrine.
Besides, while it was Hitler’s declared postwar intention to go on decimating the Russian population, and exterminating all remaining Jews and gypsies, allied bombs stopped falling the minute the war was over.
One may legitimately question the political or tactical wisdom of allied strategy, but never its morality. A la guerre comme � la guerre.

B. Roozendaal, Amsterdam

Peter

April 29th, 2008 3:41am

For the Spectator to have published such an encomium of this pernicious rubbish at the very time when it ought to be taking every opportunity to remind our society of the disastrous consequences of pacifism in the past in order to encourage it to resist the creeping dhimmitude to which it is currently being subjected was a major error of editorial judgement and a betrayal of its readers. Shame on you!