Nicolson was correct in anticipating that future generations would recoil in dismay from the strategic bomber offensive, but he misjudged the nature of their revulsion: in the twenty-first century, it is the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians, more than the devastation of baroque palaces, that rouses strong emotions. More than a few Germans, and even some Anglo-American critics, see a moral equivalence between Nazi wickedness in massacring innocents, especially Jews, and Allied wickedness in burning cities. This seems mistaken. The bomber offensive was designed to achieve the defeat of the Axis and the liberation of Europe. The Nazis’ mass murders not only killed far more people, but lacked the justification of pursuing a strategic purpose. Instead, they were conducted solely to fulfil Nazi Germany’s ideological and racial objectives. Technological determinism was the decisive factor in the worst excesses of bombing, which took place in 1945 when the war was obviously approaching its conclusion: vast air forces existed, and thus they were employed. Years of conflict against a barbaric enemy had coarsened Allied sensibilities, shrunk humanitarian instincts. This is unremarkable.
When it was all over, the American and British airmen who had participated in the strategic offensive against Germany, at such risk and sacrifice to themselves, were dismayed to find their campaign the object of criticism and indeed opprobrium. They had bombed the Nazi war economy into a state of collapse; unfortunately, however, their achievement came too late to secure the credit which the air chiefs thought their due. The Allied armies stood on the brink of completing the Reich’s defeat by their own exertions. The bomber offensive made a significant contribution to the outcome, but reached its terrible maturity too late to claim success on its own terms.
Critics concluded that the Allies had paid an unacceptable moral price for a marginal strategic achievement. Sir Arthur Harris said: ‘It all boils down to the fact that everybody dislikes bombers because they drop things on them, and everybody loves the fighter because it shoots down the bomber.’ He once wrote bitterly: ‘I have no intention … of going down to History as the author, or sole executant, of the Strategical plans to destroy the cities of Germany.’ He himself, he asserted, ‘never had strategical control of the Bomber Offensive … only tactical control with which to implement the strategical directives … received’.
He quoted the remark of General John Burgoyne after accepting defeat in the American War of Independence: ‘I expect ministerial ingratitude will be displayed, as in all countries and at all times has been usual, to remove the blame from the order to its execution.’ Harris added, ‘In my experience, I doubt he ever spoke a truer word.’ He had a point. Harris was a formidable commander, if an unlovable human being, who developed a personal obsession with destroying Germany’s cities, and displayed the spirit of an ancient Roman in fulfilling this end: Delenda est Carthago. But if his superiors dissented from his conduct of Britain’s bomber forces, it was their duty to sack him. As it was, Churchill and the chiefs of staff permitted Harris to pursue to the blazing end the policy they themselves had mandated back in 1942; he was the enforcer of area bombing, not its architect.
It is unjust that fighter pilots of all nations today retain a popular adulation often denied to bomber aircrew. Moral strictures upon strategic air attack should properly be deployed against those who instigated it. The killing of civilians must always be deplored, but Nazi Germany represented a historic evil. Until the last day of the war, Hitler’s people inflicted appalling sufferings upon the innocent. The destruction of their cities and the deaths of significant numbers of their inhabitants seems a price they had to pay for the horrors they unleashed upon Western civilisation, and represents a far lighter toll than Germany imposed upon the rest of Europe.
Victims
1 MASTERS AND SLAVES
Almost every citizen of the nations that participated in the war suffered consequences, but in widely varying degree. Historians describe events chiefly in terms of clashes of arms, which of course determined outcomes. But the conflict should also be understood as a human experience which changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, many of whom never saw a battlefield. Fear of injury or death created the most obvious apprehension, especially in the new age of air bombardment. But beyond this, there were many other causes of distress: about food and health; the absence of loved ones; the dissolution of communities. There were simple sorrows, such as being unable to give presents to loved ones. ‘Eva’s birthday,’ Victor Klemperer, a Jew rendered destitute by Nazi confiscation of all that he owned, wrote of his wife in Dresden on 12 July 1944. ‘My hands quite empty again, not even a flower.’ Nor was it necessary to be subject to Axis hegemony to suffer grievously: Stalin deported eastwards vast numbers of Soviet citizens from minorities whose loyalties he deemed suspect, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars, some 3.5 million in all. An unquantified but large proportion of these people died in consequence, some from typhus which broke out during their transportation. Their sufferings, unlike those of Hitler’s victims, are scarcely recorded, but it is known that four Heroes of the Soviet Union were among the deportees; Beria’s purges spurned discrimination.
Among other victims of the Soviets were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberian exile or the gulag in 1940–41, in furtherance of Stalinist ethnic cleansing policies; at least 350,000 perished of starvation or disease, and a further 30,000 were executed. Edward Matyka, a twenty-one-year-old soldier, naïvely supposed that the Russians would not impede his escape to Romania from the German-occupied region of Poland. But he was arrested by a Soviet patrol in January 1940, imprisoned, and awarded a sentence of five years’ hard labour for ‘illegal crossing of the border and attempts to carry out spying on behalf of the enemies of the Soviet Union’. In October, after weeks of travelling on prison barges, he and his comrades were required to march forty miles in bitter cold to reach their labour camp: ‘Four hundred shadows of men moved after one another slowly, with difficulty, making their way through deep snow … We went through forest and the column began to stretch and thin out as the weak and owners of baggage dropped out.’
At their camp, they spent the next eighteen months in conditions of ghastly privation. Some mornings, even in the prison hospital, Matyka awoke to find his hair covered with white hoar-frost. Each day, an average of twelve men perished. The Pole wrote of his desolation: ‘I was so far from my dear ones and I lay ill among unknown dying people. I knew that if I died, I would be forgotten like those whose lifeless bodies were carried out each day and that my family would never know what had happened to me. I cried like a helpless child that has been wronged, and prayed for a miracle.’ He was sent to work inside the Arctic Circle at a camp named Ust-Usa, canning meat for prison consumption. By the time he and his comrades were finally freed, they had completed a six-hundred-mile railway, laid with their bare hands. Matyka wrote bitterly, ‘The bones of Poles and other prisoners probably lie under every sleeper.’
Feliks Lachman, another Polish prisoner in the gulag, afterwards wrote a bitter little poem:
Lice bugs bugs lice
More bugs more lice
Rats fleas gnats flies
And bread-devouring mice
Dirt mud no soap
Stench filth to cope
No faith no hope
In darkness we grope
Our beds bare planks
Our mates sheer cranks
Our dreams long ranks
Of American tanks.
In the Soviet Union’s desperate circumstances of July 1941, Stalin amnestied 50,295 Poles who were released from prisons and camps, together with a further 26,297 from PoW cages, and 265,248 from special settlements and exile. A substantial number of soldiers subsequently joined the communist Polish army raised inside the Soviet Union. In the following year 115,000 others, 73,000 of them military personnel and the remainder women and children, were astonished to receive permission to leave Russia for Persia, where they became a British responsibility. Though foreign secretary Anthony Eden recogn
ised the Poles’ ghastly plight, ‘living in harrowing conditions, diseased and threatened with death by starvation’, this was not a burden welcomed by their new hosts. The British colonial authorities in Cairo wrote to the Foreign Office in June 1942 expressing acute alarm about the scale of the Polish migration: ‘To put matters brutally if these Poles die in Russia the war effort will not be affected. If they [are allowed] to pass into Persia, we, unlike the Russians, will not be able to allow them to die and our war effort will be gravely impaired. Action must be taken to stop these people from leaving the USSR before we are ready to receive them … however many die in consequence.’
This shamelessly callous analysis illustrates the brutalisation of some of those directing the Allied war effort, in the face of so many competing tragedies. The Polish migration went ahead anyway: a British medical officer in Persia responsible for the care of the arriving refugees reported that 40 per cent were suffering from malaria, and almost all from dysentery, diarrhoea, malnutrition or typhoid. Nearly two years elapsed before these Polish soldiers were medically fit to join the Allied armies fighting in Italy, where they served with distinction until the war’s end. Their dependants were shuffled from camp to camp, in humane but nonetheless unhappy British captivity. Many were shipped to India, and thence in 1945 to Britain, where most chose to spend the balance of their lives. Whatever the shortcomings of British behaviour towards these Poles, the fundamental reality was that they were victims of a murderous persecution by the Soviet Union, a power joined with the democracies in a supposed ‘crusade for freedom’.
In Europe, meanwhile, an estimated twenty million people were displaced from their pre-war homes, often in circumstances of terrible hardship. One evening in 1940, Łód Jew Szmulek Goldberg took his girlfriend Rose to the nearby sports club where they had spent many happy hours. It was now bomb-damaged and shuttered. They wandered into the derelict gymnasium where Szmulek once won a dance contest, partnering his mother. ‘I had dressed in my flashy clothes and brown felt hat for the last time. We stopped and I turned to Rose. “My name is Szmulek Goldberg,” I said in a formal, introductory tone. “My name is Rose,” she replied, her eyes glistening with moisture. I bowed to her and she curtsied in return. We waltzed through the stillness to music we heard only in our hearts.’ That night, amid Rose’s sobs and a long embrace, Szmulek said his farewells. He fled Łód and survived – but spent the last years of the war in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He never saw his girl again.
A powerful sensation among hundreds of millions of people was that of injustice: they did not believe they merited the plagues of peril, privation, loneliness and horror that had swept them away from their familiar lives into alien and mortally dangerous environments. ‘I don’t believe I am wicked,’ wrote British gunner Lt. John Guest, ‘and I don’t believe the majority of people, Germans included, are either – certainly not wicked enough to have been deservedly overtaken by this war.’
The peoples of countries ruled by the Axis were in worse condition, of course: almost all found themselves at the mercy of both the enemy’s soldiers and new collaborationist administrations. A Chinese in Malaya, Chin Kee On, wrote: ‘The former social order was reversed. The “nobodies” of yesterday became the “big shots” of today. The former scum and dregs of society, such as ex-convicts, notorious gentleman-crooks, swindlers and well-known failures became the new elite, riding high in official favour and power.’ On Java, two young Dutch girls travelling with their mother aboard a hopelessly overcrowded train were startled to be denied the seats to which they were accustomed. An elderly Indonesian noted their confusion. ‘Ya Njonja, daly Iain sekarang,’ he said sardonically to the mother – ‘Yes madam, things are changed.’
That Dutch family soon fell victim to far worse misfortunes. Elizabeth van Kampen, daughter of a planter, spent the years between her fifteenth and eighteenth birthdays in a Japanese internment camp with her mother and two sisters, clinging precariously to life as they suffered malnutrition, lice, beriberi, dysentery and repeated attacks of malaria. Most of Mrs van Kampen’s teeth fell out; her husband perished at the hands of the Kempeitai police. Elizabeth tried to preserve her sanity by dreaming of her past idyllic colonial childhood, and of a world beyond walls, but ‘How can you dream while you are locked up in a dirty, overcrowded prison, when you are lying on a filthy mattress full of bugs? How can you dream while your stomach cries for food? How can you dream without a sound of music? I was seventeen years old, but I became scared to dream at all.’
In the occupied countries, law was no longer an absolute, but became whatever the conquerors chose that it should be. Few Germans were as squeamish as Abwehr official Helmuth von Moltke, who during a visit to Oslo found himself occupying a requisitioned Norwegian home. ‘The … disgusting thing was the feeling of having entered a stranger’s house, to sit there like thieves, while the owner, as I knew, sat in a concentration camp.’ In Łód in April 1940, the lzak family was evicted from their small flat and shop, which were given to their neighbours, who were ethnic Germans; George’s mother wept bitterly. ‘My dear father was a gentle giant. I had never known him to lose his temper. Seeing the Bucholts take our home and shop, he shook with anger, but could say nothing with two Gestapo men present.’
German and Japanese carpetbaggers who had achieved little status or respect in their own societies became proconsuls in their nations’ new possessions; Takase Toru, from 1942 to 1945 a powerful figure in Japanese-ruled Singapore, taunted Chinese business leaders: ‘I have been to Malaya three times before, and seen many of you at dinner table … but you had not paid any notice to me then.’ The Japanese extorted a ‘gift’ of fifty million Straits dollars from the Chinese community, renamed many streets, and advanced clocks two hours to Tokyo time. During the brief 1942 honeymoon between the Burmese and their ‘liberators’, a Japanese classical theatre troupe performed in Rangoon, singing:
Let us dance happily,
And if we dance happily,
It will be in the heart of Tokyo,
Joy! Joy!
In the midst of Tokyo flowers.
But Japanese arrogance and brutality soon destroyed the goodwill of the Burmese people. Malays likewise recoiled from their new masters’ conduct, exemplified by their ubiquitous habit of urinating in public. The local population was outraged by the Japanese custom of administering a rebuke by a slap in the face. The occupiers grudgingly modified this practice in 1943, decreeing that only senior officers, colonels and above, could physically abuse natives; but scant heed was paid to the restriction. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, vivid chroniclers of the Asian experience, have written: ‘The Japanese seemed hardly more culturally sensitive than the British and were certainly more brutal.’
Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of Poland, wrote in his 1942 diary: ‘Humanity is a word that one dares not use … The power and the certainty of being able to use force without any resistance are the sweetest and most noxious poison that can be introduced into any government.’ This is an important statement, for it captures the exhilaration experienced by many Germans and Japanese on finding themselves, together with their local acolytes, occupying posts which conferred absolute powers of life and death. In ordinary peacetime life, men’s and women’s actions are constrained not only by law, but by social convention; even those who might feel no moral inhibitions about pillaging, injuring or killing others are subject to machinery which prevents them from doing so. But the men who exercised authority under the totalitarian regimes, emphatically including that of the Soviet Union, knew themselves liberated from all constraints and safeguards upon the sanctity of human life, provided only that killings advanced the purposes of the system they served. This huge, terrible freedom thrilled its beneficiaries: the few Nazi office-holders who afterwards gave honest testimony described their exercise of power in lyrical terms.
It was hard for victims, accustomed to lives in ordered communities, to grasp the implications of their absolute impotence. The chasm between a bourge
ois society going about its lawful business and the Arbeit Macht Frei entrance arch to Auschwitz was initially too wide for comprehension. Occupation and subjection seemed bad enough; only progressively did it become apparent that there could be higher gradations of suffering. Ruth Maier, a young Austrian Jewish refugee living in Oslo, wrote on 25 April 1941 about her quest for a US visa: ‘I’ve been to the American Consulate about it. I’m sure to get a visa after the war. But not before then … So we need to be patient.’ The hapless girl did not yet understand that her inability to secure a visa was no mere inconvenience, but a matter of life and death – her own: five months afterwards, she was deported and murdered. As late as 1944 Edith Gabor, eighteen-year-old daughter of a Budapest diamond merchant, heard reports of the fate of Europe’s Jewish communities, ‘but we thought: “Oh, this is something that happens to other people, in other countries.”’ She herself was frightened, but not frightened enough. Later that year she was transported to the first of a succession of concentration camps where she narrowly survived unspeakable horrors. All the rest of her family save one brother were gassed.
Many people met death far from any battlefield. The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians – Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians – were extinguished by wilful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation. Their deaths were no less terrible because they took place in circumstances of obscurity, in some ruined village rather than at Auschwitz or Majdanek, and unaccompanied by any redemptive opportunity to offer resistance or win medals. Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr was appalled to learn of mass hostage shootings in occupied territories, writing to his wife on 21 October 1941:
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