Has the role of resistance in the second world war been exaggerated?

When in 1941 Winston Churchill famously declared that the newly formed Special Operations Executive, set up to encourage resistance movements, would ‘set Europe ablaze’, neither he nor anyone else could have known the extent of the help the partisans would provide to the liberation of the continent. Nor, indeed, did anyone envisage the fact that not all of them would prove as biddable to Allied wishes as they hoped. As Halik Kochanski shows in her compendious book on the six-year underground war, resisters came in all shapes and sizes, not easily controlled or corralled into categories.

She divides her survey into three periods. The first runs from March 1939 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia to the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. The second carries the story up to the surrender of Italy in September 1943, the period of the maximum growth of the resistance, when the communists, held back by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, were freed to rise up against Moscow’s former allies. The last and perhaps most interesting section runs to the aftermath of the war, when the resistance was most organised, but also most rivalrous and disputatious about post-war politics. Looking at Europe as a whole allowed her, she says, to avoid the ‘pitfalls of nationalism’ and the epic myths of any one single country’s resistance memory. Her task was not an easy one.

Moving between France, Italy, the Balkans, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, Kochanski charts the rise and fall of the separate movements, as they formed, developed, splintered and suffered repeated losses at the hands of the German occupiers. She looks at the uprisings in Naples, Paris and Warsaw, at SOE operations, at the role of the communists in the various resistance movements, at Jewish participation in the partisan bands and at preparations for D-Day. Where there was a high degree of collaboration with the occupiers — as in France — the episodes of extreme brutality were, she argues, relatively rare.