The swastika was always in plain sight

In 1940, when Stephen Spender heard a German bomber diving down towards London, he calmed himself by imagining that there were no houses, and that the bomber was ‘gyring and diving over an empty plain covered in darkness’. The image consoled Spender with his ‘smallness as a target, compared with the immensity of London’. But it also exposed the ‘submission of human beings to the mechanical forces that they had called into being’. It seemed to Spender that entire nations were gripped by the ‘magnetic force of power’. People ‘no longer had wills of their own’.

As Tolstoy complained in the second epilogue to War and Peace, this sort of thinking is tautological. The people transfer their ‘collective will’ to a leader, on the condition that the leader expresses the collective will. The Germans followed Hitler; Hitler led the Germans. ‘That is, power is power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.’ Our attempts to explain the malignant power of Nazi Germany resemble
theodicy: the manifestation and conquest of evil, the exposure of Leopold von Ranke’s ‘holy hieroglyph’, the inner meaning and moral of history. In other words, how could this have happened?

The War in the West is the first part of a projected trilogy by the popular historian James Holland. Power here means organisation and logistics: the conversion of civilian industries to military production. Holland, who has previously ripped the yarns of the siege of Malta, the dam busters and the Battle of Britain, weaves between the abstractions of the ‘operational level’ and the chaotic, dangerous experiences of a wide cast of civilians and soldiers: between ingenious administrators like Lord Beaverbrook and Bill Knudsen, the president of General Motors, and ‘the smell of rotting flesh, dust, burnt powder, smoke and petrol’.