Might and wrong

‘Was all this the realisation of our war aims?’, Malcolm Muggeridge asked as he surveyed the desolation of Berlin in May 1945.

‘Was all this the realisation of our war aims?’, Malcolm Muggeridge asked as he surveyed the desolation of Berlin in May 1945. ‘Did it really represent the triumph of good over evil?’ All wars pose moral dilemmas for those who fight them, and the Second World War more acutely than most. How many allied lives was it legitimate to risk in pursuit of victory, even over an enemy of unspeakable wickedness? How many enemies was it legitimate to kill? Is the question even worth asking?

This admirable book is a history of the Second World War, seen through the eyes of the few who asked themselves these questions at the time, and the many who encountered them briefly before brushing them aside. It is one of a rash of books to review the morality of both sides’ conduct of the war, in a way which is symptomatic of a wider loss of confidence in the superior virtue of the victorious allies. The war is recent enough for its moral dilemmas to resonate with us. It cannot be regarded with the detachment that we bring to the far more horrible narratives of, say, the Mongol invasions or the Thirty Years’ War. Yet it is also distant enough for another generation, with little or no personal experience of confronting these issues, to have taken over the business of making judgments about them.

Michael Burleigh is more balanced than most. Certainly, he has little time for retrospective judgments. His purpose is to show how men responded, in real time and often on wholly inadequate information, to the moral dilemmas posed daily by the conduct of war.