Human Smoke

DG Forbes

Churchill 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?

Eoin Lynch

It'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.

Chris

Is it really a good idea to get an idiot to review a book by another idiot?

eric james

Ask the Poles how their passive resistance went. I don't believe the Jews resisted much either.

Herbert Thornton

If Britain and France had refrained from war with Germany, what would now be the relationship of Europe with Islam?

Johanna

As somebody of Afrikaans descent I don't have a great deal of time for Churchill, but is Baker seriously suggesting that refusing to fight Hitler would have made things better? Surely if any tyrant in history needed to be stopped then it was this man.

TDK

"Jewish refugees were not welcomed in any great numbers anywhere"

Well perhaps they weren't welcomed but according to Strauss, the Jewish population of Germany had gone from 499,800 in June 1933 to 185,100 in September 1939, a reduction of 63%. Ignoring those over 40, the rate increases to 80%.

Jews who escaped to say Poland, Netherlands or France would still have been victims of the Holocaust.

The rest of Europe might be blamed for failing to accept the 37%, assuming every one of those wanted to leave. The rest of Europe might be criticised for treating those refugees with suspicion. However it is a huge calumny to equate the rest of Europe's behaviour to that of Nazi Germany.

TDK

"The record of the bombing was similar. In 1941 it was estimated that only one in five British bombers placed its payload ‘within 75 square miles of its assigned target’. ‘Not more than one per cent’ of bombs hit their military targets — so targets were selected in order that the bombs that missed would hit civilians rather than be ‘wasted’. And what were the results? By May 1941, there had been ‘no collapse of civilian morale, no revolutionary unrest, no industrial taproot cut’. What was needed? Why, more and bigger bombs, more dead civilians."

This paragragh gives the false impression that no change in policy occured during 1941.

Prior to the Butt report (Aug 1941), the RAF had attempted to hit precision targets such as municitions factories. Their failure to achieve any significant result caused a rethink. Either Britain should cease the strategic bombing effort and concentrate on tactical support or the methods and objectives be completely revised.

Area bombing was selected because it offered the only way to hit back at Nazi Germany. Britain was hesitant to invade France in 1944 let alone 1941, so to abandon Strategic bombing would effectively mean Britain's resistance to Germany would be limited to the periphery, such as the desert campaign. It's worth pointing out that in May 1941 the Blitz was still in full swing. When the decision to switch to Area bombing was made, Germany had far exceeded the Allies in tonnes of bombs dropped on cities and the destruction there caused.

I'm sympathetic to claims that Area bombing was immoral but judgements made after the event should take into account the limited range of options available at the time.

TDK

"Jewish refugees were not welcomed in any great numbers anywhere"

The statistics are as follows (Strauss):

Jewish population of Germany June 1933: 499,800

Jewish population of Germany Sept 1939: 185,100 63% reduction

The same figures for Jews under 40 years old are 261,000 (1933) 48,800 (1939) an 81% reduction.

Maybe they were not welcomed but they were certainly admitted to other countries.

TDK

When you allowed my second comment but not my first I assumed it was somehow offensive - I therefore rewrote it. I apologise for the duplicate posting and also for my failure to spell check "munitions"!

Kevin Dunn

I have a standing order for "The Spectator" with my newsagent. On the strength of this review I shall be cancelling it on Monday. I do not spend my money to read one moral imbecile reviewing another.

Bob Wright

"Right on," my ass. The world is a very dangerous place. If all good people disarm and look the other way, or when forced to fight do so with one (or both) hands tied behind their back, then the Nazis/Taliban/Islamofascists (or some other "True Believers") will rule the world. Noone will be safe, anywhere.

Dennis Hoines

Sam 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???

Herbert Thornton

Bob 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.

jon livesey

We 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.

David

I'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?

John Lea

A 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.

JR Holliday

Pacifism 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?

Frank Pulley

If 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!"

Nicky Bird, RUSI, UK

This 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'...

John

Ignotant drivel reviewed by an ignorant idiot.

Werner

> ... 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!

Peter

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!

Bart J. Roozendaal

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 á la guerre.

B. Roozendaal, Amsterdam

Hans Slobbe

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.

Werner

> ... accepted history ...

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

Alberto Lupi

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.

Son of a Warsaw Uprising survivor

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,"

TDK

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?

John Richardson

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!