A World at War, 1911-1949: Explorations in the Cultural History of War 9004393544, 9789004393547

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A World at War, 1911–1949

History of Warfare Editors Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland) John France (University of Wales, Swansea) Paul Johstono (The Citadel, South Carolina) Michael S. Neiberg (United States Army War College, Pennsylvania) Frederick C. Schneid (High Point University, North Carolina)

volume 124

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hw

A World at War, 1911–1949 Explorations in the Cultural History of War Edited by

Catriona Pennell Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: ‘Bombardement d’usine’, Maurice Busset (1880–1936), 1918. Oil on wood. H. 176 cms x L. 250 cms. Musée de l’Armée, Paris, Inv. 1008T, Eb 1636. © Paris - Musée de l’Armée, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Anne-Sylvaine Marre-Noël. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pennell, Catriona, editor. | De Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro, 1969- editor. Title: A world at war, 1911-1949 : explorations in the cultural history of war / edited by Catriona Pennell, Filipe Ribeiro De Meneses. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: History of warfare ; volume 124 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018056511 (print) | lccn 2018059945 (ebook) | isbn 9789004393547 (ebook) | isbn 9789004276673 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: War and society--Europe--History--20th century. | War and civilization--Europe--History--20th century. | World War, 1914-1918--Social aspects. | World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects. | Europe--Politics and government--1918-1945. | Europe--Social conditions--20th century. Classification: lcc d443 (ebook) | lcc d443 .w673 2019 (print) | ddc 940.3--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056511

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1385-7827 isbn 978-90-04-27667-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-39354-7 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements  vii List of Illustrations  viii Notes on Contributors  ix Introduction  1 Catriona Pennell and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses

Part 1 Mobilizing Minds 1

Cultural Mobilization: Henry Moore and the Two World Wars  19 Jay Winter

2

Petitioning the World: Intellectuals and Cultural Mobilization in the Great War  42 Tomás Irish

3

“German Servicemen See Europe”: Cultural Mobilization of Troops on the Aegean ‘Quiet Front’  61 Anthony McElligott

Part 2 Soldiering: Experience and Representation 4

The Sharp End: Witnessing, Perpetrating, and Suffering Violence in 20th Century Wars  83 Alan Kramer

5

The Isle of Saints and Soldiers: The Evolving Image of the Irish Combatant, 1914–1918  108 Heather Jones and Edward Madigan

6

“For What and For Whom Were We Fighting?” Red Army Soldiers, Combat Motivation and Survival Strategies on the Eastern Front in the Second World War  133 Robert Dale

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Part 3 Civilians under Fire 7

Against Civilians: Atrocities, Extermination, and Genocide from One World War to the Other, 1942/44–1914  161 Annette Becker

8

Mobility and Immobility in Civilian Experiences of the First World War: Refugees and Occupied Populations in Europe, 1914–1918  181 Alex Dowdall

9

Occupation, Memory, and Cultural Demobilization: Paris as Case Study  200 Michael S. Neiberg

Part 4 Victory and Defeat 10

Post-wars and Violence: Europe between 1918 and the Later 1940s  221 Robert Gerwarth

11

A Croat Iliad? Miroslav Krleža and the Refractions of Victory and Defeat in Central Europe  243 John Paul Newman

12

“The Worst Disaster”: British Reactions to the Fall of Singapore  260 Daniel Todman A World at War: 1911–1949: Conclusion  279 John Horne Bibliography  307 Index  346

Acknowledgements This volume’s origins lie in a workshop entitled “International Experience and Legacy of the Two World Wars”, which was held at the Royal Irish Academy in June 2015. We would like to thank the Academy for the use of its premises and all of the support shown on the occasion. We would also like to thank all those who sponsored the workshop: The ucd Centre for War Studies; the Alliance Française; the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, the Trinity Association and Trust, and the Trinity College Department of History; the London School of Economics and Political Science; the University of Exeter; and the International Society for First World War Studies. Finally, our gratitude to all those who participated in the Workshop, as speakers, panel chairs or audience members. In relation to this volume, we would like to thank the contributors for their professionalism and constant good will, the staff at Brill, notably Marcella Mulder, and the following organizations for their permission to reproduce the images that enrich this volume: The Trinity College Dublin Library; the Henry Moore Foundation; the vicar and churchwardens of St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton; and Madame Sylvie Le Ray-Burimi, Conservateur en chef du patrimoine, Département des peintures et sculptures, Musée de l’Armée, Paris. Material from the Mass Observation collection in Chapter 12 is published with the permission of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.

Illustrations 1.1 1.2 1.3

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1945). Darlington Hall  27 Henry Moore, Standing Figure (1950). Glenkiln Estate  28 Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion (1946). St Matthew’s Church, Northampton  35 1.4 Henry Moore, Madonna and Child (1943–44). St Matthew’s Church, Northampton  38 5.1 “If you are an Irishman” (1915)  116 5.2 “Irishmen avenge the Lusitania” (May 1915)  118 5.3 “The Isle of Saints and Soldiers” (May 1915)  120 5.4 “An Irish Hero!” (April 1915)  122

Notes on Contributors Annette Becker is a Professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre and is deputy Director of the International Research Centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Among her books are Les cicatrices rouges, 1914–1918, France et Belgique occupées (Paris, 2010); Biographie de guerre d’Apollinaire, 1914–2009 (Paris, 2009 and 2014); and Voir la Grande Guerre, un autre récit (Paris, 2014). She coordinated the French edition (Fayard) of the Cambridge History of the First World War (directed by Jay Winter), 2014. Her latest book, Messagers du désastre, Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les genocides (Paris, 2018), is a history of the concept of genocide from the Armenians until today: the perpetrators, the victims, and the ‘messengers’, who try to warn, to see, to speak. Robert Dale is Lecturer in Russian History at Newcastle University, where he has been based since September 2015. He previously held a British Academy, Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London, and has taught at: Queen Mary, University of London, the University of York, and Nottingham Trent University. His research concentrates on the Soviet experience of the Second World War, and social and cultural history of the war’s aftermath. His monograph, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015. His current research project explores the post-war reconstruction of Soviet society, paying special attention to how the war’s painful legacy continued to divide and destabilise post-war society. Alex Dowdall is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, where he is a member of the Centre for the Cultural History of War. His research is concerned with the impact of military violence on civilians in modern Europe, with a special focus on France during the First World War, as well as the history of refugees in the period of the two world wars. He most recent book is (ed., with John Horne) Civilians under Siege from Sarajevo to Troy (Basingstoke, 2018), and he is currently preparing his first monograph, entitled Communities under Fire: Urban Life at the Western Front, 1914–1918. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of UCD’s Centre for War Studies. He has published widely on the history of

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v­ iolence in the first half of the 20th century, most recently The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–23 (London, 2016). John Horne is an historian, emeritus Fellow and former Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin, and Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is a board member of the Research Centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. In 2016–17 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He is the author and editor of a number of books and over 100 chapters and articles, many relating to the Great War. Tomás Irish is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University. He is the author of The University at War 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States ­(Basingstoke, 2015), Trinity in War and Revolution 1912–23 (Dublin, 2015), and (co-edited with Marie-Eve Chagnon), The Academic World in the Era of the Great War ­(Basingstoke, 2018). He completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Professor John Horne, graduating in 2012. In 2015 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Heather Jones is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College ­London. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she was a foundation scholar and a Government of Ireland Research Scholar, and St John’s College, Cambridge. She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Her 2011 monograph Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 was published by Cambridge University Press. She has co-edited two books and published over 27 scholarly articles and chapters on the First World War. Her next monograph on the British monarchy at war, 1914–1918 is forthcoming with cup, 2019. Alan Kramer is Professor of European History at Trinity College Dublin. He publishes on the cultural history of violence, war crimes, prisoners of war, and economic history in the era of the First World War in a context extending to the Second World War. He is a founding co-editor of 1914–1918 Online: ­International ­Encyclopedia of World War i, and his current research is dedicated to the

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global ­history of concentration camps and the transnational history of fascist warfare. Publications include Welt der Lager. Zur “Erfolgsgeschichte” einer Institution (Hamburg, 2013, co-editor Bettina Greiner); Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007); and, with John Horne, German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven CT & London, 2001), which was also published in German and French. Edward Madigan is Lecturer in Public History and First World War Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work combines cultural, military history and he is particularly interested in the British and Irish experience and memory of the First World War. In his capacity as a historian of the Great War and the Irish Revolution, Edward has appeared on British, Irish and US television and worked with numerous public-facing history and heritage organizations. He also co-edits the Historians for History blog. His publications include Faith Under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (Basingstoke, 2011), Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912–1923 (Dublin, 2013, with John Horne), and, with Gideon Reuveni, The Jewish Experience of the First World War (Basingstoke, 2019). Anthony McElligott is founding Professor of History and chair of the Department of History at the University of Limerick. He has written extensively on the history of the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich, including: Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (edited with Tim Kirk, Manchester, 2003); Weimar Germany (editor, Oxford, 2010), and Rethinking the Weimar Republic. Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 (London, 2014). He recently edited, with Jeffrey Herf, Antisemitism before and since the Holocaust. Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (New York NY, 2016). A study of the destruction of the Jewish community of Rhodes titled: The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018. He is also working on a study of Himmler’s chief statistician, Richard Korherr. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1999 and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2015. Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak

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of World War i (Cambridge MA, 2011) one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War, 1914–1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. He is now at work on a history of US involvement in the Middle East from 1942 to 1950. John Paul Newman is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at Maynooth University. He is the author of Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903–1945 (Cambridge, 2015), and the co-editor (with Mark Cornwall) of Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War (New York NY, 2016), and (with Julia Eichenberg) The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism (Basingstoke, 2013). Until September 2011, he was an erc Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the project “Paramilitary Violence after the Great War”, to which he contributed a case study of violence in the Balkans. Catriona Pennell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Exeter. She specialises in the history of 19th and 20th century Britain and Ireland with a particular focus on the relationship between war, experience, and memory. Her publications include A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), “Presenting the War in Ireland, 1914– 1918”, in Troy R.E. Paddock (ed.) World War i and Propaganda (Leiden, 2014), and “Taught to remember? British youth and First World War centenary battlefield tours”, Cultural Trends, 27 (2018), 83–98. Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses is Professor of History at Maynooth University, in Ireland, and has published extensively on 20th century Portugal and its colonial empire. His works include Portugal 1914–1926: From the First World War to Military Dictatorship ­(Bristol, 2004), Salazar: a Political Biography (New York NY, 2009) and, with Robert McNamara, The White Redoubt, the Great Powers, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980 (Basingstoke, 2018). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Daniel Todman is a Reader in History at Queen Mary University of London. He co-edited, with Alex Danchev, a new edition of the wartime diaries of Field Marshal Lord ­Alanbrooke (Berkeley CA, 2001). His first book, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2005) explored the changing way in which the First World

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War was ­represented in Britain over the 80 years after 1918. The first of his two volume history of Britain’s ­Second World War, Britain’s War, 1937–1941: Into Battle, was published by Allen Lane in 2016. The second volume, which includes the fall of Singapore, Britain’s War, 1942–1947: A New World, will be published in 2019. Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, Research Professor at Monash University, and a specialist on the First World War and its impact on the 20th century. Winter is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995) and War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, 2017). He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Graz in 2010, from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2014, and from the University of Paris in 2015. In 2017 he received the Victor Adler prize of the Austrian state for a lifetime’s work in history.

Introduction Catriona Pennell and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses As the centenary of the First World War draws to a close, the time has come both to review what has been accomplished over the course of four and a half years of intense public commemoration and academic activity and to look forward to new intellectual challenges. Of these, one stands out: testing the extent to which the advances made latterly in our understanding of the Great War – why and how it was fought; how and with what consequences entire populations were mobilized, physically and culturally, for the struggle; how it ended; and the related price of victory and defeat – are applicable to later conflicts, starting with the Second World War. Historiographical dialogue between the two conflicts has, on the whole, been slow to emerge. The First World War has primarily been integrated into a cross-conflict analytical ­framework as part of investigations into the Second World War’s origins (not least through the increasingly popular notion of a European Civil War).1 There are, of course, exceptions – set out below – in the subfields of gender, memory and national identity, predominately within the British context. But, for the most part, historians devote themselves exclusively to either one of the conflicts; and even if the once strict chronological delineations of each of the two wars is now fraying, so that the gap between them is narrowing, the fact remains that there is scope for much more intellectual cross-over between the two sets of historians.2

1 See, for example, Paul Preston, “The Great Civil War: European Politics, 1914–1945”, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, ed., T.C.W. Blanning (Oxford, 1996), 148–81; Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 (London, 2015); Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, trans. David Fernbach (London, 2017). 2 A number of recently edited collections have sought to consider aspects of the two world wars in comparative fashion. See Lothar Kettenacker and Torsten Riotte, eds., The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011); Nicholas Doumanis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2016); Robert Gerwarth, ed., Twisted Paths: Europe 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2008); Eric Storm and Ali Al Tuma, eds., Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1913–1945 (London, 2017); Carlos Reijnen and Marleen Rensen, eds., European Encounters: Intellectual Exchange and the Rethinking of Europe, 1914–1945 (Leiden, 2014). Nicholas Martin, Tim Haughton and Pierre Purseigle, eds., Aftermath: Legacies and Memories of the War in Europe, 1918–1945–1989 (London, 2014) goes even further, adding the end of the Cold War to the list of defining moments in 20th century European History.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_002

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This is not to downplay the significant contribution made by historians of the Second World War (and beyond) to our understanding of the cultural ­history of modern war, in particular the attributes, representations, and meanings of war in the modern world.3 The memory boom of the 1990s – in response to a wider permeation of Western culture of questions of remembrance, commemoration, and the uncovering of family history and eyewitness testimony – led historians to pay particular attention to the ways in which ordinary E ­ uropeans experienced and found meaning in the trauma of modern conflict.4 Known as the ‘cultural turn’ – discussed in more detail below – the study of history in this period was transformed by insights from anthropology, psychology, and literature, which, taken together, encouraged the study of representations as cultural constructions rather than objective realities.5 Significantly, the remembrance of the traumas of the Second World War lay at the heart of this endeavour; exploration of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust was initially crucial to the emergence of the study of memory as a legitimate scholarly project.6 Nevertheless, and although, as Geoff Eley notes, the bookshelves have since become “thick with discussion”,7 there is a w ­ eighting t­ oward scholarship  related to the First World War.8 Such is the disparity b­ etween 3 Three major research centres based in Ireland and the UK have been home to much of the pioneering research on these topics from a variety of 17th–20th century conflict perspectives: the tcd Centre for War Studies (https://www.tcd.ie/warstudies/); the ucd Centre for War Studies (https://www.ucd.ie/warstudies/); and the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester (https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/history/research/centres/ cultural-history-of-war/). Accessed 2017 Nov 16. 4 Jay Winter, “The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical Studies”, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington 27 (2000), 69–92. 5 Daniel Todman, “The First World War in History”, http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/?p=2512. Accessed 2017 Nov 16. See also Stephen Heathorn, “The Mnemonic Turn in the Cultural Historiography of Britain’s Great War”, Historical Journal 48 (2005), 1103–24; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Introduction” and “Setting the Framework”, in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, eds., Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, 1999), 1–39; Stefan Goebel, “Intersecting Memories: War and Remembrance in Twentieth-Century Europe”, Historical Journal 44 (2001), 853–58; K.L. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse”, Representations 69 (2000), 127–50. 6 Patrick Finney, “Introduction”, in Remembering the Second World War, ed., Patrick Finney (Abingdon, 2018), 2. See also Joan Tumblety, “Introduction: Working with Memory as a Source and Subject”, in Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject, ed., Joan Tumblety (Abingdon, 2013). 7 Geoff Eley, “Foreword”, in British Cultural Memory and the Second World War, eds., Lucy ­Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (London, 2014), xii. 8 Two useful recent surveys of the ‘regeneration’ in First World War scholarship are provided by Alan Kramer, “Recent Historiography of the First World War”, Journal of Modern European

Introduction

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the scholarship of the two conflicts that, according to Martin Francis, in his seminal article on the relationship between the two world wars in British ­historiography, “historians of the Second World War cannot but look upon the historiographical sophistication of the literature dedicated to the First World War with a mixture of admiration and envy”.9 Those scholars who have approached the subject of the Second World War through the lens of cultural history have made a significant contribution to our understanding of memory, gender, and national identity, particularly in Britain.10 As Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson argue, few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. The rich legacy it has left, in a range of media, has led to significant cultural memory work on the war’s presence in family stories, popular and material culture, and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.11 Patrick Finney’s Remembering the Second World War challenges nationcentric approaches to the conflict in memory studies, drawing strength from transnational, transcultural, and interdisciplinary scholarship.12 Work by, amongst others, Martin Francis, Claire Langhamer, and Penny Summerfield, complicates the narratives of the war experience for British men and women, in the process unravelling the multifaceted impact of the war upon gender hierarchies and identities.13 Sonya O. Rose explores the contested and often 9 10

11 12 13

History 12 (2014), part 1, 5–27 and part 2, 155–74; and Heather Jones, “As the Centenary Approaches: the Regeneration of First World War Historiography”, Historical Journal 56 (2013), 857–78. Martin Francis, “Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography”, Twentieth Century British History 25 (2014), 349. The predominance of literature on Britain and the Second World War is perhaps down to the fact that, as Daniel Todman observes, “Britain can’t shut up about the war”; a mediated (and fictionalized) version of the conflict upholds many of the popular tropes underpinning British national identity, be it class and political unity, victory in (over?) Europe, and imperial prestige, which academic scholarship seeks to revise and critique. See Daniel Todman, “Drunk on Dunkirk spirit, the Brexiters are setting sail for a dangerous future”, Guardian, 3 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/03/ dunkirk-spirit-brexiters-uk-britain-europe. Accessed 2017 Nov 16. Todman has written a new history of the conflict: see his Britain’s War Vols i Into Battle, 1937–1941 and ii A New World, 1942–1945 (London, 2016 & 2019). Noakes and Pattinson eds., British Cultural Memory and the Second World War. See also Geoff Hurd, ed., National Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television (London, 1984). Finney, ed., Remembering the Second World War. Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2008); Claire Langhamer, “‘A Public House Is for All Classes, Men and Women Alike’: Women,  ­Leisure and Drink in Second World War England”, Women’s History Review 12 (2003), 423–43; Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and

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contradictory articulations of Britishness and citizenship that emerged during the years 1939 and 1945.14 Rather than focusing on the historical memory of the war, as Angus Calder did in his efforts to interrogate the constructions of such narratives as the ‘Blitz spirit’,15 Rose uses wartime sources to identify and contextualise key aspects of wartime Britons’ attitudes towards class, gender, regional and imperial identities, and race, shining “some light onto wartime subjectivities” and the meaning made by British citizens of their experiences of war.16 It is the case, however, that most historians have been slow to acknowledge or appreciate the commonalities and cross-referencing between the two world wars.17 As noted above, some recent scholarship has drawn attention to ­affinities between these conflicts. Historians concerned with Germany’s zone of occupation in Eastern Europe during the First World War have considered the ways perceptions and behaviours evident in 1914–1918 returned in even more extreme and violent form between 1939 and 1945. Others, in understanding the development of the Weimar Republic, have argued for an expanded chronology that goes back to the First World War and/or extends until at least the end of the Second World War.18 On the other hand, Susan R. Grayzel, in her At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz, argues that in order to understand the real impact of the Blitz, it is necessary to go back a quarter of a century to the first aerial assault on Britain; air raids of the first war created new forms of understanding of the relationship between modern warfare and civil identity that were reignited during the Second World War.19 And key contributions by Ana Carden-Coyne and Lucy Noakes in the field of gender and warfare have attempted to draw S­ ubjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998). See also Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven CT, 1987); Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939–91 (London, 1997). 14 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003). 15 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991). 16 Rose, Which People’s War? 26 17 Francis, “Attending to Ghosts”, 357. 18 A point made by Francis in “Attending to Ghosts”. See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: National Identity and German Occupation in World War One (Cambridge, 2000) and Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford, 2000). See also Anthony McElligott, Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 (London, 2013). 19 Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012).

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out critical themes of change and continuity from 1914 to the present day.20 Combined, they reveal that women’s involvement in conflict across the 20th and 21st c­ enturies is “a story of paradoxes, at once a narrative of recognition and progress and at the same time a tale of containment and constraints”.21 The present volume seeks to build on these pioneering works. It is envisaged as a contribution to the on-going attempts to push the boundaries of academic exploration of warfare in the 20th century, deliberately adopting a crossconflict analytical stance in order to explore where further progress might be made in the future. We may be in the early days of this endeavour, but there are clearly benefits in breaking free not only from geographical boundaries – taking perspectives of the two world wars beyond Britain – but also from chronological restrictions, a case made convincingly by Gerwarth and Manela in particular.22 Renouncing chronological and geographical parameters is liberating, providing historians with the necessary scope, breadth, and knowledge to establish more effectively what the First World War did and did not do, how it helped to shape the inter-war period, and, of course, what was and was not new about the Second World War. For most of the men and women who found themselves at war from 1939 to 1945, soldiering or working for victory in many other capacities was not a new experience. Rather, it was a repetition of similar efforts, successful or not, made only two decades earlier. The mobilization (from above and from below) of combatants, economic resources, and minds was built on the experience of the Great War in accordance with prevailing (and often profoundly incorrect) readings of what had succeeded, and what had failed, between 1914 and 1918. So too were practices of occupation, economic warfare, and the treatment of suspect minorities and internal dissenters. There is much to gain from tracing the commonalities – of ­principles, of strategies, even of personnel – in all of these areas across the period 1914–1945. In many ways it is easy to understand why cross-conflict dialogue has been slow to emerge, given the differences between the two world wars. The First, with its confused and disputed origins, broadly similar regimes in differing stages of liberalization (the most liberal, France and Britain, being allied to the least, Russia), and ensuing military stalemate on all fronts, lent itself naturally to attempts to answer questions related to the endurance of soldiers and civilians alike: how and why did they withstand what was happening all around 20

Ana Carden-Coyne, ed., Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2012); Lucy Noakes, Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–1948 (London, 2006). 21 Noakes, Women in the British Army, 157. 22 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, “The Great War as a Global War: Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923”, Diplomatic History 38 (2014), 786–800.

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them? How could such a bloodletting be endured and tolerated by those who, guns in hand, could apparently have put a stop to it? And how did the experience of combat in the trenches, common to millions of veterans drawn from all over the world, as well as the scale of human losses, affect the course of history in the years that followed? For decades the historiography of the First World War was dominated by diplomatic and military historians, concerned with the war’s origins and its course on the battlefield. However, their combined efforts failed to account for the transformation of attitudes, beliefs and outlooks that the war had quite clearly brought about. The world of 1919 was different to that of 1914, but this change was yet to be understood and explained. Social and economic historians then took the lead, establishing how the various countries responded to the challenges of mass industrialized warfare – how the production of all that was needed at the front was optimized, how each state took on new economic roles, how the resources of colonial empires and neutral nations were tapped to keep the armies on the field of battle.23 But this better understanding of how the war was fought, in the material sense, could not provide a satisfactory answer to why the fighting continued, or how beliefs were transformed by conflict. A cultural answer was required; questions such as what soldiers and civilians believed about the war, why they believed it, and for how long, had to be understood.24 The turn to cultural history made all the difference in this respect, and it has enriched our understanding of the First World War enormously.25 This was indeed a great war of ideas and beliefs, fought out in each country, across Europe, and throughout the world. Drawing on each country’s histories and traditions, as well as on international movements and trends, political, social, intellectual, and religious arguments were advanced in an attempt to confer meaning to the war, shape war aims, and 23

24

25

See, for example, Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 2nd edition (Providence RI & Oxford, 1992, 1st published 1966); Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley & Los Angeles CA, 1977, 1st published 1973); Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Cambridge MA., 1986); Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1991); Patrick Fridenson, ed., The French Home Front 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1992); Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munition Workers in the Great War (Berkeley CA, 1994); Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War i (London, 1998). A pioneering work which hinted at the change to come is Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (1983, repr. Leamington Spa/Heidelberg /Dover NH, 1985). See also, in this respect, P.J. Flood, France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (Basingstoke, 1990). See Jones, “As the Centenary Approaches” and Kramer, “Recent Historiography of the First World War”. See also Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005).

Introduction

7

dictate peace terms. This wartime cultural mobilization, which explained how societies at war would be reconfigured in the aftermath of the longed-for victory, helped to keep soldiers in the trenches, not through fear and intimidation but rather out of a sense of duty: to their comrades-in-arms, their families, and their class, religion, and country.26 Those armies that could not do this – that did not accept that citizen-soldiers had to be convinced, not coerced – faced ever greater difficulties as the war dragged on.27 Mass literate armies had to understand, and believe in, what they were doing, and what would arise from the victory they sought – and the defeat they feared. The same was true of the home fronts that backed them up.28 Given the broadly similar experiences of the main combatant nations, the First World War invited first a comparative, and then a genuinely transnational, historiographical approach, one which established why and how phenomena and debates evolved irrespective of national borders in Europe, and indeed the world, as a whole.29 The cultural turn, 26

27

28

29

On soldiers’ commitment to the war effort, see, for example, Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War i (Princeton NJ, 1994); Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke, 2000); Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies (Cambridge, 2008); Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009); and Edward Madigan, Faith Under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (London, 2011). One example of such an army was Portugal’s, which fought both on the Western Front and in Africa. See Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Portugal 1914–1926: From the First World War to Military Dictatorship (Bristol, 2004). A more recent English-language cultural exploration of Portugal’s war can be found in the E-Journal of Portuguese History 11 (2013), edited by Sílvia Correia and Helena Pinto Janeiro. On home fronts and cultural mobilization in wartime, see, for example, Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford, 1998); Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008); Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie: Génération Grande Guerre (Paris, 2012); Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012); Tomás Irish, The University at War 1914–25: Britain, France and the United States (Basingstoke, 2015); and Michael S. Neiberg, The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford, 2016). On the blurring of the differences between the home and battle fronts, see Nicholas Beaupré, Écrire en guerre, écrire la guerre: France, Allemagne, 1914–1920 (Paris, 2006). Some important early works in the cultural history of the war include Stéphane ­Audoin-Rouzeau, La guerre des enfants 1914–1918: essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris, 1993); Jean-Jacques Becker, Jay Winter, Gerd Krumeich, Annette Becker, and Stéphane ­Audoin-Rouzeau, eds., Guerres et cultures 1914–1918 (Paris, 1994); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995); John Horne, ed., State Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War

8

Pennell and de Meneses

marked by a greater acceptance of interdisciplinarity, also allowed a new set of questions to be asked by historians – questions pertaining to the role of gender, race, and violence (against civilians and in combat) during the war.30 It has also blurred the chronology of the Great War, thanks to a renewed interest in the conflicts that immediately preceded and followed it, and the difficulties involved in demobilizing minds in the wake of the conflict.31 The Second World War was, at first glance, very different. Both conflicts were, in their own way, total wars: conflicts in which national governments, individually or in broad coalitions, went as far as they could to mobilize all available resources in the pursuit of victory. In many ways, it is this common nature that makes their joint investigation both possible and profitable. However, the ideological distances between the regimes which fought the Second World War were enormous, and these were more easily grouped and categorized than in the First. Democratic powers, eventually in an uneasy coalition with the Soviet Union, fought fascism in its various guises. The Second World War was also a more dynamic conflict, which allowed its participants little or no time to correct their shortcomings on the battlefield before a terrifying d­ efeat was

30

31

(­Cambridge, 1997). See also Gearóid Barry, Enrico Dal Lago, and Róisín Healy eds., Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War One (Leiden, 2016) which, amongst other arguments, explores the influence of the transnational movement of ideas and peoples on the colonies and European metropoles. On race and the associated issue of empire, see Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore MD, 2008); Jonathan Krause, ed., The Greater War: Other Combatants and Other Fronts (London, 2014); Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014). On the link between war and violence, see, for example, John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven CT & London, 2001); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca NY, 2005); Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007); Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, 2011); and Alex Dowdall, “Civilians in the Combat Zone: Allied and German Evacuation Policies at the Western Front, 1914–1918”, First World War Studies 6 (2015), 239–55. On post-war developments and the application of a ‘culture of defeat’ to Germany, see, for example, Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012); John Paul Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State-Building, 1903–1945 (Cambridge, 2015); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London, 2017). Other studies examining cultural demobilization in practice in transnational terms in the inter-war period and beyond include: Gearóid Barry, The Disarmament of Hatred: Marc Sangnier, French Catholicism and the Legacy of the First World War, 1914–1945 (Basingstoke, 2012); Mona L. Siegel, The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940 (Cambridge, 2004); Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge, 2013).

Introduction

9

s­ uffered (with the exception of Great Britain, protected by the English Channel, its navy and the RAF, whose strength was carefully husbanded even as France fell). The conflict also resulted in the total ruin of Europe, whose recovery and rehabilitation had to be taken in hand by the two superpowers the war had created – there was no political space for individual countries to recover in isolation, while reflecting on, and commemorating, their individual war experience, as occurred after 1918. And, of course, at the very heart of the Second World War stood the Holocaust, which required the development of a whole set of analytical tools to approach, and which has rightly spanned an enormous literature of its own. The Second World War is still seen today as a war of absolutes, in which the motivation of the participants does not require great subtlety to understand, so obvious was it; soldiers faced either triumph and survival or total annihilation. The ephemeral nature of many of the regimes that participated in the war (some of them having been spawned during the conflict itself, under Axis occupation) also militated against transnational approaches: the functioning of each regime – Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the Soviet Union etc – had first to be understood, in all of its aspects (not least because of the scale of the crimes committed in its name) before any comparison could be engaged in. However, historiographical advances carried out in tandem by the specialists in each conflict have blurred the once apparently sharp differences between the two world wars. Once the cultural dimension of the First World War is kept firmly in mind, the demonization of the enemy first and foremost, then this conflict’s acts of violence against civilians – atrocities in 1914, aerial bombardment, U-Boat attacks, the treatment of suspect minorities, requisition of food and labour – lose their exceptional character and become an integral part of the war.32 Might not the difference between the two world wars lie in each side’s ability, by 1939, to strike the other’s civilians directly (culminating 32

For works that place the First World War firmly as a precursor of the Second, ­notably when it comes to issues of occupation and territorial expansion, see, for example, Liulevicius, War Land; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The C ­ ampaigns Against Enemy Aliens During World War One (Cambridge MA & London, 2003); Jay Winter, ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge, 2003); Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale, trans. Claudine Spitaels and Marnix Vincent (Brussels, 2006); Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa AL, 2005); Jonathan Gunz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2009); Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle WA, 2009); Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, ­14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris, 2010); Philippe Nivet, La France occuppée, ­1914–1918 (Paris, 2011); Benjamin Liberman, The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe (London, 2013).

10

Pennell and de Meneses

in the atomic attacks of 1945), along with the possibility of complete military success, as witnessed on the Western Front in 1940, and the Eastern Front in 1941? Meanwhile, our understanding of the Second World War’s soldiers has also evolved. Whether they served democracies or totalitarian regimes, they remained individuals; their experience of military service and combat must be understood in terms of what they believed themselves to be achieving; theirs too was a war of cultures, not just politics or national defence.33 They were not so different from the soldiers of the Great War, and were subjected to similar pressures. Might there be other areas of commonality?

...

The Royal Irish Academy, in association with a number of Irish and British academic institutions, hosted in June 2015 a workshop entitled “International Experience and Legacy of the Two World Wars”. The organizing committee was formed by Robert Gerwarth, Tomás Irish, Heather Jones, Alan Kramer, Edward Madigan, and the authors of this Introduction. It was the committee’s collective intention to stimulate dialogue between the historians of both conflicts, especially in the light of the ‘cultural turn’ in war studies. It was from the themes and ideas discussed during that event that the basis for this edited volume evolved. The workshop marked the retirement from Trinity College Dublin of Professor John Horne, who first joined Trinity as a lecturer in 1977 and who, teaching and writing alongside, and sometimes with, Alan Kramer,

33

On the Eastern Front, see Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Houndmills, 1985) and Hitler’s Army. Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York NY, 1991); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London, 1986); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45 (London, 2005); Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying. The Secret World War ii Tapes of German Forces, trans. Jefferson Chase (London, 2012, 1st published in German in 2011); Roger R. Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War ii (Lawrence KS, 2011); and Robert Dale, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians (London, 2015). On the British experience see Jonathan Fennell, Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: The Eighth Army and the Path to El Alamein (Cambridge, 2014); Alan Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945 (London, 2015); Paul Addison and Angus Calder, eds., Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945 (London, 1997); Jeremy A. Crang, The British Army and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (Manchester, 2000); David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War Against Germany, 1919–1945 (Oxford, 2000); and Emma Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers: War, the Body and British Army Recruits, 1939–45 (Manchester, 2014).

Introduction

11

e­ stablished enduring and stimulating intellectual connections all over the world. In addition, by supervising and supporting the endeavours of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, John Horne and Alan Kramer put Trinity College very much at the heart of global First World War studies. One of the leading practitioners of the cultural approach to war studies, John Horne, whose first monograph was devoted to the British and French labour movements during the Great War, played a fundamental role in developing ideas such as cultural mobilization and demobilization as discussed by many of the contributors to this volume. Following the original structure of the 2015 workshop, the volume is divided into four sections which reflect some of the principal concerns of cultural historians of the First World War: cultural mobilization; the nature and representation of combat; the experience of civilians under fire; and the different meanings of victory and defeat. As will be suggested below, these are not watertight categories; indeed, there is considerable overlap between them. Our starting point as editors was to invite some of the most significant cultural historians of the Great War – those who, working closely with John Horne, have done most to shape the field and influence subsequent debates – to cast their gaze over both world wars, considering ways in which their individual approach to war studies can shed new light on the 1939–1945 period (as well as other 20th century conflicts). This volume seeks thus to build on a quarter of a century’s work on the First World War and its immediate aftermath by engaging in an innovative exploration of the continuities and breaks between the two world wars. Jay Winter, Alan Kramer, Annette Becker, and Robert Gerwarth were asked to open each section with an exploratory essay that forces them, by design, to break new ground, in terms both of their earlier writings and of general approaches to the Second World War. These ‘provocation’ essays are then supported by more focused pieces which, set side by side, provide complementary case studies for the study of each World War from the point of view of the section’s theme. The aim, then, is to help establish where continuity exists (or not) and where comparisons can be profitably pursued by scholars of either conflict, or indeed, of war in general. The cultural history of modern war is built around the notion of mobilization of minds, as explored by Tomás Irish and Anthony McElligott. This was a task which governments, in the early years of the Great War, were happy to leave to other actors. From academics, artists, and journalists to religious figures, from women’s organizations and trade unionists to employer’s groups, from the military heroes of previous campaigns to the returning heroes of the present war, many were the voices that struggled to define, for the benefit of their respective audiences, what this war was about. As the sacrifices needed

12

Pennell and de Meneses

for victory mounted, and enthusiasm waned, governments began to take this task more seriously, attempting to coordinate efforts and streamline messages. In the more developed countries, all elements of belligerent societies were mobilized for war; as one moved from the Western Front both the intensity and the coordination of the mobilization campaigns decreased. When the war had ended, demobilization was the order of the day, at least among the victorious powers; commemoration, reconciliation and reconstruction soon emerged as priorities. A number of issues are of immediate interest when extending this kind of analysis from the First to the Second World War. First and foremost, of course, is the extent which mobilization from 1914 to 1918 and then ­demobilization – to a great extent built on the hope war itself would become a thing of the past – influenced the process of gearing up for war once more in 1939. Was the process doubly difficult after two decades of peace (less in the East)? Had the public in general – and soldiers in particular – become more cynical? Then there is the extent to which would-be totalitarian regimes were more or less effective than parliamentary democracies at the task of cultural mobilization – a question closely linked to the relationship between victory and defeat in the Great War and the posture adopted after 1939. The experience of combat remains a mystery to those who have not lived through it, but is nevertheless the subject of constant academic fascination. Does it unlock a state of primal fury among those who engage in it, no matter what their respective circumstances and the nature of the war being fought, or, alternatively, can soldiers be made to respect certain codes – of care for the wounded, prisoners, civilians and cultural treasures, say? Do commanding officers and, beyond them, national leaderships set the tone for the kind of war being waged, all soldiers acting accordingly? If so, how can the right balance be found between aggression – the lifting of the cultural restrictions on killing – and the preservation of order, discipline and respect for non-combatants? If the first explanation holds true, then there is no difference between the world wars and any other conflict, or between the soldiers of different armies in different centuries. If it is not, then again there is room for an instructive comparison between the conflicts of the 20th century and, within them, the armies of parliamentary democracies, fascist states and the Soviet Union, as demonstrated by Robert Dale. It is also the case that representations of combat, and the battlefield performance of individual armies, or units within these armies, can be used as part of the mobilization process as explored by Heather Jones and Edward Madigan. Does a direct appeal to manly, or racial, warlike ‘virtues’ affect the kind of war being waged? And what happens when a setback is suffered? Wartime cultural mobilization is carried out not just in favour of a set of values, a dazzling vision of a better post-war world, or the deliverance of ­ethnic

Introduction

13

kinsmen imprisoned in another political entity; it is also directed against the enemy: its armies, its values, and its culture. This was particularly acute in situations of military occupation during both world wars, as revealed by Alex Dowdall and Michael S. Neiberg. The very first weeks of the Great War saw considerable violence employed with shocking ease against the civilian population, notably in Belgium and northern France. Under the pressure imposed by the Schlieffen Plan’s strict timetable, German units attributed the unexpected difficulties they faced to civilian resistance and reacted accordingly. Did all mass citizen armies pitted against each other find it naturally difficult to distinguish between combatant and defenceless populations? Was the line between the two blurred as Europe embraced the idea of total war? Was there no way to prevent such violence? How could national and religious minorities fare under such circumstances, if they were not trusted to participate wholeheartedly in their country’s war effort? How did the different belligerent governments weather the social pressures generated by mass civilian mobility and immobility? And to what extent is enmity and hatred demobilized in the aftermath of such intense experiences such as military occupation? The experience of 1914–18 suggests that while the life and property of enemy civilians (and of suspect internal groups) could be spared, the temptation to not do so was ­often too great; military and political expediency, allied to the political aims of some in or close to power, unrealizable in peacetime, made such violence ­acceptable. All that was missing were the means to obliterate the distance between the battle and the home fronts, although even here strides were made in the development of long-distance bombing planes, zeppelins having shown themselves to be too vulnerable to the task. Meanwhile, the rival economic blockades became attempts to starve the enemy into surrender, carried out at great cost to the civilian population of the Central Empires. Significantly, the most important episode involving violence against a defenceless population was the Armenian genocide, carried out by the Ottoman authorities against a minority suspected of collusion with foreign enemies. The parallels at all levels with the Second World War are clear in this category: violence against national minorities and enemy civilians, indiscriminate bombing of cities under often spurious pretexts, genocidal policies put into action on a hitherto unknown scale, culminating in the attempt to destroy Europe’s Jewish population. There was only one step not taken – the return to the military use of poison gas, be it on the battlefield, be it, as was feared during the inter-war period, against enemy cities. Yet despite the heightening of wartime hatred, former enemies of the first half of the 20th century have learned to live with one another. In fact, memories of the civilian experience of military occupation might be said to have contributed to the dismantling of enmity in the post-1945 era.

14

Pennell and de Meneses

The greater inclusivity of First World War studies in recent years – the wider consideration of events away from the Western Front – combined with the ‘cultural turn’ in war studies has led us to understand victory and defeat in new ways, as discussed by John Paul Newman and Daniel Todman. The war did not end in November 1918 in the minds of many who had been mobilized for it. For those who saw the events of 1914–1918 as the ‘war to end all wars’, victory was by definition a conditional state; all the sacrifices only made sense if peace was preserved. In other countries, the rewards gained in victory did not seem to match the cost and effort invested in the war, with consequences for the governments and even the regimes responsible for intervention. And in the newly established states of Central and Eastern Europe the situation was less clear still: their existence was, to a great extent, the result of military defeat, with all the attendant costs when it came to making sense of what had happened. Countries like Poland and the future Yugoslavia were assembled from populations which had fought on different sides of the conflict; in these cases, the notion of victory was especially difficult to celebrate. Conversely, defeat too was a problematic notion. Post-revolutionary Russia refused to accept that it had been beaten; the same might be said of Romania. Greece emerged as a victor, after much turmoil, but squandered that victory with a war against Turkey which turned the latter, improbably given the events of 1914–1918, into a victor. Furthermore, victory and defeat were not confined to the closing stages of conflict and contributed to vital mood shifts during the wars themselves. Perceptions of coming victory and defeat affected the behaviour of all involved and those in charge of mobilization had to adapt accordingly. A culture of victory, in some ways, infiltrated Germany in early 1918 after Russia had been knocked out of the war. This ‘in war’ experience of victory and defeat was perhaps clearer in the Second World War when the fall of France was widely assumed to mean the end of the war, which the British failed to absorb fully. The legacy of great defeats reverberated – even within victorious nations of the First World War – and had implications for the way military disasters were understood as the second unfolded. The 12 chapters that make up this volume present readers with a chance to consider, in greater depth, the potential richness of cross-conflict cultural analysis of the two world wars. While by no means exhaustive, the volume highlights the possibilities and challenges that arise from this type of scholarly endeavour. Emerging and established historians alike reflect on four core themes relating to wartime experience in the 20th century. Fundamentally, it was our wish as editors to encourage future dialogue, not to have the final say. There is still much more work to be done in this realm. As a result, the conclusion cannot provide neat closure; instead it reflects on the ideas contained

15

Introduction

within the 12 pieces and gives a sense of direction to future research endeavours in this area. Appropriately, this task has been undertaken by John Horne, a key instigator and inspiration of many of the discussions included within this volume.

...

Like the 2015 workshop at the Royal Irish Academy, this book is intended as a tribute to John Horne, lecturer, mentor, colleague, and friend to all those who have contributed to it. John has framed the way a generation of historians approaches the First World War; he has contributed to how the war is remembered and commemorated in its centenary, from Ireland to Australia, but above all in France; he has established solid collaborations with scholars from all over the world on the basis of mutual respect, intellectual curiosity, and tolerance. As his former students we can only hope that the work invested in this volume goes some way towards expressing our gratitude for the help given and the support shown by John, from our very first meeting as supervisor and postgraduate student until today. CP & FRdeM

PART 1 Mobilizing Minds

∵

Chapter 1

Cultural Mobilization: Henry Moore and the Two World Wars Jay Winter Wartime cultural mobilization is the gathering together of the cultural institutions and practices of a nation at war in support of the war effort. It overlaps with social mobilization, adding an emphasis on language, texts, and objects to the gathering together of the social institutions and practices of the nation at war, for example, those organized in trade unions or chambers of commerce. Cultural mobilization extends further, though, in that it deals with the languages and practices of political and military life. Social mobilization usually describes the home front, though the distinction between battlefront and home front wore thin during the Great War. Together, social mobilization and cultural mobilization started from below, with initiatives in Great Britain, for example, coming from within civil society. The longer the war lasted, though, the more state institutions coordinated elements of social and cultural life.1 But the nature of cultural mobilization also depends, crucially, on the war in question and the position within it of the different combatant states. In this chapter, I wish to use substantial variations in the nature of cultural mobilization in Britain to explore some fundamental differences in the history of the two world wars. 1

The Setting

Prime among those differences was the nature of the imagined future and in particular the prospect of defeat. Very few people in Britain ever seriously contemplated British defeat in the First World War. There were furrowed brows at the Admiralty when the toll taken on Allied shipping by U-boats was totted up in 1917, and General Haig’s “backs to the wall” communiqué in 1918 did present 1 The locus classicus of this argument is John Horne’s introduction to his collection of essays, entitled State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997). Thanks are due to Robert Dare and Harvey Mendelsohn for useful comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_003

20

Winter

a bleak picture of the challenges British forces faced after the German breakthrough in April. But other than those critical points, there was hardly a trace of doubt that the Allies would ultimately win the war. No one could tell what the price would be, but whatever it was, most people believed that it had to be paid. Why the optimism? Probably because Britain had not fought a continental war for a century, and relied on its navy to assure its hegemonic position in both trade and in war. It was Germany’s attempt to break that hegemony by threatening to install its fleet on the Channel ports, with a lightning victory over France, which forced Britain to go to war in 1914 in the first place. But underlying these calculations, there was a subtler reason why victory was inevitable. Britain would win the war because it was Britain. Twenty-five years later, the tables had turned. First, the technology of warfare had changed to make air power the decisive weapon, rendering the fleet vulnerable in a way it had not been in 1914–18. Secondly, even former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had believed that “the bomber will always get through”, creating an image of massive civilian casualties in the event of a new war. Thirdly, Conservative appeasement of Italy and Germany made it clear that Britain was not only unprepared for war, but entirely reluctant to engage in hostilities, whatever the provocation. Too many families had too many memories of the carnage of the Great War to see another war as anything other than a disaster. During the first year of the war, that disaster turned into defeat after defeat, in Norway and in France, essentially rewriting the end of the First World War, this time with Germany as victors. We ought to register the uncomfortable fact that in May 1940, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wanted to accept an Italian idea to broker a peace conference, where Germany would be granted legitimate power over Europe and Britain would get to keep the Empire. Over my dead body, said Winston Churchill, who no longer had an army in France, but who defied ‘facts on the ground’, refusing to contemplate defeat. That refusal was noble, but it did nothing to sugarcoat the message that Britain in May 1940 was in the worst strategic position it had ever been in its history. With Russia and America still neutral, defeat for Britain was avoided in part by Churchill’s bloody-minded refusal to use the word. But even Churchill’s corpulence was a thin reed with which to cover the military nakedness of his nation. What followed was a mixture of defiance, in Churchill’s famous speeches, and, in the face of palpable defeat, a cultural mobilization from May 1940 on, enabling Britons to imagine a better future: one in which a welfare state would replace the warfare state, and a new social contract would emerge, paid for by those who suffered and died in the conflict. Of course these visions were dreams, utopian moments in a very hard war, but they mark out a cultural landscape in Britain at war in 1939–45 unknown during the Great War.

Cultural Mobilization

21

The paradox in this mode of thinking about the future is clear. On the one hand, these images of transformation entailed a real break with the past, in particular the dismal inter-war depression. On the other hand, these imagined Britains rested on a language of continuity, which configured an unbroken line between past and future. A backward-facing rhetoric for radical purposes suited a country which had not known war at home for 300 years. As Gareth Stedman Jones showed in his classic Languages of Class, with reference to the Chartists, looking backwards to face the future is an old English tradition, not at all invented in 1940.2 William Morris did the same. To Walter Benjamin, this is always the way the angel of history operates. Timing matters. I want to tell the story of the tendency of some people to imagine a better future precisely at the moment when that future seemed almost unachievable. Antonio Gramsci once said that the more his physical circumstances contracted, the wider his intellectual horizons became. Britain was facing Nazi power all alone, and even its possible victory was one such moment of counter-intuitive imaginings of the future, aligned with a timeless and unbroken past. Here is cultural practice mobilized for war in a unique way, totally without precedent in the 1914–18 conflict. To paraphrase Dr Samuel Johnson, defeat concentrates the artistic mind (and imagination) wonderfully.3 During this early phase of the Second World War, between 1939 and 1942, Britain faced defeat for the first time in its modern history. That moment was configured time and again during the war as the crossroads between civilization and darkness, between a British past and a German future, between Christianity and barbarism. Artists and poets captured this antinomian moment, this division of time between the flowering of Englishness and the withering of Europe, which threatened to inaugurate a new Dark Ages throughout the world. Turning to the past as a guide to the future was a gesture of reassurance, of defiance, of belief that the British way of life would survive the most severe military challenge in its history. This essay presents this turning towards the future in a number of domains while considering the work of the sculptor Henry Moore. 2

Landscape, Family, and the Sacred

Moore’s configuring of the Englishness of the landscape, the family and the sacred had a utopian element in it. The Beveridge Report into the future of the 2 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983). 3 On the utopian imagination, see Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (New Haven CT, 2006).

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social services represented one element in this impulse to imagine a future very remote from the present being lived in 1942. There are many other ways in which we can see how striking the construction of alternative futures was, precisely while the German aerial assault on centres of civilian population was still going on, and when defeat was a palpable possibility. I want to suggest as well that these glimpses of a future were gendered, an important element through which we can understand both their appeal and their limitations. These visions of an imagined England – used inaccurately but incessantly as shorthand for Britain – took on many forms, including configurations of the feminine deeply rooted in older iconographic traditions. These images of the feminine and motherhood had religious sources and references, which were reconfigured in a kind of artistic Christian revival in wartime. There are many areas in which artists and writers inscribed their defiant message, paradoxically finding hope at a very dark moment in British history. One was in the celebration of the English landscape. A second was in the nurturing of the English family. And a third was in the reaffirmation and elaboration of a certain kind of sacred language, a casting of the Second World War in the form of a struggle between Christianity and barbarism, between human values and inhuman crimes, between art and annihilation. The second and the third of these tropes were gendered, and deployed images of femininity of a very old kind. I want to dwell in particular on the work of Henry Moore in this context. He is well known for his drawings of Londoners seeking shelter in the Underground during the Blitz. But his work configured war and peace in a host of other ways too. In the glow of Allied victory in 1945, and in its celebration in the decades that have followed, we may have lost sight of these subtler colours, these greyer tones, which described a war of anxiety and sacrifice, a war during which for a long time, the enemy had the upper hand. Only by recognizing this sombre mood can we appreciate the ways artists like Moore used gendered images to create an art of defiance, a turning away from the awful possibilities of war and defeat to configure art which embodied what was at stake in the conflict. 2.1 Landscape In 1944, the National Trust celebrated its jubilee.4 At the end of the war, the Trust launched a Jubilee Appeal, which had the support of the new Labour government. A matching grant gave the Trust the chance to buy public spaces. 4 For the official story, see: James Lees-Milne, ed., The National Trust, a Record of Fifty Years’ Achievement (London, 1946).

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The New National Land Fund set aside £50 million to purchase land in memory of those who had died in the war. In 1947 the Country Houses scheme offered the National Trust the means to rescue and restore for the nation the landed property of impoverished aristocrats and gentry. These stately homes were to be preserved not only as architectural sites, but as the envelope of a way of life in danger of extinction. In consequence, where possible, the original owners retained quarters in properties now to be vested in the nation. Why this conservation effort? Part of the reason was the huge increase in the value of the nation’s symbolic capital at a time when its housing stock was reduced to rubble by wartime aerial bombardment. Alongside the rebuilding of housing estates came the rebuilding of the symbols of continuity, of stately dignity, of an orderly world which patently could no longer survive in private hands. In 1939 Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore’s champion and director of the National Gallery,5 instructed the artists working for the Pilgrim’s Trust to record the country houses of England before they were all converted into “lunatic sanatoria”. And, in a way, he was right. Stately homes were, like everything else, mobilized in the war. They became barracks, hospitals, offices, training grounds, decrypting centres, mobile residences for a host of wartime personnel. It was one of the ironies of the war effort that the British army did more damage to stately homes than generations of speculators or incompetent managers – or even the Luftwaffe itself. Perhaps we can appreciate even more the nostalgic glow of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited when we consider the fate of the English landscape in the period of the Second World War. It is in this context that we should place some of Moore’s work. After the Second World War – and in contrast to the post-1918 period – it was not the names of the fallen which occupied the centrepiece of commemorative art. Memorial plaques, columns, statues from the First World War were all there, and provided the space, at minimal cost, for arraying the names of the fallen in 1939–45 alongside or adjacent to those of the 1914–18 war. Fortunately, the number of those British men and women who had died in the Second World War was much smaller than in the First. After 1945, the names were inscribed, but perhaps more importantly, historic buildings, gardens, grounds, landscapes, parish churches became essential, local, de-centred sites of memory which c­ arried with them the message not only of wartime loss, but also of continuity, survival, endurance, and hope. From early on in the war, Henry Moore produced sketches of the effects of the war on people and the landscape. Like most city dwellers, he left the city for the countryside, but returned periodically to see what was happening. He 5 David Cannadine, Kenneth Clark: From National Gallery to National Icon (London, 2002).

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produced with remarkable speed a series of sketches of Londoners sheltering in the Underground. Moore was better prepared for this task than perhaps he realized thanks to his earlier sculptural work, in which he had derived from Mexican art and other sources a series of motifs of mothers and children as well as of reclining figures. These themes became his signature preoccupations.6 Here is his account of encountering the people in the Underground: I had never seen so many rows of reclining figures and even the holes, out of which the trains were coming, seemed to me to be like the holes in my sculpture. And there were intimate little touches. Children fast asleep, with trains roaring past only a couple of yards away. People who were obviously strangers to one another forming tight little intimate groups. They were cut off from what was happening above, but they were aware of it. There was tension in the air. They were a bit like the chorus in a Greek drama telling us about the violence we don’t actually witness.7 What Moore was able to capture was the fragility of these efforts to provide some semblance of family life without the privacy of a home. That is why his images have a ghostly character to them. They resemble a nightmare, which, despite the myth of the Blitz as a time of cocky stoicism, was what the Blitz was.8 After his London sketches, Moore produced a series of sketches of miners working in the Wheldale colliery in his native town of Castleford. The seventh son of a Yorkshire miner, Moore accepted a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to portray facets of the coal mining industry, and in particular, of underground work during the war. These images are of men working without the company of whole families recorded in the London underground sketches. Some scholars have related these sketches of London and Yorkshire during the Second World War to an earlier phase of Moore’s own life. Moore volunteered and served as a machine-gunner in the First World War. In No­ vember 1917, at the age of 19, Henry Moore carried a Lewis gun, a small machine-gun, into the confused assault known as the Battle of Cambrai. Most of his unit were hit; Moore was one of the casualties. His regiment was reduced from 400 to 52.9 Having been gassed, he was hospitalized for three months. 6 Herbert Read, Henry Moore: Mère et enfant (Paris, 1966). 7 Henry Moore, A Shelter Sketchbook, ed., Frances Carey (London, 1988), 9. 8 David Ashford, “Children Asleep in the Underground: The Tube Shelters of Brandt and Moore”, Cambridge Quarterly 36 (2007), 295–316. 9 Zoe Dare Hall, “How Henry Moore turned the horror of Cambrai into art”, Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2014, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/inside -first-world-war/part-eight/10742106/henry-moore-war-sculptures.html. Accessed 2017 Oct 5.

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Once recovered, he was posted to a training camp, where he taught bayonet drill. When one recalcitrant infantryman recoiled from the task, Moore’s reply was succinct and dour, in true Yorkshire style: “Stick it right in and shout ‘Take this, thee bugger’”.10 Like many other war artists and soldier poets, Moore hated the misery of war but was no pacifist. Moore himself rarely commented on this part of his life. He nodded to the conventional view, said Herbert Read, that the Great War was a “romantic adventure”.11 As such, it was radically different from the Second World War. You can characterize the 1939–45 conflict in many ways, but a romantic adventure is not one of them. The romance (if any) of the Great War lay not in the conditions in which the war was fought nor in its carnage but rather in the sense that ultimately Britain would win. Moore’s first carving during the First World War was for his school, Castleford Grammar School. He produced its roll of honour, listing all those who served in the war. His name would later join all the others. Late in life he went even further and said “I was not horrified by the war. I wanted to win a medal”.12 Spoken like the Edwardian youth he had been when war broke out in 1914. Rather than turning him into a pacifist, the war left marks on Moore’s religious outlook, a strong part of his life which later separated him from Dada, surrealists, and others who loathed religion. To a friend, he wrote this: The one great mistake in religion as I have known it, is the belief it creates in one that God is Almighty. He is strong & powerful & Good; but were he Almighty, the things I saw and experienced, the great bloodshed & the pain, the insufferable agony & depravity, the tears & the inhuman devilishness of the war, would, could never have been.13 Moore’s later work can be seen as an affirmation of life despite the cruelties of war. This is the core of much of the war poetry of 1914–18, and locates his imagination in the deep ambivalence many ex-soldiers felt about the war when they (like everyone else) realized later that it was not going to be the war to end all wars. In addition, Moore had a deep sense of a violated landscape, of no man’s land as a space where human figures and the earth come together, not in shared fertility but in devastation. And reclining figures, some without faces, 10 11 12 13

Anthony Barnett, “Moore’s Figures”, Prospect (August/September 1998), 70. Hall, “Cambrai”. Alice Correia, “Insufferable agony: Henry Moore and the First World War”. Available at https://soundcloud.com/ww1-art-leeds/insufferable-agony-henry-moore-and-the-first -world-war-1. Accessed 2017 Oct 5. Hall, “Cambrai”.

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some perforated with holes bigger than any in Moore’s sculpture, littered the battlefields of France and Flanders. His wartime work drew upon his personal experience of combat and his deep knowledge of the harsh, painful experience of civilian life during the Second World War. Moore and his wife had to leave London after their flat was damaged during the Blitz. The link between war and landscape also suggested themes that were less personal and contemporary than universal and ancient. Here the central notion is that stone is less allegorical than elemental. The call to bring into public ownership and thereby to preserve important elements of an ancient and ageing landscape antedated the war. In 1927, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, led the appeal for funds so that the National Trust could purchase 1400 acres surrounding Stonehenge. In 1918, Stonehenge itself had been presented to the nation. A decade later, Baldwin urged that “The solitude of Stonehenge should be restored and precautions taken to ensure that our posterity will see it against the sky in lonely majesty before which our ancestors have stood in awe throughout all our recorded history”.14 For Henry Moore and others, landscape was a natural setting for sculpture – sculpture of a certain kind, the shape of which emerged time out of mind. In 1945, Moore executed a commission in honour of Christopher Martin, Dartington Hall’s first Arts Administrator, who had died the year before. His Reclining Figure is a paean to the land and to those who shaped it. Moore said of this work: “All the time I was working on it I was very much aware that I was making a memorial to go into an English scene that is itself a memorial to many generations of men who have engaged in a subtle collaboration with the land”.15 The figure’s raised knee, Moore added, “repeats or echoes the gentle roll of the landscape”.16 14

15 16

For this citation and other points, I am grateful to Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, who were kind enough to provide me with their unpublished paper, entitled “Landscape and Post-war British Sculpture”, presented to the conference “Denkmale und kulturelles Gedächtnis nach dem Ende der Ost-West-Konfrontation”, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 18–22 November 1998. Their work in this field is fundamental. See Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945 (Oxford, 1999). On her work as Curator of the Henry Moore Institute, see Curtis, “Sculpture’s Edges, Sculpture’s Core”, American Art 24 (2010), 35–39. See too David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell, eds., The Geographies of Englishness. Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940 (London, 2002), and Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell, eds., Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Burlington VT, 2003). “Henry Moore’s memorial figure”. Available at: https://www.dartington.org/about/our-history/history-of-our-listed-gardens/henry-moores-memorial-figure. Accessed 2017 Oct 5. Boris Ford, Cambridge Cultural History of Britain vol. 9 Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2006), 135. See also Frederick S. Wight, “Henry Moore: The Reclining Figure”, The Journal of Aestheticism and Art Criticism 6 (1947), 94–105.

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Illustration 1.1 Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1945). Darlington Hall. Reproduced with the permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

In 1950, Moore cast a Standing Figure for a neighbour, William Keswick, who wanted to put it on his estate in Glenkiln in Scotland. Three other Moore sculptures followed, and are now placed on rocks or hillside on Keswick’s estate. How far we are from reclining figures, damaged or deformed men, half resting, half merging with the earth. This second, monolithic notation goes beyond the individual figure to a timeless history, one whose meaning is obscure to us, but whatever it is, it is imbedded in the British countryside. 2.2 Family British propaganda during the Second World War harped on many themes. Strikingly prominent among them were landscape and family. And how bucolic were such appeals: Your Britain: Fight For It Now, by Frank Newbould, made the South Downs the iconic English countryside. A few months later, Abram Games also produced a work on the same topic, Your Britain: Fight For It Now, but this time the Britain in question was embodied in the Peckham Health Centre. This pioneering venture, sponsored by a ­Labour-party-dominated municipal council, had been created before the Second World War, and became

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Illustration 1.2 Henry Moore, Standing Figure (1950). Glenkiln Estate. Reproduced with the permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

the prototype for a new National Health Service. Indeed, the idea at the heart of the Peckham scheme, that ‘consumers’ should share the management of health services, went well beyond the centralized bureaucracy of the post-war nhs.17 Here was a model of what was meant by the slogan ‘welfare for the people’. 17

Jane Lewis and Barbara Brookes, “A Reassessment of the Work of the Peckham Health Centre, 1926–1951”, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly. Health and Society 61 (1983), 307–50.

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This became one of the central themes of the conflict: it was the warfare state, symbolized by the Nazis, versus the British welfare state in the making. That antinomian outlook was at the heart of the astonishing public response to the appearance of the Beveridge Report on the future of the social services, issued in late 1942, and then translated into 17 languages, and which despite Churchill’s monumental annoyance, did indeed become the blueprint for discussions of a future welfare state. With the Labour party running the home front in coalition with Churchill, to many people it was for this better, more just, more equitable social order that the war – then in its darkest phase – had to be fought and won. Increasingly, wartime writers proclaimed that the welfare to be defended was that of the family, then defined in conventional patriarchal terms. Women and children were not only part of the war, as daily bombing casualties suggested. They were the future. Just as in the 1914–18 conflict, war both fragmented family life and made it a more precious national asset. In the Second World War, mobilization separated families in one way; evacuation did so in another manner. Domestic accidents soared, especially those suffered by unsupervised children, wandering around the bombsites that used to be their neighbourhoods. Mothers and children received special rations, and these measures helped account for an extraordinary fall in both the infant and the maternal mortality rates during the war.18 After 1945, the Labour government created a set of entitlements imbedded in British citizenship, which aimed not only to prevent a return to the destitution of the inter-war years but also to ease the burdens of raising a family. This initiative worked. For many reasons outside the scope of social policy, including the social effects of military service, but also because of legislative enactments with respect to child benefit and public health, the marriage rate soared after the Second World War,19 during a period of severe austerity. There is no doubt that this phenomenon reflected a greater propensity for women to marry earlier in their childbearing years, and for a greater proportion to marry in general. Paradoxically, a war which had torn family life to shreds had increased the popularity of marriage.20

18 19 20

Jay Winter, “The Demographic Consequences of the Second World War in Britain”, in War and Social Change, ed., Harold L. Smith (Manchester, 1986), 151–78. Jay Winter, “Population, Economists and the State: The Royal Commission on Population”, in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, eds., Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple (New York NY, 1990). Jay Winter, “War, Family and Fertility in Twentieth-Century Europe”, in The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970, eds., John R. Gillis, Louise Tilly and David Levine (Cambridge MA, 1992), 291–309.

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Now that the ‘Baby Boom’ has come and gone, we can see clearly that the years following the Second World War were a highly unusual exception to the general trend, in motion for a century, of a major decline in fertility and a consequent transformation in family life. In the period following the Second World War, such a trend appeared (mistakenly) to be a thing of the past. The birth rate increased during the Second World War, and continued to rise for the following decade. The celebration of maternity and the domestic realm was the order of the day. In 1942, Henry Moore and his wife Irina settled in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, away from London and the Blitz. Their farmhouse, Hoglands, became their home, and it is there that they had their daughter Mary in 1946, right in the midst of the Baby Boom. Everyone knew that the war had been won at home just as much as it had been won abroad, and this consensus expanded the notion of the heroic to include women’s productive and reproductive lives. Henry Moore’s Family Group of 1945 could have served as an icon of the re-gendering (or perhaps the ungendering) of what was meant by heroism and by war service. HM 6 and HM 7 are in the same genre, as is the Mother and Child on Ladderback Chair of 1952. Note the evident contrast between these sculptures and the series of warriors and helmeted heads which were produced in the same post-war period. What a striking distance there is between the healing and hopeful form of the family, on the one hand, and the damaged or imprisoned body of the warrior, on the other.21 The same contrast appears here as in the context of Moore’s approach to the landscape. On the battlefield, men are isolated, threatened, vulnerable. There is no centre of action; just a shifting, lethal field of force. And Moore knew of what he spoke. He had been there, and in his sculpture we can observe the dialogue of the warfare state and the welfare state: the two massive forms of collective life we led in the violent 20th century. 2.3 The Sacred There is a third context in which to place a portion of Moore’s work stemming from the period of the Second World War. It is the revival of a Christian discourse in a war which threatened to eclipse not only British values, but ­Christianity itself. This movement of opinion and creativity was powerful, but evanescent. It was the last great moment in which public issues in Britain were translated into transcendental terms. After the First World War, commemorative forms had sought to mark the sacrifice of three-quarters of a million men. They also aimed to restore meaning to the notions of sacrifice and service. The ­problem 21

Angela Summerfield, “Henry Moore”, rsa Journal 136 (1988), 836.

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remained, though, that war memorials had offered a warning. They constituted a sign on which were engraved two words: “Never again”. And “never” had lasted a mere 20 years. The warning had failed. There were other reasons why the upsurge of Christian notation during and after the Second World War was short-lived. It lacked the foundation of a church-going population. When the war was over, and the Nazi challenge to ‘Christendom’ was dead and buried, the impulse in retrospect to Christianize the struggle against the Nazis had no purchase, no resonance. And the specific crimes committed against the Jewish people made it more difficult to Christianize the conflict. Auschwitz was not redemptive. Neither was Hiroshima. For these and many other reasons, the use of Christian language in memorialization slowly faded away. Yet before it did, it left behind a number of enduring works of art. Basil Spence’s reborn Coventry Cathedral is one of them. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, produced for the re-consecration of the Cathedral in 1962, is another. And during the war itself, there were other equally powerful voices who spoke out in the language of Christian imagery and belief. Among them was T.S. Eliot, a native of St Louis but an adopted son of Britain. An established poet by 1939, the author of The Wasteland, that bleak evocation of the lassitude that followed the Great War, Eliot was also a committed Christian, who joined others in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Church to reaffirm the power of Christian beliefs to illuminate the world.22 We must place his Four Quartets clearly in this context of a return to the sacred during the early years of the Second World War. 1940–42 was not only the darkest phase of the war, it was also the time when this moment of Christian revival took on striking political and social forms.23 In 1942 William Temple, a Christian socialist who was Archbishop of York, became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the inspiration behind an earlier meeting of intellectuals and churchmen at Malvern in 1941 seeking ways to Christianize public life. No man of the left, Eliot was very sympathetic to the revival of Christian language in a war which threatened to destroy it. And so, for many like Eliot within the Church of England, the time had come to speak out about England, about the war, and about the future, and to do so both as Christians and in identifiably Christian terms.

22 23

Giles C. Watson, “Catholicism in Anglican Culture and Theology: Responses to Crisis in England (1937–1949)”, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1998. Available at https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/9952. Accessed 2017 Oct 5. Watson, “Catholicism”.

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One man who did so was George Bell, Bishop of Chichester.24 When refugees from the Nazis were interned in the Isle of Man, despite the fact that many had risked their lives to stop the German advance through Europe, a few men and women called out in protest.25 Bell did so, in part because he saw the war as a crisis, understood in the original Greek sense: a judgment, a moment which exposed realities and beliefs to the core. Time and again he spoke of the war as a moment when Christianity was in danger of being totally destroyed. Nazi paganism was its antithesis. Consequently, Christians had to affirm their beliefs and act on them as never before.26 Bell is perhaps best known for his public and very unpopular stand against the indiscriminate bombing of German cities during the war. He also worked during the war to support the German resistance, and in particular the work of the Confessional Churches and his friend the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bell tried unsuccessfully to get the British Foreign Office to support their part in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in 1944. No help came; the assassination attempt failed; Bonhoeffer was hanged. Bell was also the inspiration for Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, a work meant to demonstrate the value of using verse plays to spread the Gospels and to portray the lives of the just. “To Dr Bell’s initiative”, Eliot wrote, “I owe my admission to the theatre”.27 Reaching out to the people through t­heatre was  one facet of Bell’s ministry; another was bringing art back into the churches. Here is the intersection with another facet of Henry Moore’s sculpture during the war and in the post-war years. A number of British artists contributed to the revival of sacred notation, drawing on indigenous traditions linking ­medieval painting and sculpture to Blake and the pre-Raphaelites. In this way, painters and sculptors deepened the sense in which the English parish church was itself a war memorial, a repository of messages which touched on the most important issues of the day. Such an engaged approach to theology and art was not new in 1939. But what the Second World War did was to shake the Church 24 25 26

27

Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids MI, 2016). Andrew Chandler, “The Church of England and the Obliteration Bombing of Germany in the Second World War”, English Historical Review 108 (1993), 920–46. Chandler’s work is the best on this topic. On religion and the army, see Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London, 2005). On the home front, see Dianne Kirby, “The Church of England and ‘Religious divisions’ during the Second World War: Church-State Relations and the Anglo-Soviet Alliance”, Electronic Journal of International History (Institute of Historical Research London), article 4 . Watson, “Catholicism”, 153.

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of England and the Christian conscience it claimed to express to their foundations. These artists were responding not only to the paganism and brutality of the Nazis, but were also voicing the fear that in the very effort to defeat evil, much that was good about English society would be destroyed. In 1948 George Orwell wrote 1984 about London in the Second World War. The encroachment of state power over every aspect of life, including freedom of thought and expression, troubled many at the time. The small decencies of life, which so many identified with the English way of doing things, were expendable in wartime. This is the theme of a remarkable wartime propaganda film turned into a work of art, Powell and Pressberger’s Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a work so cunningly subversive that Churchill wanted it totally suppressed. Fortunately Churchill did not get his way. When Kenneth Clark wrote to The Times in October 1939, announcing the formation of a War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Bishop Bell saw a unique opportunity. He wrote to Central Council for the Care of Churches asking if “some way could be devised for linking up the artists with the Church at this very moment, and helping the artists in war”.28 What he had in mind was a series of small-scale commissions, perhaps radiating out from his see in Sussex. This is how he put it in November 1939: In days not less unsettled long ago, the Church offered all manner of opportunities to the Artist – the sculptor, the painter, the craftsman as well as the architect. The evidence of their skill is to be found in the Churches and Cathedrals all over England. Could not the Church as part of its sense of the inestimable value of spiritual things, renew its association with Artists of different kinds today? And that is precisely what he managed to do. He commissioned the exiled German Jewish artist Hans Feibusch to provide a wall painting for St Wilfrid’s Church in Brighton. Then came a competition in 1940 among eight artists to produce a mural for the Bishop Hannington Memorial Church, in Hove. AngloCatholics believed that by bringing art into the churches, they were expressing their links with 1,000 years of English history. Parish churches were, in a ­manner of speaking, what England was fighting for. That certainly was Bishop Bell’s point of view.29 One important expression of his project can be seen in East Sussex today. In 1943, Duncan Grant, the Omega painter and Bloomsbury perennial, decorated the chancel arch of the East Sussex parish church of St Michael and All 28 As cited in Watson, “Catholicism”, 128. 29 Chandler, Bishop Bell, passim.

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Angels, Berwick. There we find the rector of St Michael’s, George Mitchell, standing alongside Bishop Bell, observing “Christ in Glory”. On the West Wall of the same church, Grant offered The Victory of Calvary in Byzantine style, and Vanessa Bell offered an Annunciation and a Nativity. While these paintings were under way, The Times of London noted that “when more beauty is being destroyed and threatened than ever in the world before (…) mural painting, already growing in worldly use and esteem, will also surely win back its place in the Church’s regard”.30 When the paintings were installed, Bell hailed them as signalling the “re-entry of the artist into the realm of religion”, which he believed would be an important part of “the general awakening of our time”.31 The specifically local reference in the paintings linked the eternal and the immediate problems of the defence of the south of England. In September 1944, Bell convened a conference on “The Church and the Artist”. The aim of the meeting was to bring together churchmen, artists, and critics. The “great spiritual crisis” of the war had changed the role of art in everyday life: “What we all need, what the world needs, is Order, a Pattern, a sense of purpose, a Philosophy, a Faith. The Church has a Faith, and the artist with his vision has the genius and the capacity to mediate Order and to represent that Faith”.32 Bell accepted that the Church itself had been responsible for creating a gulf between artists and the churches, but now that gulf was being bridged. This ecclesiastical revival was remarkable, though as I have already noted, it was short-lived. But during the war itself, the terrifying nature of the conflict and its desperately uncertain outcome created an atmosphere in which many artists worked to explore Christian themes. To do so did not entail theological orthodoxy, but rather theological and aesthetic dialogue. Consider the work Francis Bacon did in 1943, on Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Put alongside it a number of works by the Roman Catholic artist Graham Sutherland. In particular, consider his Thorn Tree of 1945 and his Crucifixion of 1947, in Pallant House, Chichester. Sutherland also contributed a Crucifixion in 1946 as an altarpiece for St Matthew’s parish church, Northampton. It is a Catholic meditation on the ­concentration camps, and as such, open to objections which have plagued the Christian iconography of a Jewish catastrophe. But for our purposes, the Sutherland Crucifixion is significant in another way. In the same church, three years earlier, Henry Moore had placed a Madonna and Child.

30 31 32

The Times, 16 October 1943, leader. Watson, “Catholicism”, 137. Watson, “Catholicism”, 143.

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Illustration 1.3 Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion (1946). St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Reproduced with the permission of the vicar and churchwardens of St Matthew’s Church.

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Moore had attended Bishop Bell’s conference on the Church and the Artist. So had T.S. Eliot. In the Northampton commission, Moore left his own ­distinctive mark on what was clearly a much wider cultural movement to grace the English parish church with an art that was both timeless and contemporary, catholic and indigenous. The church where it was placed had been built in the 1890s in the spirit of the Gothic revival. The rector of St Matthew’s, Walter Hussey, was a close friend and kindred spirit of Bishop Bell’s. Indeed, he was later Dean of Chichester.33 Kenneth Clark called him “the last great patron of art in the Church of England”.34 During the war, he helped resettle in the Midlands town of Northampton the art schools funded by the London County Council. Among them was the Chelsea School of Art, where Moore had taught. Not only artists, but also musicians were scattered around the Midlands during the war. The bbc Orchestra performed in Hussey’s church. And the vicar had commissioned Benjamin Britten to write a Festival Cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb, drawing on Christopher Smart’s poem and his verse hailing “the hand of the artist inimitable”. The cantata was performed in the church in September 1943. Moore carved this commission himself. He was unprepared to leave the design in the form of a small maquette, but instead worked the project through until it was completed. Hussey had seen Moore’s drawings of families in the London Underground, and found in them “a spiritual quality and a deep humanity as well as being monumental and suggestive of timelessness”.35 What Hussey wanted was a work of art from Henry Moore which would “visualize ancient traditions blooming again, as it were, in S. Matthew’s!”36 Initially, Moore had some doubts about the project. He worried that “the general level of Church Art has fallen so low (as anyone can see from the affected and sentimental prettiness sold for Church decoration in Church Art shops)”. But instead of a mindless romanticism of the mid-Victorian kind, Moore saw the possibility of creating a new sculptural form: There have been two particular motives or subjects which I’ve constantly used in my sculpture in the last 20 years. They are the ‘Reclining Figure’ idea and the ‘Mother and Child’ idea. (And perhaps of the two the 33 34 35 36

On Hussey, see David Howard, “The Way Forward: Building on Dean Hussey’s Vision”, Musical Times 43 (2012), 73–86. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, London’s Burning: Life, Death and Art in the Second World War (London, 1994), 61. This was the first work to place Moore in the context of a revival of the sacred in the Second World War. Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore (London, 2003), 212. As cited in Stansky and Abraham, London’s Burning, 62.

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‘­Mother and Child’ has been the more fundamental obsession.) And I began thinking of a ‘Madonna and Child’ for St Matthew’s by considering [that] (…) the ‘Madonna and Child’ should have an austerity and a nobility and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness), which is missing in the everyday ‘Mother and Child’ idea. From the sketches and little models I’ve done, the one we’ve chosen has I think a quiet dignity and gentleness. And I have tried to give a sense of complete easiness and repose, as though the Madonna could stay in the position for ever (as being in stone she will have to do).37 The statue was moved to Northampton in February 1944. The dedication service on 19 February was a typical wartime event, filled with delay and confusion. An air raid had destroyed the railway line to Northampton, and the temporary shunting system delayed the train bringing Moore to the church for over three hours. Moore himself recognized the imprint of these contemporary events on his work: “I’d never have done the Northampton Madonna without the war”, is the way he put it.38 The critic John Russell caught its force precisely. What Moore answered was the need for “something that would make sense of the war and confer a lasting dignity upon what was in its cumulative effect a period of unmitigated exhaustion”.39 In a very local, and small-scale project, Henry Moore approached the universal reach of Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall in London, the national monument to the Lost Generation of the 1914–18 war. In Moore’s case the n ­ otation was more Christian than Greek, but it still had ecumenical appeal. In the Second World War, a conflict in which women and children were in the front line of military operations, the notion of sacrifice and suffering could not be restricted to soldiers and sailors alone. In the Northampton Madonna, Henry Moore found a way to speak about the experience of war in a language which transcended older forms of thinking which saw war as the realm of men.40 From his explorations of the landscape, and his images of family life in wartime, Moore went on to explore the meaning of the sacred at a moment in history when what Martin Buber called “an eclipse of God” was occurring. He 37 38 39 40

Stansky and Abraham, London’s Burning, 63–64. Stansky and Abraham, London’s Burning, 67. Stansky and Abraham, London’s Burning, 67. For Nicholas Pevsner, the Northampton Madonna was Moore’s masterpiece. See Pevsner, “Thoughts on Henry Moore”, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 86 (February 1945), 47–49.

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Illustration 1.4 Henry Moore, Madonna and Child (1943–44). St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Reproduced with the permission of the vicar and ­churchwardens of St Matthew’s Church.

captured a moment of doubt and found a language of stone to still at least some of the fear and trembling the war had brought in its wake. Through his meditation on the landscape, the family and the sacred, Henry Moore contributed to a wider dialogue in British society about the ‘meaning’ of the war

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against Hitler. By doing so, he managed to show in palpable form what peace might mean in a war-torn world. 3

From One War to Another

As I have already noted, Henry Moore was no stranger to death in wartime. His military service in the First World War marked his imagination thereafter. The Blitz drew out his compassion for the vulnerable city dwellers who faced an underground death each night the Luftwaffe flew overhead. Moore was, in some respects, the visual poet not only of life, but of death as well, especially in the “demented existence” men and women are forced to endure in wartime.41 Through his work, we can see ways in which the notion of peace became feminized at precisely the moment when conventionally masculine images of the war and the warrior were still very widely circulated. Religious iconography of this kind was a kind of counterpoint, a vocabulary able in part to humanize the masculine face of war. This essay is a brief meditation on the work of an artist who knew both world wars from within. The central contrast I have tried to make is between Moore’s Edwardian innocence in approaching military service as a romantic adventure, which was common at the time and frequently the source of rueful self-criticism, and the experience of war as evidenced in the art that he subsequently created. Moore did not share in the retrospective bitterness. But he did juxtapose innocence and experience, not to produce modern memory, as Paul Fussell has it,42 but to move on in his work to a different sense of the frailties and strengths of the human body and of the society in which we live. Let me try to link the mixture of the old and the new in this set of cultural projects. The aim of this chapter has been to explore a relatively forgotten facet of British history during the Second World War. Behind many heroic and uplifting narratives of the war lies a dark domain, that of anxiety and terror surrounding the possibility of invasion and defeat. The three tropes of landscape, family, and the sacred stood for all that was at risk of being damaged beyond all repair. Defending them was a curiously mixed operation. Partly, this was nostalgia, but given the dreariness of the 1930s, Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”, a straightforward celebration of the past could not serve the purpose of building a belief in victory. Instead, the future had to be charted as a break with the past, in town planning and urban renewal, in eliminating the miseries 41 42

Peter Székely, “Henry Moore: The Greatest Living Sculptor”, Leonardo 21 (1988), 316–17. The term “demented existence” is Henri Focillon’s, as cited in Pevsner, “Moore”, 48. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

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of family life for the poor and the infirm, and in restoring some faith if not in God, then in human decency, which Orwell saw as something quintessentially English. Some of these steps forward lasted; others did not. My guess is that the cultural moves recorded here mattered more to civilians than to soldiers, most of whom remained hostile to anything which had the scent of the sacred in it. But we need to see the time for what it was: when the British army was either rebuilding at home or in retreat everywhere from Singapore to Tobruk. Front and home front fused when invasion was on the cards, and even after the Nazis moved East, their spectacular victories in 1941 and 1942 could have prepared the ground for a second go at taking Britain before the United States, preoccupied by the Japanese attack, fully mobilized. At that time, the Nazis planned their new order for Europe, and to a degree forced the Allies to think about the future at the same time. This is when social citizenship and human rights became part of the Allied cause, beyond the evident determination to destroy Nazi Germany completely. Clause six of the Atlantic Charter of 1941 was explicit as to the need to create a welfare state once the Nazi menace had been obliterated. For Churchill, this commitment was entirely rhetorical, but not so for the population he led.43 Cultural moments are hard to delimit; the one at the heart of this essay was a product of particular military events which constitute the apogee of Nazi power and the nadir of British hopes. We would do well to note how far Britain in 1940–42 was removed from the Britain which never doubted victory in 1914–18; and how far we are now from both those painful and worrying periods. And yet what may be termed progressive nostalgia did not disappear in Britain at the end of the war. It is the hallmark of the Festival of Britain of 1951, when new architecture like the Royal Festival Hall celebrated a future of creativity and life enriched rather than encumbered by the pull of the past.44 4

Conclusion: Beyond Cultural Mobilization

Was Henry Moore culturally mobilized in the Second World War? Yes and no. He produced public art of an astonishing variety, touching on the three overarching themes of the landscape, the family, and the sacred which symbolized what Britain was fighting for. But it is always a danger for those following the work of an artist to over-interpret it and to place one framework around 43 44

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge, 2012). I owe this point, and much else, to Robert Dare.

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it which does justice to its subtlety and its beauty. Artists work in their own rhythms, and Moore’s were much more complicated than I have been able to suggest in a single essay. Perhaps another term suits the case of Moore and that of other artists and poets who left enduring work in the shadow of the Second World War. That term is an empathetic identification with the people. Sympathy is compassion from outside; empathy is compassion from inside.45 And Moore was an insider, a Yorkshireman born and bred. He moved as did his contemporaries from one war which, precisely because they were Englishmen, they were bound to win, to another war, in which defeat was so close at times that one could touch it. That cold reality was previewed in newsreels of the defeat of the Spanish Republic, and thereafter of France and the Low Countries, and then confirmed as defeat after defeat made Hitler master of the whole of Europe. It was writ directly into the national mythology of Dunkirk, turned from a disaster to a noble defeat in the speed of light. Moore’s work is an excellent instance of mobilization from below. He did not need the state to tell him what he needed to see or do during the war. He used his immense empathy to bring him into contact with the war at home. Yes, he served as an official war artist, but that simply helped him gain access to places from which he probably would have been barred by officialdom. He was already a celebrated artist, but his official role in the war probably spread knowledge of his work to a wider population than had known it before. Moore’s configurings of war captured a much wider body of opinion that the essence of the conflict was to defend a British way of life, imbedded in the landscape of Yorkshire and of the rest of Britain. The British family embodied the future, and the anguish and sufferings of women in the war bring out vividly the fear contemporaries forgot or buried as soon as the conflict was over. The theme of the sacred in Moore’s work is much more complex. The efflorescence of religious symbols pointed not to renewed piety but profound patriotism. Parish churches are at the heart of thousands of villages, and this geometry of ordinary rural life captured the idea that what turned near defeat into victory in the Second World War was not the state but the strength of civil society. Perhaps cultural mobilization was in play here, but the term does not fit the playfulness, the profundity, and the genius of Henry Moore. Moore dipped his feet in the waters of cultural mobilization, but he spent a lifetime preparing for it long before the outbreak of the war. His work happily escapes from any attempt to capture its magic, including this one.

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Jay Winter, “From Sympathy to Empathy”, in Empathy in the History of Emotions, ed., Ute Frevert, in press.

Chapter 2

Petitioning the World: Intellectuals and Cultural Mobilization in the Great War Tomás Irish 1 Introduction Writing in 1918, the German novelist Thomas Mann claimed that “this war seems (…) a repetition of the Dreyfus affair on a colossally magnified scale”.1 Mann was referring to the ways in which intellectuals had mobilized on all sides by invoking their own cultural authority and right to speak collectively on behalf of the intellectual heritage of their respective nations. The mobilization of intellectuals during the First World War is by now a well-known story. From 1914, writers, poets, artists and academics across Europe engaged in a cultural war, writing lectures, articles, pamphlets and books to justify their national cause and to denigrate that of the enemy, and a large body of scholarship has addressed this issue.2 Intellectual mobilization was part of the broader process through which societies entered the First World War in an imaginative sense, by defining what it was that their respective nations were fighting for and against. Intellectual mobilization for war sits at the intersection of two fields, the history of intellectuals and the (cultural) history of the First World War itself. Most works have tended to focus upon the latter when analyzing the nature and significance of cultural mobilization. This chapter will take a different approach by instead focusing upon the nature and organization of intellectual interventions in war-related matters. Intellectual organization and engagement in this period is frequently understood in national terms; intellectuals

1 Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York NY, 1983), 40. 2 Anne Rasmussen, “Mobilising Minds”, in The Cambridge History of the First World War vol. 3, Civil Society, ed., Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2013), 390–418; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “German Artists, Writers, and Intellectuals, and the Meaning of War 1914–1918”, in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed., John Horne (Cambridge, 1997), 21–38; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge MA, 1969), 180–90; Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge MA, 1996); and Tomás Irish, The University at War 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke, 2015). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_004

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are generally seen as emerging and acting in a context that responds to particular national conditions. This chapter will place intellectual engagement in the war into an international setting, arguing that while the forms of intellectual engagement in the war became internationalized, the vexed question of what constitutes an intellectual remained contested in different national contexts. 2

The Intellectual

There are two dominant reasons why historians have explored intellectual engagement in the war in national terms.3 First, intellectuals are seen as having particular national characteristics and national modes of behaviour. Second, the beginning of the war saw intellectuals speak out in order to legitimize and strengthen their respective nation’s cause both domestically and internationally, and they are often described as having acted in a manner that was not in keeping with their usual conduct. By throwing themselves enthusiastically into a war of words, they abandoned any pretence of being “above partisanship” and temporarily abandoned their critical faculty.4 Few historians have explored, either in a national context or otherwise, how wartime intellectual action was framed, understood, and performed in different national cases. Closer scrutiny of intellectual action also provides a means of identifying who ‘the intellectuals’ were (or were understood to be) and how they typically behaved. This is important because, since the turn of the century, a consciousness was growing across Europe of these issues. The modern intellectual is frequently seen as having originated in France. The catalyst for this development came in January 1898 when a group of writers and scholars published a protest in l’Aurore, a daily newspaper, in support of Emile Zola’s J’accuse letter which had, in turn, been deeply critical of the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.5 It soon became known as the “manifesto of the intellectuals”.6 The intellectual intervention in the Dreyfus affair was significant because it combined three elements: the right to protest against scandal, 3 On Germany, see Mommsen, “German Artists, Writers, and Intellectuals”, 21–38; Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 180–90; on France, see Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect; on Britain, see Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh, 1988) and Jonathan Atkin, A War of Ideals: Bloomsbury attitudes to the Great War (Manchester, 2002); on the United States see Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War One and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge LA, 1975). 4 Rasmussen, “Mobilising Minds”, 390. 5 “Une protestation”, L’Aurore, 14 January 1898, 1; “Une protestation”, L’Aurore, 15 January 1898, 2. 6 Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises (Paris, 1990), 33–34.

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the right to form a coalition to create a symbolic community, and the right to claim authority based upon professional and academic titles.7 The petitionary intervention in the Dreyfus affair is the foundation myth for modern intellectuals in France and their assumed right to intervene in matters of general, and often political, importance. The Dreyfus affair also saw the emergence of the term ‘intellectual’ as a collective noun to describe figures who acted in this way.8 The Affaire produced a particularly French understanding of the intellectual as someone with qualifications that derive from a non-political (and usually cultural or literary) field intervening publicly in a political matter.9 These interventions were associated with a variety of acts of ‘speaking out’ at the turn of the century, of which the petition, or mass-signed public letter, was especially prominent. In the decades that followed the Dreyfus case, the term was often used in France to describe political interventions from the left.10 In Britain, intellectual engagement was premised upon cultural authority; intellectuals boasted, in the words of Stefan Collini, some sort of “qualifying activity” (eminence or achievement in a certain field) which “qualified” them to address a wider audience, and made a wider public receptive to this.11 The term ‘intellectual’ was imported into English from France in the years following the Dreyfus affair but did not hold a clear meaning, nor did it describe a well-defined group, until the 1930s.12 Similarly, while political intervention was an important element of British intellectual life, it was not as pronounced as in the French case.13 Germany took a different path. Jurgen Habermas has argued that “the intellectual acquires a specific role only when he is able to address a public opinion formed by the press and the struggle between political parties”. Thus, the intellectual requires a healthy democracy and public sphere in which to operate.14 For Habermas, the emergence of the intellectual only took place in Germany after 1945, which was its equivalent to the Dreyfus affair moment. However, he argues that during the First World War and Weimar years a number of forms 7 Charle, Birth of the Intellectuals, 2. 8 Shlomo Sand, La fin de l’intellectuel français? De Zola à Houllebecq (Paris, 2016), 58. 9 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), 48. 10 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 39–50; Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s ­Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London, 2011), 154–68. 11 Collini, Absent Minds, 47–48. 12 Collini, Absent Minds, 28–33. 13 Collini, Absent Minds, 49–50. 14 Jurgen Habermas, “Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany”, in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, 1989), 72–73.

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of intellectual engagement emerged, all of which self-consciously rejected the notion of being an intellectual.15 Habermas noted, for example, an absence of the use of the term intellektuellen in German, with authors instead using terms such as Geistesmenschen or gesitigen arbeiter to describe those preoccupied with matters of the mind.16 Where the term intellektuelle has been used it is usually seen as strongly pejorative.17 In his work, Fritz Ringer argued that German society in the early 20th century had “mandarins” rather than intellectuals; these were “a social and cultural elite which owes its status primarily to educational qualifications” and who saw themselves as both “bearers of culture” and speaking for the elite which they constituted.18 Ringer’s mandarins were primarily a university-based elite; they were conservative and close to the prevalent political ideology of the state. They were not oppositional in their outlook as in France, nor did they claim to speak for universal values.19 Elsewhere in Europe, intellectual organization and self-fashioning took place in conditions that were informed by broader political developments of a given nation. Russia is a case in point: there, a distinct mode of intellectual engagement pre-dated the Dreyfus affair. Many Russian writers commented on the actions of the government and came to constitute an ‘intelligentsia’. Their position between the state and wider society provided them with a unique vantage point from which to do this and this position became sanctioned by the wider public, who saw them as constituting a defence against the encroachments of the state.20 The Russian sense of the word ‘intelligentsia’ always held a distinctly political set of connotations and became associated with socialism and revolutionaries from the 1860s onwards. In the United States, too, the pre First World War period has been described as being the crucible for the emergence of modern intellectuals. Richard Hofstadter argued that, from the 1890s onwards, intellectuals became more perceptible as a class in American society, for whom alienation from the society on which they commented was an important principle.21 Christopher Lasch also labelled the origin of American intellectuals as a modern phenomenon

15 Habermas, “Heinrich Heine”, 79, 91. 16 Habermas, “Heinrich Heine”, 76. 17 Collini, Absent Minds, 205. 18 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 3–6. 19 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 6. 20 Jennings and Kemp-Welch, “The Century of the Intellectual”, 7–8; Martin Malia, “What is the Intelligentsia?”, in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed., Richard Pipes (New York NY, 1961), 2. 21 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York NY, 1963), 408–09.

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and defined them as having a greater capacity to comment on modern society owing to their presumed detachment from production of power.22 The historiography of intellectuals, and intellectual engagement, has developed in a manner that reflects the particular national contexts in which intellectual engagement emerged. Implicitly, these speak to a sense of national difference, a consequence of the emergence of distinct national literary, academic, and artistic styles in the 19th century, which were in turn used to support nation-building of the period. That said, there were also distinct shared features which underpinned the emergence of intellectual engagement in this period. One was the sharp rise in literacy rates around Europe, which allowed intellectuals to speak out to wider publics. By 1920, the male population of major European countries (as well as a growing proportion of the female population) possessed basic reading and writing skills.23 The late 19th century was a period when the popular press, both newspapers and periodicals, was widespread and affordable across Europe and North America, furnishing intellectuals with the media through which they could disseminate their message.24 While intellectual engagement may have emerged and operated primarily in specific national contexts, by the late 19th century the conditions – cheap publications, a literate public, and international networks of communications  – existed for them to perform a similar role in a wider, international context, should the opportunity present itself. The outbreak of the Great War presented just such a moment, as it saw an international audience eager to acquire information, explanation, and validation of events that followed the outbreak of the conflict. While the outbreak of war in 1914 saw a commonality in terms of the ways in which writers, scholars, and artists from different countries engaged with war issues, it provided no consensus about who ‘the intellectuals’ were and how they ought to behave in different nations. Pre-war debates about the function and role of intellectuals in different national contexts would continue, sitting awkwardly alongside increasingly internationalized forms of intellectual engagement.

22

Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in American 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York NY, 1966), ix. 23 Jurgen Österhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton NJ, 2014), 788. 24 Collini, Absent Minds, 52; Malia, “What is the Intelligentsia”, 14; Carlton Hayes, France: A Nation of Patriots (New York NY, 1974), 124–31.

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Cultural Mobilization and the Outbreak of War

In 1914, societies mobilized for war in a multitude of ways: militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. Cultural mobilization is a concept developed by John Horne to analyze the imaginative engagement of belligerent nations in the war effort, a consequence of the rise of mass involvement in the political process, which in turn meant that legitimacy and the consent of the ruled was “a vital condition of the state’s effective operation”. As such, political mobilization for war was also a cultural process.25 Mobilization, understood in this way, was not simply a top-down process instigated by states; it was frequently bottom-up, led by individuals and collectives independent of the state apparatus. This was especially pronounced in the case of intellectuals, who took it upon themselves to publically discuss, explain, and promote their respective national cause and stake in the war.26 Cultural mobilization of this sort emerged from the outbreak of war in ­August 1914 and typified the first two years of the war, where popular engagement in the conflict was – in the cases of Britain, France, and Germany – premised more upon consent rather than coercion.27 Writers, scholars, and artists spoke out as representatives of a national culture in order to convince a wider population of the righteousness of their national cause and this cultural war quickly came to take on a life and logic all of its own. The outbreak of the First World War is widely seen as having brought decades of international intellectual exchange to a halt.28 Scholars who had once been colleagues and friends ceased fraternizing, their respective nations being now at war with one another; representatives of enemy states were struck off the lists of corresponding and honorary membership of national academies; most international conferences were cancelled, and publications often ceased being imported from enemy states. However, the end of intellectual internationalism was paradoxical because by speaking out on war issues, intellectuals frequently directly addressed one another in order to refute an argument or besmirch a colleague-turned-enemy. This responsive phenomenon is a peculiar feature of the early months of the First World War, with public statements by intellectuals simultaneously seeking to rally national audiences and 25 26 27 28

John Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War’, 1914–1918”, in State, Society, and ­Mobilization, 2. Horne, “Introduction”, 6. Ibid., 5; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York NY, 2002), 100. Daniel Kevles, “‘Into Hostile Political Camps’: The Reorganization of International Science in World War I”, Isis 62 (1971), 47–60; Irish, The University at War, 24–38.

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convince international listeners. Moreover, intellectuals in different nations experienced events that were understood and presented as part of the same narrative, all of which related to the war. The cultural war is often seen as a consequence of the German invasion of Belgium and northern France starting in August 1914 and, in particular, the cultural vandalism which took place both at Louvain, with the burning of the university library in late August, and at Rheims, whose cathedral was shelled in early September. Allegations of atrocities committed by the German army, and its targeting of sites of cultural significance, created a widespread sense that the war was a cultural one, with libraries and cathedrals targets in a new form of warfare. From its outset, the war was presented as a conflict between western civilization and German Kultur, which had the effect of “reinforcing the cultural unification of the belligerents and of supplying the conflict with founding myths of a war in defence of a territory, but also of a cultural idea”.29 However, the opposition of civilization and barbarism – and the idea that the war was a cultural phenomenon – had emerged in the weeks prior. Famously, the French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that “the struggle against Germany is the struggle of civilization against barbarism” in a speech at the Académie des Sciences Morales on 8 August 1914.30 This binary opposition between the universal claims of civilization and the more regional claims of German Kultur also underpinned intellectual action. The German conception of Kultur referred not only to the Germany’s cultural heritage, but encompassed civic virtues such as self-sacrifice, heroism and creative idealism. Many German scholars and writers saw the war as an opportunity to spread these ideas, which they contrasted with the materialistic ideals of civilization embodied by France and Britain.31 For their part, those who espoused the virtues of civilization took it to mean a number of (often contradictory) things: the ideas of 1789 and the rights of man; democracy, universalism, and a heritage derived from ancient Greece and Rome. So, while the two sides represented divergent intellectual traditions, and different understandings of the nature and righteousness of intellectual engagement in political events, they fought with one another using similar means. 29 30 31

Rasmussen, “Mobilising Minds”, 396. Le Figaro, 9 August 1914, 3. Mommsen, “German Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War 1914–1918”, 31; Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 180–90; Jörg Nagler, “From Culture to Kultur. Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870–1914”, in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776, eds., David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Cambridge, 1997), 131–54.

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Intellectual mobilization at the beginning of the war can be seen in a variety of initiatives: petitions were signed by representative bodies of ‘­intellectuals’ speaking in the name of their nation and specific field of expertise; pamphlets and books were written rapidly, addressing war issues; and individuals spoke out in newspapers and public meetings, commanding media interest in the process. In most belligerent nations, intellectuals soon began working for the state, producing propaganda in the form of pamphlets, books, public lectures, and newspaper articles for domestic and international audiences alike, at the behest of government.32 However, a type of ‘speaking out’ or political intervention quickly established itself, in which representatives of different fields of learning and achievements in belligerent nations ‘spoke to’ each other, across national borders and front lines. 4

Petitionary Activity

The issuing of petitions soon became a prominent and controversial way through which the intellectual war was fought. The most famous (and infamous) example of a petition was the “Appeal to Civilized World”, which appeared on 4 October 1914 and was signed by 93 German writers, artists and academics. However, petitions were being issued and traded for weeks prior to the appearance of the “Appeal to the Civilized World”. Indeed, as will be discussed below, the “Appeal” itself was a response to intellectual activities in other countries. Petitions were important in this context for a number of reasons. First, their composition and publication became a common currency through which intellectuals spoke to international audiences. They did this through the symbolic force of collective action – the joint composition and signing of documents articulating a national position had weight – and through the understanding that their eminence in a given field (usually indicated in the list of signatures) also was expected to resonate with international audiences. They also tended to speak in terms of universals; while they were representatives of individual nations, they claimed to represent ideas and values that resonated across national borders. The petitions issued at the beginning of the First 32

Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2003), 56; Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “The Role of British and German Historians in Mobilizing Public Opinion in 1914”, in British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, eds., Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford, 2000), 358–59; Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect; Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 118–62.

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World War spoke to international audiences using an authority which was also assumed to be international. The events at Louvain galvanized international opinion against Germany and led to a series of condemnatory petitions being published. For example, on 3 September 1914, 16 eminent Irish figures, with backgrounds in art, medicine, academia and the law, wrote a “protest” that was published in the Irish Times. In the preamble to their letter, they noted that similar letters were in d­ evelopment in cities and universities elsewhere in Britain, America, and the European continent. In the letter they decried the events in Louvain as “the gravest injury to the whole fabric and life of European and general civilisation”.33 A series of German petitions and open letters appeared in September 1914, with each making similar arguments in the hope of convincing international opinion. The German scholars Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken published an open letter in the New York Times on 10 September 1914. The letter, designed to appeal to neutral American audiences by invoking universal values, decried Britain’s retreat to nationalism and alliance with “a Slavic, half-Asiatic power against Germanism” and bemoaned the demise of a “spiritual cooperation of the two peoples which promised so much good for the development of mankind”.34 In the middle of September 1914, 29 German church leaders issued a manifesto called “To the Evangelical Christians Abroad”.35 They argued that “a systematic network of lies” had been perpetuated about Germany’s role in the outbreak of the war and stated that the war was being fought against “Asiatic barbarism”.36 Following the German theologians’ document, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, organized a response which was signed by 42 British theologians and Church leaders and published in The Times on 30 September 1914. The newspaper noted that the signatories were “famous alike for their scholarship and their piety”.37 The British theologians’ document expressed “amazement” that their German counterparts had seen fit to “commit themselves to a statement of the political causes of the war”. As such, it took issue with the fact that the German theologians had addressed issues beyond their immediate area of qualification or expertise. However, because this discourse had been initiated by the German theologians, their British counterparts ­replied to the issues raised regarding the outbreak of the war.38 33 “Louvain: a Protest”, Irish Times, 3 September 1914, 6. 34 “A German Declaration”, New York Times, 10 September 1914, 8. 35 Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 90. 36 “Theologians and the War”, The Times, 30 September 1914, 4. 37 Cambridge, St John’s College Library, A1/5/1/27, Glover Papers, F.B. Meyer to T.R. Glover, undated. 38 “Theologians and the War”, The Times, 30 September 1914, 4.

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At the same time, 53 British “writers of the Empire”, including poets, historians, and novelists, issued a petition in defence of Britain’s cause in the war. Billing themselves as “men of the most divergent political and social views”, they claimed that Britain’s case was justified to “uphold the rule of common justice between civilized peoples ( … ) and to maintain the free and law ­abiding ideals of Western Europe”.39 Originally published in The Times, the document was reproduced in the New York Times, in neutral America, in the middle of October 1914, with the signatures of the authors reproduced in facsimile in order to draw attention to their eminence. The “Appeal to the Civilized World” was rapidly disseminated and translated across the world following its publication in October 1914. Again, it demonstrated the paradoxical situation whereby scholars were retreating to narrow national positions, severing ties with erstwhile colleagues and collaborators, but simultaneously continuing an international dialogue via the trading of petitions. The German document, written as a series of denials of actions which were alleged by Allied writers in the weeks prior, was a response to earlier statements which claimed wrongdoing by the German Army in Belgium (among other things). Signed by 93 representatives of German art, science, and literature (including seven Nobel prize winners in science and 12 theologians or biblical scholars), its list of signatories had an international authority which made its content shocking to many in allied and neutral countries. In France, newspapers explored the list of signatories in close detail, analyzing their qualifications but insisting upon referring to them as “intellectuels” (in inverted commas).40 The “Appeal to the Civilized World” provoked a barrage of replies from across Europe, with figures in belligerent and neutral countries alike issuing statements on behalf of their national cultures. While much literature emerged which critiqued some of the claims made in the “Appeal to the Civilized World” (in particular the claim that German militarism and culture were united in the conflict), the primary mode of response was the manifesto. Manifestos were published, translated, and read by educated international audiences.41 The response of intellectuals in Britain and France is well known. On 21 October 1914, a “reasoned statement” was published in The Times, signed by 118

39 40 41

“Britain’s Destiny and Duty”, The Times, 18 September 1914, 3; “Famous British authors defend England’s war”, New York Times, 18 October 1914, 5. Le Temps, 16 October 1914, 2. A good example of this is the volume published by Th. Jaulmes called Ignorance? Inconscience? … ou hypocrisie?: Etude méthodique de l’appel des intellectuels allemands aux nations civilisées” (Paris, 1915), which translated and presented a selection of manifestos from different countries.

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“scholars and men of science representing different sides of British learning”.42 This statement refuted many of the claims made in the “Appeal”. Another petition was issued from Germany, this time in the name of German u ­ niversities, on 16 October. This was translated into 14 languages.43 A French response was published on 3 November 1914. This document differed a little from those which preceded it, as it was signed not by individuals, but in the name of universities. It responded to claims made by German intellectuals but, in replying to these claims, addressed itself explicitly to universities in neutral countries, arguing that facts contradicted German claims of innocence for the outbreak of the war, and it again appealed to universal values: “civilization is not the work of one people, but of all”.44 Petitions emerged from countries across Europe and the globe. On 14 ­November 1914, one, signed by 1000 representatives of Russian literature, art, and science, was published in France. It claimed that they spoke based on an “elevated position of profound worship for great works and monuments in the arts and sciences, as well as by humanitarian sentiments”.45 On 21 November 1914, a second petition emerged, signed by 1100 representatives of science, letters and arts in Russia. It explicitly addressed itself to “our fatherland and the whole civilised world” and made an argument for universal values over narrow nationalism.46 In the weeks following the appearance of the “Appeal to the Civilized World”, direct replies were published and translated by intellectuals in neutral countries such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Greece.47 Portuguese intellectuals issued a response to the “Appeal” on 23 October 1914. It spoke in the name of “scientific, artistic, industrial and commercial corporations”, and claimed that the names of the German signatories of the “Appeal” had been stripped of all glory and distinction as a consequence of their collective action.48 A manifesto signed by 12 Swiss intellectuals – all corresponding members of the Institut de France – was published in France on 1 December 1914.49 Romanian university professors also issued a statement of ­collective s­ olidarity 42 “Reply to German Professors”, The Times, 21 October 1914, 10. 43 Christophe Prochasson, 14–18: Retours d’expériences (Paris, 2008), 282. 44 Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 82–84, Paris, Archives Nationales (AN), AN/ AJ/16/2589, “Les universités françaises aux universités des pays neutres”; Le Temps, 8 ­November 1914, 3. 45 “Autre protestation d’Intellectuels russes”, in Jaulmes, Ignorance?, 39–40. 46 “Appel des intellectuels russes ‘au monde civilisé tout entier’”, in Jaulmes, Ignorance?, 39. 47 Prochasson, Retours d’expérience, 283. 48 “Addresse des intellectuels portugais aux Universités des ‘Nations civilisées’”, in Jaulmes, Ignorance?, 44. 49 Le Figaro, 1 December 1914, 3.

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with the Allied cause in December 1914.50 Coming rather later late in this flurry of petitionary activity was the manifesto issued by Spanish i­ ntellectuals in July of 1915. This document was signed by 58 professors, writers, musical composers and painters. They spoke explicitly as men who dedicated their lives to “matters of the mind”, adding that “we feel that to serve the fatherland and to be a good and useful citizen, one must be a good and honest man for all people”.51 To achieve this, they pledged their cause to that of the Allies, but said little more. The primacy of the petition was not restricted to pro-war voices. It soon came to be used by pacifists in belligerent countries. In each case, however, it was seen as a means of communicating a message using a universal standard of ‘speaking out’. As a counter-petition to the “Appeal to the Civilized World”, physicist Albert Einstein, along with biologist Georg Friedrich Nicolai, astronomer Wilhelm Julius Foerster, and philosopher Otto Buek, signed a Aufruf an die Europäer (“Appeal to the Europeans”).52 The document called for a “union of all in any way attached to European civilization” as a first step towards a united Europe. It suggested that those connected with intellectual pursuits should lead the way in making this a reality, with the authors calling on readers to add their names to the document. The document did not reach a wide readership owing to wartime censorship and was only published for the first time in 1917, in Switzerland.53 This demonstrates the importance to intellectuals in having a medium through which to convey their ideas; in wartime Europe, pacifists were constrained by censorship, and thus, the scope for intellectual criticism was significantly lessened. By the end of 1915 the petitionary war had more or less come to an end. The immediate causes of international outrage – the invasion of Belgium and the issue of atrocities – had led to most parties, be they in belligerent or neutral countries, to take their collective position. Most importantly, the sides in the war had been more-or-less established by the end of the year, with many neutral states choosing an emotional, if not formal, political alignment. However, while intellectual engagement had been internationalized through the ubiquity of the petition, there was much debate within nations about the rectitude of this action, especially within the context of established national understanding of intellectual intervention. 50 51 52 53

Le Temps, 24 December 1914, 3. Le Figaro, 5 July 1915, 1. Georg Friedrich Nicolai, The Biology of War (New York NY, 1918), xvii–xix. David Rowe and Robert Schulmann, eds., Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton NJ, 2007), 64–67.

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Critiquing Intellectual Engagement

The petitionary activity at the start of the Great War established a pattern and mode of public intervention by intellectuals irrespective of their geographical location. In this sense, it saw a proliferation of performative behaviour, with modes of intellectual intervention becoming increasingly standardized across national borders. In particular, intellectual authority was based upon academic qualifications, specialism in a set range of intellectual fields (law, sciences, medicine, art, music, theology, humanities), and not necessarily restricted to academic institutions. Moreover, this petitionary activity was inherently international; intellectuals in different countries were engaged in a dialogue, responding to claims and addressing their arguments to colleagues in other nations. The early years of the war also saw a growing awareness by contemporaries of intellectual engagement. Many associated with intellectual vocations began scrutinizing the process by which they and their colleagues ‘spoke out’, with a tension emerging between forms of intellectual engagement and the self-fashioning of ‘intellectuals’ in different nations. One of the earliest examples of this tentative approach to engaging a wider audience came in a publication called Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case, which was compiled by six members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History and published within months of the war’s outbreak. The volume “was written to set forth the causes of the present war, and the principles which we believe to be at stake”. The authors, led by historians H.W.C. Davis and Ernest Barker, justified their intervention on the grounds that they had “experience in the handling of historic evidence” and could “treat this subject historically” while acknowledging that they were “not politicians”.54 However, the preface to the Oxford volume illustrated the difficulty that some scholars felt about publicly addressing topics in which they were not expert and the extent to which they felt the need to qualify their public interventions. Critiques of intellectual engagement were sometimes explicitly pacifist, in that they took issue with the way that the war was being waged as a whole, including its cultural manifestations, but that was not always the case. ­Occasionally, individuals wrote privately to question the rectitude of figures speaking out; the root of their unease seems to have rested with the issue of cultural authority and who had the right to speak publically on issues of ­general ­importance. In early 1915 the writer and Cambridge don A.C. Benson 54

Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History, Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case (Oxford, 1914), 5–6.

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wrote in his diary that “more and more I feel that my mistake has been to philosophize about the war. I don’t see widely enough or know enough (…) It is as if a man gave up shoemaking to reflect about the war’”.55 On reading news of Bergson’s already mentioned speech in August 1914, Romain Rolland, a French writer based in Switzerland, mused privately whether “it is the role of a Bergson to give such speeches”.56 Across Europe, people began critiquing intellectual engagement and examining the claims to cultural authority implied by those who spoke out. Writing in The English Review in January 1915, Viscount Harberton identified a group in British society who: are all authors of something weighty, and they average after their names eight to ten letters a-piece, signifying degrees of learning or culture of some kind. Every one of those letters testifies to their aptitude for ‘mopping up’ the accepted opinion of the day, of which they are the gifted exponents.57 Harberton was specifically speaking about men from academic backgrounds who had crossed over into politics, and who merely reflected, rather than ­critiqued, public opinion. An anonymously authored article appeared in the Aberdeen University Review in June 1915 which critiqued the universities of Britain, Germany, and elsewhere as homes of reaction. Universities were blamed for the cultural war while simultaneously being identified as the home of the intellectuals. The author noted that “it is really from the universities that the blessed Mesopotamian word ‘intelligentia [sic]’ has come”. The article argued that universities graduated intellectuals (i.e. people with qualifications) who defended the status quo in public against the will of the wider population, who, they claimed, “lacks the experience, the knowledge, the lessons of history, to tread the path into the Unknown”.58 In this reading, universities were centres of power and intellectuals were custodians of cultural authority.59 In April 1915, the British pacifist and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote an article called “Justice in War-Time: An Appeal to the Intellectuals of E ­ urope”. Russell’s article identified (and bemoaned) behavioural commonalities among 55 56 57 58 59

“5 February 1915”, in The Diary of A.C Benson, ed., Percy Lubbock (London, 1926), 280. Romain Rolland, Journal des années de guerre, 1914–1919: notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire morale de l’Europe de ce temps (Paris, 1952), 39. Viscount Harberton, “The Arrogance of Culture”, The English Review 19 (1915), 136–46, 137. “University Intelligentia and the War”, Aberdeen University Review 2 (1915), 216. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge, 1988), 74.

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intellectuals in Europe. To Russell, intellectuals were primarily “men of learning”. He argued that the war had presented an opportunity for the international intellectual to make a pronounced difference, namely, to perform “a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them”. This service was to “make themselves the mouthpiece of truth”, by using their “reputation and their freedom from political entanglements to mitigate the abhorrence with which the nations have come to regard each other”.60 Russell’s intellectuals were defined not by national characteristics but by learning, a commitment to universal values, and the promotion of understanding. To Russell, the intellectual was by definition an international figure, to whom the war had bestowed a uniquely international role. Romain Rolland, mentioned above, had found fame as a novelist before the war and was living in Switzerland when it broke out. From there, he critiqued the war and intellectual engagement in it in a series of articles, manifestos, and open letters.61 In an essay on war literature published in April 1915, Rolland noted that “the intellectuals (intellectuels) on both sides have been much in evidence since the beginning of the war; one could almost say that this war is their war, as they have brought so much passion and violence to it”.62 A number of his wartime writings were collectively published in 1915 as Au-dessus de la mêlée, also published in English translation. In the essay “Au-dessus de la mêlée”, originally published in the Journal de Genève on 15 September 1914, Rolland noted that the intellectual war had pitted eminent scholars in belligerent countries against one another.63 Rolland claimed that “even in war it remains a crime for finer spirits to compromise the integrity of their thought” and identified “artists and writers, priests and thinkers” as those implicated.64 Within France there was also much discussion about the nature of intellectual engagement and its international dimensions. Writing in newspaper le Figaro in December 1914, André Beaunier, a signatory of the original “manifesto of the intellectuals” in January 1898, felt comfortable using the term intellectuel to describe German writers, but refused to apply the “ugly neologism” to their

60 61 62 63 64

Bertrand Russell, “Justice in War-Time: an Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe”, in Russell, Justice in War-Time (Manchester, 1915), 2–3. See R.A. Francis, Romain Rolland (Oxford, 1999) and David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley CA., 1988), 39. Romain Rolland, “Littérature de guerre”, in Romain Rolland, Au-dessus de la mêlée (Paris, 1915), 193. Rolland, “Au-dessus de la mêlée”, 46–47. Rolland, “Au-dessus de la mêlée”, 59–60.

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French counterparts, preferring to call them philosophes.65 Alfred Capus, the editor of le Figaro, felt no such discomfort in applying the label of ‘intellectual’ to French or Germans: in October 1914, he claimed that “a high-standing German intellectual or a Prussian corporal [is] the same enemy”.66 Criticising the public utterances of German writers, Emile Doumergue wrote that “as intellectuals, we were astonished – to say the least – that [German] intellectuals, whose name was justly held in high esteem, could misunderstand the elementary rules of historical science”.67 In 1918 René Lote published a work called Intellectuals and French Society (Les intellectuels et la société française) in which he linked the emergence of intellectuals to the importance of public opinion in modern societies. His study traced the history of the intellectual from the Ancien régime to 1914 and cited the intellectuals’ failure to warn France of the coming of war as evidence that they were not independent of wider opinion.68 The recent Dreyfus affair, and the distinct political connotations of the term in France, meant that the term intellectuel was used to describe different types of public intervention in wartime. It could equally be applied to French writers, German writers, both, or neither. Similar debates took place in Germany. In 1918, Thomas Mann published his polemic, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Reflections of a NonPolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen). This text refuted intellectual engagement on the terms which had become commonplace during the war, when Allied writers invoked universal values. Mann argued that the war was a repetition of the Dreyfus affair on a larger scale and rejected its transposition onto the conflict, with the result being that “whoever is engaged in a spiritual struggle on the side of the civilization entente against the forces of the ‘saber’, against Germany, is an intellectual”. Mann maintained that while German writers and scholars had spoken out using similar media to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, they did not believe that the same assumptions of universalism underpinned their interventions.69 Similarly, in a famous lecture given in 1917 but published only in 1919, the sociologist Max Weber argued that scholars should not intervene in politics as a matter of course, and that in cases where this happened, it was due to happenstance rather than a link between 65 “Nos ‘intellectuels’ et les leurs”, le Figaro, 14 December 1914, 1. 66 Le Figaro, 8 October 1914, 1. 67 Le Temps, 15 December 1914, 4. 68 René Lote, Les intellectuels dans la société française (Paris, 1918), 2–4. 69 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 40. In the original German, Mann referred to “Ein Intellektueller”. Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen: Herausgegeben und textkritisch durchgesehen von Hermann Kurzke (Frankfurt, 2009), 66.

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the two. “Those qualities which make somebody an excellent scholar and academic teacher are not those which make him a leader in the field of life’s practicalities or, more particularly, politics”.70 In this way, while commonalities can be seen between German intellectual engagement and that occurring in other countries, German writers and scholars self-consciously rejected the notion that they were ‘intellectuals’. Meanwhile, the United States entered the war in April 1917, and there, too, there was much reflection on the function of the intellectuals. The most famous intervention came from Randolph Bourne, an anti-war writer, who published “The War and the Intellectuals” in June 1917 in the journal Seven Arts. Bourne argued that American intellectuals had been part of an international moment of intellectual mobilization at the beginning of the war: “the reputable opinion of the American intellectuals became more and more either what could be read pleasantly in London, or what was written in an earnest effort to put E ­ nglishmen straight on their war-aims and war-technique”.71 Bourne’s ­“intellectual class” included “socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature”, and he argued that they bore ­responsibility for American entry into the war against the better knowledge or judgment of the American population. It was “a war made deliberately by the intellectuals!”72 All of these critiques responded to international developments, both in terms of the political and military events of the war, and the different intellectual explanations and justifications for them. In this way, the war led to the emergence of a set of discourses about the function and responsibilities of intellectuals that was nationally framed but responded to international events and discourses. 6 Conclusion The national and international preoccupation with the societal role of the intellectuals continued in the decades following the war, and many took the conflict as their point of departure. In the spring of 1919, Romain Rolland wrote a rejoinder to Au-dessus de la mêlée called a “Declaration of the Independence of 70 71 72

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”, in Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation, eds., Peter Lassman and Irving Velody (London, 1989), 25. Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”, in War and the Intellectuals: essays by Randolph S. Bourne 1915–1919, ed., Carl Resek (New York NY, 1964), 6. Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”, 3.

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the Mind”. In it he addressed “workers of the mind, colleagues dispersed across the world and separated for five years by armies, censorship and the hatred of nations at war”. His declaration called not only on the reformation of the world of the mind that had existed before the war, but its re-imagination as something “more solid and more sure than that which existed before”. The war had led “the majority of intellectuals to turn their science, their art, their reason to the service of governments”.73 Rolland’s “Declaration of the Independence of the Mind” was translated and published in English and German and signed by intellectuals in many different countries. Many, such as Henri Barbusse, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Fried, Albert Einstein, or Georg Friedrich Nicolai, held pacifist beliefs or had been outright critical of the conduct of the war at the time. One hundred and forty intellectuals signed the document from nations such as France, Germany, Britain, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Greece, the United States, Austria, Argentina, Sweden, ­Hungary, India, Spain, and Hungary. Not only was the document a testament to the way in which the war had a dynamic impact upon the conception of intellectual function, it also demonstrated its essential transnational logic. The split between intellectuals on opposing sides in the war continued into the mid-1920s in many cases; cultural mobilization in 1914 necessitated cultural demobilization in the aftermath of war, with belligerent attitudes being slowly wound down.74 However, the societal role of the intellectual remained much contested across Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s a number of notable arguments were made about the function and role of the intellectuals in different countries, by figures such as Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci, Alfred Weber, and Julien Benda.75 The phenomenon of intellectuals addressing themselves to international audiences over international events would remain prominent, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Spanish Civil War providing occasion for this practice to be repeated, albeit on a smaller scale than in the First World War. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of the international role of the intellectual can be seen in the work of the League of Nations. The League set up a Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in 1922, bringing together an intellectual elite (such as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Gilbert Murray, Henri Bergson, and Hendrik Llorentz) who all commanded cultural 73 74 75

Romain Rolland, “Déclaration de l’independence de l’esprit”, in Romain Rolland, Quinze ans de combat (1919–1934) (Paris, 1935), 7–9. John Horne, “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919–1939”, French History and Civilization 2 (2009), 101–19. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1972); Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1927); Alfred Weber, Deutschland und die europäische Kulturkrise (Berlin, 1924); Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York NY, 1993).

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authority nationally and internationally. The League never sought to define who ‘the intellectuals’ were in a general sense, but the committee – and the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, founded in 1926 – had an important role in advising the League’s Council, as well as fostering international links between scholars and addressing themes such as transnational approaches to the education of schoolchildren, all of which cumulatively demonstrated the importance of intellectual matters and intellectual action to post-war international relations. Cultural mobilization during The First World War initiated a pan-European discourse about the nature of intellectual engagement and questions of cultural authority. The phenomenon of intellectual ‘speaking out’ – and its conceptualization as such – had become common in the decades prior to the ­outbreak of the war. The war accelerated this process and also internationalized it; no longer were intellectuals thought of as inhabiting a distinct nationally defined sphere or having solely national characteristics. The war, as an international event, saw the normalization of a certain means of speaking out which was, in 1914 and 1915 especially, based upon the issuing of petitions signed by people deemed to have cultural authority. While the petition became an international currency in 1914 and 1915, it also prompted much debate about the identity and role of intellectuals in different nations and internationally. Cultural mobilization in 1914 and 1915 can be seen as the starting point for an international definition and role for intellectuals, although this would take decades to fully elucidate.

Chapter 3

“German Servicemen See Europe”: Cultural Mobilization of Troops on the Aegean ‘Quiet Front’1 Anthony McElligott The quote at the head of this chapter stems from the title page of an illustrated journal found in the scrapbook of a German soldier who had served on the island of Rhodes between April 1943 and September 1944.2 The journal’s cover photograph shows a group of eight German sailors gathered around the fountain at the base of the castle built by the Knights of Jerusalem in the early 13th century. One of the soldiers is peering into the depths of the fountain, another stands next to him, the other six sailors are nonchalantly looking on. The composition is relaxed; the group could be on a day’s outing in any period. Before the war, the Hamburg shipping company Hapag Lloyd organized tours to the islands of the Aegean, and it was on one such tour that Joseph Goebbels came to Rhodes in the spring of 1939.3 Certainly it is a scene that is echoed by tourists who visit the island today. The image we are discussing is undated, but its presence in Duty Sergeant Otto Stenker’s scrapbook tells us that it is contemporaneous with the occupation of Greece and the islands of the Aegean. Stenker had arrived in Rhodes in April 1943 from Crete with units of Infantry Regiment 22 and would remain on the island until the early autumn of 1944. He was assigned to staff headquarters as a desk clerk in the picturesque hills of Psintho, possibly as part of divisional Section 1a, which had among its tasks recording and filing the Division’s official reports and war diary. Stenker appears not to have seen action himself. The photographs in his scrapbooks-cum-war diary document the conflict from behind the lines and there is little sign of the ravages of war in any of the places in

1 This essay is based on a chapter titled “Inside the Garrison” of my forthcoming book The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean (London, 2018). 2 I had an opportunity to view parts of the scrapbooks online before they were eventually sold. Email communication from Rick White, www.historical-media.com, 20 February 2017. 3 “April 3, 1939”, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil 1 Aufzeichnungen 1923–1939 vol. 6 August 1938-Juni 1939, ed., Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1998), 307–08.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_005

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Europe his unit was deployed between 1940 and 1944. Stenker collected items of interest as his unit moved across Europe from Holland in the West to Russia in the East, to the Balkans, and finally the Greek islands of the Aegean. The 200 photographs in his collection amount to a pictorial Grand Tour of Europe, albeit at war.4 The contents of Stenker’s scrapbooks are suggestive of the experience of war for those occupation troops of the Wehrmacht who saw little direct action on a ‘quiet front’. Historians are well aware that war frequently offered ordinary Germans an opportunity to travel beyond their own borders, underscored in this case by the image and caption of the journal.5 In the context of the islands of the Dodecanese, where the soldier as ‘tourist’ became part of a settled and “immobile occupying force”, the experience had to be managed to some extent by the military authorities.6 On the one hand there was the question of the relationship between occupiers and the occupied population. The weakening of the soldier’s fighting capability as a consequence of slackening in military vigilance and fraternization with the local population (the former frequently the consequence of the latter) was a constant concern to military commanders that had to be monitored. Increasingly, discipline and combat preparedness became critical issues in 1943/44 for the German army in the Aegean theatre of war. Here the problem of demobilization was a constant concern for the army command, especially given the experience of the First World War, when in its final months there was insubordination and mass desertion as troops “self-demobilized”.7 Focusing on the German garrison of Rhodes, this chapter examines whether or not attempts by the military authorities on the island to maintain a degree of mobilization of combat readiness of the garrison found success. Speaking about the experience of First World War trench warfare, John Horne noted how: The drama was one of cognition and imagination since it entailed slowly and painfully replacing understandings of war inherited from an earlier era with those that addressed industrial siege warfare. The ‘front’, 4 Stenker belonged to 22nd Infantry Division and had in fact seen action in France, Holland, and on the Eastern Front. The different postings before coming to Rhodes are documented in volumes 1–3 of his scrapbooks. 5 Kerstin Wölki, “Krieg als Reise – Die Wahrnehmung Frankreichs Durch Deutsche Soldaten in Zweiten Weltkrieg”, MA thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (2007). On the experience of Italian soldiers see Sheila Lecoeur, Mussolini’s Greek Island: Fascism and the Italian Occupation of Syros (London, 2009), Chapter 7. 6 Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven CT, 1993), 202. 7 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993), Chapters 2 and 3 in particular.

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t­ herefore, did not just happen. It had to be conceived and imagined. For this reason it became the quintessential experience of the Great War and its lasting cultural legacy for the subsequent century.8 This “drama” as Horne puts it, was not confined to the Great War. A similar reimagining had to take place in those theatres of the Second World War where a certain staticity also prevailed as ordinary soldiers negotiated the opportunities and limitations of the everyday experiences of a ‘quiet front’. On the one hand, ensuring the “inner combat preparedness” – (geistige Wehrhaftmachung) – of troops was a cornerstone of the program of talks and induction organized by the newly formed (December 1943) Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier (nsfo – National Socialist Training Officers) corps, in which troops were to be instructed on the ideological and existential character of the war.9 The study and defence of Greece’s classical heritage, for example, was used to legitimate the occupation among rank-and-file soldiers, especially as it became increasingly questionable as to why they were deployed nearly 3000 kilometres from Berlin, ostensibly to defend the ‘fatherland’ and their homes. On the other hand, the occupation of Greece and the Greek islands offered potential for a very different experience of war. There is evidence to suggest that in spite of these efforts, or parallel to them, soldiers ‘educated’ themselves. Again Stenker’s scrapbook offers some clues here. Before arriving on Rhodes in April 1943, Stenker had been posted with his Division to Crete, where he had clearly taken the time to inform himself on its natural and political-cultural history since antiquity. Thus, among the items he conserved is a copy of volume 11/12 of the Merkblätter für den deutschen Soldaten an den geschichtlichen Stätten Griechenlands, one of 20 pamphlets in a historical series published by the Department for the Protection of Art of the military command in Greece; this volume focused on Crete (the last volume, n. 20, was on Rhodes). There are also numerous clippings of articles on classical Greece. Like the writer Erhart Kästner, who would join the garrison a year later, Stenker showed an avid interest in the classical heritage of Greece and its islands, collecting official publications and documenting his own explorations through photography.

8 “Professor John Horne, ‘Inventing the ‘Front’: Cognition and Reality in the Great War”, lecture, King’s College London, 1 November 2016, found at https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/ history-of-war/professor-john-horne-talks-inventing-the-front-cognition-and-reality-in-the -great-war/ Accessed 2017 Oct 13. 9 Manfred Messerschmidt, “Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat”, in Deutschland 1933–1945: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft, eds., Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Düsseldorf, 1991), 441–79. See also Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests. Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Cambridge MA, 2015), 128–32.

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On Rhodes, Stenker, like many of his compatriots, ceased to be an ephemeral tourist passing through the landscape but instead became semi-resident. The sojourn in Rhodes for many of the German garrison was to last at least a year and a half; it lasted even longer in the case of those who were still on the island when it capitulated to the British on 8 May 1945. What was their experience? As we shall see, embedded as “figures in the [Greek] landscape”, soldiers either developed an empathy for their surroundings that ultimately stood in contradiction to Nazi precepts of occupation and dominance, exploited their situation contrary to military precepts of discipline, or simply relapsed into apathy, becoming unresponsive to attempts to culturally mobilize martial instincts. 1

Inside the Garrison

The Eastern Aegean islands of the Dodecanese archipelago were, strictly speaking, part of the Italian sphere of control (since 1912, when they were seized from Ottoman Turkey), and not Greek. They assumed greater military importance for Germany with Italy’s withdrawal from the war in early September 1943. A small German force, “Storm Brigade Rhodes”, had been stationed on Rhodes since the end of March 1943. It was quickly expanded to divisional strength from mid-May, when it was renamed “Assault Division Rhodes” and placed under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant-General Ulrich Kleemann, a highly decorated panzer commander and veteran of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The fact that the Assault Division remained at barely half divisional strength meant that there was a constant pressure to maintain discipline and combat preparedness. This aim became all the more pressing as the progress of war turned against Germany thanks to defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, the success of the Allies’ Tunisia campaign in May, and the Allied Sicily landings that July. The turning tide in North Africa meant that Crete and the Aegean islands took on greater significance for Hitler and his generals by 1944. German control of Crete could only be guaranteed if Rhodes was held securely. The result was that by the early summer of 1944 the Aegean islands, as well as the Ionian island of Corfu, were thrust into the frontline of war, and that the c­ ommanders of the fortress islands of Crete and Rhodes were given extraordinary military powers.10 Such powers eventually impacted negatively on 10

Führer-Erlasse 1939–1945, compiled and introduced by Martin Moll (Stuttgart, 1997), 417. See also Gerhard Schreiber et al, Germany and the Second World War vol. 3 The Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North Africa 1939–1941, trans. Dean S. McMurray, Ewald Osers and Louise Willmot (Oxford, 1998).

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the ordinary soldier’s experience from late September 1944, when the garrison received a new commander after Kleemann’s departure. Kleemann’s Assault Division was nominally under the command of the Italian Supreme Commander of the Dodecanese, Admiral Campioni. But after the removal of Mussolini in July 1943, preparations codenamed “Operation Axis” were made for disarming the much larger Italian garrison in the event of Italy’s exit from the war. When Marshal Pietro Badoglio withdrew Italy from the war, Kleemann moved decisively to neutralize the Italian garrison of 40,000 men and secure Rhodes against a counter-offensive by the British. Meanwhile, the islands of Cos and Leros, the former important for its airstrip and the latter important because of its naval base, only surrendered in late October after fierce resistance from the local Italian commanders aided by British forces.11 After the seizure of Rhodes, Kleemann was appointed overall military commander of the Dodecanese and continued in this capacity until his redeployment to Bulgaria in September 1944.12 The 18 months following the German victory in the Aegean saw little major military action. In spite of this, the garrisons on the larger islands had to remain vigilant, especially given the ‘hit-and-run’ incursions by British-led commandos. Frequent Allied air attacks kept the German flak units occupied, but ground troops had little to no direct engagement with the enemy. Unlike in the Balkans proper, or on mainland Greece and on the island of Crete, partisan activity was largely conspicuous by its absence in the Dodecanese. Instead, the problem facing Kleemann was of a very different nature: how to maintain the discipline and thus the combat preparedness of his troops in a context of a ‘quiet front’, where the only enemies in sight were material shortages and boredom. Sturmdivision Rhodos was made up of a diverse range of units: infantry, light armour (Panzer), artillery, flak and support units, and so on.13 By the summer of 1944, the garrison numbered 10,435 men, comprising 208 officers, 1711 ncos, and 7011 ordinary ranks, as well as 1505 non-combatant auxiliaries (so-called HiWis), drawn mostly from demobilized Italian soldiers. While the Grenadier Regiment and the Fusiliers (both infantry) formed the critical fighting force

11 12 13

Isabella Insolvibile, Kos 1943–1948. La strage, la storia (Naples, 2010). Führer-Erlasse, 351. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (hereafter BA-MA) RH 26/1007/12, Bl. 316, 27 July 1944; ibid., RH 26-1007/15, Anlage zu St.Div.Rh. 1a Nr. 1093/44 g. Rhodos, Meldung vom 1 August 1944. Landesarchiv Bremen, Rep. 4,89/3–841, Bl.158–160, Deutsche Dienststelle für die Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligendeutschen Wehrmacht to Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, 13 Dec., 1963 (Becker) (Sturm-Division “Rhodos”).

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on the island, a significant element of the garrison was made up of a so-called punishment battalion (Bewahrungsbattalion), totalling nearly 1000 officers and men (or circa ten per cent of the Division), around half of whom were part of iv/Art. Regt. (mot.) 999, under the command of Major Winter.14 The ranks of this battalion comprised men who were either convicted criminals or who had fallen foul of the regime’s political system. By serving in the army, they were given the opportunity to redeem their ‘honour’. The surviving military sources have little to say about the ratio of criminal to political conscript in the battalion. But according to Alfred Ströer from Vienna, who had been a member of the Austrian Socialist Party (spö), and who had consequently served some time in prison for political underground activities, about one-third of his 120man unit were, in his words, “politicals”, and the others “so-called criminals”.15 Some unintentional corroboration is provided by Major Winter himself. After the conclusion of the brief battle for Rhodes, Winter wrote to the High Command, citing Hitler’s order (Führerbefehl) of 30 October 1942 allowing for the regaining of military honour (Wehrwürdigkeit) and the right to bear arms. Winter stated that the members of his unit had proved themselves in battle and were now looking for the restoration of their right to bear arms on the Eastern Front. “The majority of the soldiers”, Winter wrote, “take this undertaking very seriously and [have] approached their officers with the request that the promise be fulfilled”.16 Indeed, regaining military honour was a topic of conversation during so-called information evenings with the nsfo, whose officers were broadly sympathetic to this goal. Major Winter fully supported his men’s desire to regain their military honour. But he added a cautionary note: “The deployment of the unit in Russia is, according to the will of the founder of the Africa Division, General Thomas, not practicable and with regard to the political past of these people not recommended”.17 In the light of their political orientation Major Winter suggested redeployment to Italy, although this never took place. Instead, this battalion would remain on Rhodes until capitulation in May. Its members would be looked upon with suspicion and 14

15 16 17

BA-MA RH26/1007/7, Bl. 164 [39], Personalstärke Ib B.B.N. 796/43 pk., iv/AR 999 (mot.); total strength: 497 comprising 398 ordinary ranks, 81 ncos 15 officers and 3 administrative staff (Beamte). The full name of the unit was iv Artillery (motorized) Regiment 999. On the punishment battalions, Hans-Peter Klausch Die Geschichte der Bewährungsbatailone 999 (Cologne, 1987). Visual History Archive, usc Shoah Foundation. Interview 45518, Ströer, Alfred. Accessed 2016 Jul 22. Ströer was born 3 December 1920 in Vienna. BA-MA RH26/1007/7, Bl. 53–54: Geheim! iv./Art.-Regt. (mot.) 999, Betr. Verwendung der iv./Art.-Regt. (mot.) 999 an der Front in Italien. Auszeichnungen die an Offiziere und Stammannschaften verliehen werden konnten (1 E.K. i. 7 E.K. ii Kl). ba-ma rh26/1007/7, Bl. 53–54: Geheim! iv./Art.-Regt. (mot.) 999, Betr. Verwendung der iv./Art.-Regt. (mot.) 999 an der Front in Italien.

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held in ­contempt by Kleemann’s successor from late September, Colonel (from December Major-General) Otto Wagener and his staff officers. Their attitude towards the ordinary soldiers of Battalion 999 would impact directly on morale and ultimately lead to a loss of fighting capability among the men and, indeed, of the garrison as a whole. Perhaps typical of the type of recruit with a political background to this battalion was Erwin Lenz, a former clerical employee from Berlin. By his own account, given in 1947, Lenz, like his contemporary Ströer, had fallen foul of the Nazi regime in March 1937, when he was arrested and then sentenced in November to a term of two and three-quarter years in a penitentiary. Considered unfit to serve in the regular army after his release in 1939, he was eventually drafted into Punishment Battalion 999 in February 1943 and landed in Rhodes a few weeks after Stenker with his unit iv Abt[eilung] Artillerie Reg[iment] 999, as part of the strengthening of the German garrison. His assignment was to survey the terrain of the island and to create maps accordingly.18 There was little love lost between Lenz and Kleemann’s officers, many of whom Lenz considered fanatical Nazis. Lenz typifies a large number of soldiers on Rhodes. He was conscientious in carrying out his tasks; he followed his orders; he was moderately educated – which was more than many infantrymen from the former West Prussian regions of Upper and Lower Silesia, who had a poor command of German; he does not appear to have been swayed by Nazi ‘education’. Lenz gave evidence in 1947 and again in the 1960s, and even though investigating prosecutors doubted his reliability as a witness by the later date, it is clear from much of what he stated that the prevailing culture of the garrison was largely apolitical, and information circulating among soldiers was mostly based on rumour.19 Ströer’s account of garrison life on Rhodes also provides some insight into the general situation on the island, and casts light onto the general morale of the garrison, especially after Wagener assumed command. Ströer was assigned to the repair company (Werkstattkompanie) stationed at the captured Italian vehicle depot, but his unit was made up mostly of soldiers from North ­Germany, not all of whom had the same political background as him, as is shown below. Whilst he appears to have had three compatriots in his division (two Austrians and a Bavarian) whom he could trust, “one had to be otherwise very careful. One could not say anything because one just did not know (…) [who to trust]”.20

18 19 20

Wiener Library, London, 1538, nokw 1715, Lenz sworn statement, 10 May 1947. Bundesarchiv-Ludwigsburg B162/1514, Bl. 349, testimony Erwin Lenz, 17 February 1964. Visual History Archive, usc Shoah Foundation. Interview 45518, Ströer, Alfred.

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An important aspect of the garrison was its geographical composition. By far the four most heavily represented regions in the division were those of North Germany, including Hannover, Hamburg, Braunschweig and SchleswigHolstein (15.4 per cent), followed by the Central German regions of Saxony, ­Halle-Merseberg, Magdeburg-Anhalt (14.2 per cent), and the provinces east of the Elbe including Upper and Lower Silesia, and the Sudetenland (12.8 per cent). Finally, the Catholic and industrial heartlands of the Rhineland/Ruhr, including Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen and Westphalia, made up a sizeable contingent (10.8 per cent). The significance of this geographical distribution lies partly in the political traditions of these areas before and after 1933 (many of the regions had been bastions of Social Democracy or Catholic Centre Party politics). They were also thrust into the front line of war by intensified Allied aerial bombardment in 1943. The ‘life-or-death’ presentation of the war by the nsfo assumed a depressing reality for those men whose home towns and cities were in the cross hairs of British and American bombers as the war was brought home to Germany. The impact and human losses resulting from ­carpet-bombing of Hamburg in the summer of 1943, for instance, was meticulously recorded by Stenker through numerous newspaper clippings in his scrapbook. No doubt Stenker was fearful for the safety of his wife, Hedi (­Hedwig), and their fiveyear-old son, also named Otto. It is not clear what impact reports of the war on the home front actually had on Stenker and his compatriots. It is reasonable to speculate whether some soldiers in the Eastern Aegean wondered what the purpose of their mission was. Meanwhile, Nazi population policies in the East also impacted negatively upon soldiers hailing from that region. According to a divisional report: In one case (rifleman Stuczynski, 7./Grenadier Regiment Rhodes), the Division intervened for the mother of S., who had been expropriated within the framework of the strengthening of Germandom, even though her son was already serving under the flag, had her property restored to her. The efforts of the Division with the relevant office of the Heimat services led to success.21 This intervention had less to do with the iniquity of the sequestration of the farmstead and more to do with countering the negative psychological impact on the fighting morale of soldiers. The army wished to show that it cared for the ordinary soldiers, recognizing that they were fighting across Europe to 21

BA-MA RH26/1007/24, “Sachgebiet Wehrgeistige Fuhrung/Geistige Betreuung”, undated situation report by 1c officer Dr Brenner.

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defend their homes and families (which was an irony given the facts of this particular case). Training officers (Betreuungsoffiziere) were appointed in each combat unit of the garrison to ensure morale. This became all the more necessary as the battle lines in the East were pushed westwards, and so-called Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) infantrymen from Upper and Lower Silesia as well as the Ukraine grew increasingly anxious about the fate of their loved ones as the Soviet army advanced. Given these broad characteristics of the troops in the Aegean, m ­ aintaining discipline and readiness for combat was an important desideratum. Other units comprised soldiers considered either too old for combat or lacking in ideological commitment, especially among those troops belonging to the so-called Punishment Battalion 999 (where desertions were frequently reported).22 Notwithstanding such concerns, it was boredom on the ‘quiet front’ that appears to have caused the greatest problems for commanders. It seems to have been widespread across the ranks from men to officers, possibly accounting for the drunken evenings in the officers’ mess. Unlike Kleemann’s command staff, who arrived with him, many of the mid-ranking and junior officers lacked experience, and troops were susceptible to low morale, with incidents of desertion not uncommon.23 Meanwhile, there were numerous reports of poor discipline and the absence of ‘soldierly manners’, especially vis-à-vis the I­ talian garrison and its officers before September 1943. Indeed, immediately after the Italian capitulation, incidents of plundering of Italian property by German soldiers, mostly for black-market purposes, were reported. This poor behaviour continued long after Italy’s surrender and, by the spring of 1944, was increasingly levelled at the Greek population. The reports of the Division’s 1c officer (security), First Lieutenant Dr. Brenner, show that great efforts were made to ensure troop reliability by providing a mixture of welfare and ideological indoctrination. The particular make-up of the garrison, especially with its large contingent of “punishment battalion” 22

23

For example BA-MA RH26/1007/25, Bl. 85–86, Bl. 131–132, Bl. 136 Anl. 36, Kommandant Ost-Ägäis Abt. 1c Br.B.Nr. 5857/44 geh. Betr. Personen-Ermittlung; ibid., Bl. 139, Anl.38, Tätigkeitsbericht 1c, Geh.Feldpolizei. See General Speidel’s situation reports for November and December 1943 and for the period 16 February 1944 to 15 March 1944 where he paints a picture of troop indiscipline and behaviour vis-à-vis civilians bordering on gangsterism, in: WL 1655/1362, nokw 692, Report from the Military Commander in Greece to the Commander-in-Chief South East concerning the confiscation of Jewish property, 18 December 1943. BA-MA RH26/1007/5, Bl. 56, 80, 82–83, 207–209; RH26/1007/6, Bl. 16, 3.10.43; RH26/1007/16, Bl. 110–111, 18.9.44, order to maintain discipline by force upon order evacuate the Eastern Aegean. The secret military police kept troops under constant surveillance, RH26/1007/25, Bl. 139 Anl. 38 Abt. 1c, Geh. Feldpolizei.

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troops and Volksdeutsche infantrymen from the German Empire’s former eastern territories, meant that the type of commitment to Hitler’s war, found for instance among General Lanz’s xxii Mountain Corps operating on mainland Greece, was lacking.24 This did not mean that the garrison was a redoubt of opposition to Hitler and Nazi policies, but it did mean that neither loyalty nor reliability could be taken for granted.25 Certainly, when the island’s Jews were deported in the summer of 1944, there were reports of widespread dissent and hostility towards those units of the garrison involved, provoking Kleemann to issue a stern rebuke. At the very least there appeared to be a slackening in enthusiasm for the outward trappings of regime loyalty. Kleemann complained about this in early August 1944: For the rest, I notice that the German greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ is very seldom used. I assume that this is essentially because of lack of thought and misplaced comfort, and expect that this negligence will cease in the light of recent events [the plot to assassinate Hitler], and that the army’s pledge [of loyalty] to the Führer will again be visibly and consciously expressed in relations between officer and man, and also in relations with the civilian population through the [Heil Hitler] greeting.26 This apparent lack of enthusiasm in Rhodes at least for the outward trappings of the Hitler state appears to have been shared by some of Kleemann’s officers, if references to tensions between younger fanatical officers and their older fellow-officers, especially when fuelled by alcohol – consumed abundantly in the mess – are anything to go by.27 Within two months of taking over command, Kleemann’s successor, Wagener, had opened a punishment camp (Straflager) for soldiers who fell foul of army discipline. Here soldiers were treated cruelly, with between 30 and 35 deaths from starvation, ill-treatment and shootings by beginning of May 1945.28 24 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, Chapters 15 and 16 in particular; Christoph U. SchminkGustuvus, Feuerrauch. Die Vernichtung des griechischen Dorfes Lygiades am 3. Oktober 1943 (Berlin, 2013). 25 Klausch, Die Geschichte der Bewährungsbatailone 999, frames his approach to the battalion in terms of military resistance to Hitler and Nazism. 26 BA-MA RH26/1007/15, Bl.86, Kommandant Ost-Ägäis StQu. 4 August 1944/kr. See also the report of the Secret Field Police in BA-MA RH26/1007/25, Bl. 136. 27 BA-MA RH26/1007/13, ktb Anlage 42. 28 The National Archives, London (tna), WO/208/4645, File: Generalmajor Wagener, MD/ JAG/FS/55/29 (D), witness statement Capt. Ernst Stuckmann.

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Following the battle for Rhodes, the everyday life of the garrison settled into a routine of training and military manoeuvres, as well as continuous political education alongside various leisure activities, including entertainment for both officers and ordinary ranks. From the end of August, Lieutenant Ewald, a company commander from Pz Art Rgt iv/999, was appointed Divisional Betreuungsoffizier, with the task of training officers and ncos, who in turn would ensure their units were fully informed of the imperatives of war.29 Briefly interrupted by the battle for Rhodes, Ewald resumed his duties sometime in October. On the 5th of that month he issued Order n. 1, concerning the establishment of a unified approach between his unit and Ic for the ideological education of troops. While Ewald appears to have dealt with the pedagogical side, Brenner organized lectures for the officer corps. At a conference in Athens at the beginning of December, which Ewald attended, dbos were renamed Nationalsozialistischer Führungs-Offizier (nsfo) and were issued with new guidelines on ideological education (weltanschauliche Erziehung); Ewald continued to work closely with Brenner’s unit. Unit and company commanders represented the “key to cohesion”30 and were issued with guidelines on the content for weekly meetings. Their men were to receive lectures on the “political themes of the day”, that included instruction on the general situation, especially in the Dodecanese; policies of the Nazi leadership; and how to combat enemy propaganda. They were also to be given an opportunity to air rank-and-file concerns. The lessons were also to go beyond the narrow terrain of Nazi political imperatives to include aspects of the history of Greece and the Aegean. While soldiers were to be also educated in Greek history, officers were to receive training on “what motivates us” (“was uns bewegt”) – so went the title of one of the propaganda pamphlets issued to them.31 While the garrison’s officers busied themselves with such topics or read Der Kompaniechef and Die Verantwortung des deutschen Offiziers (The Company Leader and The Responsibility of the German Officer), ordinary soldiers chose to read either technical and training manuals in the electrical and mechanical trades, or simply lighter entertainment material. Particularly popular was 29

BA-MA RH26/1007/–; Byron Tesapides, Die Deutsche Wehrmacht in Griechenland im Weltkrieg 1941–1945. Einheiten – Standorte – Offiziere- FP. Nummern – Gefechte, Band 1, (Saloniki, 2005) 84. This is a desktop publication that fails to give its sources, although it is clear that the author has consulted files in the Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg, The National Archives, London, and the National Archives, Washington DC. 30 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, 208. 31 The other popular title was Erziehung und Bildung im Heer [Training and Education in the Army].

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the pamphlet: Europäisches Russland (European Russia) and the pictorial ­dictionary Bilderduden deutsch-serbisch-griechisch. As well as the dictionaries, the military radio broadcast language and cultural programmes each evening, tailored to the soldier in Greece. The interest in mechanical subjects and the popularity of training manuals and evening classes, where lessons in electrical trades and mechanics were given, suggests a young generation of soldiers whose occupational lives had been interrupted by the war. At the same time, reading for pleasure suggested welcome distractions when confined to barracks. When not writing reports, Stenker’s unit in the hills of Psintho produced a makeshift ‘newspaper’ for their own entertainment, titled Inselpost (Island Post). The interest in literature on Russia and in the German-Serbian-Greek dictionary temptingly leads us to speculate on whether or not such interest existed among those members of the garrison with the sort of political past Major Winter alluded to, or among the likes of Stenker, who showed an educated curiosity about those regions his unit passed through. Morale could only be maintained by ensuring soldiers were by and large happy and kept busy. Constant alarms and manoeuvres would not suffice in this regard. The leisure life of the garrison was aided by the existence of three cinemas in the north of the island, as well as a mobile cinema that had been sequestered from the Italians. By October, arrangements were in place for a regular programme. Soldiers could thus be entertained not just by newsreels but also by lighter popular German and Italian films, such as Meine Freundin Josefine (My Girlfriend Josephine) and Canto d’Amore (Song of Love). The regimental band of the Grenadier Regiment entertained the garrison on special occasions, such as at Easter 1944 and again in mid-August 1944, with “two hours of colourful happiness” in Trianda (recently divested of its Jews). It played a mixture of military marches, classical and popular music (foxtrot etc.). But various units also founded their own small orchestras and bands and choirs. The garrison was not concentrated solely in Rhodes but was distributed throughout the island, in the centre and in the south, where the poor villages offered little in the way of leisure other than the ubiquitous small café bar (katheneon). In this respect the mobile cinema seized from the Italians and a perambulatory theatre/song troupe were important in ensuring that all soldiers benefitted from a fortnightly programme. In conditions where continued shortages and disrupted supply lines meant that fresh material was often lacking, soldiers turned to providing their own entertainment. Once again, Stenker’s scrapbook throws some light on this aspect of occupation life. Before the war, Stenker appears to have been involved with a local youth rambling club (Hansische Jugendwanderbewegung), composing Heimat poetry which extolled aspects of local life and natural history. On Rhodes he helped to organize

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evenings where Heimat literature and poetry were recited and music strongly featured. He read one of his poems, titled Es leuchten die Sterne (The Stars are Shining) to a gathering of members of the garrison in mid-May, when he also entertained his comrades with the song Was ist Liebe (What is Love). The task of ensuring discipline and thus combat preparedness among the ordinary ranks could not be left entirely to troop pedagogy. As soon as the island had been secured, a Captain Kleinschmidt from military counter-intelligence (Abwehr) was sent from Athens to coordinate arrangements with Brenner for evaluating captured Italian documents and registering the members of Italian military intelligence (Ufficio i), as well as assessing the Italian internees. But these intelligence personnel were also concerned with the psychological and political quality of the German troops. Kleinschmidt soon fell sick within weeks of arriving and operations were subsequently left to Brenner.32 The garrison also had a contingent of regular military police, numbering 21 men in late 1943, which was augmented by a small number of officers sent from branch 611 of the secret military police (Geheime Feldpolizei), based at Chania, in Crete.33 These officers, together with Brenner and another officer from Kleemann’s headquarters, Major Kronbein (Section 1a), ensured that a web of surveillance was maintained over the troops, reporting on their mood, reliability and any signs of potential subversion.34 Some indication of its impact can be seen in Ströer’s observation above that alluded to an atmosphere of suspicion and mutual mistrust among soldiers, confirmed by other reports from military sources. As material conditions of the occupation worsened due to uncertain supplies, shortages began to bite and in turn had a negative impact on morale. ­Kleemann’s official reports to his superiors give little indication of this, providing instead a positive picture of morale. As a consequence of the food shortages soldiers tended to go out and forage – which meant usually stealing from farmers or shooting their stocks of goats and sheep.35 Some soldiers also took boats out to sea in order to fish – against strict regulations governing conservation of diesel and also against all rules of safety and security, given the presence of marauding British commandos. Kleemann, afraid of antagonizing the local population and out of concern for the Wehrmacht’s reputation, was repeatedly forced to exhort the garrison to desist from deviant behaviour, not least the theft and illicit slaughter of goats and other black-market activities, 32 33 34 35

BA-MA RH26/1007/24, “Sachgebiet Wehrgeistige Fuhrung/Geistige Betreuung”. Described as the “Gestapo of the army” by its historian Klaus Geßner. See Klaus Geßner, “Die ‘Gestapo der Wehrmacht’,’’ in Die Gestapo: Mythos und Realität, eds., Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Darmstadt, 1996), 492–507. BA-MA RH26/1007/25, Bl. 136, Tätigkeitsbericht Ic, Anlage 36, 5 August 1944. BA-MA RH26-1007/8, Kleemann report July 1944.

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and the “sequestering” of local fishing boats. Such activities attracted severe punishments, including summary execution once Otto Wagener took command in September.36 Kleemann’s remonstrations regarding lax discipline and poor behaviour suggest that the garrison’s mood was anything but “reliable” (zuversichtlich), the description used by him and Wagener in their reports to Army Group Command. A striking feature of life on Rhodes was the acute rise in injuries and fatalities among the troops. The exact cause for this is not clear, but the September report refers to “irresponsible handling of explosives”. Whether this was due to lack of training and experience, or to “larking around”, or even to self-inflicted wounds in order to “self-demobilize” (as in one particular case), or a mix of all three, is not always clear.37 Between August and September the number of soldiers killed nearly tripled from five to 13. Perhaps a more ominous sign of a brittle discipline for the command of the garrison was the steep rise in those classified as missing – usually indicating desertions. Indeed, Brenner’s section desk 1c regularly reported on missing soldiers, such as the 23 desertions or unaccounted missing in September, half of whom were nonetheless swiftly apprehended.38 This was a steep increase on the preceding reporting period of June to early July, when there had been just four desertions. There were also worrying reports of suicides among both German soldiers and Italian military helpers. Although this is a small number when measured against the garrison’s overall size, it nonetheless provides a snapshot of deteriorating conditions. Increasingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, these cases were registered mostly among members of Battalion 999. In this unit a combination of political distance, especially after Wagener, a fanatical fellow-traveller of Hitler’s, took command, discontent arising from thwarted soldierly ambition (as we saw, the battalion was never redeployed), dire material conditions that bore down heavily on soldiers’ morale, and the prospect of inevitable defeat probably spurred on soldiers to risk court martial and certain execution as they either took to the hills or attempted escape from the island to Turkey. The development of “inner combat preparedness” was not necessarily only limited to formal lectures or training. Newspapers played a considerable role both in relaying news of the war and also in providing entertainment. From 1 October the garrison published a daily broadsheet (except Sundays), Wacht auf Rhodos. Deustche Soldatenzeitung für die Insel Rhodos, edited by nco 36 37 38

BA-MA RH26/1007/5 Bl. 195–196, Div.Tagesbefehl Nr. 20/43, 20 September 1943, Item 12; and ibid., Tagesbefehl 21/43, 24 September 1943. BA-MA RH26/1007/25, Bl. 33. BA-MA RH26/1007/25, Bl. 33.

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Robert Kern from Propaganda-Kompanie 690, with a circulation of 2000, which gave it a distribution ratio of 1:7.39 In terms of format and content the paper was modelled on the Wacht im Südosten, which was produced by the propaganda unit of Army Group E headquartered in Belgrade.40 Having worked on Wacht im Südosten, Kern was part of a small unit sent to Rhodes with the purpose of producing Wacht auf Rhodos and thus provided Ewald and Brenner with an “important support” in their propaganda work on the island. Its readers followed carefully news from home, and were fed a diet of triumphant news from other theatres of war, even to the very end of the Occupation. But Wacht auf Rhodos also ran articles of an historical interest on Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands and encouraged writing competitions, including the best battleof-Rhodes story, won by Gunner Hanshelmuth Bubat with his entry: “Baptism of Fire”.41 The paper also published historical articles and reprints of tales from the Iliad and other stories, usually with the intention of extolling martial virtues from the ancient Spartans to the contemporary German soldier.42 2

German Figures in a Greek Landscape

Literary examples of wartime tourism by Nazi writers in field grey tended towards a mythologizing of both landscape and past. In his wartime writings on Greece, Erhart Kästner, in common with other Nazi enthusiasts such as Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich, combined philhellenism with an acute ideological proclivity to mythologize German ‘aryanism’ as the true inheritance of the ancient classical world. One result of this approach was the 39

40 41 42

Copy found in BA-MA RH26/1007/24. After the German occupation of the island, Kern also had responsibility for the Messagero di Rodi, which he “managed with aplomb” (“mit geschickt gemeistert”). Kern was assisted by Obergefreite Gawe, and Obergefreite Stemmwedel. Among their propaganda efforts were reports “Wort und Bild” of battles on Simi, Cos, Piscopi and Nisiro. Julia Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, “Meine Liebe zu Griechenland stammt aus dem Krieg”. Studien zum literarischen Werk Erhart Kästners (Göttingen, 1994), 141–52, 144. BA-MA RH26/1007/24, Wacht auf Rhodos Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung für den Dodekanes [sic] 65, 13 December 1943, “Die Feuertaufe”. Also cited by Mazower, Inside, 206 with extensive quotation. It continued publication right up to the last day of the occupation, ceasing with n. 466 on 7 May. Wacht auf Rhodos Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung für den Dodekanes [sic] 466, 7 May 1945, copy in Imperial War Museum, London (Cat. E.J. 4053), and in Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Inventarnummer Do 61/600.4. The Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich has copies of the newspaper as well as others from the Mediterranean theatre of war. Hiller von Gaertringen, “Meine Liebe zu Griechenland stammt aus dem Krieg”, 142.

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­ ythologization of the classical past. The literary scholar Nafsika Mylona has m argued that this injected a quasi-religious imperative into the occupation of Greece, and as such Mylona claims it provided an alibi for the German presence.43 But there was also a strong secular aspect to this literary activity, since it was hoped that cultural mobilization would aid “inner combat preparedness” when ordinary soldiers learned that their mission was to safeguard the “cradle” of Europe’s classical inheritance.44 To this end, a special department, the Office for Protection of Art (Referat Kunstschutz), was set up by the military high command principally to deal with Greek antiquities, ensure archaeological preservation and also to compile registers. An office assigned to the military administration in Salonika included two classical archaeologists from Heidelberg University: Hans-Ulrich von Schoenebeck and, after July 1942, Wilhelm Kraiker.45 The Referat also had the function of producing literature on Hellenism for the occupation army that was little more than propagandistic in its aims. The ordinary German soldier was not only introduced to the history, culture and customs of Greece and its islands, but as conqueror was reminded of the occupation’s broader cultural mission. Thus, soldiers were advised on “correct” behaviour in the face of the remains of a classical and noble civilization of which, they, the Nordic German soldiers – and not the modern Greeks – were the true descendants, as postulated by Kraiker.46 This approach was very much woven into Kästner’s numerous writings on Greece, in which his depiction of German soldiers was in the style of the Homeric saga. Kästner had been the assistant to the great naturalist playwright 43

44 45

46

Nafsika Mylona, “Politisch-religiöse Implikate in Spundas und Kästners Ortsbeschreibungen”, in Die Okkupation Griechenlands im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Griechische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur, eds., Chryssoula Kambas und Marilisa Mitsou (Cologne, Vienna, Weimar, 2015), 399–408, 406. But this was not exclusive to the Germans: Lawrence Durrell and his compatriots, as part of the British military presence from 1945–1947, did much the same. Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953; repr. London, 2000). Hiller von Gaertringen, “Meine Liebe zu Griechenland stammt aus dem Krieg”, 163. Angelos Chaniotis, Ulrich Thamer, “Altertumswissenschaften”, in Die Universität Heidelberg im Nationalsozialismus, eds., W.U. Eckart, V. Sellin and H. Wolgast (Heidelberg, 2006), 391–434, 404–05. I.D. Kanalis, “Recent Restoration and Preservation of the Monuments of the Knights in Rhodes”, The Annual of the British School of Athens, 47 (1952), 213–16. Thamer and Chaniotis, “Altertumswissenschaften”, 416; the authors cite the following works by Wilhelm Kraiker, “Vorgeschichtliche Zeugnisse für die nordischeHerkunft der Griechen”, in Rasse 4 (1937), 1–10; idem, “Die Einwanderung der Nordstämme nach Griechenland”, in Rasse 5 (1938), 69–382; idem, “Nordische Einwanderungen in Griechenland”, in Antike 15 (1939), 195–230; idem, “Die nordischen Einwanderungen nach Griechenland. Forschungsbericht” in Die AltenSprachen 4 (1939), 272–80.

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Gerhart Hauptmann, and volunteered for military service in 1939 (the year he joined the Nazi Party). According to his own account, a series of lucky breaks brought him in 1941 to Greece. He was able to convince the Air Force Command in Athens that he was an authority on all matters Greek, being originally assigned duties as a translator (even though he had no knowledge of the Greek language). No doubt his literary connections to Hauptmann and his training as a librarian helped him. Armed with military travel privileges, Kästner embarked on what would become a successful wartime career as a literary propagandist. In 1941 he travelled across German occupied Greece; the resulting book, Greece. A Book from the War (published in 1942 and revised in 1943) was a bestseller among the troops of the Wehrmacht and brought him accolades from his superiors. The positive reception allowed him to request that he be allowed to do something similar for Crete and then the islands of the Dodecanese. Finally, in May 1944, Kästner arrived in Rhodes and would remain on the island until its surrender to the British in May 1945. Ordered to accompany ­Kleemann’s units to the Balkans, Kästner opted to remain on the ‘quiet front’ – in other words, he demobilized himself from combat.47 The chapter on Rhodes stands in sharp distinction to his letters and diary, which offer some glimpses of the deteriorating conditions on the island and his own mental state. There are no soldier heroes in this later work, unlike in his earlier two volumes. The Greeks who appear in Kästner’s account of Rhodes are individualized personalities of the modern age and not reduced as previously to stereotypes of either the bucolic goat herder or the ‘unwashed’ shadowy Balkan town-dweller. As in Stenker’s photographs, war is entirely absent in Kästner’s Griechische Inseln and this too suggests his retreat from the ugly realities of the occupation of the Dodecanese, especially from the late autumn of 1944. In much the same way that German philhellenes received a rude awakening when confronted by latter-day Greeks during war-time encounters, the gap ­between the aesthetic representation of blond German youth as heroes straight out of the Iliad and the reality of rough-and-ready soldiers was often wide. One of Kraiker’s colleagues, also from Heidelberg, the historical g­ eographer

47

Griechenland. Ein Buch aus dem Kriege (Berlin, 1942–1943), revised and republished as Ölberge und Weinberge. Ein Griechenlandbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 1960) based on 1953 printing; Kreta: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahre 1943 (Berlin, 1946), revised and reprinted in 1975; Griechische Inseln. Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahre 1944 was published three decades after the war in 1975 (Frankfurt am Main, 1975); Helga Karrenbrock, “Erhart Kästners Griechenland”, in Die Okkupation Griechenlands im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Griechische und deutsche Erinnerungskultur, eds., Chryssoula Kambas und Marilisa Mitsou, (Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Vienna, Weimar, 2015), 391–98. See also Arne Strohmeyer, Dichter im Waffenrock. Erhart Kästner in Griechenland und auf Kreta 1941 bis 1945 (Mähringen, 2006).

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and ­archaeologist Ernst Kirsten, who was deployed to Crete in 1942, exhorted soldiers to: (…) respect the ruins, which have lasted for thousands of years and are supposed to last for thousands of years to come (…) Anyone who scratches his name in the marble defaces the testimony of a great past (…) The art and culture of Hellenism are advanced and kept alive by the power and spirit of German men (…) Urinating on marble columns spoils the marble, damages the works of art, and is a lack of discipline.48 Writers such as Kästner or his contemporary Ernst Jünger, writing about an earlier war, have provided ample material for literary scholars. Historians too have been able to draw much insight from their activities as ‘framers’ or ‘shapers’ of German efforts to provide the war with cultural legitimation. But scholars today are also interested in the experience of ordinary soldiers as reflected in their letters and diaries from the frontline. As suggested above, the war offered Germans in uniform an opportunity ‘to see the world’, but their ‘way of seeing’ was also shaped by their own experience, as well as external influences of the type we discussed earlier. Stenker’s scrapbooks provide a narrative of the war that was informed both by the meta-narratives of the likes of Kästner and the historical pamphlets he had acquired and presumably read, but also by his own socialization prior to the war. Stenker’s photographs record his exploration of classical sites on the island and its varied landscape. Within a month of arriving, he had photographed the ancient acropolis, the Knights’ medieval fortress at Lindos, on the eastern coast, 60 kilometres south of the city, and the ancient site of Ialyssos, closer to Rhodes. In June he visited the pretty ancient olive grove of Malona, where another unit was stationed. Probably soon after arriving on the island, he took shots of the bazaar of the old town of Rhodes and its narrow streets, where he would have mingled with Greeks, Turks and Jews. On furlough at the beginning of October, like many of his compatriots Stenker visited Athens and dutifully acquainted himself with the classical sites of the city, notably of course, the Acropolis. Finally, in July 1944 and back on Rhodes, he captured the void streets of Trianda, the small village just south of Rhodes on the western side of the island, to which many Jews had fled after the aerial bombardments of the Juderia. 48

Chaniotis, Thamer, “Altertumswissenschaften”, 405 and note 58. Cf Merkblätter für den deutschen Soldaten an den geschichtliche Stätten Griechenlands: 11/12 Kreta (Salonika, 1942).

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Stenker’s visits to these ancient sites were not accompanied by acts of vandalism, such as those carried out by soldiers in various locations on the Greek mainland or elsewhere in the islands. Instead, he carefully recorded them with his camera. There is little to suggest that his fellow travellers acted any differently. Indeed, Rhodes appears to have been spared some of the depredations to historical sites committed elsewhere by the German occupying forces. At Messini in the Peloponnese, for example, soldiers used a 4th century tower and its contiguous western wall for artillery practice. The monastery of Osios Loukas at Sitia in Boeotia, like that of Ayios Kharalambos at Meteoria, was looted of its kitchen utensils, while the altar of its church was fouled with human excrement and two illustrated books on the archaeological and architectural history of the site, donated to the monks by the British School in Athens, were burned. At Skhimatari, German troops billeted in the museum smashed ancient vases and took various clay figurines. At Mycenae, “The Germans (…) chipped the walls of the Tholos of Atreus in an attempt to extract bronze pin-ends from the original decorations still embedded in the stone”.49 Looting and wanton vandalism were not uncommon. Rhodes seems to have been spared such excesses. Damage to ancient monuments in the town, mostly to its medieval churches’ gates and walls and to its mosques, was the result of aerial bombardment by the British. On Cos, however, troops were less disciplined and the Knights’ Castle was looted. The plundering of ancient sites was not restricted to ordinary soldiers. On this island the plundering probably took place after its subjugation by troops of Stenker’s former Infantry Regiment 22, led by Lieutenant-General Müller, who also helped himself to some of the antiquities of the island of Samos as war booty. On Crete, General Ringel apparently considered the artefacts of the Villa Ariadne as his personal property, as he did those antiquities at Knossos, arranging for their shipment to Germany. 3 Conclusion The experience of war on the ‘quiet front’ of the Eastern Aegean had none of the jagged contours of battlegrounds elsewhere. The brief battle for Rhodes in September 1943 was swiftly brought to an end in a diplomatic manner: 49

tna, T209/37 Greece (1947): Works of Art in Greece, The Greek Islands and The Dodecanese: Losses and Survivals of the War (London, 1946), 9–39 passim. Quote is at 9 ibid.; I.D. ­Kondis, “Recent Restoration and Preservation of the Monuments of the Knights in Rhodes”, The Annual of the British School at Athens 47 (1952), 213–16, for this and following references in this paragraph.

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­ leemann had sought to avert barbarization on his front, unlike his fellow genK eral, Müller, who on Cos ordered the mass execution of surrendered Italian officers from X Regiment of Regina Division.50 The Aegean ‘quiet front’ occupies a liminal space between war and atrocity on the one hand, and an almost Elysian, if not bucolic, experience on the other. This does not paper over the fact that there were deep cracks in the occupation experience, but it does point to a final observation. The mosaic of sources that have survived, including Stenker’s scrapbooks, depicting everyday life inside the garrison in which German soldiers appear as mere tourists in the Aegean landscape, suggest a disconnect between that idealized and innocent image of the soldier-tourist and the ideological purpose and harsh realities of the occupation. On the one hand, the military authorities sought to utilize culture as a means to maintain mobilization of combat preparedness. But there was an ever-widening gap between intention of action and its outcome, as John Horne has noted in reflecting upon his own work on France in the First World War.51 On the other hand, the ‘self-help’ cultural activities and ‘flights’ into the archaeological remains of the classical world were as much about forgetting the war, and therefore demobilizing oneself, as they were about pleasure and interest.52 There is a clear indication of this in Kästner’s attitude towards war and violence by early 1945. By the time the harsh and arbitrary regime of General Wagener over the Dodecanese drew to a close in May 1945, many soldiers’ dream of ‘seeing the world’ on a Greek island had long turned sour. 50

51 52

Isabella Insolvibile, “The Island of Kos under German Occupation and British Military Administration (1943–1947)”, paper delivered to “The Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes & Cos: 1944–2014. A Commemorative International Symposium on the Holocaust in the A ­ egean”, July 2014. Müller was tried and executed in Athens in 1947 for war crimes. See also, Marco Clementi, Camicie nere sull’Acropoli. L’occupazione italiana in Grecia ­(1941–1943) (Rome, 2013). Interview with John Horne, “French Historians under the spotlight: Prof. John Horne” French History Network Blog, http://frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/blog/?p=254. Accessed 2017 Aug 20. See the excellent discussion in Lecoeur, Mussolini’s Greek Island, 144.

part 2 Soldiering: Experience and Representation

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Chapter 4

The Sharp End: Witnessing, Perpetrating, and Suffering Violence in 20th Century Wars1 Alan Kramer My interest in this topic was sparked by a number of things. One was an observation by Len Smith. Despite the fact that killing the enemy is the main purpose of soldiers in wartime, “[a]ctual killing”, he wrote, “is surprisingly elusive in Great War testimonies. Millions died; very few indeed seemed to have killed”.2 Another, acknowledged in the title, was John Ellis’s book on combat in the Second World War, although he, too, devoted little space to this central issue. Both Anglophone and German scholarship have noted the relative absence of work on this question.3 The third inspiration came from my longstanding exchange of ideas with John Horne, dating back to our earliest discussions on the phenomenon of the ‘German atrocities’ of the First World War, but ranging since then more broadly over the history of warfare, both in the research seminar of the Centre for War Studies at Trinity College Dublin and in informal conversation that is such an important part of intellectual life. One intention of this chapter is to consider this question in the context of the idea of a continuum of violence from the First to the Second World War, or, as some Eurocentric historians have put it, the idea of a ‘European Civil War’ as a ‘Second Thirty Years War’. Was the Second World War a continuation of the First, merely employing more modern technology and ideology, but essentially similar in terms of combat experience? Using evidence mainly from the First

1 This brief survey is based on publications mainly by historians; a systematic study of published documents (memoirs, letters, diaries) and archival sources would be desirable. Its title is derived from the book by John Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War ii (London, 1980). 2 Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self. French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca, NY 2007), 90. A similar passage can be found in Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London, 1998), 66. 3 Michael Geyer, “Eine Kriegsgeschichte, die vom Tod spricht”, in Physische Gewalt. Studien zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, eds., Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt, 1995), 136–61; Peter Gleichmann and Thomas Kühne, eds., Massenhaftes Töten. Kriege und Genozide im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen, 2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_006

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and Second World Wars, but with a look back to the South African War and forward to the Vietnam War, I first ask if training was adequate preparation for violence. Secondly, I assess the controversial argument that since men derive enjoyment from killing, war produces a dynamic of violence that becomes potentially limitless, ending with the commission of atrocities and the brutalization of the perpetrators. Thirdly, I ask if soldiers’ narratives of perpetrating and suffering violence changed over the century, and if some topics were standard fare while others were taboo. This chapter thus attempts to analyze the perpetration and suffering of violence, while recognizing that soldiers’ narratives have to be used critically.4 The confessional mode has its own risks for the historian; as the literature historian Samuel Hynes says, “personal narratives are not history and can’t be”. Rudyard Kipling, who wrote the history of the Irish Guards in the First World War, knew the limitations of confused evidence given by survivors of combat, and Robert Graves was aware of the “high proportion of falsities” in soldiers’ accounts.5 1

Preparation for Violence

John Keegan wrote in his History of Warfare that there was “a widespread cultural inhibition against face-to-face killing”, yet some military cultures learned to overcome it. Roman warfare inflicted appalling, extreme violence on its enemies, including the massacre of women, children, and captured soldiers, the purpose being to ‘strike terror’ among populations that might contemplate resistance.6 Nevertheless, warrior peoples were only ever a minority among all peoples.7 It required special training to turn men into such killing machines. Greek warriors were usually content with inflicting a battlefield defeat on their enemy. The fundamental principles of military training in the modern age, the period of the battlefield dominated by long-range rifle bullets and artillery projectiles, are to impart “the basic grammar of military service”, distinguish the soldier from the civilian, create cohesion, inculcate the instinctive adoption of tactical skills, and enable recruits to master weapons technology. Finally, the purpose of training is to overcome the prohibition of killing on which civilization rests. Bayonet practice, however anachronistic the weapon was, had the 4 See Jörg Baberowski, Räume der Gewalt (Frankfurt, 2015), 10. 5 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 15–16. 6 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London, 1994, 1st published 1993), 265–66. 7 Keegan, A History of Warfare, 227.

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function of overcoming the inhibition on inflicting lethal injury on a fellow human, and it was a standard element of training.8 Yet only a small part of the training of British and American infantry soldiers in the First and Second World Wars was spent on courses simulating combat. Just a few weeks, in the British case three, were devoted to creating battlefield conditions. In 1939–45, ‘hate training’ depicted the enemy as brutal and involved recruits bayoneting straw dummies. None of this was very effective, and the British soon stopped the experiment with ‘hate training’ after a public outcry.9 The training of German soldiers before 1914 was thorough and lengthy, and it included an element of combat simulation, though during the First World War military doctrine also insisted on continuous drill exercises and formal discipline. The experience of the war showed that although soldiers coming out of the front were exhausted, even in 1918 they would go back after rest with recharged eagerness. “Making war”, as Michael Geyer has written, “thus really created war readiness”. Military training in the Wehrmacht drew on these lessons of 1918, and instilled a sense that every soldier could act as an autonomous warrior, as part of a well-functioning military elite.10 The troops that invaded Poland in 1939 were well trained for one to two years.11 That soon changed. With the opening of Operation Barbarossa, the high casualty rate meant that divisions were often filled with replacement troops who were thrown into 8

Hew Strachan, “Training, Morale and Modern War”, Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006), 211–27, 216–17; Cf. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing. Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London, 1999), 89–93. Paul Hodges, “They don’t like it up ’em!: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army during the First World War”, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1 (2008), 123–38, on the alleged British ‘fetish’ with bayonets (in fact it was common to most major armies) contains appropriately gory detail on the training and use of this weapon. He suggests that the bayonet fetish led to brutalization and promoted the commission of atrocities, in particular the wanton killing of surrendered enemy soldiers. This requires more than the anecdotal evidence he cites. Above all, a comparative approach would be necessary. 9 Ellis, Sharp End, 13–18. A similar point about the lack of firing practice is made by Brian Bond, “The British Field Force in France and Belgium, 1939–40”, in Time to Kill. The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West 1939–1945, eds., Paul Addison and Angus Calder (London, 1997), 40–49, 42. Useful detail on the advances in British and American training during the Second World War in detailed in Strachan, “Training, Morale and Modern War”. See also Bourke, Intimate History, 84–89 and 151–55. 10 Michael Geyer, “Vom massenhaften Tötungshandeln, oder: Wie die Deutschen das KriegMachen lernten”, in Massenhaftes Töten, eds., Peter Gleichmann and Thomas Kühne (Essen, 2004), 105–42, 129–31. 11 Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt, 2006), 34.

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battle after brief superficial training.12 But German soldiers continued to be effective killers until May 1945. Military training is thus only a small part of the explanation. The example of the South African War confirms this: the Boers had no standing army, but a militia system in which every man was expected to be skilled in the use of a rifle; most were experienced horse riders. Despite the lack of formal training, they were able to deploy their new German Mauser rifles to devastating effect, defeating the British in several initial battles. The British Empire’s forces were trained professional soldiers, though the poor quality of their marksmanship, tactics, and strategy suggested otherwise. 2

Killing as Labour?

Several historians have noted that many soldiers compared their task with industrial work, with routines, skills, and the division of labour. In autobiographical accounts by soldiers in both world wars, men frequently used the analogy of labour, e.g. in which “the killing of people and the destruction of material counted as a good job”. Violence could be “comprehended thus as something meaningful, or at least experienced as something necessary and unavoidable”.13 Ernst Jünger wrote in the 1930s about the soldier as “war worker”: the rational principles of industrial work were applied to using the tools of warfare. Henri de Man, the Belgian socialist, soldier, and later collaborator, wrote in 1919 about fighting as industrial labour.14 If soldiers saw killing as routine work, it was normalized; it was not immoral or criminal. Taken to its extreme, even killing defenceless civilians, which broke all national and international laws of war, could be regarded as ‘labour’: after the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Lieutenant Calley and his men described their behaviour as “killing work”.15 Yet it would be wrong to suggest, as the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky does, that once violence commences, the laws of war become scraps of paper; written and unwritten codes condition men’s conduct, and they remain aware that killing breaches a fundamental principle of social existence.16 12 13 14 15 16

Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Houndmills, 1985), 7–21, 31. Alf Lüdtke, “Gewalt und Alltag im 20. Jahrhundert” (2003), cited in Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben (Frankfurt, 2011), 37. See also Baberowski, Räume der Gewalt, 155. Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 36; Henri de Man, The Remaking of a Mind. A Soldier’s Thoughts on War and Reconstruction (New York NY, 1919), 162. Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts. The usa in Vietnam, trans. Anne Wybird with Victoria Fern ( New Haven CT & London, 2009), 222. Wolfgang Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt, 1996), 141.

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Although most military reports on combat use language that is as far removed from emotion and experience as possible, we know that the notion of war as work only represents a fraction of that experience. Military reports make no mention of pain, fear, and rage. German unit reports during the invasion of Poland in 1939 routinely spoke of ‘cleansing’ villages (of the ­regular Polish enemy and alleged civilian fighters), or ‘pacification’ without mention of the bloody business of executing unarmed civilians, throwing hand grenades into cellars filled with terrified families, or killing captured soldiers. Even in private, soldiers usually distanced themselves from anything that might unsettle their assumptions: one lieutenant, writing a letter on (or shortly after) 3 September 1939, noted passing endless burning houses and seeing “dead Polish civilians in the most bizarre contortions lying in the field by the road. Spies and partisans. Everyone looks, I notice, but hardly anyone betrays any feeling”.17 That does not mean that the act of killing was emotionless. Polish survivors often recorded that soldiers who committed massacres were enraged, shouting denunciations and curses at civilians (“dregs”, “rubbish”, etc.), and beating them savagely. Especially in the first days of war, when inexperienced, nervous soldiers came under fire, when feelings of vulnerability vied with fantasies of omnipotence, tensions were discharged in “battlefield frenzy”.18 “Frenzy” may have been a common mechanism to overcome fear. A Scots Guards officer recalled a battle in Italy in 1943, in which he and his men captured a group of Germans, some of whom started firing: Everyone started yelling (…) An awful savagery now seemed to take hold of us and we rushed along the embankment shouting oaths and shooting at Germans who were lying there. I felt as if some wild animal had got me by the throat and I had to keep shouting and shooting or else my normal self would return bringing fear along with it.19 Ernst Jünger felt something similar in Germany’s final offensive in March 1918, though his frenzy was an expression of rage rather than fear:

17 18 19

Cited in Böhler, Auftakt, 77. Ibid., 87, 138. “Battlefield frenzy” is cited here, 156, from Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York NY, 1992), 161. Cited in Diana M. Henderson, “The Scottish Soldier: Reality and the Armchair Experience”, in Time to Kill, eds., Addison and Calder, 21–28, 24–25. This is probably not a case of killing captured Germans in cold blood; the context shows that this was a kind of botched surrender, in which some of the Germans resumed firing.

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As we advanced, we were in the grip of a berserk rage. The overwhelming desire to kill lent wings to my stride. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes. The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded we were all ecstatically happy.20 Perhaps war was after all not just like a day on the production-line. We might describe this fear and frenzy with the term the sociologist Randall Collins used: “forward panic”.21 Killing in 20th century wars was, however, often anonymous mass violence that was not a response to fear or anger. In the act of killing and injuring, soldiers regained some degree of autonomy, the “consciousness of action”, as Sofsky puts it.22 3

Killing for Pleasure

Fear and anger do not fully explain the eruption of German violence in Poland in 1939. German officers and soldiers were in the main convinced that they were acting in legitimate self-defence in killing civilians and captured soldiers.23 In a classic book Omer Bartov put forward the idea that the extreme violence of German soldiers in the Second World War resulted not only from Nazi indoctrination, but also from the conditions of fighting on the Eastern Front after the invasion of the Soviet Union – the “barbarization of warfare”.24 In fact this set in much earlier. Jochen Böhler has argued that the transition from “normal” warfare to the “war of annihilation” took place with the invasion of Poland.25 The extreme violence of the ordinary military was immediately evident, which means that ‘situational’ factors such as the lengthy experience of warfare cannot be counted. Military training, ideological indoctrination, and, in particular, socialization through the Nazi mass organizations were important factors: in the last quarter of 1939, 31 per cent of men in an average infantry division were members of Nazi organizations. This massive ideological 20 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hofmann (Harmondsworth, 2003), 232. 21 Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton NJ, 2008), 83–133. 22 Sofsky, Traktat, 81. 23 Böhler, Auftakt, 243. 24 Bartov, Eastern Front. 25 Böhler, Auftakt.

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­ ressure must have had consequences for almost all young men socialized p through school and the Hitler Youth.26 The propaganda directed against Poland before the invasion denounced its people in ever more shrill language as backward, cunning, and brutal. Catholic priests, intellectuals, and Jews were expected to organize sabotage and resistance by ‘guerrillas’ (Freischärler and Franktireurs); commanders ordered their units to punish the civilian population “if necessary with ruthless measures”.27 Collective punishments often extended beyond the main suspects of Jews, Catholic priests, intellectuals, and labour leaders, with arbitrary violence and executions. Occasionally, soldiers recorded their pleasure. During the fighting for Neu Sandez/Nowy Sącz, German troops assumed that only francs-tireurs were firing, although the district was heavily defended by the Polish army. “It must be a great lark to break in to the houses, pistol in your hand, and hunt down the damned civilian swine”, a lieutenant told his men in view of the burning houses.28 A Luftwaffe lieutenant boasted in captivity in April 1940 to a comrade about his experiences in early September, the first days of the war: POHL: On the second day of the Polish campaign I had to drop bombs on a station in Posen, right among the houses. I did not like it. On the third day I felt indifferent towards it, and on the fourth day I began to enjoy it. It was our pre-breakfast treat, chasing soldiers through the fields with machine guns and leaving them dead with a few bullets in the back. MEYER: But only ever against soldiers (…)? POHL: People, too. We attacked the columns on the roads… The leading aircraft dived on the road, and (…) [we targeted the ditch on the left], with all machine guns blazing. We saw horses flying about. MEYER: Shame, not the horses! POHL: I felt sorry about the horses, not the people, not at all. But I feel sorry about the horses to this day.29 It took this man only three days to find pleasure in targeting civilians. We might add that Luftwaffe pilots had even less opportunity than the infantry 26 Böhler, Auftakt, 34. 27 Böhler, Auftakt, 39–41. 28 Böhler, Auftakt, 80. This was a personal account of the battle possibly intended as a contribution to a later history of the war. 29 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 84–85.

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to have been barbarized by the conditions of warfare. Before we leap to conclusions about Nazi socialization, however, we should recall that British and American air force pilots sometimes experienced the same pleasure of the hunter at targeting people – whether enemy soldiers or civilians.30 Although there was an unwritten code of chivalry, according to which one did not shoot at air crew parachuting from a damaged aircraft, both the Germans and, in the last months of the war, in at least 100 cases, the Americans did precisely that.31 This suggests there was a dynamic of violence, in which men not only became accustomed to killing, but quickly grew to enjoy it. Sociological theories postulate that “violence intensifies itself”; Sofsky writes that “once unleashed, violence follows the unending movement of excess which has no summit, no climax. It has an immanent tendency to the absolute”.32 Like so much else in Sofsky, this is ahistorical. There is no absolute rule about becoming accustomed to killing. The example of the most famous Afrikaner commando in the South African War, Denys Reitz, shows there were self-imposed limits. Despite his pleasure in fighting, Reitz was no indiscriminate killer: in close combat, when a British soldier attempted to bayonet him, Reitz had him at his mercy, but had “an aversion to shooting him down like a dog”, so he took him prisoner.33 The crucial variable, then, was not conditions of war, nervousness, or other situational factors. Notwithstanding his book’s subtitle, Bartov provided the essential clue: “The most direct cause for the criminal activities of the German army (…) were the so-called ‘criminal orders’”.34 He was referring to the set of commands issued by the Wehrmacht on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, but a similar military-cultural factor applies to the invasion of Poland: officers ordered or gave informal approval to the most brutal methods of warfare. In a hierarchical organization such as an army – any army – the pressure to act according to the orders or approval of commanders, reinforced by indoctrination and the immediate exigencies of the peer group, was almost irresistible. To an even greater degree than in Poland in 1939, Nazi indoctrination and propaganda prepared the ground for combat soldiers to wage all-out war against the ‘sub-humans’ of the east once Operation Barbarossa commenced. A former Hitler Youth leader and Waffen-SS volunteer explained in an ­interview three decades later: “We had after all gone to Russia, we wanted 30 Bourke, Intimate History, 47–57, has several examples of Allied soldiers in both world wars expressing this pleasure. 31 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 445 fn. 192. 32 Sofsky, Traktat, 62. 33 Denys Reitz, Commando. A Boer Journal of the Boer War (London, 1982, 1st ed., 1929), 41. 34 Bartov, Eastern Front, 106.

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there [to ­destroy] subhumanity – I was (…) strongly convinced of my task, that I was right. And once it goes that far, then you don’t think about it much, then only one thing remains, (…) either him or me”.35 Contemporaries confirmed that soldiers “found it difficult to believe that the enemy was composed of human beings rather than Untermenschen”.36 This produced a dynamic of violence that in this historical case was hard to stop, even when it was dysfunctional. Not only ‘Bolshevik commissars’ and Jewish soldiers, but also Soviet prisoners of war were the victims of brutality and indiscriminate shooting. Bartov found that “wild” and “undisciplined” shooting of surrendered soldiers began in the first days of the invasion, despite their commanders’ efforts to stop such “unmilitary” conduct. Many senior officers became concerned that the barbarities would lead to a general breakdown of discipline and erode their authority. Again and again, commanders issued orders to stop the “senseless shootings of both POWs and civilians” in 1941.37 Since similar orders were still being repeated in April 1943, it is clear that the army commanders failed to stop the dynamic. This is not to argue that it was unstoppable. On the contrary, German military conduct in western Europe shows that the army, given firm political direction, could by and large avoid committing atrocities. Still, the self-reinforcing dynamic of fear, hatred, and violence was evidently very powerful. Does it lend support to Joanna Bourke’s argument in her Intimate History of Killing that men enjoy killing, that men and women ‘like us’ are capable of grotesque acts of violence against fellow human beings?38 (Chapter 1 is entitled “The Pleasures of War”). Unfortunately, Bourke makes little systematic attempt to explain historical development or draw distinctions between different circumstances, so that violence in Vietnam often appears indistinguishable from that in the world wars. Moreover, there is no attempt to ask what stops the dynamic or inhibits killing, which I discuss below. Refining her original position, Bourke admits that “reality disappoints”; many pilots, for example, who “felt elation after shooting down Japanese planes” were “profoundly shaken when forced to fly down ‘on running human beings, opening up all the guns, (…) killing and maiming many of those unknown individuals’”.39 She even acknowledges that “with occasional e­ xceptions most servicemen killed the enemy with a sense that they were performing a 35

Cited in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991), 112. 36 Bartov, Hitler’s Army, 211, fn. 110. 37 Bartov, Eastern Front, 115–17. 38 Bourke, Intimate History, 368–75. 39 Bourke, Intimate History, 5, 244.

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slightly distasteful but necessary job”.40 This was probably true of British, American, and French soldiers in the two world wars, but was it generally valid? German soldiers, who are not the subject of her study, killed indiscriminately on the Eastern Front with racist hatred and millenarian confidence in victory, gradually supplanted by desperate fear of the consequences of defeat. Even ­non-Nazi Germans, such as the sensitive young intellectual, Willy Peter Reese, discovered how the hell of war transformed him. In his diary he noted mowing down enemy soldiers with his machine gun, and murdering women and children. He killed like an automaton, without empathy, to save his own life, but there was more to it: “We survivors loved danger, for it passed the time of murderous waiting. (…) War led us into a dreamlike zone, and many a peaceable character felt a mysterious yearning for the horrendous, in suffering and action”.41 But by the end, Bourke returns to her initial argument that most AngloAmerican soldiers killed with abandon, in a frenzy of anger over loss of ­comrades or news of enemy atrocities, or justifying violence by reference to “primitive blood-lust”, or that the victims were not really human.42 Like Bourke, several historians have cited the British soldier Julian Grenfell to endorse the argument that men feel joy in killing.43 Grenfell expressed his unashamed delight at his skill in stalking and killing Germans, comparing it to the pleasure of hunting: “It is all the most wonderful fun, better fun than one could imagine”. His posthumously published private letters should be analyzed in their context, however. Grenfell was a professional soldier from an aristocratic family. Not only did his romantic concept of warfare go out of fashion in the industrial killing fields of 1914, he also knew it. The cavalry – his arm – was vulnerable and useless, and he understood the devastating effect of artillery fire: “About the shells; after a day of them, one’s nerves are really absolutely beaten down”. Above all, the end of his letter in which he described his sniping exploits deserves to be known. Half an hour after he killed a German, the enemy attacked “in a massed formation, advancing slowly to within ten yards of the trenches. We simply mowed them down. It was rather horrible”.44 Grenfell’s vitalist joy in killing thus did not preclude an understanding of modern warfare and horror at mass death. 40 Bourke, Intimate History, 166. 41 Willy Peter Reese, “Mir selber seltsam fremd”. Die Unmenschlichkeit des Krieges. Russland 1941–1944 (Munich, 2003), 129–30, cited in Baberowski, Räume der Gewalt, 16, also 18. 42 Bourke, Intimate History, 225–35. 43 Bourke, Intimate History, 139–41. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 34–41, provides essential context. 44 Viola Meynell, Julian Grenfell (London, 1917), 12–13.

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Was there a difference between the 20th-century wars with regard to the pleasure in killing? Perhaps less than we might think. R.H. Tawney, a sergeant in the British army, later to become famous as an economic historian and Christian socialist, gave candid expression to this emotion that was usually not talked about in public at the time, in an article published just a few weeks after his experience on 1 July on the Somme: Most men, I suppose, have a Paleolithic savage somewhere in them, a beast that occasionally shouts to be given a chance of showing his joyful cunning in destruction. I have, anyway, and from the age of catapults to that of shot-guns always enjoyed aiming at anything that moved, though since manhood the pleasure has been sneaking and shamefaced. Now it was a duty to shoot, and there was an easy target. For the Germans were brave men, as brave as lions. Some of them actually knelt – one for a moment even stood – on the top of their parapet, to shoot, within not much more than a hundred yards of us. It was insane. It seemed one couldn’t miss them. Every man I fired at dropped, except one. Him, the boldest of the lot I missed more than once. I was puzzled and angry. (…) Not that I wanted to hurt him or anyone else. It was missing I hated.45 There was nothing ideological in Tawney’s killing, nor did he hate the enemy, and he claimed that most of his men felt a kind of comradeship with the ­Germans who suffered the same weather and the same conditions.46 But he enjoyed the sportsmanship of shooting. The pleasure of the huntsman was a common feature, though perhaps mainly among men from an aristocratic or rural background. In the campaign in North Africa in the Second World War, a soldier saw: the Colonel and the Adjutant (…) having grand sport with borrowed rifles, picking off crews climbing out of stricken panzers. They vie with each other in choosing their targets, take careful aim, and chalk up their respective ‘bags’ with mock-emulative gusto. You’d think they were out shooting grouse.47 45

46 47

R.H. Tawney, “The Attack”, first published in The Westminster Gazette 24, 25 October 1916, and reproduced in Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers (1953; repr. London, 1981), 11–20, 15–16. I should like to thank John Horne for drawing my attention to Tawney’s important article. Lawrence Goldman, The Life of R.H. Tawney. Socialism and History (London, 2013), 104. Cited in Ellis, Sharp End, 225.

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We can find something similar in the First World War account by the French infantryman who admitted he found as much pleasure at killing the Boche as shooting rabbits, or artillery captain Pierre de Mazenod when firing on a line of German infantry: And when the fire had finished, when the smoke had dissipated, I saw scattered across the ground black, immobile spots. Two or three among the spared got out of those human ruins, and dragged themselves over to the ridge. It was the most beautiful moment of my life.48 Usually, the artillery killed at such a distance that the victims were no more than black spots, and such impersonal killing helped a man to overcome whatever empathy he might feel. Trench mortar units, who combined the explosive power of heavy artillery with such short range that they could see the victims, were an exception. One of the rare accounts we have by artillery men was by Henri de Man, who commanded a trench mortar unit and in his 1919 memoir expressed his feeling of rapture at a direct hit, at seeing bodies and body parts fly up in the air: “I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life”. Yet de Man felt a “burning shame” that he had found joy in the bestiality of what he had done.49 This leads Antoine Prost to say that it was only a small minority of men who took pleasure in killing.50 It is difficult to tell, because our source material is so imperfect: most men probably felt exactly as ashamed at their joy as de Man and therefore could not confess to it even in diaries or letters. Even Jünger, who delighted in violence, felt remorse at having killed.51 John Keegan also was convinced that only a minority enjoyed killing, and many officers shrank from it.52 More important, most men could never tell if they had killed: they fired rifles or machine guns at long range, and the enemy they saw disappeared. Had he taken cover, had he been killed, or merely grazed? Even more uncertain was the artillery man, although his shells statistically killed far more often.53 Neitzel and Welzer’s evidence of German soldiers bragging to each other and Bourke’s evidence of Allied men in three wars cast doubt on Prost, but we 48 Smith, Embattled Self, 93, 41. 49 Henri de Man, Remaking of a Mind, 198–99. 50 Antoine Prost, “‘Les limites de la brutalisation. Tuer sur le front occidental, 1914–1918”, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 81 (2004), 5–20, 9. 51 Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation”, 17. 52 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1976) 274–75. 53 Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation”, 10.

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lack comparative evidence from transcripts of Allied soldiers’ conversations, and Bourke did not make the criteria clear for her selection of material. Hynes’s dictum that there are more soldiers’ tales of dying than killing, and “more dead friends than foes”, is perhaps also too rigid.54 For autobiographical narratives operate with a communicative filter, depending on among other things the audience and the broader culture, and the gauge of the filter grew larger over the course of the century. Allied tank crews, once they had overcome the risk of armour-piercing fire, also expressed pleasure in their task of impersonal destruction. In the Far East, tank operations centred on reducing Japanese bunkers. One British tank officer recalled that “it was considered great fun to stand literally feet away from the slit of a bunker and pump every available round into it, also to run backwards and forwards over the bunker until the whole thing collapsed”.55 By the time of the Vietnam War, as soldiers were more willing to admit to witnessing, even perpetrating, atrocities, they were also more willing to admit to emotions such as pleasure or shame.56 American soldiers’ narratives of Vietnam, Hynes shows, are marked by their frankness, their depiction of the ghoulish nature of that war, and the confession of their own brutishness. It was also the first war “in which the mutilated wrote books that bore witness to their mutilation”.57 All wars are ‘strange’, in the sense that they take human beings out of their accustomed environment and throw them into an alien world of horrifying sensations, pain, and destruction; for American soldiers, Vietnam was even more alien than the Second World War. Yet a survey conducted in 1980 found that an astonishing 71 per cent of veterans “were glad they went to Vietnam”, and 74 per cent “enjoyed their war”.58 That is a necessary antidote to the assumption of alienation based on the published memoirs or war films. 4

Combat and Psychological Breakdown

Far from the notion that most men ‘enjoyed’ war, expert studies confirm that prolonged exposure to combat reduces military effectiveness and increases the risk of mental breakdown. According to US army psychiatrist John Appel, there is no such thing as getting used to combat. The many officers he interviewed in 1944: 54 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 21. 55 Ellis, Sharp End, 144. 56 See Bourke, Intimate History, 180–81. 57 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 177–223, 198. 58 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 221–22.

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were emphatic in stating that (…) most men were ineffective after one hundred and eighty or even one hundred and forty days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first ninety days of combat, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until finally he was useless.59 It was a “simple fact that the danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down”, Appel wrote.60 A comprehensive post-war study of army psychiatric statistics by Appel and Beebe confirmed the peak effectiveness thesis.61 Similarly, Brigadier G.W.B. James, who treated shell shock at the Maudsley Clinic in the First World War and was consultant psychiatrist to the British Eighth Army in north Africa, recognized that a combination of physical strain and extended exposure to killing and the threat of death could lead to “complete and utter exhaustion”.62 In other words, prolonged combat did not ‘brutalize’ men; rather, it could make them less likely to kill, as Antoine Prost has argued.63 Undoubtedly, men were scared in battle, and some were so terrified that they became dysfunctional. Psychological breakdown or combat exhaustion, which could affect the majority of men, should be distinguished from ‘shell shock’, or ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, with severe mental and physical symptoms that could be permanent. Bourke suggests that “more men broke down in war because they were not allowed to kill than under the strain of killing”; support troops exposed to danger who had no opportunity to return fire had the highest risk of psychiatric illness. Lacking “any outlet for aggressive tendencies” made them more susceptible to psychological disorder; only 20 per cent of British soldiers suffering from neurosis in 1914–1918 had been under fire. This is based on a misreading of the evidence. The original study, a paper in the Journal of Mental Science of 1919, stated that “20 per cent of the 200 cases 59

60 61 62 63

Cited in Rebecca Jo Plant, “Preventing the Inevitable: John Appel and the Problem of Psychiatric Casualties in the US Army During World War ii”, in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, eds., Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago IL, 2014), 209–38, 232. The seminal article was by John Appel and Gilbert W. Beebe: “Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiologic Approach”, Journal of the American Medical Association 131 (1946), 1469–75. Appel and Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry”, 1469. Gilbert W. Beebe and John Appel, Variation in Psychological Tolerance to Ground Combat in World War ii (Washington DC, 1958), 163. Edgar Jones, “The Psychology of Killing: The Combat Experience of British Soldiers in the First World War”, Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006), 229–46, 236–37. Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation”, 14.

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have never been under fire” (emphasis added).64 A study based on the records of 2,500 psychiatric casualties from 150 rifle companies in the US army in the Second World War conclusively showed that men in units with the greatest exposure to combat danger suffered the highest rate of psychological breakdown: “The rates of breakdown for non-combat military service (…) are in the range of 10 to 30 per thousand per year, in comparison with about 285 for men in regimental combat”.65 Edgar Jones, using British army medical statistics for both the First and the Second World Wars, reached a similar conclusion.66 Moreover, a man’s bravery or character was no protection against breakdown. Beebe and Appel concluded that “we are all vulnerable”; it was “one of our cultural myths” that “only weaklings break down psychologically”.67 The different types of violence in warfare raise the question: was there an inverse relationship between perpetrating and being vulnerable to violence? Were those most vulnerable to impersonal violence more likely to suffer breakdown? Were the agents of impersonal violence less susceptible to mental stress, especially artillery and aircraft crew? Even an infantryman, killing at 400 metres, would hardly see the damage done to a body.68 Those most distant from their victims were not forced to reflect on the consequences, and could kill without remorse. Thus the navigator of the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, claimed he “had not lost a night’s sleep over the bomb in 40 years”.69 The bomber crews, who had trained for their task for almost one year, knew that the nuclear device would destroy the city and its civilian population, but succeeded in suppressing any thought of ethical or humanitarian considerations. They were proud of their professional achievement, as were the scientists who developed the weapon.70 Did tank crews share the sense of impersonal killing? The account of a tank officer in Burma in 1945 evidently did: We knew what the infantry wanted us to do – to go ahead and clean up the mess so that they could advance with the least danger – but they 64 Bourke, Intimate History, 248; O.P. Napier Pearn, “Psychoses in the Expeditionary Forces”, Journal of Mental Science 65 (1919), 101–08, 101. 65 Beebe and Appel, Variation in Psychological Tolerance, 167. 66 Jones, “Psychology of Killing”, 240–41. 67 Bourke, Intimate History, 248; Beebe and Appel, Variation in Psychological Tolerance, 164. 68 Jones, “Psychology of Killing”, 237. 69 Quoted in Bourke, Intimate History, 221. 70 Detlef Bald, “Atomare Vergeltung – Über das Töten im Atomkrieg”, in Massenhaftes Töten, eds., Gleichmann and Kühne, 207–23, 212–19.

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did not always understand, in this very close fighting amongst smoke and trees and burning huts, how blind, ungainly and vulnerable the tanks themselves could feel, in spite of their power (…) Eventually we (…) became more adept in recognising the direction of fire and spotting the enemy foxholes and bunkers. Like all forms of shooting it was a question of learning where to look and what to look for.71 So the enemy soldiers were “the mess” which had to be cleaned up. But the tank crews very much had also their own sense of vulnerability. In a reversal of their role in the First World War, tanks in the Second World War had to advance with infantrymen in front as bodyguards.72 The enemy was not the only component of the sharp end. The designers of tanks thought above all about engines, guns, and armour; the comfort and safety of the men inside had low priority. British and American tanks were noisy, cramped, and too cold in winter. Inside a Sherman tank, there were innumerable levers and handles, in addition to the engine, petrol tank, ammunition, breech mechanisms, and five men, who found it difficult not to bump into each other or sharp pieces of metal in the course of their actions. During combat, the men would be in addition engulfed in dust, smoke, and cordite fumes, against a background of ear-splitting noise of their own weapons and frantic radio and intercom traffic.73 And that was all before the enemy started firing. The Sherman proved to be highly vulnerable in the Normandy campaign: “sixty per cent of Allied tank losses were the result of a single shot from a 75-mm or 88-mm gun”.74 I need not describe the horrifying effects of a direct hit by armour-piercing shells; if the men were lucky, they had a few seconds to clamber out before the fuel tanks or the ammunition caught fire. The spot inside the tank where the shell hit turned a bright yellow, like a sunrise. The rest may be left to the ­imagination – suffice to say that the infantry no longer felt much envy at the tank crews when they saw what they called a ‘brew up’.

71 Ellis, Sharp End, 145. 72 Ellis, Sharp End, 144–45, 136–37. 73 Ellis, Sharp End, 147–48. 74 Terry Copp, ‘‘‘If this war isn’t over, And pretty damn soon, There’ll be nobody left, In this old platoon…’: First Canadian Army, February–March 1945”, in Time to Kill, eds., Addison and Calder, 147–58.

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Intimations of Mortality

The longer combat lasted, the more fatigue set in from lack of sleep and exhaustion. Infantrymen could catch a few hours’ sleep lying on open ground, on rocks, in the mud, even during gunfire; tank crews in their vehicles in cramped, uncomfortable positions. Worse than fatigue was the growing realization that the longer the men were in the front line, the greater the likelihood of being hit, or suffering mental breakdown. As one British tank officer told a group recently arrived in the north African desert, “the actual business of fighting is easy enough. You go in, you come out, you go in again and you keep doing it until they break you or you are dead”.75 In 1915, Sigmund Freud had written in his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” that “Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day”.76 In a way, fatalism enabled the killing machine to function: many, perhaps most, soldiers in the world wars felt it was only a matter of time before they were hit, and since it was inevitable, there was no point in struggling against one’s fate.77 The appalling noise and threat of destruction of modern war caused utter terror and a feeling of absolute vulnerability. Although the Second World War is often assumed to have been a war of movement, the experience of the First World War, including trenches and long artillery bombardment, was replicated in practically all theatres from 1939 to 1945. Imagining the effect of a shell was nerve-racking. One soldier, Private S. Bagnall, wrote in an account published in 1947: I could feel the exact spot in the small of my defenceless back (I wish to God we had packs on, I thought, (…) not because they’re any use but it feels better) where the pointed nose of the shell would pierce skin and gristle and bone and explode the charge that would make me feel as if I had a splitting headache all over for a fiftieth of a second before I was spread minutely over the earth and hung up in trees.78

75 Ellis, Sharp End, 207. 76 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. 14 (1914– 1916), trans. under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London, 1957), 275–300, 291. 77 Ellis, Sharp End, 208. Ellis refers to British and Americans in the Second World War. See also Alex Watson, “Self-Deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914–18”, Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006), 247–68. 78 Cited in Ellis, Sharp End, 70.

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The mental impact on men, above all on the infantry at the ‘sharp end’, was similar in both wars, although we associate ‘shell shock’ mainly with the First World War. In the Second, the authorities rejected the term, replacing it with the less disconcerting ‘battle exhaustion’. But it was still a widespread problem. Allied infantry divisions in the Mediterranean found that one in five of their non-fatal casualties were due to such psychiatric illness.79 Major John Wishart, psychiatrist to xxx British Corps, which suffered high casualties during the advance into Germany in February 1945, treated some 1000 cases within two weeks. He found that the largest group was made up of men who had been wounded in previous battle, evacuated to the UK, and returned after recovery and retraining. Wishart surveyed them on their thoughts on death, and found that typically their attitude before injury had been: “Never thought about it”. Now they generally replied: “I know what it’s like now – I know what can happen”. The second group consisted of “young, immature boys”, who experienced severe “grief reactions at the sight of dead and mangled friends”.80 Although one-half, possibly two-thirds, of men surviving the First World War had been wounded, most narratives avoided the topic or treated it as “an interruption of the real war story”. Second World War, and especially Vietnam War, narratives were no longer so reticent.81 A major factor in the silence on the subject in the First World War was the strict censorship operating in most states, but the victims themselves shared the taboo, regarding injury and mutilation as somehow shameful. Helplessness and dependence on others meant an attack on one’s male identity as an autonomous subject, and the implicit loss of masculinity was unspeakable.82 Blaise Cendrars, the avant-garde poet who wrote of the experience of killing a German with a knife – and it should be added that we do not know if the incident was fact or fiction, – celebrating it as an affirmation of existence and identity, gave his own injury and the amputation of his arm only oblique mention in his subsequent publications.83 The shock impact of the German artists George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix, with their relentless depictions of disfigurement, and Ernst F­ riedrich’s 79 Copp, ‘‘If this war isn’t over’’ 153. 80 Copp, ‘‘If this war isn’t over’’, 154–55. 81 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 128, 141–42; Antoine Prost, “War Losses”, in: 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, ed., by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. doi: 10.15463/ie1418.10271. Accessed 2017 Aug 2. 82 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male. Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996). 83 Smith, Embattled Self, 1–7; Blaise Cendrars, J’ai tué, (Paris, 1918).

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collection of photographs showing the horrors of war, derived precisely from breaching the taboo after 1918. It took a strong man to acknowledge the grisly corporeality of his own injury. That is one of the exceptional qualities of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920), based on his war diaries, which describes the terrible wounds suffered by other men and also his own seven injuries, in detached, clinical detail. One of the few others who overcame the usual reticence was R.H. Tawney, who published his personal account just a few weeks after his horrific injury. It is unusually valuable for its immediacy and its very lack of detachment: I don’t know what most men feel like when they’re wounded. What I felt was that I had been hit by a tremendous iron hammer, swung by a giant of inconceivable strength, and then twisted with a sickening sort of wrench so that my head and back banged on the ground, and my feet struggled as though they didn’t belong to me. For a second or two my breath wouldn’t come. I thought – if that’s the right word – ‘This is death’, and hoped it wouldn’t take long. By-and-by, as nothing happened, it seemed I couldn’t be dying. When I felt the ground beside me, my fingers closed on the nose-cap of a shell. It was still hot, and I thought absurdly, in a muddled way, ‘this is what has got me’. I tried to turn on my side, but the pain, when I moved, was like a knife, and stopped me dead. There was nothing to do but lie on my back. After a few minutes two men in my platoon crawled back past me at a few yards’ distance. They saw me and seemed to be laughing, though of course they weren’t, but they didn’t stop. Probably they were wounded. I could have cried at their being so cruel. It’s being cut off from human beings that’s as bad as anything when one’s copped it badly, and, when a lad wriggled up to me and asked, ‘what’s up, sergeant?’ I loved him. I said, ‘Not dying, I think, but pretty bad’, and he wriggled on. What else could he do?84 War witnesses provided plenty of descriptions of death: it was no taboo subject. The most famous wartime novel of the First World War, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (Under Fire), published in 1916, is inhabited by mangled bodies, corpses in various stages of decomposition, and the omnipresence of death. Soldiers usually spared their families the graphic details, but in their letters they certainly did not avoid the topic. A German lieutenant wounded and captured, wrote home in 1915: 84

Tawney, “The Attack”, 17–18.

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By the way, I don’t have any comrades who have not been killed, injured, or taken prisoner. In spite of that I did not imagine that I could ever be injured: that is what lent me courage in the last battle. During the battle I laughed and was delighted at having beaten off the attack, and I thought I would receive a medal.85 Especially in testimony published after 1918 the death of comrades and the fear of death was a constant topic, a pacifist metanarrative in a world that had recoiled in horror from war in the democratic-pacifist political culture of France, Britain, America, and Weimar Germany. Did German soldiers also suffer from ‘battle exhaustion’ or ‘shell shock’ in the Second World War? Strangely, accounts of psychiatric illness hardly feature in our perception of the Wehrmacht. Yet there is evidence that it was widespread. Medical reports on the three divisions studied by Omer Bartov suggest that the strain of wretched conditions and constant battle produced nervous disorders among many men and officers. “All men” of one battalion in the 18th Panzer Division had suffered extreme nervous exhaustion as a result of mental strain: “The men are completely indifferent and apathetic, partly suffering from fits of crying, and are not to be cheered up by this or that phrase”.86 One reason why this phenomenon is largely absent from the popular image is that the Wehrmacht has been depicted either as a supremely efficient killing machine or as the perpetrator of mass crimes; there is little space to imagine the German soldiers as miserable victims. 6

Inhibitions to Killing

What of the claim of S.L.A. Marshall, in his influential book Men Against Fire (1947), that at most 25 per cent of American combat infantrymen fired their weapons, or perhaps only 15 per cent?87 His view has come to dominate both American army doctrine and military historiography. Marshall’s supporters cite his cultural arguments, namely that soldiers are reluctant to fire because Western civilization is essentially peaceful and it takes a great deal to overcome the moral threshold before killing.

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Letter of 29 October 1915, cited in Frontalltag im Ersten Weltkrieg. Wahn und Wirklichkeit, eds., Bernd Ulrich and Benjamin Ziemann (Frankfurt, 1994), 78. 86 Bartov, Eastern Front, 26–27. 87 Samuel L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington DC, 1947).

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The Marshall thesis has been widely accepted, so much so that even Joanna Bourke accepts it. 88 John Ellis did not confront it head-on, merely stating that while new troops might “display a vague compunction”, any moral scruples over killing swiftly disappeared in combat.89 The sociologist Anthony King broadly confirms the thesis, saying that Marshall’s aim was not to produce a precise statistical calculation or numerical accuracy, but rather to make a point about the culture of citizen soldiers.90 This punches a rather large hole in Marshall’s argument. Some historians have been more critical. John Whiteclay Chambers concluded that Marshall’s thesis “appears to have been based at best on chance rather than scientific sampling, and at worst on sheer speculation”.91 He discovered that the captain who accompanied Marshall on his after-action ­interviews in 1944 could not recall him ever asking men who had fired his weapon.92 As Robert Engen has shown, Marshall ignored evidence that was contrary to his thesis. Using the evidence of Canadian officers, Engen not only refutes Marshall’s claim, but also says that the problem Canadian officers identified was that their infantrymen fired too much, not too little.93 Even assuming Marshall was right, there could be many more reasons than the cultural explanation that men had an innate resistance to killing. The prime cause was military training. The Canadian army in the Second World War taught the infantry that the ideal was “controlled and highly-disciplined (…) fire”, not saturation fire, although that often happened. One Canadian training memorandum in 1944 stated: You are trained to shoot straight, you have plenty of ammunition (…); but make sure of it – wait – wait and again wait even if you are frantically excited – WAIT!94 Several other reasons could account for occasional ‘low fire ratios’. They included the “live and let live” system, described for the First World War by Tony 88 Bourke, Intimate History, 72–78. 89 Ellis, Sharp End, 318. 90 Anthony King, The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Oxford, 2013), 40–61. 91 John Whiteclay Chambers ii, “S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire: New Evidence Regarding Fire Ratios”, Parameters (2003), 113–21, 120. 92 Chambers, “S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire”, 113–21. 93 James Sandy, review of Robert Engen, Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War (Montreal, 2009), Canadian Military History, November 2013, available at http://canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/review-of-robert-engens-canadians-under-fire -infantry-effectiveness-in-the-second-world-war-by-james-sandy. Accessed 2014 Jun 8. 94 Cited in Robert Engen, “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire History, Interpretation, and the Canadian Experience”, Canadian Military History, 20 (2011), 39–48, 45.

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Ashworth, when men in quiet sectors had no cause to unsettle an informal truce.95 There could be good tactical reasons to hold fire, in order not to give away one’s position. Lack of opportunity, when no targets were visible, was probably a common cause. The nature of the terrain has to be taken into account, the intensity of enemy fire, and something as mundane as the time of day played a role. Darkness meant indiscriminate fire would risk hitting one’s comrades. Some soldiers had the kind of humanitarian moral inhibition to violence that Marshall described, or, more likely, were frozen by fear into inaction. There is no reason to assume that training in the British army, on which Canadian manuals were based, was very different, and there is no good reason to believe that the majority of American soldiers failed to fire in battle. 7

Narratives of Killing

Hynes argued persuasively that “death is a recurrent subject in the soldiers’ tale” – but was killing?96 He argued that men usually refrained from narrating their experience of killing because they “seem to have felt a reluctance, a moral fastidiousness, before the act of taking a life”.97 This is borne out by the majority of First World War narratives. In Maurice Genevoix’s account of his experience of war, published from 1916 to 1923, he referred to only two incidents of his involvement in killing, on less than two pages out of nearly 700. In a remarkable piece of self-censorship, Genevoix deleted one of these, in which he shot three Germans, from a subsequent edition of Sous Verdun, and only restored it in the 1950 edition.98 Even in 1977, when Antoine Prost interviewed him on television, his feeling of guilt was clear: the memory of shooting the Germans who were running away still haunted him.99 The exception was airmen. An entire sub-genre of memoirs was published, starting already during the war, to record the experiences of the new form of warfare that was often expressly related to the romantic conception of chivalrous war. The air aces related their technical prowess, their manoeuvres, and their kills. Yet it was usually the enemy aircraft that was the target, not the ­human being or his suffering.100 Similarly, British narratives of the Battle of Britain almost all tell of the romance of individual combat, but it was a battle b­ etween machines: it was seldom the German pilot who died, rather the plane.101 95 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (London, 1980). 96 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 19. 97 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 66. 98 Smith, Embattled Self, 95–100. 99 Prost, “Les limites”, 5. 100 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 81–93. 101 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 124–26.

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This finding is confirmed by Neitzel and Welzer for the Second World War: in the German armed forces it was rare for men in the army to relate their experiences of killing in combat. The same goes for navy personnel, who bragged to each other about the number and size of ships they had sunk. It made little difference whether they were warships, merchant ships, or passenger ships; the main criterion was their size, because German policy was to sink more tonnage than the Allies could build. But the killing and drowning of people usually did not feature. U-boat crewmen were not in a position to save any of the shipwrecked, and gave the matter no further thought.102 Soldiers did, however, talk at great length to each other about the killing of alleged partisans and the reprisals against uninvolved civilians. Some enjoyed the killing, others claimed they did not take part in it. While German warfare is generally held to have been chivalrous on the Western Front in 1940, the bombing of civilian targets such as Rotterdam and Coventry showed that there was no absolute rule to spare the lives of west European civilians. Luftwaffe pilots sometimes deliberately machine-gunned ­civilians in Britain, and in one case even had orders to attack non-military targets, so the pilots aimed at women with prams. One pilot boasted of having sunk a passenger ship carrying children, the City of Benares, in September 1940.103 Does this mean there was a special ‘fascist way of war’? If modern warfare, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, was war between armed doctrines, rather than princes and standing armies, then fascist warfare was supercharged by ideology. Add collusion in a criminal enterprise under conditions of total war, and the result was not only the often-admired German ‘military effectiveness’, but also the propensity to take high risks and the perpetration of extraordinary violence.104 The contrast presented by Allied soldiers in the Second World War makes the role of ideology and hatred clear. American soldiers were sceptical of all ideological speeches and propaganda; the GI “often regarded himself as too wise to fall for propaganda – and thus remained suspicious of stories of Nazi atrocities and rumours of the death camps”. Few GIs hated the Germans – ­certainly less than the Union soldiers hated Confederates, and in ­particular less than American soldiers hated the Japanese. Fewer than ten per cent of men, according to one American army survey, said they would “really

102 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 111–15. 103 Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 109–11. 104 MacGregor Knox makes these points in an inspired section in Common Destiny. Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2000), 186–90, 207–21.

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like” to kill a German soldier; by contrast, almost half said they would “really like” to kill a Japanese soldier.105 This resulted from the fiercely racist anti-Japanese propaganda and from hearing news of the savage Japanese treatment of prisoners of war. An American Marine who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa wrote in his memoir of the “brutish, primitive hatred” on both sides. He witnessed his own comrades commit atrocities on soldiers and Japanese civilians, and with painful honesty recalled how he almost succumbed to the common mentality: “Time had no meaning, life had no meaning (…) The fierce struggle for survival (…) eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all”. Another Marine wrote: “Death was as common as head colds (…) I had resigned from the human race. (…) I just wanted to kill”.106 The commission of what would be called ‘atrocities’ anywhere else was no secret. Allied soldiers gunned down countless surrendering Japanese, on occasion tortured captives, and frequently mutilated corpses. The American press openly reported on these incidents, and public approval reinforced such practices.107 Narratives of killing were thus not merely confessional, or sensationseeking (although they undoubtedly were both): they facilitated the act. Yet there were ultimately differences between Allied and fascist warfare. There was never any policy to wipe out the entire Japanese or German people, notwithstanding the atomic bomb, nor any intention to enslave or colonize them. Fascist warfare aimed at enslavement, colonization, and genocide of broad swathes of enemy peoples; it was potentially limitless in its violence. Fascist (and Japanese) warfare thus represented an extreme radicalization of violence which the Allies never replicated. 8 Conclusion Men’s inhibitions against killing in war could be, and were, overcome through military training and combat experience. A minority of men experienced euphoric joy at killing enemy combatants, akin to the pleasure of hunting; others killed in self-defence, from peer pressure, in a frenzy of rage or fear, or simply to follow orders. This complex of motivations, plus criminal orders, explains 105 Reid Mitchell, “The GI in Europe and the American Military Tradition”, in Time to Kill, eds., Addison and Calder, 304–16, 313. Another US survey, with similar results, is cited by Bartov, Eastern Front, 155. 106 Both cited in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London, 1986), 63–64. 107 Dower, War Without Mercy, 65–73.

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the killing of defenceless non-combatants. Many of them were aware of the immorality and illegality of their actions, and some attempted to stop the dynamic. Since that dynamic was indeed stopped in several cases, there is no natural law of brutalization. The unleashing of violence against non-combatants in the wars after 1918, the escalation of violence in 1939 and 1941, and the evident satisfaction felt by ever more soldiers at their death-dealing, indicate one fundamental factor: the greater the ideological charge, the lower the threshold. The more ‘alien’ the enemy, the easier it became to dehumanize the victims and kill without compunction. This was true not only in genocidal killing in both world wars, but also in wars in the ‘shatterzone’ of empires after 1918, Fascist Italy’s imperialist wars, and most visibly in Vietnam. In Vietnam, the enemy for US troops could be everywhere and everyone, including women and children; it was ideological warfare against an alien people in a thoroughly alien environment. American soldiers in Vietnam killed, and took satisfaction in the ‘body count’. One reason was group pressure. Thomas Kühne’s conclusions on comradeship in the German army are applicable to all modern armies: it “neutralizes the immorality attached to killing in war”; violence was the “social transmission belt” for the group network – and men needed the group for survival.108 Other reasons were fear of an omnipresent enemy and the conviction of legitimacy. Thus “C company” at My Lai “simulated a battle situation, (…) imagined themselves into the world of real warfare and therefore into a universe where they were allowed to kill”.109 The Vietnam War was therefore not only a story of the disaffection of the American troops and their victimhood, but also their wanton killing of civilians, routine sexual violence, and the destruction a people’s culture and the environment.110 That “universe where they were allowed to kill” was the ‘sharp end’ where men could be witnesses, perpetrators, and victims – and often all three. 108 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft. Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006); Thomas Kühne, “Massen-Töten. Diskurse und Praktiken der kriegerischen und genozidalen Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert”, in Massenhaftes Töten, eds., Gleichmann and Kühne, 11–52, 30. 109 Greiner, War Without Fronts, 219. 110 Greiner, War Without Fronts.

Chapter 5

The Isle of Saints and Soldiers: The Evolving Image of the Irish Combatant, 1914–1918 Heather Jones and Edward Madigan The First World War witnessed by far the greatest mobilization of Irish manpower in history, with at least 210,000 Irish men, from all regions and classes and from both sides of the nationalist/unionist divide, serving in the British army. Yet in Irish popular, official and academic memory, their experiences and ideals would be eclipsed for most of the 20th century by those of the men who fought against the forces of the Crown during the Easter Rising of 1916 and in the War of Independence. The Irish soldiers who served on the Western Front and in the other theatres of the Great War were not quite forgotten in the decades that followed the Armistice. Indeed, in unionist Ulster, the memory of the war, and the Battle of the Somme in particular, attained an almost sacred significance. Elsewhere on the island, remembrance was more complex and often more muted, but Armistice Day commemorations in Dublin, Cork and Limerick were generally well attended in the 1920s and 1930s, poppies were quite commonly worn in the Free State, and prominent nationalist politicians expressed a certain amount of reserved sympathy for the Irishmen who had been killed in the conflict.1 The dominance of the Irish Revolution in the popular and official consciousness of independent Ireland would mean, however, that British army service was rarely regarded with esteem and the memory of Irish soldiers of the Great War became increasingly obscure and peripheral as the century wore on.2

1 See especially D.G. Boyce, “‘That Party Politics Should Divide Our Tents:’ Nationalism, Unionism and the First World War”, in Ireland and the Great War: A War to Unite Us All?, eds., Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (Manchester, 2002), 201–02, Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), 109–31; and Jane Leonard, “The Twinge of Memory: Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday in Dublin since 1919”, in Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture, eds., Richard English and Graham Walker (Basingstoke, 1996), 99–114. 2 For a compelling account of the evolving cultures of First World War commemoration in Ireland up to the centenaries, see Keith Jeffery, “Irish Varieties of Great War Commemoration”, in Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912–1923, eds., John Horne and Edward Madigan (Dublin, 2013), 117–25.

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From the late 1980s, this general amnesia was gradually replaced by a keen and consistent curiosity, and, over the past decade or so, John Horne has contributed enormously to a popular journey of discovery. The provocatively-titled collection of essays that he edited in 2008, Our War: Ireland and the Great War, brought together leading experts on the Irish experience of the conflict and made their work accessible to an increasingly attentive public.3 He followed this in 2013 with the publication of a particularly innovative edited volume on the history, memory and commemoration of the war, and his highly engaging media appearances have impressed the sheer magnitude of the First World War as a global event on Irish minds. John’s erudite commentary and collaborative energy have thus greatly enriched the Irish process of rediscovering and re-imagining the war. The advent of the centenaries of the conflict has enhanced this process and popular interest in the Irish experience of the ‘war to end all wars’ is now widespread and intense. In historiographical terms, the traditional dearth of research in the field has been significantly redressed over the last two decades and the experiences of the Irish soldiers of the Great War are now reasonably well documented.4 Importantly, moreover, research conducted by Paul Taylor, Michael Robinson and others has shed valuable light on the varied fates of the Irish veterans of the war.5 The recent torrent of books and articles on Ireland and the war has, in particular, rescued the Catholic nationalist soldier from historical obscurity. Indeed, in 2014, the well-known broadcaster and historian Myles Dungan wrote of how it was “enormously gratifying to witness the effective rehabilitation of the nationalist cohort of Irish Great War veterans in the last decade. The era of aphasia is past”.6 Yet historians and other commentators have had relatively little to say about the ways in which Catholic Irish soldiers were represented and perceived during the war itself, or, crucially, about how the roots of the antipathy and simple indifference directed at many of the Irishmen who served in the war developed in relation to changing attitudes to Ireland’s war effort during specific phases 3 John Horne, ed., Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin, 2008, revised edition in 2012). 4 See, for example, Timothy Bowman, Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and Morale (Manchester, 2003); Richard Grayson, Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists Fought and Died Together in the First World War (London, 2008); and Stephen Sandford, Neither Unionist Nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War (Dublin, 2015). 5 Paul Taylor, Heroes or Traitors: Experiences of Irish Soldiers Returning from the Great War, 1919– 1939 (Liverpool, 2015); Michael Robinson, “‘Nobody’s Children?’’ the Ministry of Pensions and the Treatment of Disabled Great War Veterans in the Irish Free State, 1921–1939”, Irish Studies Review 25 (2017), 316–35. 6 Myles Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War [preface to new edition] (Dublin, 2014, 1st published 1995), xiv.

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of the conflict. The notable exception is Catriona Pennell, who has analyzed official propaganda campaigns and their presentation of the war to the Irish public.7 The complexity of the image of the Irish Catholic soldier remains largely unacknowledged, however, and the way he shifted from serving as a positive patriotic trope for Home Rule nationalism in Ireland and Britain to a symbol of Ireland’s failure to contribute adequately to the war effort has been overlooked. Nor has there been much recognition of the degree to which the conflict was ‘sold’ to the populace as an Irish war. This chapter seeks to address these oversights by drawing on a wide range of contemporary representations from sources across the public sphere – including cabinet discussions, newspapers and recruitment posters – to explore the degree to which the image of the Irish Catholic combatant evolved over the course of the conflict in tandem with changing portrayals of the Irish war effort itself. Marked changes over time will be assessed by comparing the image of the Irish Catholic combatant in recruitment campaigns at the start of the conflict with that which emerged as a result of the conscription debate towards the war’s end. We will first consider the depiction of the Irish soldier in the early part of the war as a brave and, importantly, patriotic warrior, integral to a broader positive image of Ireland’s war effort, before examining the ways in which the conscription debate undermined this portrayal in the second half of the conflict. Drawing upon this analysis, the chapter will contend that it was during the latter part of the war that the Irish Catholic combatant became significantly marginalized in public discourse, particularly in conjunction with the conscription crisis. It was not only due to republican anti-war propaganda or the Easter Rising that the image of the Irish Catholic soldier became discredited; the debate on the extension of conscription to Ireland, along with unionist and British press discourses concerning this issue, significantly contested the adequacy of nationalist Ireland’s war effort, with direct implications for the image of its soldiers. 1

Fighting for Ireland, 1914–1916

Loyalty to the wartime government and support for the war effort could not be taken entirely for granted in any part of the United Kingdom, but the political crisis sparked by the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 meant that Ireland was viewed as particularly problematic in this regard. The unionist and nationalist volunteer forces had been actively drilling and stockpiling 7 Catriona Pennell, “Presenting the War in Ireland, 1914–1918”, in Propaganda and World War 1, ed., Troy Paddock (Leiden, 2014), 42–64.

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arms in the months before August 1914 and domestic armed conflict had become a very real prospect by the end of July. When nationalists landed arms at Howth and transported them to dumps in Dublin on 26 July, British soldiers fired on a crowd of civilians on Bachelor’s Walk, killing three and wounding scores more. A much larger unionist gunrunning operation in June had provoked no such response; nationalist opinion was predictably outraged and over 200,000 people attended the funerals of the victims.8 On 31 July, a mere four days before Britain declared war against Germany, a major Irish Volunteer parade took place in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, at which a Catholic priest told the crowd that the people of Ireland would no longer tolerate the British “enemy”.9 On the eve of war, then, relations between the British government and much of the nationalist population were strained to breaking point. In the event, however, the political figureheads of the opposing camps, John Redmond and Edward Carson, along with most of their respective colleagues and supporters, endorsed the government decision to intervene in the European war and thousands of volunteers from either side enlisted in the British army. Civil conflict in Ireland was thus famously averted by events on the continent, and a prevailing antipathy toward Britain among large sections of the Irish nationalist population was replaced, at least temporarily, by widespread support for the British war effort. Yet it is against the backdrop of acute political tension and the threat of serious violence in the immediate pre-war period that the image of the Irish soldier during the war must be considered. The Government of Ireland Act was officially given legal status on 18 September 1914. Although the implementation of this historic piece of legislation was suspended for the duration of the conflict and there was no agreement on precisely what form it would take, the Irish Parliamentary Party could now claim to have secured Home Rule for Ireland. For nationalist MPs the war thus presented both a political and a moral challenge. On the one hand, they recognized that the wartime conduct of the nationalist population would have a direct influence on the nature of the post-war settlement regarding Home Rule. On the other, many of them believed quite sincerely in the justice of the Allied cause. James McConnel has emphasized the degree to which some nationalist MPs felt uneasy about the Party’s support for the war in 1914, and his research highlights the tensions within constitutional nationalist circles concerning

8 Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), 163–97. 9 Jérôme aan de Wiel, The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914–1918: War and Politics (Dublin, 2003), 19–20.

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the war in general and recruitment in particular.10 The fact remains, however, that several prominent nationalist leaders, including John Redmond’s brother Willie, Stephen Gwynn, and Tom Kettle, volunteered for service in the British army and became actively involved in recruitment.11 Others, such as Redmond himself and John Dillon, strongly supported Irish participation in the war effort and encouraged enlistment in the British forces. In order to justify this support and to effectively present service in the British army as an appealing prospect to the average Irishman, nationalist leaders, and Redmond in particular, consistently portrayed the conflict as an Irish war in which Irish interests were at stake. In an oft-quoted speech spontaneously delivered to a brigade of Irish Volunteers at Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow on 20 September, Redmond interpreted the war in typically eloquent terms: The war is undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, and a reproach to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of her history, if young Ireland confined their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores from an unlikely invasion, and shrunk from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race throughout history.12 The following week, Redmond spoke at a major recruitment meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin, at which no less a figure than Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was the guest of honour. “I have heard some people speak of this war”, he told the mostly nationalist audience, “as an English, and not an Irish, war. This is absolutely and fundamentally untrue. Ireland’s highest material interests are at stake”.13 Redmond’s presentation of the conflict as a righteous war in defence of Irish interests very clearly implied that Irishmen who joined the British forces were patriots while those who refused to enlist were shirking their duty to defend their homeland. This vision of the war as a patriotic and just enterprise, along with Redmond’s emphasis on the martial qualities of the Irish “race”, would 10 11 12 13

James McConnel, “Recruiting Sergeants for John Bull? Irish Nationalist MPs and Enlistment during the Early Months of the Great War”, War in History 14 (2007), 408–28. For an insightful analysis of Tom Kettle’s belief in the Allied cause see Senia Pašeta, “Thomas Kettle: ‘An Irish Soldier in the Army of Europe’?”, in Ireland and the Great War, eds., Gregory and Pašeta (Manchester, 2002), 8–27. F.X. Martin et al, eds., The Irish Volunteers, 1913–1915: Recollections and Documents (Dublin, 2013), 159. Skibbereen Eagle, 2 October 1914.

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feature heavily in recruitment propaganda as the process of cultural mobilization intensified in Ireland in the coming months. Importantly, moreover, the Irish Party’s support for the war was generally approved of, at least in the first two years of the conflict, by the other great influence on nationalist opinion, the Catholic Church. Jérôme aan de Wiel has demonstrated the extent to which Catholic bishops were prepared to express support for the war in 1914 and 1915.14 Crucially, parish priests across the island, men who often wielded extraordinary influence over their congregations, also attended recruitment meetings and vocally supported Irish enlistment.15 The endorsement of the war by Ireland’s political and clerical elite, combined with economic necessity and other, more nebulous factors, led to a steady stream of Irish recruits in the first months of the conflict.16 Although levels of enlistment were not as high in Ireland as in Britain, more than 50,000 Irishmen, from a variety of social, regional, and religious backgrounds, had joined the army by February 1915.17 Most of these wartime volunteers ultimately served in one of the three specially dedicated Irish divisions and would not see active service until the 10th (Irish) Division took part in the second wave of landings at Gallipoli in August. In the opening months of the war, however, tales of the sacrifice and gallantry of the thousands of Irish regulars attached to the British Expeditionary Force (bef) were widely reported in the Irish press. While levels of peacetime recruitment in Ireland had declined significantly since the mid-19th century, as many as 30,000 Irishmen were serving in the British army when the war broke out. Thousands of rapidly mobilized reservists soon joined these troops and within a matter of months over 40,000 Irish soldiers had been deployed to the emerging Western Front.18 Irish regiments, including the Munster Fusiliers, the Irish Guards and the Royal Irish Regiment, were thus well represented at the front and played a prominent role in the Battle of Mons on 23 August, the subsequent tactical retreat of the bef, and the pivotal battles of the Marne and the Aisne in September. Irish troops acquitted themselves well during this dramatic opening phase of the war, notably in the fierce rear-guard actions fought along the line of retreat from Mons, and their 14 Wiel, The Catholic Church in Ireland, 8–15. 15 Wiel, 19–25. On the gradual rise in anti-war sentiment among Irish clergy from mid-1915, see Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (London, 2005), 78–79. 16 On Irish recruitment, see David Fitzpatrick, “The Logic of Collective Sacrifice: Ireland and the British Army, 1914–1918”, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 1017–30; and Timothy Bowman, “Irish Recruitment to the British Armed Forces”, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed., Alvin Jackson (Oxford, 2014), 607–11. 17 Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, 7. 18 Dungan, Irish Voices, 3.

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gallantry and sacrifice were warmly lauded in the Irish press.19 Eyewitness testimony in the form of letters from soldiers serving at the front also occasionally offers an insight into the way Irish regulars reconciled their nationality, and indeed their nationalism, with their status as British soldiers. In a letter printed in the Kilkenny People at the end of October, for example, a certain Corporal O’Meara, who was serving in France with the Irish Guards, painted a picture of Irish rankers who were both “proud British soldiers” and patriotic Irishmen, whose “foremost consideration is to add lustre to the fair name of ‘Erin’, always remembering that the glory and honour of the Empire depends largely on the men in the field”.20 The Irishmen who enlisted in the ranks of the British army in the years before the war tended to be drawn from the disenfranchised rural and urban poor and were arguably less nationally-minded and politically conscious than their more privileged compatriots.21 Many of the civilian Irishmen who were considering enlistment during the war years belonged to more prosperous skilled working-class and middle-class communities and were thus generally more invested in civilian life than peacetime recruits. The British military authorities were at first slow to tailor recruitment rhetoric to such men, but efforts to appeal to distinctly Irish sensibilities were very much in evidence in the ambitious Irish poster campaigns that began in the spring of 1915. With some notable exceptions, historians have generally overlooked the hundreds of posters and pamphlets through which the British military authorities appealed for recruits in Ireland during the war years.22 Yet in their idealization of the Irish soldier and the cause for which he was being asked to fight, the images and texts incorporated into this propaganda material offer a remarkable insight into the way in which the war was presented to potential recruits and, importantly, to the wider civilian population. In their study of First World War posters in Britain and continental Europe, Jim Aulich and John Hewitt argue that pre-war divisions rarely surfaced in the 19

20 21 22

For representative examples of this sort of reportage see “Irish Soldiers’ Valour”, Irish Independent, 1 September 1914, 3; “Bravery Of The Munsters”, Kerry News, 2 September 1914, 2; “Plucky Irish Soldier”, Irish Examiner, 13 October 1914, 5; “Battle Won By Irish, Green Flag Waved”, Irish Examiner, 28 October 1914, 3; “Irish Soldiers’ Heroism”, Derry Journal, 23 November 1914, 4; and “The Irrepressible Irish Boys”, Evening Herald, 2 December 1914, 2. Kilkenny People, 31 October, 1914, 10. Peter Karsten, “Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792–1922: Suborned or Subordinate?”, Journal of Social History 17 (1983), 31, 41. See Paul Bowen, David Fitzpatrick and Mark Tierney, “Recruiting Posters”, in Ireland and the First World War, ed., David Fitzpatrick (Dublin, 1986), 47–58, and Pennell, “Presenting the War in Ireland, 1914–1918”.

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Irish recruitment campaigns. They go on to claim that one of the interesting things about the Irish posters is “the absence of any direct appeal to religion or references to the case for or against Home Rule”.23 Yet although the term ‘Home Rule’ was rarely used in posters and other Irish recruitment literature, partisan religious and political loyalties, for the most part nationalist and Catholic, were very consciously evoked. To begin with, recruitment posters circulated in Ireland were the same as those used in Britain and featured no specifically Irish iconography or references to Irish issues. When the Central Council for the Organisation of Recruiting in Ireland (ccori) was established in April 1915, however, posters designed for an Irish audience began appearing throughout the island.24 The ccori was officially appointed by the War Office in Whitehall and was in no sense a nationalist organization. The new Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, acted as honorary president and the council’s committee was composed of a fairly narrow cross-section of Anglo-Irish landowners and government officials from across the island.25 The majority of posters printed between 1915 and the Armistice were nonetheless designed to appeal to distinctly nationalist sensibilities and concerns. Public statements made by Irish Party MPs were, for example, consistently used in recruitment posters and pamphlets. Thus, although nationalist leaders exercized relatively little personal influence on the Irish poster campaigns, the Redmondite notion that the world war was not simply a British conflict but an enterprise in which the people of Ireland had a very real moral and material investment was a constant refrain in recruitment propaganda during the war years. Some of the earliest Irish-themed posters conveyed this idea by representing Ireland as a distinctly independent member of the coalition of Allied states. One colourful poster from early 1915 features an Irish sergeant standing to attention and saluting beneath the flags of the Allied countries. Ireland is represented by the traditional green flag emblazoned with a golden harp hanging between the Union flag and the Belgian flag. Ireland, the image thus suggests, is not merely a constituent nation of the United Kingdom, but an independent belligerent state, and the Irishmen who fight in the war are serving not as imperial subjects but in voluntary partnership with Britain and the other Allies. The Redmondite spirit of mutually beneficial partnership between Ireland and Britain under Home Rule is emphasized by the intertwining of their respective flags. 23 24 25

Jim Aulich and John Hewitt, Seduction or Instruction? First World War Posters in Britain and Europe (Manchester, 2007), 48, 50. Bowen et al, “Recruiting Posters”, 47–48. Trinity College Dublin Library, Early Printed Books [epb] Papyrus Case 54a, Pamphlet: “The Central Council for the Organization of Recruiting in Ireland”.

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Illustration 5.1 “If you are an Irishman” (1915). Reproduced with the permission of the Trinity College Dublin Library.

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Recruitment posters further highlighted Ireland’s individual patriotic stake in the war effort by emphasising the threat that the German military posed directly to Irish lives. Partly due to the Allied naval blockade, U-boat attacks became increasingly aggressive toward the end of 1914 and the German intention to target commercial shipping and draw the coastlines of Britain and Ireland into the zone of war was officially announced in the middle of February 1915.26 A text-based poster circulated the following month warned that the German imperial navy would now be targeting Irish men and women. “GERMANY’S THREAT TO IRELAND!” reads the banner of the poster, above a list of highly ominous statements concerning German aggression towards Irish life and property: “The Germans have issued their orders: The Irish Seas are to be sown with Mines. Irish Ships are to be sunk. Irish Men, Women and Children are to be sent to their doom without warning. Ireland’s Food Supply is to be cut off”.27 The validity of the poster’s message seemed to be dramatically confirmed in May when the Cunard passenger liner, the Lusitania, was torpedoed off the coast of Cork. Almost 1200 passengers, including 39 Irish civilians, lost their lives, traumatised survivors were taken ashore at Queenstown (now Cobh), and the incident brought the war very close to home for the Irish public. The German navy was roundly condemned by civilian commentators and the ccori lost no time in producing a very arresting poster that capitalized on the propaganda value of an incident that was widely seen as a war crime. The theme of vengeance was already a consistent feature of recruitment rhetoric in both Britain and Ireland and the sinking of the Lusitania quickly became shorthand for German barbarism. The poster thus draws quite bluntly on the moral dimension to the war.28 The German violation of Belgian neutrality had given the British government a legal pretext to declare war and a plausible casus belli. But atrocities committed by members of the German armed forces against French, Belgian, British, and Irish civilians allowed clergymen and other public commentators to cast the war effort in morally righteous terms.29 The ccori and the dri recognized the considerable sway that the Church held over the Catholic population in Ireland and was keen to incorporate the prowar utterances of Catholic clergy in their recruitment literature. No fewer than 18 posters in the largest collection of Irish recruitment posters, held at Trinity 26 27 28 29

Alan Kramer, “Combatants and Noncombatants: Atrocities, Massacres and War Crimes”, in A Companion to World War i, ed., John Horne (New York NY, 2010), 188–201, 195. epb, Papyrus Case 53, “Germany’s Threat to Ireland!”. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities: A History of Denial (New Haven CT & London, 2001), 292–93. Edward Madigan, Faith Under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (Basingstoke, 2011), 35, 40–41.

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Illustration 5.2 “Irishmen avenge the Lusitania” (May 1915). Reproduced with the permission of the Trinity College Dublin Library.

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College Dublin, cite public speeches, sermons, or letters of Catholic priests, bishops, or cardinals.30 The theme of Irish solidarity with Catholic Belgium was publicly evoked by a number of prominent Irish clergymen whose statements featured in recruitment posters, including the bishops of Cloyne, Dromore, Ferns, and Derry, and the Archbishop of Tuam.31 The statements of more junior clerics and at least two Irish Catholic army chaplains, Francis Gleeson and H.V. Gill, also featured in posters and pamphlets. This clerical rhetoric was quite consciously incorporated to suggest that good Catholic Irishmen were duty-bound to enlist. One of the most visually striking of the Irish-themed posters, captioned “The Isle of Saints and Soldiers”, draws on the theme of the religiosity of ordinary Irish Catholics and their moral duty in wartime. It features a simple ‘son of the soil’ pausing at his plough, cap reverently in hand, while he contemplates an ethereal vision of Saint Patrick and the ruins of Rheims Cathedral. The medieval cathedral had been severely damaged by German shellfire in September 1914 and became a symbol of the wanton destruction wreaked by the German army. The ghostly saint is motioning to the cathedral and seems to be appealing to the man to consider his duty. Irish Catholic men, the poster suggests, are morally obliged to make common cause with their co-religionists in France and Belgium. As with recruitment material used in Britain, Irish-themed posters both played on male insecurities and attempted to entice men with the promise that active service offered the chance to fulfil a particularly idealized form of masculinity. Recruiters in Ireland, however, tended to draw on distinctive and wellestablished notions of the ‘fighting Irish’. Terence Denman has emphazised the frequency with which both Irish and English politicians, officers and journalists testified to the distinctive martial qualities of Irish troops during the war years.32 Yet while certain Irish units fought with extraordinary tenacity, there is little evidence to suggest that Irish soldiers were more naturally suited to combat than troops from any other national community. As Joanna Bourke has argued, however, Irish soldiers, in common with some of their African and South Asian counterparts, were regarded as the manhood of an inherently martial people.33 The notion that Irishmen were born-fighters and naturally suited to warfare was thus both imposed upon and embraced by the Irish during the war years and featured prominently in recruitment rhetoric. 30 31 32 33

Bowen et al., “Recruiting Posters”, 51. epb Papyrus Case 54b. Terence Denman, “The Catholic Irish Soldier in the First World War: The Racial Environment”, Irish Historical Studies 26 (1991), 352–65. Joanna Bourke, “Shell-Shock, Psychiatry and the Irish Soldier during the First World War”, in Ireland and the Great War: A War to Unite Us All? eds., Gregory and Pašeta (Manchester, 2002), 157–59.

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Illustration 5.3 “The Isle of Saints and Soldiers” (May 1915). Reproduced with the permission of the Trinity College Dublin Library.

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A 1915 poster featuring a portrait of Victoria Cross recipient, Sergeant Michael O’Leary, raised the question of Irish martial masculinity in quite a pointed fashion. In killing eight German soldiers and neutralising two enemy machine-gun posts, O’Leary had performed a genuinely extraordinary feat of battlefield violence and the poster presented the opportunity of winning similar glory as an incentive to enlistment. “Have You No Wish”, the text demands, “To Emulate the Splendid Bravery of Your Fellow Countryman”, under a banner that suggested that even ten Germans were no match for a lone Irish soldier. The message that the war was an Irish fight as much as a British one remained a consistent motif in recruitment propaganda in Ireland until the Armistice, and this material consistently presented the Irish soldier as patriotic, pious and brave, and, as such, echoed the vision of the war promoted by Irish Parliamentary Party MPs. Yet as the conflict wore on, the seemingly interminable hostilities, the change in public opinion in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and, crucially, the threat of conscription, meant that the war became increasingly unpopular in Ireland. Also, and importantly, the relatively small number of republican rebels who had fought in Dublin in April 1916 began slowly but quite firmly to take the place of the Irish soldiers serving in the British forces as publicly idealized combatants. While popular responses to the rebellion were mixed and often extremely antagonistic, the rebels of Easter week were lauded for their gallantry, their patriotism and their devout faith by quite a varied range of commentators in the weeks and months that followed the rebellion; even the pro-union Church of Ireland Gazette noted of the rebels that “they fought with a courage worthy of a better cause”.34 The evident hopelessness of their struggle against vastly superior numbers, their soldierly bearing in defeat, and the equanimity with which the leaders of the rebellion faced execution all had a powerful influence on the way the rebels and the cause they represented were perceived.35 The fate of the executed leaders had a particularly strong impact on public opinion and moved even those who stood to lose from the rise of a more unapologetically separatist form of popular Irish nationalism. On 11 May, after a week of executions in Dublin, the deputy leader of the Irish Party, John Dillon, made an impassioned speech in the House of Commons in which he lauded the courage of the rebel leaders:

34 35

Valerie Jones, Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Easter Rising (Dublin, 2016), 122. See especially Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916 (Oxford, 2010), 250–51 and 264.

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Illustration 5.4 “An Irish Hero!” (April 1915). Reproduced with the permission of the Trinity College Dublin Library.

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It is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would be a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did those men in Dublin – three thousand men against twenty thousand with machine guns and artillery.36 What is perhaps most striking about this intervention in the context of the wartime image of Irish servicemen is the way Dillon, wilfully or not, contrasts the rebels with “your soldiers”, by which he of course means the British soldiers then serving on the Western Front and elsewhere. Yet, as Clair Wills points out in her account of the emergence of the legend of the General Post Office, that cohort then also included tens of thousands of Irishmen.37 Thus, within less than two weeks of the end of the rebellion, a pro-war Irish nationalist lauded the Irishmen who fought against the British in Dublin at the expense of their compatriots who were fighting with the British in the theatres of the world war. Throughout the remainder of 1916, the men and women who had staged the rebellion were only occasionally commended in the regional Irish press.38 In the Catholic Bulletin, by contrast, admiration for the republican dead was very open and transcended mere praise.39 Month after month, insurgents killed in the fighting on Easter week and the executed leaders of the Rising were eulogized as highly-accomplished, religiously devout and deeply respectable men who had selflessly sacrificed their lives for a higher purpose.40 Indeed, the language employed in the Bulletin was similar to that used in the obituaries of Irish officers killed in Flanders and on the Somme that regularly appeared in the Irish press and other periodicals.41 The difference was that the rebels could very clearly be said to have died fighting in Ireland for Ireland, whereas the status of even the most nationalistic Irish soldiers killed while serving in the British forces was more ambiguous. A romanticized, religiouslytinged vision of a gallant band of martyrs who died for Ireland thus provided a powerful counterweight to the image of Irishmen serving in British uniforms on the Western Front. 36 For the complete text of Dillon’s speech see Hansard HC Deb 11 May 1916, vol. 82 cc 935–70. 37 Clair Wills, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the gpo (London, 2009), 97. 38 Wills, Dublin 1916, 102. 39 McGarry, The Rising, 274 and 282. 40 See, for example, The Catholic Bulletin 6 (July 1916), 395–96, in which Eamonn Ceannt’s family connections to the Catholic hierarchy and the papal blessing he and his wife received on the occasion of their marriage are highlighted. The authors are grateful to Fearghal McGarry for drawing our attention to this and other sources. 41 See, for example the tributes to Lieut. Louis Quinlan and other Irish officers in The Clongownian 7 (June 1916), 330–31.

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Sympathy for the rebels and the cause they represented increased in tandem with, and tended to reinforce, popular anti-war sentiment as the months passed. In the case of the Sinn Féin leadership, and the ever-growing party faithful, opposition to the war was absolute and increasingly vocal. The meteoric rise of the republican-infiltrated Sinn Féin party in the year after the Rising in Dublin led to a concurrent increase in anti-war propaganda throughout Ireland. For the advanced nationalists who produced this material, Irish Party MPs, and Redmond in particular, were no more than servile recruiting sergeants in league with the British state, while the Irishmen fighting at the front, far from being heroic patriots, were misguided cannon fodder.42 Importantly, moreover, this republican castigation of the Irish nationalist war effort was compounded by the Irish unionist and British press discourses that emerged over the question of extending conscription to Ireland, which undermined the portrayal of the patriotic Irish combatant highlighted in the recruitment poster campaign. 2

Dying for Britain, 1917–1918

The threat that conscription would be introduced to Ireland in the latter half of the war had a profound two-fold impact. First, such was the hostility regarding the coercive element of conscription that even those moderate nationalists who had supported the war effort were alienated. It was only possible to sell the conflict as Ireland’s war to nationalists if Ireland could be depicted as determining its own national role and involvement in it; Irish combatants as volunteers epitomized this autonomous national participation at the microlevel. This was the narrative adopted by the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in particular, as the first part of this chapter has shown. As soon as the image of the Catholic combatant shifted from autonomous volunteer, choosing his own fate, to coerced conscript, using him to symbolize Ireland’s national autonomy became impossible. Thus the propaganda message of “fighting for Ireland”, constructed in the first half of the war, became unsustainable. Moreover, radical nationalist separatists quickly recognized this and made use of the conscription crisis to redefine the narrative; conscription now meant dying for Britain, not Ireland. The war was thus no longer Ireland’s war. ­Second, for unionists and the population of Britain itself, dying for Britain was 42

On nationalist wartime propaganda see Ben Novick, Conceiving Revolution: Irish Nationalist Propaganda during the First World War (Dublin, 2001); on war propaganda, Pennell, “Presenting the War in Ireland”.

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the ultimate test of loyalty to the UK. By openly rejecting conscription in 1918, the Irish were suddenly showing the extent to which their contribution to the war effort was limited, and not unconditional, at a time when the state was demanding unconditional sacrifice both at the front and home front. This stance triggered considerable British resentment. The following section sketches out these shifts, exploring the ramifications of the conscription debate between 1916 and 1918 upon the image of the Catholic Irish combatant. There has been little research into the ways the conscription debate impacted upon the image of the Irish soldier, although Adrian Gregory and others have commented on the government’s decision-making on the issue.43 Conscription had been looming in Ireland since at least 1915 when calls for it in the conservative press and debate about the likelihood of its introduction in Britain led to widespread fears that Irishmen would be coerced into military service.44 However, conscription had been ruled out for Ireland when it was introduced by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in Britain in January 1916; given conscription in Britain had faced widespread opposition, the government had no appetite left to deal with Irish opposition and feared conscription would radicalize Irish nationalists. There were also concerns about the garrison needed to implement it. Ireland’s initial exemption from conscription co-existed with racialized stereotypes of the Catholic Irish soldier in public discourse, which helped to soothe over any potential questions as to why the Irish population was being spared obligatory military service. They also helped mask the fact that conscription marked the introduction in Britain of the concept of the ‘citizen army’; on the continent, military service had been seen as the corollary of male citizens’ rights received from the state since the late-18th century. By excluding Irishmen from conscription, the British government was effectively setting up one class of male citizens in the United Kingdom, those from the island of Britain – with specific rights and obligations to the state – separate from another in Ireland, the Irish. Indeed, Ulster unionist circles resented this recognition of dual standards and, in early 1916, the standing committee of the Ulster Unionist Council sent a resolution via Sir Edward Carson to the “Government and the people of Great Britain” conveying “their indignant protest against

43

Adrian Gregory, “‘You Might As Well Recruit Germans’: British Public Opinion and the Decision to Conscript the Irish in 1918”, in Ireland and the Great War, eds., Gregory and Pašeta (Manchester, 2002), 113–32; Alan J. Ward, “Lloyd George and the 1918 Irish Conscription Crisis”, Historical Journal 17 (1974), 107–29. 44 Townshend, Easter 1916, 78.

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the ­differential treatment of Ireland” when the matter of compulsory military ­service was before the House of Commons.45 If the Irish Parliamentary Party emphasized the Irish war effort as voluntary to promote self-determination, Irish voluntarism was initially depicted in ­Britain in ways that emphasized presumed involuntary essentialist Irish behaviours and emotions. Public discourse played upon older pre-war ‘positive’ racialized stereotypes of the Irish as passionate, hardy, natural-born fighters, ­providing valuable shock troops for the British army; here we find the discourse on the Irish paralleling some of the language used to describe the Dominion troops of the Empire, particularly the Australians, who also notably were not subject to conscription. Sir Lawrence Parsons, an Irish Protestant, commander of the 16th Irish Division between 1914 and December 1915, believed Irish regiments “could march round most English regiments” due to their hardiness and bravery and their ability to endure harsh weather “like salamanders”.46 In his 1916 book, The Irish at the Front, London journalist Michael MacDonagh referred to Irish soldiers “with their astonishing courage and their beautiful faith, with their natural military genius, with their tenderness as well as strength (…)”, adding that “the war has brought into view again what had been somewhat obscured of late: the military qualities of the Irish race”.47 MacDonagh, who had travelled widely in the war zone, added: “On the Western Front I heard the same idea put in another pointed phrase: ‘We always look upon an Irish regiment as a corps d’élite’”.48 Nowhere in his book is the word conscription mentioned, despite its publication year.49 Overall the ‘positive’ stereotype set up the argument that the ongoing successful mobilization of Irish volunteers for the war led to highly motivated, gifted fighters joining the British army, negating the need to force Irishmen to enlist. If, as the recruitment posters illustrated, the problem in Ireland was how to portray the Irish soldier in a way that shaped the conflict as equally Ireland’s war, in Britain press and cabinet papers reveal that the conscription debate revolved around whether Irish combatants could be regarded as the equivalent of British soldiers. The corollary of the ‘born warrior’ essentialist description of the Irish was a ‘negative’ racialized stereotype of the Catholic Irish combatant as more primitive than other Europeans, in thrall to violent urges and thus difficult to discipline, superstitious, rebellious, dirty, and susceptible to a­ lcohol 45 “Nationalist Shirkers”, Belfast Newsletter, 6 October 1916, 4. 46 Sir Lawrence Parsons, cited in Denman, “The Catholic Irish Soldier”, 354. 47 Michael MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front (London, 1916), 2. 48 MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front, 3. 49 MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front, 3.

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abuse – perceived traits that had obvious colonial overtones. One implication of this ‘negative’ perception was that it would be pointless to conscript such an unreliable population. Another, which gained ground after 1916, was that, given these Irish weaknesses, conscription was necessary and had to be implemented harshly. The Ulster unionist press suggested that as the Irish nationalist population was unreliable and had supported the rebels of the Easter Rising, it should be conscripted in order to remove young men from the dangerous influence of Sinn Féin. Lord Londonderry, speaking in Derry in December 1917, urged the government to extend conscription to Ireland where there were “200,000 Irishmen of military age idling and worse still a prey to agitation or victims of German intrigues”, a situation he described as an “indelible stain” upon Ireland.50 Indeed, for War Cabinet member Lord Alfred Milner, negative Irish traits made conscription imperative. In January 1917, he argued for the introduction of conscription in Ireland, although the policy would involve bloodshed in forcing men to comply, claiming this would have beneficial “moral” effects, and would be welcomed by townspeople keen to get rid of the “loafing population”; moreover, Ireland would be the better for “the improvement of the men drilled”.51 Here was language with clear social engineering overtones, suggesting the war offered the opportunity to reshape a deficient Irish male population. Lord Milner had formerly served as High Commissioner in South Africa, where he crudely attempted to ‘anglicize’ the Boer population and where his poor decision-making had helped unleash the Second South African War. He had thus already used military force to dragoon local colonial populations into submission; his language concerning Ireland must therefore be taken seriously. Prime Minister David Lloyd George held a very different view, seeing Ireland’s case in terms of the values for which Britain was purportedly fighting. He believed the Dominions would protest as follows: “You are fighting for the freedom of nationalities. What right have you to take this little nation by the ears and drag it into the war against its will?”52 If Lloyd George’s conclusions were more democratic than Milner’s, his rhetoric remained infantilizing – depicting Ireland as a small child being compelled by Britain. This was far from the esteemed Irish warrior image projected by MacDonagh or in the rhetoric of Irish Party MPs and recruitment posters. Unionist press discourse on conscription also used negative tropes, employing the language of masculine honour and shame to suggest that Catholic Irish 50 51 52

“Ireland and Conscription”, Liverpool Daily Post, 14 December 1917, 5. Ward, “Lloyd George”, 108. Ward, “Lloyd George”, 109.

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soldiers who had volunteered to fight were the exceptional ‘good’ men among an otherwise treacherous and cowardly ‘bad’ nationalist population. In January 1917, the Northern Whig, while praising the “fighting qualities of Irish soldiers whether they come from North or South”, reported that: No amount of special pleading will get rid of the fact that Irish Nationalists have failed hopelessly to do their duty in this great struggle. (…) Nationalist Ireland is the only black spot in the Empire – the only part that has refused to recruit and that organised a rebellion for the benefit of Germany. If the nationalists are willing to remain under this disgrace they need not be surprised if loyal people treat them with contempt.53 Just a few weeks earlier, in December 1916, the Anglican Dean of Belfast, C.T.P. Grierson, had preached the following negative depiction of nationalist rejection of conscription: We thanked God for the loyalty of Ulster. We were Irishmen and loved ­Ireland. But when we looked out over the dear homeland we found that here in our own country conscription had been refused. Not only that, the Motherland had been stabbed in the back by revolution at the moment of her great need. Englishmen, Welshmen and Scotchmen had submitted to conscription in the interests of the Empire, and of our homes, [sic] our Irish homes were being defended from the Hun by the conscripts of Great Britain. It was a burning shame, an utter humiliation (…).54 In reality, the situation in Ireland was far more complex than the press assertions of shirking suggested. The Chief Secretary of Ireland, H.E. Duke, warned Lloyd George in 1917 that “there might be as many as 161,000 eligible Irishmen but that many of these were working in British factories on war production or were farming essential food supplies”.55 Few were idle since the war had created an agricultural boom for Ireland as Britain was cut off from more distant food supply chains. Lloyd George accepted Duke’s argument, although he admitted there was little public awareness of this among the British population. Proconscription arguments in the British press exacerbated misunderstanding by continuing to push British and Irish nationalist public opinion further apart from each other in the aftermath of the Rising. In 1917, the deeply ­xenophobic 53 54 55

“Ireland and the War”, Northern Whig, 16 January 1917, 4. “The Need for Individual Repentance”, The Belfast Newsletter, 11 December 1916, 8. Ward, “Lloyd George”, 108.

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National Party was founded in Britain. It campaigned for the extension of conscription to Ireland, gaining considerable support. As one National Party member, E. Petter, wrote to the editor of the Western Daily Press on 9 February 1918: “it is time that Democracy should let the Government know that in this war against this most deadly enemy it does not intend to allow such a resource as the manhood of Ireland provides to be left untapped any longer”.56 There were also growing concerns that Irish immigrants to Britain were taking British conscripts’ jobs. The British government remained reluctant to conscript, however, fearing such a move would further exacerbate the rise of Sinn Féin, offend Britain’s new ally, the United States, and damage the ongoing Irish ­Convention – a broad conference which had been set up in Ireland in May 1917 by Lloyd George to find a solution to Ireland’s Home Rule impasse. However, on 21 March 1918, when the German army launched the Ludendorff Offensive leading to rapid German advances and fears that the Allies were about to lose the war, the government’s position changed dramatically.57 In desperate need of troops to replace casualties lost, the cabinet decided to combine the extension of conscription to Ireland with the immediate implementation of Home Rule. In April, the Military Service Bill, which extended conscription to Ireland, was passed. Virtually the whole Irish nationalist population, already radicalizing towards Sinn Féin, vehemently opposed the introduction of conscription. In mid-April, a common anti-conscription front was formed in Dublin, uniting moderate and radical nationalists. The Irish Parliamentary Party vociferously and angrily rejected the extension of conscription in the House of Commons and, on 21 April, thousands of opponents of conscription across Ireland took an anti-conscription pledge, supported by the Catholic Church and the Irish Labour movement. At the local level, the conscription crisis increased support for separatism and prompted plans for resistance. In Cork, these included plotting a general strike, export disruption and armed insurrection for when conscription would begin.58 Significantly, in Ireland in April 1918 conscription was not framed in the language of participating in a United Kingdom-wide conscript citizen army akin to that of France; the idea that with male citizens” rights came equal obligations to defend the state. Rather it was framed in terms of a separate nation being forced to fight for a state of which it was 56 57 58

“National Party Petition for Conscription in Ireland”, Western Daily Press, 9 February 1918, 2. Martin Kitchen, “Michael-Offensive”, in Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, eds., Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina Renz (Paderborn, 2014), 714. John Borgonovo, The Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork City, 1916–1918 (Cork, 2013), 186–212.

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not part. There could be no clearer indication of the success of the 1916 Easter Rising’s separatist message. Here too was the moment when the idea that the Great War was not Ireland’s war moved beyond separatist republican circles and became mainstream across Irish nationalism. The anti-conscription reaction in Ireland was viewed extremely negatively by Ulster unionists and in the British mainstream press. On 29 April 1918, The Scotsman reported on a sermon given in St Paul’s Cathedral in London by the Rev. R.J. Campbell which railed that “we have (…) reached the most critical period of the war in which a little may turn the scales of destiny on one side or another and Ireland refuses to help us. (…) We had a moral right to ask Ireland to stand by our side in this dark hour”.59 In his later Bureau of Military History statement, a former London-based Irish Volunteer, Joseph Good, provided further evidence of such attitudes: “What Irishmen did not understand was that Englishmen regarded Irishmen as fellow-Britishers, somewhat rowdy, but good fellows when disciplined; that they, Englishmen, were protecting Irishmen from German aggression (…)”.60 Interestingly, those condemning the Irish anti-conscription movement appeared to largely forget the fact that the leadup to the introduction of conscription in Britain in 1916 had also been hotly contested using similar arguments, with conscription being seen as an attack on traditional British rights and coercive of individual and national freedoms. Did the negative portrayal in Britain of Irish opposition to conscription ultimately bear fruit by generally undermining British views of the quality of Catholic Irish combatants by 1918? In a cabinet meeting on 27 March 1918, when the extension of conscription to Ireland was discussed, statements from both the head of the Royal Irish Constabulary, General Byrne, and the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, General Mahon, suggested the quality of the men conscripted from Ireland would be very poor and not worth the trouble. H.E. Duke declared “we might almost as well recruit Germans”.61 Carson warned the cabinet against Irish conscription because it would yield only “unreliable” men at the cost of a high price in disorder.62 This was a clear departure from the depiction of the patriotic Irish Catholic war volunteer of the first years of the conflict. In parliament, there were similar questions as to whether forcibly recruited Irish combatants would be of any use. Moreover, debate in the House of Commons, most notably on 10 April 1918, occurred against the backdrop of suggestions from critical voices that the Irishmen in the Fifth Army, which had 59 60 61 62

“Roman Catholic Church and Irish Conscription”, The Scotsman, 29 April 1918, 3. Bureau of Military History, Dublin, Witness Statement, Joseph Good, WS0388, 37. Ward, “Lloyd George”, 110. Ward, “Lloyd George”, 111.

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borne the brunt of the first Ludendorff Offensive attack on 21 March, had given way too easily.63 The military crisis immediately triggered suspicions of Catholic Irish soldiers. Haig noted on 22 March 1918 that “certain Irish units did very badly and gave way immediately the enemy showed”.64 The Fifth Army’s Irish commander, Hubert Gough, who was removed from his command, rejected accusations against his Irish troops, pointing to the scale of the German attack, the fact that his units had inherited new front lines from the French without time to build adequate defensive positions before the German action, and that London had withheld reserves.65 Yet, as Philip Orr has observed: “Stories went around in British circles of the ‘inadequate’ response of the Irish soldiers to the German attack of March 1918 which was thought to be due to political disaffection in the Irish ranks and the ‘fact’ that ‘Celtic troops’ did not have the temperament for defence”.66 Ironically, as Orr points out, the 36th (Ulster) Division faced no such calumny despite experiencing “the same kind of fighting retreat as the 16th (Irish) Division only a few miles distant from it and with similar results in terms of the number of prisoners taken”.67 The reputation of the Ulster Division survived while the 16th Division’s deployment to the Western Front was put to an end in June when it was sent to England to be reconstituted.68 Moreover, the suspicion heaped upon the Fifth Army’s Catholic Irish troops in 1918 contrasts with Mons in 1914, when the British army was also forced to retreat, but when no ethnic group from the United Kingdom was singled out for blame, despite high surrender rates. The government thus faced a paradox: on the one hand, in the aftermath of the near-collapse of the Fifth Army on 21 March 1918, there was a growing belief that Irish troops were unreliable; on the other, there was intense public pressure to extend conscription to Ireland to plug the growing manpower gaps on the Western Front. The two issues were in fact related – one associated the Catholic Irish with weakness at the front, the other with weakness at home, where they were perceived as shirking their duty and not volunteering to defend the state. The British and unionist ‘good’ and ‘bad’ popular distinction between the two types of Catholic Irishmen – those at the front and those still

63 64 65 66 67 68

The Times, 10 April 1918, 8. Robert Blake, ed., The Private Papers of Douglas Haig 1914–1919 (London, 1952), 296. Hubert Gough, The Fifth Army (London, 1931), xiii. Philip Orr, “200,000 Volunteer Soldiers”, in Our War. Ireland and the Great War, ed., Horne, 75. Orr, “200,000 Volunteer Soldiers”, 75. This privileging of the 36th Division dated back to the start of the war: see John Horne, “Ireland at the Somme: A Tale of Two Divisions”, History Today 57 (2007), 12–19.

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at home in Ireland – was collapsing in the public sphere; all were now failing their military duty. 3 Conclusion In the event, although the Military Service Bill extending conscription to Ireland was passed in the Commons, conscription was never actually implemented in Ireland. Indeed Adrian Gregory argues that Lloyd George only included Ireland to distract from the act’s very ruthless reforms to conscription in Britain, including lifting the government’s pledge not to deploy 18 year olds on overseas service.69 The government thus ultimately accepted that conscription in Ireland was unworkable, but the damage had already been done. The carefully crafted, moderate nationalist, pro-war propaganda line of the first half of the war, which presented Irish war volunteers as symbols of national autonomy, had been destroyed; coercion and self-determination were incompatible. The Irish Parliamentary Party looked impotent, unable to prevent Irish conscription being included in the Military Service Bill. The introduction of Home Rule was also now fatally associated with deeply unpopular conscription and the image of the patriotic Irish Catholic soldier, so carefully cultivated in the recruitment posters, now symbolized threefold failure: failure of the John Redmond-led strategy to convince Britain, through volunteering in sufficient numbers, that nationalist Ireland could be trusted to self-mobilize adequately to defend the state, thereby proving that Ireland was ready for Home Rule; failure, from a British perspective, to inspire the Irish to share equally in the moral economy of war sacrifice that the rest of the UK was enduring, even at a point of extreme war crisis when the state was in danger of defeat in 1918. And, most significantly, failure when overwhelmed by the Ludendorff Offensives to live up to the exaggerated stereotypes of the valiant patriotic fighter invented for Irish Catholic Soldiers in the first half of the war. The image of the Catholic Irish combatant was thus undermined by multiple factors before the end of the conflict, of which republican propaganda was only one. Ultimately, a positive image of Irish nationalist patriotism in service of the United Kingdom was incompatible with forced conscription. Irish republicans exploited this well, and it was their narrative of a coercive war that would win out in independent Ireland for much of the 20th century. 69

Gregory, “You Might As Well”.

Chapter 6

“For What and For Whom Were We Fighting?” Red Army Soldiers, Combat Motivation and Survival Strategies on the Eastern Front in the Second World War Robert Dale In recent years, films, television dramas, and documentaries about the war on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945, what Russians continue to call the Great Patriotic War, have become entertainment staples in Russia. Turn on the television, and it is hard to avoid reruns of late Soviet war films and new multi-part wartime dramas. The Ministry of Defence’s own channel, Zvezda (Star) can be relied upon for a wartime fix, if other stations disappoint.1 Russian blockbusters such as Citadel (dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, 2011), Stalingrad (dir. Fedor Bondarchuk, 2013), and The Battle for Sevastopol (dir. Sergei Mokritskii, 2015) signalled the war’s triumphant return to the big screen. Stalingrad, the first Russian film produced completely in IMAX 3D, broke Russian box office records, grossing an estimated $51,000,000, and was met with positive, if not universal, approval.2 As the living memory of the Great Patriotic fades, many Russians’ appreciation of this most murderous and destructive conflict derives from what they see on their screens, and to a lesser extent read in print. The glossy production values and computerized special effects of recent films, and the personal stories fleshed out by television dramas, enliven the viewing experience. Many films and dramas have opened less heroic aspects of the war effort up for public discussion. While a post-Soviet generation of cinema goers, or indeed an older generation watching at home, might feel that these cultural products bring them closer to the action, and enhance their understanding of the wartime experience, for historians these are highly problematic sources of inspiration. 1 Stephen M. Norris, “Guiding Stars: The Comet-Like Rise of the War Film in Putin’s Russia: Recent World War ii Films and Historical Memories”, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1 (2007), 163–89. 2 Anastasia Kostetskaya, “Stalingrad Re-imagined as Mythical Chronotype: Fedor Bondarchuk”s Stalingrad in IMAX 3D”, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 10 (2016), 47–61.

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This chapter seeks to strip away the multiple layers of myth and official distortion woven around the Red Army’s wartime experience, which accrued during and after the Cold War, through the politicization of war memory, and the influence of cultural products like films. It asks for what, and for whom, Soviet soldiers fought for nearly four long years. What motivated rank-and-file soldiers to fight, and keep fighting, amidst the carnage and privation of the Eastern Front? Although these are simple questions, determining how soldiers experienced extreme violence and coped with the physical and psychological pressures of war presents serious methodological difficulties. Accessing Soviet soldiers’ inner worlds, at moments of great individual and collective stress, is complicated. Although the hyper-realism of modern film can be seductive, historians find it harder to peer into soldiers’ souls than filmmakers and screenwriters. As Mark Edele dryly notes, “Motivation is an inherently tricky p ­ henomenon to investigate, even more so if the subjects of such investigations are, in their vast majority, dead”.3 Nevertheless, many historians have embraced the challenge of explaining why soldiers fought, and continued to fight. Historians of the First World War in particular have long grappled with these problems.4 Studies of the importance of frontline cultures, emotions, and communication in the Red Army, in comparison with the state of scholarship of the western front during the First World War, are in their infancy. John Horne’s work, which has sought to apply social and cultural history approaches to a field once considered the domain of military historians, has been a special source of inspiration for this chapter. His work has challenged established myths about wars, often by interrogating the beliefs and cultural assumptions which underpin them. The focus in John’s work on the techniques of cultural mobilization employed by belligerent states, and the collective mentalities and powerful emotions of individuals on or behind the frontlines, offers important insights for studying combat motivation, which are particularly prescient in the context of Stalinism.5

3 Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945 (Oxford, 2017), 11. 4 For recent examples see: Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2008), and Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009). 5 John Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991); John Horne, ed., State Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven CT & London, 2001).

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The Complexities of Combat Motivation in Stalinist Society

Scholars of Soviet history have long questioned why soldiers fought for a political system which persecuted large sections of society and whose policies wrought widespread economic and social damage. Before the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the difficulties of understanding why the Red Army fought were compounded by highly restricted access to source materials. Military archives were closed to all but a select few, while official histories and published memoirs told reassuring narratives that preserved a patriotic cult of the war.6 Although pinpointing why Soviet soldiers fought is difficult, these questions get to the heart of historiographical debates about the nature of Stalinism, and the extent to which the state and its ideology commanded popular support.7 Military historians, constrained by the available evidence, were amongst the first scholars to consider soldiers’ combat motivations. Conventional military historians, however, tended to produce operational histories, which focused on military performance, at army, regimental, or battalion level. The motivations of rank-and-file soldiers were subsumed into wider examinations of the Red Army’s recovery, and its transformation into an effective fighting force after the disasters of 1941.8 Only with the gradual application of social and cultural approaches to military history was greater emphasis placed on explaining why soldiers kept fighting in the face of catastrophe, massive ­casualties, failures in leadership, training, and supply. In the mid-1990s Elena Seniavskaia’s research opened the everyday experience of the frontlines to anthropological scrutiny, and probed at the psychology of frontline soldiers (frontoviki).9 More recently Catherine Merridale and Roger Reese have re-examined the frontline experience, asking directly why Soviet soldiers fought, and questioning how the regime mobilized combatants. Both stress the importance of ideology, patriotism, propaganda, and the culture of the Red Army in sustaining soldiers in the 6 On the Soviet war cult see, Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War ii in Russia (New York NY, 1994). 7 Catherine Merridale, “Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army, 1939–45”, Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006), 305–24; Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 165–78. 8 John Erickson, Stalin’s War with Germany, 2 vols (London, 1975, 1983); David M. Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Edinburgh, 1995); Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War: A Modern History (London, 2007); Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, 2nd Edition (London, 2016, 1st published 2005); Alexander Hill, The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge, 2017). 9 E.S. Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie, 1941–1945: istoriko-psikhologicheskie issledovanoe (Moscow, 1995); E.S. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v xx veke: istoricheskii opyt Rossii (Moscow, 1999).

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heat of battle.10 The level of coercion employed on the frontlines, something frequently exaggerated, and the role of ideology in motivating soldiers, has proved particularly controversial. “The cement”, according to Hellbeck, “that the Red Army command used to bind together diverse soldiers and motivate them to fight was ideology”.11 Soviet ideology, he argues, was integrative, rather than purely repressive. Although ideas about socialism, the party-state, and the political leadership were important in a militantly ideological state, a new generation of scholars is deepening our understanding of combat motivation by revealing, in ever greater detail, the emotions, cultures, and behaviours that sustained soldiers before, during and after combat. This chapter seeks to re-examine the Red Army’s combat performance in light of recent research, new approaches, and new evidence. It resists the temptation to present total mobilization as something that the Soviet state forced on its citizens, preferring to examine the subtle interplay of state and social forces. It argues the importance of culture in shaping how individuals, armies, and societies were mobilized to fight. The role of singing songs, telling jokes, receiving letters and parcels, and sharing food, cigarettes, and news from home was just as important as Stalinist ideology and the exertions of party agitators in sustaining soldiers in extreme circumstances. What motivated a social organism as complex as the Red Army, which included men and women from across the age, class, ethnic, and professional spectrum, is far from clear. Different groups and individuals responded to the strains of combat differently. Furthermore, those pressures shifted enormously between 1941 and 1945, as a war of desperate defence gave way to liberation, and eventually conquest. This chapter, reflecting this diversity, draws upon a wide range of source material, including the wartime press, published documents, soldiers’ wartime letters, post-war memoirs, and cultural products, such as songs and poetry, designed to keep soldiers fighting. How anybody maintained their motivation to fight amidst the extreme violence, death and destruction of the Eastern Front almost defies imagination. The intensity of fighting, the lethality of combat, and the horrors of the battlefield are difficult to describe let alone comprehend. Calculating Soviet military casualties is itself a daunting task, and the statistics have been hotly contested, but approximately 8.5 million Soviet soldiers lost their lives.12 The Red Army’s 10 11 12

Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45 (London, 2005); Roger R. Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War ii (Lawrence KS, 2011). Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, trans. Christopher Tauchen and Dominic Bonfiglio (New York NY, 2015), 22. G.F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (­London, 1997), 83–85; Sergei Kropachev and Evgenii Krinko, Poteri naseleniia sssr v 1937–1945 gg.:

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casualties dwarfed those of its British and American allies. Mawdsley calculates that “Soviet losses in every three-month period of the war (except AprilJune 1943) were greater than the number suffered by the Americans for the whole war”.13 In addition, the Red Army sustained approximately 14.7 million cases of injury, and 7.6 million cases of sickness.14 At least 2.5 million soldiers were permanently disabled by their service.15 Extreme violence characterized the entire conflict; as recognizable in Stalingrad’s street-fighting, Kursk’s tank battle, or the scorched-earth policies of partisan warfare. Big-budget cinematic representations of battle attempt to bring violence to life, but how soldiers really reacted in such extreme circumstances remains frustratingly unclear. Soldiers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs are often silent about combat, and surviving veterans are reluctant to explore painful memories in oral history interviews. Many maintain that nobody could truly understand combat unless they had experienced it themselves. 2

Violence, Fear and Survival

Although extreme violence adds to the problem of analyzing combat motivation, it has also been presented as part of the explanation. Violence, and the fear that it engendered, have often been cited as mobilizing factors. “This was a war fought with utter unrestraint from the start”, as Mark Edele and Michael Geyer write; “(…) this was not a ‘conventional’ war, but a war in which the imperative was to win by whatever means necessary or to perish entirely”.16 The escalation of the conflict into a life-and-death struggle between two implacably opposed ideological enemies gave Soviet soldiers little alternative but to fight. As the veteran Nikolai Nikulin wrote in his memoirs:

Masshtaby i formy. Otechestvennaia istoriografiia (Moscow, 2012), 232–49. For a recent reexamination see, Lev Lopukhovsky and Boris Kavalerchik, The Price of Victory: The Red Army’s Casualties in the Great Patriotic War, trans. Harold Orenstein (Barnsley, 2017). 13 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 389. 14 Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties, 87–88. 15 Beate Fieseler, “The Bitter Legacy of the ‘Great Patriotic War’: Red Army Disabled Soldiers under Late Stalinism”, in Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed., Juliane Fürst (London, 2006), 46–61, 46–57; Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (Oxford, 2008), 81–101. 16 Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945”, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, eds., Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge, 2010), 345–95, 348.

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You had to be prepared to die not only now, but constantly. Today you might be lucky, death passed you by. But tomorrow it would be necessary to attack again. Again it would be necessary to die, and not heroically, but without a mention, without an orchestra and speeches, but in the mud and stench.17 Faced by the extraordinary physical and psychological pressures of war, and a brutal invading enemy, fighting could be reduced to a survival instinct. Fear of German retribution, what awaited soldiers in enemy captivity, and the Wehrmacht’s murderous policies towards Jews and commissars, added to the impulse to resist. Soviet propaganda created and celebrated fearless heroes, like the 28 Panfilov Men and Alexander Matrosov, who demonstrated superhuman determination and remarkable self-sacrifice. The exploits of these heroes, however, were often fabricated or distorted; Red Army soldiers were anything but immune to fear.18 Olga Omelchenko spoke for many when she told the oral historian Svetlana Alexievich that she would not “believe anyone who says that war isn’t terrifying”.19 Fear was a natural reaction amidst battle’s sensory onslaught, especially for inexperienced soldiers. Accounts of soldiers’ first taste of battle often focus on the sights, smells, and sounds: the chatter of machine gunfire, the thunderous roar of shells, the ringing in the ears, the rank smell of soil, blood, and burning, and the horrific visions witnessed. As Steven Jug observes, “Many soldiers’ introduction to battle overwhelmed their perception”.20 Battle, as the artillery officer Isaak Kobylanskiy described, could induce an intense “bodily” fear: It appeared instantly when you heard the ever increasing hissing of murderous metal, and when shells or bombs exploded close at hand. The 17 18

19 20

Nikolai Nikulin, Vospominaniia o voine (Moscow, 2014), 47. V. Koroteev, “Gvardeitsy Panfilova v boiakh za Moskvy”, Krasnaia zvezda, 27 November 1941, 3; “Zaveshchanie 28 pavshikh geroev”, Krasnaia zvezda, 28 November 1941, 1; Alexander Statiev, “‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas!: Once Again on the 28 Panfilov Heroes”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (2012), 769–98; Rosalinde Sartorti, “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints”, in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed., Richard Stites (Bloomington and Indianapolis IN, 1995), 176–93; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War ii (Cambridge MA, 2012), 59–67. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London, 2017), 135. Steven G. Jug, “Sensing Danger: The Red Army during the Second World War”, in Russian History Through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present, eds., Matthew Romaniello and Tricia Starks (London, 2016), 219–40, 224.

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e­ xplosions deafened you and cast you about like a piece of grain. This kind of fear deprives you of your will.21 Fear could paralyze, and although taboo in this hyper-masculine environment, it caused combat breakdown and psychiatric casualties.22 In his memoirs, Gabriel Temkin admitted to being “profoundly scared” by combat. As a Jewish soldier, his fear of capture was as strong as his fear of death.23 It would, however, be inaccurate to suggest that Soviet soldiers were permanently in fear. As Temkin himself writes, “It is just not possible to participate in a terrible fouryear war and always be scared, especially if one is, as I was, a generally healthy young man between the ages of twenty and twenty-four”.24 Yet even the young and healthy broke down under fire. 3

Coercion and Stalinist Discipline

Violence was ever-present on the frontlines, although its scale and intensity fluctuated, but it was never monopolized by the enemy. The Red Army has enjoyed a fearsome reputation, especially in the West, for employing violence against its own. The use of blocking detachments and penal units to enforce strict military discipline and prevent desertion has become legendary. These coercive techniques, however, were a continuation and radicalization of prewar practice, rather than a new departure. Stalinist society was already accustomed to the regime’s violent policies and actions. Forged in the crucible of total war, revolution, civil war, and famine, what Peter Holquist terms “Russia’s continuum of crisis”, the Soviet party-state routinely subjected its population to unrestricted violence.25 It was hardly surprising that a political system which doubted the loyalty of its army throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and purged its officer corps on the eve of war, employed violence to ensure compliance on 21

Isaak Kobylanskiy, “Memories of War: Part 2: On the Railroads, the Battle on the Outskirts of Vishnyovy Hamlet, ‘Mysterious Are the Ways of the Lord’, Fear, and about Blocking Detachments”, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 16 (2003), 147–56, 152. 22 Benjamin Zajicek, “Scientific Psychiatry in Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Politics of Modern Medicine and the Struggle to Define ‘Pavlovian’ Psychiatry, 1939–1953”, PhD thesis, University of Chicago (2009), 152–53. 23 Gabriel Temkin, My Just War: The Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier in World War ii (Novato CA, 1998), 176. 24 Temkin, My Just War, 176. 25 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge MA, 2002).

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the battlefield.26 Since the archival revolution prompted by perestroika and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the famous orders demanding “not one step back” have been much discussed. Penal battalions and blocking detachments have been explored on-screen and in published memoirs. Images of blocking detachments forcing soldiers forward at gunpoint, and mass executions of soldiers whose loyalty wavered by the nkvd, have become abiding images of the war, but they are essentially myths.27 As Reese argues, “Careful scrutiny of the draconian discipline of the Red Army reveals that much mythmaking has transpired and calls into question the efficacy of coercion to motivate”.28 The security services were prepared to brutalize Soviet soldiers from the war’s start. By 10 October 1941, the nkvd alone had sentenced and executed 10,201 deserters, of whom 3321 had been shot in front of their units.29 It is likely that panicked officers, desperate to re-impose discipline, shot many more. The total number of soldiers executed between June 1941 and May 1945 is hard to establish, but it is estimated that approximately 158,000 death sentences were passed.30 The level of violence and coercion employed against the Red Army rests largely upon two orders personally sanctioned by Stalin. Order No. 270, issued on 16 August 1941, which was read to troops rather than published, obliged commanders and commissars to shoot deserting officers on the spot. The family members of deserters were to be arrested. Battalion or regimental commanders considered to be frightened of commanding were to be reduced to the ranks, and if necessary shot on the spot. Rank-and-file soldiers were obliged to “fight selflessly for as long as possible”, irrespective of encirclement and demand the same from their officers. The families of captured servicemen were to be denied state assistance and benefits.31 Pressure on officers often translated into increased coercion of their men, and an increase in 26

Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military (Lawrence KS, 2015). 27 Merridale, “Culture, Ideology and Combat”, 317. 28 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 161. 29 “Report of S.R. Mil’shtein to L.Beria on the number of arrested and executed personnel who were separated from their units and fled from the front. October 1941. rgani, f. 89, o18, d. 8, ll. 1–3”, in Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953, eds., David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov (New Haven CT & London, 2015), 258. 30 Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort: 1941–1945 (New York NY, 1998), 160; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 136. 31 “Prikaz stavki verkhovnogo glavnokomandovaniia ob otvetstvennosti voennosluzhashchikh za sdachy v plen i ostavlenie vragy oruzhiia, No. 270, 16 Avgusta 1941 g”., in Russkii Arkhiv: Velikaia otechestvennaia: Prikazy Narodnogo Komissara Oborony sssr, 22 iiunia 1941 g. – 1942 g. T. 13 (2–2), ed., V.A. Zolotarev (Moscow, 1997), 58–60.

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­executions.32 Less well-known, perhaps, is that the wave of violence unleashed by Order No. 270 was subsequently checked on 4 October 1941 by Order No. 391. This as Reese argues, “criticized commanders for too often resorting to abuse, physical assault, and ‘repression’ (summary execution) to cover their own panic and confusion on the battlefield”.33 As the popular wartime journalist Vasily Grossman put it in his diary, “[The cry of] ‘Forward, forward!’ is either the result of stupidity, or of fear of one’s seniors. That is why so much blood is being shed”.34 Once officers resorted to threats of violence, they were in danger of losing authority, weakening unit cohesion, and at risk of a bullet in the back.35 To quote Grossman again, “The phrasing of an order – ‘If you don’t go forward now, mother fucker, I’ll shoot you’ – comes from a lack of will. This does not persuade anybody, this is weakness”.36 The disciplinary culture of the Red Army shifted again on 28 July 1942 with Stalin’s infamous order No. 227, sometimes known as the “not one step back” order. It was read out to all Red Army units, making an immediate impact, not just for its harsh recommendations, but because it acknowledged the extent of Soviet military failure. Order No. 227 tasked commanders with eliminating “all notions of retreat”, and threatened them with court-martial for allowing troops to abandon their positions. The order called for the formation of penal battalions (shtrafbaty) for officers of approximately 800 men, and penal companies (shtrafroty) of between 150 and 200 soldiers and junior officers, “guilty of breaking discipline through cowardice or instability”. These were to be stationed on the most difficult sectors of the front, “so that they might atone for their crimes against the Motherland with their own blood”.37 Penal battalions were not an immediate death sentence, but those sent to serve within them faced hazardous deployments, and suffered very high casualty rates. Provided they survived their allocated period of service, usually three months, soldiers were rehabilitated and returned to regular units. By the end of the war, “the Red Army had 65 shtrafbaty and 1,048 shtrafroty in which 427,910 men had 32 Overy, Russia’s War, 80–81; Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 32–33; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 98; Hill, The Red Army, 223. 33 Reese, Why Stalin’s Solders Fought, 162. 34 Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 (London, 2006), 237. 35 Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 101; Merridale, “Culture, Ideology and Combat”, 318. 36 Grossman, A Writer at War, 219. 37 “Prikaz o merakh po ukrepleniiu distsipliny i poriadka v krasnoi armii i zapreshchenii samovol’nogo otkhoga s boevykh pozitsii, No. 227, 28 iiulia 1942 g”, in Russkii Arkhiv: ­Velikaia otechestvennaia: Prikazy Narodnogo Komissara Oborony sssr, 22 iiunia 1941 g. – 1942 g. T. 13 (2–2), ed., V.A. Zolotarev, 276–79.

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served”.38 In addition, Order No. 227 called for the creation of blocking detachments of up 200 men, to be deployed behind unstable divisions, which, “in the event of panic or disorderly retreat of part of the division”, were to “shoot scaremongers and cowards on the spot (…)”39 Blocking detachments were, of course, not new; they had been established in principle since June 1941 and in practice since September 1941. Indeed, some soldiers, such as Vladimir Gelfand, welcomed the attempt to re-impose discipline in their units.40 According to infantryman Mansur Abdulin, “the order provided a strong psychological incentive for the men. As did the knowledge that there were special holding detachments in the rear, authorized to shoot anyone who actually did drop back (…)”41 Other post-Soviet memoirs echo the sentiment that the order to take “not one step back” was necessary.42 Blocking detachments, however, were never intended to execute stragglers indiscriminately, but rather to intimidate soldiers into maintaining their positions. In practice, the implementation of the order varied. The responsibility for dealing with indiscipline and retreating soldiers often fell on inexperienced officers concerned to avoid accusations of leniency. The ambiguity and imprecision which surrounded the application of lethal discipline within the Red Army was typical of Stalinist inducements to employ state-sanctioned violence, something which helps explain the extent and escalation of violence. Scholars largely agree that although fear – of both the enemy and the nkvd – was widespread, it was never sufficient to motivate soldiers on its own. As Richard Overy writes, “Not every soldier stood with a gun to his back; not every instance of self-sacrifice and courageous defiance was a product of coercion or fear”.43 Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the failure of coercive measures to improve combat performance was the extraordinary number of Soviet soldiers who, despite the risks, stopped fighting. Alexander Dallin calculated, in figures published in 1957 but still commonly cited, that 5,754,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner between 1941 and 1945, of whom 3,355,000 or 58 per cent were taken in 1941.44 Many of these soldiers, especially those caught in 38 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 165–66. 39 “Prikaz o merakh po ukrepleniiu distsipliny i poriadka v krasnoi armii”, 278. 40 Vladimir Gel’fand, Dnevnik 1941–1946. 2-e izdanie (Moscow, 2016), 102. 41 Mansur Abdulin, Red Road from Stalingrad: Recollections of a Soviet Infantryman, trans. Denis Fedosov (Barnsley, 2004), 31. 42 Nikolai Amosov, Moia voina: Polevoi gospital’ (Moscow, 2016), 76. 43 Overy, Russia’s War, 161; Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 175. 44 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945. A Study in Occupation Policies (New York NY, 1980), 427; Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 22–23; Aron Shneer, Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 2005), 93–99.

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the encirclement battles of 1941, were victims of a hopeless military situation, and may have continued fighting in less desperate circumstances. Surrender was frequently a survival strategy; a way of escaping death.45 Yet soldiers continued to be taken prisoner, to defect across the lines, and to desert long after blocking detachments and penal units became well-established. “Overall, in 1942 and 1943”, according to figures cited by Reese, “the nkvd caught nearly 1.25 million men who were away from their units without documents, and it rounded up and sent back their units another 200,000 stragglers”.46 Even after the tide of the war turned decisively in the Red Army’s favour soldiers deserted and defected in surprising numbers. The percentage of defectors, pows who made conscious decisions to go over to the enemy, increased in 1944 and 1945, despite the Red Army’s improving fortunes, and the prospect that defectors might be recaptured by victorious Soviet soldiers.47 Enemy violence, and that practiced by their own state, was never sufficient to make Soviet soldiers fight. “Desertions on this scale”, as Merridale writes, “were evidence that tyranny alone could not make heroes out of frightened men”.48 4

Training and Growing Skill

Soviet soldiers were not simply victims of violence, at the mercy of the enemy and the coercive force of the nkvd. Over time, training improved, producing capable soldiers. Nikolai Markov was drafted in January 1943 and spent several months training with a Reserve Rifle Brigade in Gorky, before experiencing frontline duty for the first time at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. “By 1943 we knew how to fight (…) It wasn’t like 1941 and 1942, when we plugged holes in the line with infantry! Indeed, the infantry was now seasoned, and the commanders by now had learned to fight”.49 Pride in professional military skills, and the mastery of the technology of modern warfare, became increasingly important to soldiers as the war progressed. Official training at military schools and in reserve battalions were supplemented by the circulation of frontline knowledge and skills. As Vitaly Ulianov, a 17-year-old soldier from Kiev who found himself at the front in 1942, explained: 45 Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 100–03. 46 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 174. 47 Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 33. 48 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 108. 49 Nikolai Dmitrievich Markov, “There Were No Long-term Survivors”, in Panzer Killers: ­Anti-Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, ed., Artem Drabkin, trans. Stuart Britton (Barnsley, 2013), 49–63, 53.

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The first battle is the hardest, because you still don’t know anything. (…) If you remained alive after your first battle – good fellow! After the second battle – a frontline solider! And after the third battle, you were a veteran! Now you knew everywhere, where to crouch, where to fall prone, where to run, what to eat, and what to discard.50 Another soldier recalled how a battle-hardened sergeant major taught him how to recognize the direction of gun fire, by making him dig a hole, crouch in it, and listen for where he was spraying the lip of the whole with submachinegun fire.51 As the Red Army’s operational effectiveness, soldiers’ confidence and experience grew, individuals and units became skilled agents in the use of violence. 5

Powerful Emotions: Hatred and Revenge

Violence stirred strong emotions in the Red Army, but fear was just one of them. Historians of 20th century warfare have suggested that some men fought and continued to fight because they derived pleasure and satisfaction from combat, and opportunities to practice lethal violence.52 Scholars of the Soviet war effort have tended to avoid suggesting that the Red Army enjoyed enacting violence. Yet historians have also accepted that the desire to extract revenge on the enemy drove soldiers to fight and keep fighting. As Mark Edele and Michael Geyer write, “rage was also a powerful incentive to kill – both on the field of battle and between engagements”.53 Looking back decades later, Ilya Kobylyanskiy explained his hatred of the Germans: “As I fought on, I tried to take revenge on them for all of their monstrous offenses”. As he witnessed and heard stories of atrocities his hatred only increased: One could not but hate the invaders for the ‘scorched earth’ that I saw in the region between the Volga and Don rivers (…) I hated them for burning the central part of the city of Stalino and for destroying and depopulating Sevastopol, as well as for the hundreds of thousands of youth they commandeered for slave labor in Germany (…) 50 51 52 53

Vitalty Andreevich Ulianov, “The First Battle is the Hardest”, in Panzer Killers, 16–17. Boris Vasil’evich Nazarov, “A fight to the Finish”, in Panzer Killers, 92. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998), 339–66, especially 357–66; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London, 1999), 13–43; Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession (London, 2015), 137–38. Edele and Geyer, “States of Exception”, 389.

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After seeing and hearing all of this, how could I not feel a fierce hatred towards the Germans?54 This visceral hatred of the enemy was fed by the propaganda apparatus. Soviet hate propaganda de-humanized the enemy, circulated knowledge about Nazi atrocities, and exhorted Soviet soldiers to seek revenge and kill the enemy. The wartime press began to inculcate hatred, and demand revenge soon after the German invasion, becoming more intense over time.55 On 6 June 1942 Pravda published an editorial which presented a “Soviet Patriot” as “a person who everywhere, even in the most distant hinterland, sees the hated enemy before him, senses his terrible breath – and kills him”.56 Hatred became a civic duty, a mark of a genuine patriot.57 To quote Stalin: “It was impossible to beat an enemy without having learned to hate him with all the might of the soul”.58 The most infamous exhortations to revenge were written by the journalist and publicist Ilya Ehrenburg.59 He noted, in his post-war memoirs, that “during the first months of the war our soldiers did not feel any real hatred for the German army”, something that he worked assiduously to combat.60 Ehrenburg launched a ferocious appeal to eradicate the enemy in the pages of Krasnaia zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, in July 1942: We remember everything. We understood: the Germans are not humans. From now the word ‘German’ for us is the most terrible curse. From now the word German unloads a firearm. We won’t discuss. We won’t be outraged. We will kill. If on a given day you haven’t killed a single German, your day has been wasted (…) If you can’t kill the German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet (…) If you have killed one German, kill ­another one – there is nothing more entertaining than German corpses 54

Isaak Kobylyanskiy, From Stalingrad to Pillau: A Red Army Officer Remembers the Great Patriotic War, ed., Stuart Britton (Lawrence KS, 2008), 239. 55 E.S. Seniavskaia, Protivniki Rossii v voinakh xx veka: Evoliutsiia “obraza vraga” v soznanii armii i obshchestva (Moscow, 2006), 80–97; Argyrios K. Pisiotis, “Images of Hate in the Art of War”, in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed., Richard Stites, 141–56. 56 “Sovetskii patriot”, Pravda, 6 July 1942, 1. 57 Here I paraphrase Serhy Yekelchyk, “The City Duty to Hate: Stalinist Citizenship as Political Practice and Civic Emotion (Kiev, 1943–53)”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006), 529–56; Serhy Yekelchuk, Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford, 2014), 9–33. 58 Stalin’s words appear in a slogan at the top of Mikhail Sholokhov, “Nauka nenavisti”, Krasnaia zvezda, 23 June 1943, 3. 59 Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 182–93. 60 Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years – Life, vol. 5 The War 1941–45, trans. Tatiana Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (London, 1964), 5, 26–27.

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(…) Kill the German! The native soil cries out for this. Don’t miss the chance. Don’t let it slip. Kill!61 This was a refrain that Ehrenburg, and others particularly Konstantin Simonov, continually repeated.62 Writing on 13 August 1942 Ehrenburg reminded Krasnaia zvezda’s readers of the imperative to kill: Now there are no books, no life, no stars – only one thought: kill the ­Germans. Slaughter them all. Bury them. (…) We will no longer say ‘good morning’ or ‘good night’ In the morning we will say, ‘kill the German’, and at night, ‘kill the German’.63 As the war progressed through phases of defence, reclamation of territory, and then conquest, the imperative to hate intensified. Soldiers had to be reenergized to take the fight beyond Soviet borders. Nikolai Nikulin, for example, recalled that agitation had to be stepped up as soldiers approached the German border. Once again political officers shouted the slogans of “A death for a death!!! Blood for Blood!!! Don’t Forget!!! Don’t Forgive!!! We will avenge!!! (…)”64 The well-spring of such violence, however, was never senseless brutality, but love for the Soviet motherland, concern from one’s family, and grief for one’s fallen comrades.65 If hate propaganda gained traction, it did so because it channelled soldiers’ personal experiences of atrocity. The desire to protect endangered loved ones, and avenge members of new frontline families, became important sources of wartime motivation. Rather than fighting for violence’s sake, individuals were usually protecting their homes, families, and the wider Soviet collective.66 Nevertheless, vengeful passions were hard to restrain once stirred, especially once the Red Army was fighting beyond Soviet borders. Violent collectives of soldiers, partisans, security forces, and disbanded military units enacted extreme violence against civilians within and beyond

61 62

Il’ia Erenburg, “Ubei”, Krasnaia zvezda, 24 July 1942, 4. On Simonov and his poem “Kill Him” see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008), 414–15. 63 Il’ia Erenburg, “Pomni”, Krasnaia zvezda, 13 August 1942, 3. 64 Nikulin, Vospominaniia o voine, 207. 65 “Liubov” k rodine i nenavist, k vragu”, Pravda, 18 May 1943, 1; “Nenavist k vragu”, Pravda, 11 July 1942, 1. 66 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families’, Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War ii Propaganda”, Slavic Review 59 (2000), 825–47, 838.

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Soviet space, and long after the war was won. Much of this violence was generated from below and was intended to punish and humiliate enemies or collaborators.67 Although we might discern groups of men revelling in aggressive masculine behaviour, the overwhelming number of demobilized veterans did not experience long-term brutalization, but succeeded in compartmentalizing their wartime experiences.68 6

The Mobilizing Force of Ideas

If the Red Army was not simply coerced by violence, or compelled by hate propaganda, an alternative argument, prominent in the historiography, is that soldiers were inspired by ideas. As Gabriel Temkin put it, “It was the great collective fear of annihilation, turned into hate, the desire for revenge, and finally into the ‘cause’, which inspired the Red Army during this war”.69 For Temkin that “cause” was patriotism.70 Historians, however, disagree about what ideas were capable of mobilizing and motivating millions of soldiers. Two contenders have come to dominate the debate: first, the power of Soviet socialism, in the guise of Stalinist ideology, and second, patriotism for the Soviet motherland. Although, historians have frequently presented these two ideas as binary opposites, with the literature lining up official ideology against popular patriotism, my contention is that these ideas operated in a similar intellectual space, and both had a limited capacity to inspire on the battlefield. 6.1 Official Stalinist Ideology As Michael David-Fox has argued, the history of Soviet society cannot be written without due consideration of the role of ideology.71 The power of ideas in a militantly ideological state should not be dismissed. This holds true for both the military and civilian spheres. Long before the invasion of the Soviet 67

Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge MA, 1995), 33–140; Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans, 26–28; Filip Slaveski, The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence, and the Struggle for Peace, 1945–1947 (Cambridge, 2013), 28–43; Mark Edele and Filip Slaveski, “Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilian across Soviet Space, 1943–1947”, Europe-Asia Studies 68 (2016), 1020–35. 68 Robert Dale, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians (London, 2015), 131–56. 69 Temkin, My Just War, 176. 70 Temkin, My Just War, 34. 71 Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh PA, 2015), 75.

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Union in June 1941, the Stalinist system proved itself adapt at mobilizing large segments of society behind political projects.72 The youngest generation of the Red Army, the so-called frontline generation, upon whom the burden of wartime casualties fell particularly heavily, was born or grew up under socialism, and was socialized in its values. As the frontline soldier Viacheslav Kondriatev explained, “There was much in the system that we did not accept, but we could not imagine any other kind”.73 Historians of Stalinist subjectivities, in particular, have argued that Soviet citizens were shaped by the regime’s ideology, to the extent that they found it difficult to escape official language and discourse.74 The ideas and values inculcated during the 1930s did not evaporate once soldiers reached the frontlines, but continued to impinge on mentalities and behaviour. Although Soviet soldiers were a product of official ideology, it is unclear that the Red Army fought solely of out of belief in socialism, or Stalinist conviction. Veterans’ memories of the importance of ideology at the frontlines, and its role in combat motivation, vary enormously. Many frontline veterans, regardless of their politics, expressed doubt that soldiers went on the attack shouting “For Stalin! For the Motherland” as they were portrayed in post-war novels and films. Soldiers remembered swearing, but not charging into battle with Stalin’s name on their lips. As Nikolai Nikulin recalled, “Hoarse cries and deeply obscene swearing could be heard on the frontlines, while bullets and shrapnel had not shut up screaming voices”, but not cries of Stalin. “Commissars tried to drum it (For Stalin!) into our heads, but commissars weren’t in the attack”.75 The slogan itself had been appearing in the press, and repeated at meetings, from almost the very start of the war.76 Yet whether soldiers cried Stalin’s name in the heat of battle or not was a poor indicator of their politics. As Grigorii Chukrai explained in his memoirs, “What we cried going into the attacks was not so important, many of us really were Stalinists”.77 Amongst the survivors were soldiers who claimed to be loyal Stalinists, as well as those more sceptical about the mobilizing force of socialism. Some soldiers, like Vladimir Gelfand, idolized Stalin and followed his wartime speeches with rapture.78 72

David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford, 2007). 73 Quoted in Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, ed., and trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk NY, 1998), 26. 74 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 20. 75 Nikulin, Vospominaniia o voine, 48. 76 “Za Rodiny, za Stalina!”, Krasnaia zvezda, 24 June 1941, 2. 77 Grigorii Chukhrai, Moia voina (Moscow, 2001), 281. 78 Gel’fand, Dnevnik 1941–1946, 219.

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The t­ estimony of veterans who identified as true-believing Stalinist, however, should be balanced against those who experienced the war, in Mikhail Gefter’s oft quoted phrase as a form of “spontaneous de-stalinization”.79 The military disasters of 1941, and the conduct of the war in general, shook many individuals’ faith in the system. The literary historian Lazar Lazarev, himself a veteran, expressed this better than almost anyone: Before the war we had not questioned anything, we believed all the propaganda about Stalin, and believed in the Party as the embodiment of justice. But what we saw in the first years of the war forced us to reflect on what we had been told. It made us question our beliefs.80 Soldiers’ accounts are not necessarily accurate reflections of their wartime beliefs. Memoirs and memories were frequently shaped by the political atmosphere in which they were written or recorded; many veterans internalized comforting official myths. However, the range of political views expressed by veterans was not simply the product of post-war manipulation and misremembering. In the immediate wake of war a notably wide range of political opinions was available to veterans. As Mark Edele has argued, veterans expressed a remarkable spectrum of political ideas and opinions, ranging from, “an embrace of an idealized version of Western liberal democracy and capitalism to ‘Stalinism’ – with all possible shades of gray between”.81 Those who were fighting actively for, or indeed against, Stalinism were a small minority. Most Soviet soldiers, like the rest of Soviet society, were primarily concerned with their own survival, rather than ideology.82 Nevertheless, many scholars have pointed to the power of ideology to inspire victory. Pre-war party and Komsomol members were well represented within the Red Army’s ranks, with many communists volunteering to fight in the summer of 1941. Indeed, party membership increased dramatically during the war, high casualty rates necessitating a recruitment drive. Decrees passed in August and December 1941 lowered entry criteria, sweeping aside formalities for soldiers who had proved themselves in battle.83 Nearly 80 per cent of new

79 80 81

Mikhail Gefter, Iz tekh i etikh let (Moscow, 1991), 418–23. Quoted in Figes, The Whisperers, 433. See also Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 64–66. Mark Edele, “More than Just Stalinists: The Political Sentiments of Victors 1945–1953”, in Late Stalinist Russia, 167–91, 174. 82 Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 9–10, 119, 176–78. 83 Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945– 1953 (Oxford, 2004), 182.

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party recruits were from the armed forces.84 By the summer of 1945 approximately three million party members, and 2.4 million Komsomol members, were in uniform.85 Many citizens for whom party membership was an unlikely prospect before the war now found themselves inducted into the ranks of the governing party. This circumstance affected both the social composition of the party, and how socialism was practiced within party cells. Party membership conferred on the frontlines did not equate with an orthodox understanding or acceptance of Stalinism. The brand of communism which soldiers practiced on the frontlines was their own political philosophy, not just a carbon copy of the ideas expressed by political officers. As Merridale writes, “Front-line ideology was strong and deeply rooted, but it was also so distinct from that of the civilian élite that it might have been evolving in another universe”.86 This disparity between frontline and civilian understandings of ideology became clearer after the war as millions of communists, with a rudimentary knowledge of Bolshevik ideology and the conventions of civilian party life, were demobilized.87 “This might have been a war of ideologies”, to quote Edele, “but not everybody caught up in it was ideologically motivated”.88 Although the bulk of the Red Army’s soldiers were not ideological warriors, but rather non-committal citizens struggling to survive, there is little doubt that the propaganda and political apparatus helped mobilize them. The Main Political Administration of the Red Army (GlavPUR), represented on the frontlines by political officers, known as commissars, was responsible for inspiring heroic deeds and providing political education, not just fostering hatred. GlavPUR, in Reese’s words, aimed to make recruits “better socialists, better servants of the party, and better soldiers”.89 During their training and while in the frontlines, soldiers were subjected to a barrage of propaganda which was difficult to avoid.90 Rather than recalling political lectures laced with references to Stalin’s speeches, some veterans remembered their political officers with fondness. Nikolai Markov, echoing a famous Stalinist mantra, paid respect to commissars as “engineers of human souls”: It is hard for a man in war; someone has to chat with him. These fellows (political workers) were civilized, mannerly. They did their duty 84

Cynthia S. Kaplan, “The Impact of World War ii on the Party”, in The Impact of World War ii on the Soviet Union, ed., Susan J. Linz (Totawa NJ, 1985), 157–87, 160. 85 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 34–35; Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 168. 86 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 199. 87 Dale, Demobilized Veterans, 165–69. 88 Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 10, 119. 89 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 197. 90 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 94–96.

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to ­nurture the human soul. (…) It all depended on the man, but generally speaking, they were ordinary guys. They cultivated a proper attitude among the men toward each other.91 Many political officers took these pastoral responsibilities seriously. As Hellbeck writes, “Commissars saw themselves as responsible for not only the mental health of the soldiers but also their physical well-being (...)”92 At times of enormous psychological pressure, commissars could be an important source of support. The ideological reach of the political administration and its officers, however, was more circumscribed than is often appreciated. Commissars might provide solace in moments of crisis, but this did not mean that they ­successfully inculcated ideological messages. If the propaganda state was in crisis before 1941, as David Brandenberger has argued, then it faced even greater pressures in wartime.93 Practical problems complicated the work of communicating official messages. National shortages of newsprint and strained distribution networks meant that propaganda materials, including copies of Krasnaia zvezda, were often in short supply on the frontlines. Radio broadcasts could compensate for problems in newspaper distribution on the home front, but maintaining a signal in frontline conditions was difficult.94 Qualified and experienced agitators were rare commodities; those that were available found it difficult to persuade cynical battle-hardened soldiers of the official line. In the early months of the war, “soldiers at the front openly scoffed at the inaccurate report of supposed Soviet success and German weakness and took a jaundiced view of whatever GlavPUR had to say”.95 Questions about the effectiveness of political work continued to be raised throughout the war. In the wake of the battle of Stalingrad even Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, the best known of the Red Army’s commanders on the Volga, questioned the value of propaganda and agitation: “The political work was conducted haphazardly, but it was appropriate to the circumstances. During such dangerous times a soldier doesn’t need lectures or clever slogans. He needs to know that his high command is with him, that his commander is with him”.96 91 Markov, “There Were No Long-term Survivors”, 61–62. 92 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 44. 93 David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven CT, 2011). 94 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 193–95; Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 7–34. On wartime radio see Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford, 2015), 107–33. 95 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 193. 96 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 274.

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6.2 Patriotism If the capacity of Soviet ideology and Stalinist propaganda to inspire soldiers has been questioned, the mobilizing force of patriotism has become a mainstay of explanations of why the Red Army fought and kept fighting. National pride, and protecting the Motherland from an abhorrent invader, undoubtedly served as rallying points around which the war effort could form. The surge in patriotism provoked by the outbreak of the war is universally accepted. Between 1941 and 1945, according to one of the few scholars to interrogate the meaning of patriotism, the war fused the ethnic (russkii) and the imperial (rossiiskii) dimensions of Russian national identity, creating a new Russian national consciousness.97 There are, however, problems in presenting patriotism as an alternative to official ideology. Soviet notions of patriotism were themselves mediated through the ideological apparatus, and were never entirely separate from Stalinist ideology. The language and symbols of Russian national identity were revived by the party-state long before June 1941, and had been at the core of Stalinist discourse for some time. In the mid-1930s propaganda was already fostering love for the motherland, and presenting patriotism as integral to the construction of socialism.98 Appeals to patriotism continued, and indeed strengthened, following the Nazi invasion. In his radio address to the nation, announcing the German attack on 22 June 1941, Molotov invoked the memory of Napoleon’s attack in 1812, declaring that the “The Red Army and our people will again wage a victorious patriotic war for the motherland, for honour and freedom”.99 Such sentiments rapidly gained traction in the press and public discourse. By 28 June, Krasnaia zvezda’s editorial was once again calling for a “sacred patriotic war against the invading fascist vandals”.100 Patriotic slogans such as these rapidly established themselves in the press.101 Visual propaganda, in particular, played upon patriotic calls to arms, and appeals to defend the motherland (rodina), frequently

97

Geoffrey Hosking, “The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness”, Past and Present 175 (2002), 162–87, 163. 98 Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline in Communism in Russia (New York NY, 1946); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge MA, 2002); Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 98–119. 99 “Vystuplenie po radio Zamestitelia Predsedatelia Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov Soiuza ssr i Narodnogo Komissara Inostrannykh Del tov. V.M. MOLOTOVA 22 Iunia 1941 goda”, Krasnaia zvezda, 24 June 1941, 1. 100 “Sviashchennaia otechestvennaia voina sovetskogo naroda”, Krasnaia zvezda, 28 June 1941, 1. 101 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton NJ, 2000), 159–60.

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represented in female form, from invading forces.102 Mass song, popular both within and beyond the Red Army, sought to mobilize patriotic emotions through rousing tunes, lyrics which evoked the landscape, and collective acts of singing.103 According to Merridale, “music like this worked better than the prim rote-learning of the politruks (political instructors)”, but many songs were not without their ideological component.104 Political education also strove to encourage patriotic sentiment. Commissars, as Afanasy Svirin explained after Stalingrad, taught soldiers: our Russian military traditions. We often quoted our great military leaders, who said that to protect your wives and children you must defend the fatherland, you must give everything to defend the fatherland. We told them about the heroic deeds of Ivan Susanin [a widely celebrated 17th century Russian national hero] and gave many other examples from the history of the Russian people.105 Wartime patriotism, then, was shaped and influenced by the propaganda apparatus, and never ideologically neutral. Nevertheless, a popular grass-roots dimension to patriotism survived. Local patriotism, the impulse to protect home and family, as we have already seen, was as much part of wartime Soviet patriotism as grand visions of the Soviet motherland.106 Propaganda played on these emotions, in part because they were genuine. Just as soldiers practiced their own form of socialism, frontline patriotism had its own specificities. To quote Merridale, “The patriotism of the front was not the dour stuff of later ceremonial. It was maudlin, desperate, a way of clinging to the pre-war world that had been lost, a way of honouring the friends who died”.107 If we begin to consider the remarkable social and ethnic diversity of the Red Army, the limitations of socialism and patriotism as mobilizing forces become clearer. The urban working classes, for example, were more likely to have internalized propaganda messages and ideological positions than the peasant 102 For example: Irakli Toidze, The Motherland is Calling! (1941), Viktor Ivanov, For the Mother­ land, for Honour, for Freedom! (1941). 103 Robert A. Rothstein, “Homeland, Home Town, and Battlefield: The Popular Song”, in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed., Richard Stites, 77–94; Suzanne Ament, “Reflecting Individual and Collective Identities: Songs of World War ii”, in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture, eds., Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (Dekalb IL, 2006), 113–30. 104 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 170. 105 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 149. 106 Kirschenbaum, “Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families”. 107 Merridale, “Culture, Ideology, and Combat”, 315.

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s­ oldiers who were the core of the Red Army. Female soldiers, of whom there were nearly a million in the armed forces, as predominately young, educated, urban, Komsomol members, were more likely to be committed communists than their male counterparts.108 The gamut of ideas, emotions, and impulses capable of motivating men held a broadly similar appeal to women. Yet women also had their own motivations to serve, which included notions of gender equality and a determination to demonstrate what they were capable of.109 Although women were not expected to volunteer to serve, as Roger Reese argues, “many felt compelled to do so to demonstrate that, as citizens, they were the equal of men”.110 Sadly, many women experienced abuse, discrimination, and vicious taunts about their sexual conduct during and after their service, undermining lingering beliefs in Stalinist society’s commitment to gender equality.111 Similarly, the appeal to patriotic sentiment gained different levels of traction beyond ethnic Russians. Soldiers from the non-Russian nationalities often had additional reasons to serve. Jewish soldiers had special reason for fearing and hating the enemy, but they also had to contend with anti-Semitic slurs and harassment from within their own ranks.112 Soldiers from the Soviet Union’s western borderlands, particularly western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the Baltics, territories only recently acquired, had every reason to resent a Russocentric form of patriotism. They often served reluctantly, and many deserted or defected to the enemy.113 In the early phase of the wars, appeals to defend the Soviet motherland resonated even less with men from the Central Asian republics. Persuading Central Asians to fight for the Soviet state, whilst knowledge and understanding of its ideology was so weak, proved very difficult. Kazakh and Kyrgyz conscripts were initially reluctant recruits and were forcibly drafted into the Red Army. Rebellions against conscription in the Caucasus were not unheard of.114 Things were little better once soldiers reached their units. 108 Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge, 2010); Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2012). 109 Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 137–43. 110 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 269. 111 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 206–09; Reese, Why Stalin’s Solders Fought, 291–303; Markwick and Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline, 239–41. 112 Oleg Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front”, in Soviet Jews in World War ii: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, ed., Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (Boston MA, 2014), 57–84, 76–77; Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 107–8. 113 Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 146–47, 250–52. 114 Moritz Florin, “Becoming Soviet through War: The Kyrgyz and the Great Fatherland War”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17 (2016), 495–516, 495–500; Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought, 141–46.

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Non-Russians were generally seen as a problem by commanders, their resilience in battle and political loyalty questioned. Poor training and difficulties following commands in Russian, the official language of command in the Red Army, meant that Central Asian soldiers suffered especially high casualties.115 Over time the Red Army’s Political Department, and Soviet propaganda more widely, refined its messages to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek soldiers, and began to integrate non-Russians more successfully into a Soviet identity.116 Nevertheless, non-Russian soldiers continued to suffer derision and abuse. They were often assigned some of the most difficult and dangerous tasks in their sectors. As Brandon Schechter, observes, “Indifference and hostility toward ‘non-Russians’ by many of their commanders could be shockingly callous”.117 7

Frontline Communities and Social Support

In general, Soviet soldiers were more likely to be fighting for a sense of local community than for an overarching Soviet identity. That sense of community also included the ‘fictive kinship’ established amidst the shared suffering and hardship of the frontlines. The Red Army fought not only for families and loved ones, but also for members of the ‘frontline brotherhood’, the small tightlyknit groups of friends which were so important in sustaining morale. Military historians have long acknowledged the critical role of these ‘primary groups’ in combat effectiveness.118 Hellbeck questions the contribution that frontline bonds played in the Red Army, arguing that “the terrible casualty rate on the Soviet side consumed whole units in a matter of days”, which, “made it impossible for soldiers to develop personal cohesion”.119 Others have noted the challenges low life expectancy and rapid turnover created for the formation of

115 Brandon Schechter, “‘The People’s Instructions’: Indigenizing the Great Patriotic War Among ‘Non-Russians’,” Ab Imperio 3 (2012), 109–33, 109–16. 116 Schechter, “The People’s Instructions”; Roberto J. Carmack, “History and Hero-making: Patriotic Narratives and the Sovietization of Kazakh Front-line Propaganda, 1941–1945”, Central Asian Survey 33 (2014), 95–112; Boram Shin, “Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism in World War ii”, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 42 (2015), 39–63; Florin, “Becoming Soviet Through War”. 117 Schechter, ‘The People’s Instructions’, 112. 118 For example, Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War ii”, Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948), 280–315. 119 Hellbeck, Stalingrad, 22.

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primary groups in both the Red Army and other forces.120 Without doubt the membership of these primary groups was constantly shifting, as soldiers were killed, captured, or injured. As Nikolai Markov explained in his memoirs, “By September 1943 there weren’t any of the men left in my platoon with whom I’d started. The platoon was constantly being rebuilt and men were always rotating in and out of it”.121 Despite the odds against it, there were soldiers who did survive, and could become the pivots around which primary groups formed. Soldiers’ accounts often have much to say about wartime friendships, or the relationship between officers and men. As Reese explains, “veterans almost always mention the names of five or fewer wartime comrades who made a difference in their lives”. These friends, perhaps alongside a trusted officer or a compassionate political instructor, were critical in keeping fear in check.122 Furthermore, in the heightened sensory environment of the frontlines, it did not take long for strong emotional bonds to form. As one soldier wrote to the fiancée of a deceased comrade after the war: Life at the front brings people together very quickly. It’s enough to spend one or two days with someone, and you know all his characteristics and all his feelings in a way you would never know them in peacetime, even after a whole year. There is nothing stronger than front-line friendship, and nothing can break it, not even death.123 Frontline life threw soldiers into remarkable proximity, so close that they grew accustomed to the smell of each other’s sweat and unwashed bodies.124 They slept side by side, ate from the same pot, and shared almost everything, even their letters. Dead comrades remained with their friends long after they were buried; their deaths provided another reason for revenge. Years later veterans still remembered their comrades, attempted to trace the graves and relatives of fallen friends, and corresponded with fellow survivors. Comradeship helped make the pressures of battle more bearable, but so did the cultures and practices that emerged within the Red Army. Even amidst the death and destruction the routines of frontline life helped sustain soldiers. “War is never only about killing and dying”, as Oleg Budnitskii reminds us; “Card-playing, drinking, singing, jealousy, love, and theft were all part of the 120 Merridale, “Culture, Ideology, and Combat”, 322; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 173–74; Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 2nd ed., (Houndmills, 2001), 36–37. 121 Markov, “There Were No Long-term Survivors”, 53. 122 Reese, Why Did Stalin’s Soldiers Fight, 218. 123 Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie, 85–86. 124 Jug, “Sensing Danger”, 222–23.

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war”.125 For scholars of the First World War, where studies of frontline conditions are more advanced, this will hardly be a revelation. Yet, only relatively recently have historians of the Red Army begun to strip away the myths woven around the Soviet war experience. Over a decade ago, Catherine Merridale’s ground-breaking social history of the Red Army demonstrated the role improved rations, a sturdy pair of boots, a rousing song or smutty joke, receiving a letter or parcel from home, a swig of vodka or a drag on a cigarette, played in enabling soldiers to survive the frontlines.126 A new generation of scholars is now taking on the challenge of revealing in ever greater detail the complexities of wartime military culture. New research is revealing the Red Army’s military culture, the social bonds created by communal eating, the relationship between genders and ethnic groups, as well as more nuanced emotional and sensory histories.127 Nevertheless, much work remains to explore the inner turmoil unleashed by extreme violence, what Alexis Peri terms “the war within”, something which we understand better in civilian contexts.128 We still know, for example, little about the jokes and rumours that circulated on the frontlines, or the language and slang that soldiers spoke amongst themselves, as opposed to the phrases uttered at political meetings, or the words scrawled to relatives in letters. All of these might reveal more about how ideas and information circulated within the ranks, and help us better understand how soldiers adapted and ­internalized propaganda messages. Better access to the archives of the Ministry of Defence and the Military Medical Academy might inform more subtle understandings of combat breakdown, and the war’s effects on minds and bodies. 8 Conclusion No single factor adequately explains why the core of the Red Army fought and continued to fight in the face of such exceptional violence and suffering. Fear, coercion, ideology, propaganda, patriotism, and primary groups all played 125 Budnitskii, “Jews at War”, 58. 126 Merridale, Ivan’s War. 127 Brandon Schechter, “Khoziaistvo and Khoziaeva: The Properties and Proprietors of the Red Army, 1941–45”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18 (2016), 487–510; Brandon Schechter, “The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon: Rations (Paëk) in the Red Army”, in Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War ii, eds., Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (Bloomington IN, 2015), 98–157; Steven G. Jug, “Red Army Romance: Preserving Masculine Hegemony in Mixed Gender Combat Units, 1943– 1944”, Journal of War and Culture Studies 5 (2012), 321–34; Jug, “Sensing Danger”. 128 Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge MA, 2017).

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their part in motivating soldiers. Not all Soviet soldiers fought for the same reasons, and those reasons changed over the time. The wars of defence, liberation and re-conquest necessitated different attitudes from soldiers and commanders. In other words, Soviet soldiers were human beings with complicated inner worlds and their own diverse motivations to serve, not passive subjects of Soviet power. Nevertheless, the extreme violence, the scale of death and destruction on the Eastern Front, and the highly ideological nature of the conflict, have made the Soviet experience an important test case for why soldiers endured the horror of modern industrialized warfare. However, the prominence of ideology and patriotism in professional historians’ explanations of what and whom Soviet soldiers were fighting perhaps reveals more about the interests and historiographical preoccupations of those historians than the interests of ‘ordinary soldiers’. Most soldiers were desperately trying to survive, rather than thinking deeply about socialism or the motherland. Although Soviet soldiers faced great violence at the hands of the enemy, and were subject to the coercive force of Stalinist violence, the Red Army fought for many of the same reasons as soldiers everywhere. They were fighting for each other, and for their families and communities, rather than for the party or Stalin. As in other armies, primary groups and wartime emotions were more effective at mobilizing soldiers than propaganda alone. Soviet soldiers, then, were anything but the faceless unthinking brutes or superhuman heroes of Cold War mythology. They had much in common with combatants of the First and Second World wars from across Europe. Rather than being a special case, Russia and the Soviet Union were part of a wider world at war.

part 3 Civilians under Fire

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Chapter 7

Against Civilians: Atrocities, Extermination, and Genocide from One World War to the Other, 1942/44–1914 Annette Becker Translated by Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses Have the crimes against civilians of the two world wars ever been considered as a single phenomenon, and if so on what basis? In the autumn of 1942, George Orwell, in London, reflected on one of the paradoxes created by wartime acts of cruelty: they are always simply denounced as the work of the enemy camp and never fully examined in their own right. Sometimes – as occurred after the Great War – their very occurrence is denied. As Orwell put it, “everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side”. But, this most politically committed of writers added, “the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen (…) These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on”.1 Orwell was not alone in this sentiment. Beginning in the summer of 1940, Marc Bloch, historian and veteran of the two world wars, arrived at more or less the same conclusion: he too accused the media, public opinion, military men and politicians of being too sluggish in their thinking, failing to appreciate what was happening all around them.2 It is true that the Nazi horrors were regularly denounced, but rarely was there more than a moral condemnation, a form of setting the stage for a punishment to come, even in the face of public protests. Most contemporaries were, in effect, still in the grip of the propaganda lies and exaggerations of the First World War, finished some 25 years earlier, not to mention those of the more recent Abyssinian and Spanish conflicts. There were, however, many – like Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill – who were convinced of the existence of an eternal and ­uninterrupted thread of German barbarism, and who, as late as 1942 (and 1 George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, in The Complete Works of George Orwell vol. xiii All Propaganda is Lies. 1941–1942, ed., Peter Davidson (London 1998), 497–511, 499–500. 2 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London, 1999), passim.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_009

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in some cases even later) still saw the horrors of the new conflict as the direct continuation of those of the First World War. In interpreting the events of 1942–1944 in the light of 1914, this chapter will be deliberately retrospective, but never anachronic. In writing it, I am following the intellectual path set out by John Horne, who for 25 years has been my best interlocutor as I attempt to bind the two world wars together. We both agree that to understand the ordeal of civilians at a time of absolute violence, one must also come to grips with those who were unable to comprehend what was happening before their eyes, out of blindness, laziness, or, worse, simple disinterest. Myths and rumours were used at the time to escape the reality of catastrophes that were only too genuine, and that stance is even, at times, replicated today. To write History on such difficult subjects requires an ethical commitment that John Horne embodies at the very highest level.3 1

“Nazi War on Jews. Deliberate Plan for Extermination”

On 4 December 1942, The Times cited a memorandum which had reached ­London and exposed a terrifying reality: “All others war aims of Nazism will fail in the end – and the defeat of German Fascism is inevitable – but this particular aim, a complete extermination of Jews, is already being enforced”.4 The very next day, a letter by William Temple, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, returned to this theme. Temple wrote, “I am assured by Free Church friends that I may write in their name as well as in that of members of the Church of England to express our burning indignation at this atrocity, to which the records of barbarous ages scarcely supply a parallel”.5 Confronted by the alleged clash between the prelate’s ‘civilized world’ and the Germans’ ‘new barbarism’, one could be forgiven for thinking that Europe had returned to 1914. In October 1914, after all, 93 German intellectuals and artists had signed the “Appeal to the Civilized World” to defend their country and their Kultur against the accusations of barbarism made in the first weeks of what was yet to be called a ‘Great’ or ‘World War’. Employing the anaphora “it is not true that”, the 93

3 See, in this respect, John Horne, ‘‘Propagande’ et ‘verité’ dans la Grande Guerre”, in Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, eds., Vrai et faux dans la Grande Guerre (Paris, 2004), 76–95, and “Atrocities and War Crimes”, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1 Global War, ed., Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2014), 561–83. 4 “Nazi War on Jews: Deliberate Plan for Extermination”, in The Times, 4 December 1942, 3. 5 “Nazi War on Jews. The New Barbarism. Response of Civilized World”, in The Times, 5 December 1942, 5.

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signatories had unequivocally denied the occurrence of German atrocities in Belgium, during August and early September 1914. Such actions were not just relegated exclusively to the realm of propaganda; they were actually mirrored in accusations levelled against the Russian enemy and British and French colonial forces: “It is not true that our warfare pays no respect to international laws. It knows no undisciplined cruelty. But in the east the earth is saturated with the blood of women and children unmercifully butchered by the wild Russian troops (…)”6 The signatories drew attention to the alliances established by British and French alike with different categories of ‘barbarians’, such as Russians, Serbs and Mongols – the true Huns, the real Attilas – as well as to their use of colonial troops: “Those who have allied themselves with Russians and Servians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of inciting Mongolians and Negroes against the white race, have no right whatever to call themselves upholders of civilization”.7 In truth, between 1914 and 1918 racism was shared out equally among all belligerents. Was the certainty shared among the Allies that Germans were cutting the hands of Belgian children not born of a simple reversal of images? First the Belgians and then the rest of the world thought that in the summer of 1914 they had seen the severed white hands which they had not wanted or known how to see when it was a case of severed black hands in Leopold ii’s Congo Free State. ‘Mythified’ hands took the place of the real atrocities which had been committed in the colonies since the 19th century (and were still being committee during the Great War), and then were put at the service of propaganda. Archbishop Temple, as he wrote to The Times, was sure of one thing: that in 1914 the real atrocities (in the plural) had preceded intoxication. As for the ongoing reality of the Second World War, it revealed itself through the Nazis’ ‘exterminationist’ horror. However, the majority of his contemporaries thought precisely the opposite – that such allegations were simply not true, and that a great deal of exaggeration was now taking place. They were determined not be taken in by a repeat of the 1914 ‘lies’ regarding German atrocities. In effect, how could people sure that their good faith had been abused during the Great War be convinced that this time around events were far vaster – in fact, on a completely different scale – than the ‘atrocities’ (whose very quotation marks, so often employed, made clear that they were a mere invention) of the First World War? They were resolved not be fooled again. This should not come as a surprise. In 1978, Jan Karski, the Polish diplomat and Home Army agent 6 Samuel Harden Church, The American Verdict on the War: A Reply to the Appeal to the Civilized World of 93 German Professors (Baltimore MD, 1915), 27. 7 Church, The American Verdict on the War, 27.

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who brought news of Nazi atrocities out of Poland in 1942, was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for what would become the latter’s film, Shoah. On camera, Karski recounted in detail his 1942 London meeting with Lord Selborne,8 commander of the Special Operations Executive: I more or less told him the whole story. And then at a certain point I finish(ed). Lord Selborne, with typical English correctness, benevolence, tolerance, rationality, answers. ‘Mr Karski, during the First World War we were propagandized that the German soldiers were crushing the heads of the Belgian babies against the walls. I think we were doing (a) good job. We had to weaken German morale. We had to arouse hostility towards Germany. The war was a very bloody war. We knew it was untrue. Speak about your problem. Your report. Try to arouse the public opinion. I want you to know you do contribute to the Allied cause. We want this kind of report. Your mission is very important’. He’s clearly telling me, ‘Mr ­Karski, you know and I know it ain’t so’. Lanzmann: It’s not true? Karski: It’s not true. Lanzmann: But it’s good for the propaganda? Karski : Yes. Lanzmann: The same problem as during the First World War? Karsi: Yes.9 Lanzmann’s questions and Karski’s two ‘yeses’ show how, just like the majority of historians until the 1990s, they too thought that the core of the ‘German atrocities’ of the Great War had been fabrications – myths such as those of the ‘severed hands’, so well explained by John Horne and Alan Kramer in their great work on German atrocities and their denial. This chapter is, in many ways, a continuation of that volume, extending its themes so as to encompass the Second World War.10 8 9 10

Roundell Palmer, 3rd Earl Selborne, was an officer during the Great War and a personal friend of Winston Churchill. In 1942 he was named Minister of Economic Warfare, which placed him at the head of the Special Operations Executive. This exchange between Jan Karski and Claude Lanzmann, which does not appear on the final version of the latter’s film, Shoah, can nevertheless be viewed at https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003915. Accessed 2017 Oct 10. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven CT & London, 2001). See also Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, France et Belgique occupées, 1914–1918 (Paris, 2010). For an example of the long-dominant historiographical consensus on what actually occurred in 1914, with its insistence that the atrocities of the Great War were pure propaganda, never having taken place, see Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond ­Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York NY, 1986) and

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In 1921, the above-mentioned Marc Bloch turned ‘fake news’ into the object of historical inquiry: “A false news item is always born of collective representations which precede its birth; it is fortuitous in appearance only (…) the false news item is the mirror in which the ‘collective conscience’ studies its own features”.11 In 1914, the German invaders in Belgium and Northern France, perceiving enemy civilians as partisans, had considered preventive attacks necessary to ensure their own protection as the war started – hence their violent retaliation. Later, these very real atrocities – the use of civilians as human shields, their shooting as a reprisal, the rape of women – were transformed by the creation, among the Allies, of a double myth, that of the severed hands of children and of crucified soldiers. Bloch was right to recommend the study of atrocities alongside that of the known exaggerations which had emerged since 1914. Each side had used the other’s real actions – and the rumours they had given rise to – in their respective propaganda. Both real atrocities and subsequent distortions were a vital component of the attempt to demonstrate that each side’s civilization was a bulwark against the enemy’s barbarism. Real atrocities went hand-in-hand with their mythification in all areas invaded in 1914 and occupied until 1918; this was the case as well until 1920 in the areas touched by the Russian Civil War. The extermination of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire under the cover of war was the most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon. From 1914 until the 1920s it was already the case that people did not see what they did not want to see, even when it was staring them in the face. 2

The Great War’s ‘Corpse Factories’: From Glue/Leim to Lime/ Quicklime

During the 1920s, Great Britain and the United States witnessed the reappearance of one of the First World War’s most infamous anti-German scandals, that of the use of fallen combatants’ bodies (German soldiers included) in ‘corpse factories’, for unspeakable ends. While some during the war had argued – in the case of Irish MP John Dillon, during a heated debate in the House of Commons on 30 April 191712 – that the raw material in question was in fact animal

11 12

Annette Becker, Messagers du désastre, Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les génocides (Paris, 2018). To be published in English, Wisconsin University Press. Marc Bloch, “Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre”, Revue de synthèse historique 33 (1921), 13–35. “Mr. Dillon: Has the Noble Lord (Lord R. Cecil)’s attention been drawn to the fact that there has been published in the Frankfurter Zeitung and other leading German ­newspapers descriptions of this whole process, in which the word ‘cadaver’ is used, and from which it

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carcasses, others had been adamant that the bones of human corpses were being used alongside pig manure in the production of fertilizers. While in 1917 the alleged ‘corpse factories’ had only been transforming animal fat into candles and glue, confusion over words resulted – willingly or not – in inexact translations, which were then put to propaganda use. ‘Glue’, in German, is leim, similar to the English word ‘lime’, then used as a disinfectant of bodies and cemeteries. This association was quickly made, and the accounts multiplied. The Times, for example, described the goings-on at one of these plants in the following, harrowing, terms: The trains arrive full of bare bodies, which are unloaded by the workers who live at the works (…) They are equipped with long hooked poles, and push the bundles of bodies to an endless chain, which picks them up with hooks (…) The bodies are transported on this endless chain into a long, narrow compartment, where they pass through a bath which disinfects them. They then go through a drying chamber, and finally are automatically carried into a digester or great cauldron (…) In the digester they remain from six to eight hours, and are treated by steam, which breaks them up while they are slowly stirred by machinery. (…) The fats are broken up into stearine, a form of tallow, and oils (…) The process of distillation is carried out by boiling the oil with carbonate of soda, and used by German soapmakers (…) There is a laboratory and in charge of the works is a chief chemist with two assistants and 78 men. All the employees are soldiers and are attached to the 8th Army Corps (…) They are guarded as prisoners at their appalling works. It will be remembered that one of the American Consuls, on leaving Germany in February, stated in Switzerland that the Germans were distilling glycerine for nitro-glycerine from the bodies of their dead, and thus were obtaining some part of their explosives.13

13

is perfectly manifest, and stated, that these factories are for the purpose of boiling down the dead bodies of horses and other animals which are lying on the battlefield – [An hon. MEMBER: ‘Human animals!’] – and I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether the Government propose to take any steps to obtain authentic information whether this story that has been circulated is true or absolutely false? For the credit of human nature he ought to”. HC Deb 30 April 1917 vol 93 c 28. The Times, 17 April 1917, 5. The article is cited in Shimon Rubinstein, The Seventieth Anniversary of a Scandal: German Corpse Utilization Establishments in the First World War (1977, repr. Jerusalem, 1987).

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Wanting to denounce the paradox of the Germans’ ethics-starved science evident in this process, commentators sought to prove that it was precisely Germany’s very technological superiority that drove its people to more and more crimes. The many caricatures of this period make it clear that some were well aware that this denunciation was part of the ongoing propaganda campaign. On 25 April 1917, for example, under the heading “Cannon-Fodder – And After”, Punch depicted Kaiser Wilhelm ii telling a 1917-class recruit, “And don’t forget that your Kaiser will find a use for you – alive or dead”, while pointing to a smoke-covered “Corpse Factory”.14 Nevertheless, the idea that human remains were being transformed into soap can be found in numerous diaries. Rumours were born in the battlefields and the civilian areas adjacent to them. The debate surrounding the German word kadaver – used to denote both an animal carcass and a human corpse – was not settled during the Great War. It flared up again in 1925 when, during a conference in New York, Brigadier general John Charteris, once an Intelligence officer on Sir Douglas Haig’s staff, confessed to having invented the whole affair. Charteris claimed to have replaced the caption of a photograph of dead horses sent for disposal with another of soldiers being transported for burial. The world’s press had then seized on this forgery. Ten years after the conflict, the blatant misuse of images for propaganda purposes had been acknowledged by one of its practitioners, to the consternation of the British authorities, who now stood accused of manipulation. Debates in parliament ensued, as did press campaigns. Pacifists like Bertrand Russell summarily rejected all ‘German atrocities’: if some had been fabricated, why should anyone believe that others have been genuine?15 Had Charteris lied, or had he told the truth, be it in 1917, be it in 1925? Was he a true forger of falsehoods, or a false forger of truths? Once the furore had died down, everyone continued to believe what they wanted to believe. These campaigns of propaganda and counter-propaganda continued after the first global conflict, notably in Germany. Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that the British had shown themselves to be considerably stronger when it came to disinformation during the Great War; not only had their morale been strengthened by Britain’s excellent propaganda, even the German people had been convinced of the truth of British assertions. Thanks to this Greuelpropaganda, or ‘atrocity propaganda’, Hitler continued, Germany’s enemies abroad had enabled their accomplices within Germany – Socialists and, above all, Jews – to 14 15

Punch, 25 April 1917. See Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin, “Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War i”, Global Media Journal, Canadian Edition 3 (2010), 67–82.

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sharpen their daggers so as to better stab the country in the back. Viktor Klemperer, that inspired observer of the Third Reich’s language, was not surprised when the same words, the same myths, and the same debates reappeared in 1933: “The global Jews disseminate ‘atrocity propaganda’ (Greuelpropaganda) and spread ‘horror stories’ (Greuelmärchen), and if we report so much as a scrap of what happens here every day we too are guilty of disseminating atrocity propaganda and are punished accordingly”.16 In Nazi Germany, the myth of the partisans was the first of the Great War myths to reappear: it was henceforth understood that Belgian civilians had waged war on the German army during the invasion of 1914 and that the latter had been forced to defend itself. Even the “Manifesto of the 93” was once more put to use. Tellingly, from 1940 onwards the Nazis did all they could – using the archives of once-again occupied Belgium – to prove to the rest of the world that the Allied campaign about the atrocities of the First World War had been a lie and that the Kaiser’s troops had merely defended themselves against the combined aggression of soldiers and civilians alike. The Third Reich was not, however, the simple continuation of the Second. In the East it felt no need, from 1939 onwards, to ‘correct’ old propaganda claims. When the invasion of Poland was launched, barbarism against the civilian population was actually demanded, Reinhard Heydrich proclaiming that Jews were partisans and looters who should be dealt with separately. 3

“Our scepticism has been fortified by our experience with ‘atrocity stories’ during the last war”.17

Meanwhile, both Allied governments and the resistance movements in Nazioccupied countries were also busy dusting off the myths of the Great War and putting them to their own, immediate, use. ‘Partisan’ was turned into a positive term; ironically, it was the name of the resistance network to which the above-mentioned Marc Bloch belonged [Franc-Tireur]. Some of the most tired rumours of the previous conflict reappeared in 1942, tainting the reports which most seriously detailed the extermination of the Jews. When the New York Times reproduced British intelligence on the subject of the Belzec extermination camp, which stated that one million Jews had been murdered there, 16 17

Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich. lti – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London & New York NY, 2002), 30. Varian Fry, “The Massacre of the Jews”, The New Republic (New York), 21 December 1942, 816–19, 816.

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it added that human fat was being transformed into fertilizer or soap.18 Those who believed the number of Jewish victims to be grossly exaggerated immediately went on the offensive. The detail of the soap factories was used to deny the main story, that is, the mass extermination underway in Germany. This denial of the atrocities carried out in the summer of 1914 moved centre stage when, in 1942, intelligence reports regarding the extermination of the Jews began to gain consistency, resulting in poignant calls for action to save those Polish Jews still alive – calls such as those made by British campaigner Victor Gollancz and American journalist William Shirer. Still, atrocity propaganda came to interfere in this race against death, and since the German authorities knew a certain number of their own people listened to foreign radio stations, they launched a counter-offensive on the subject of Greuelpropaganda. It was at this time that the American journalist Varian Fry was kicked out of France by the Vichy regime. The Emergency Rescue Committee, which he had founded in Marseille to save Jews on the run, was shut down. At the start of 1942 he wrote, in his seminal article “The Massacre of the Jews”: We are accustomed to horrors in the historical past, and accept them (…) as phenomena of ages less enlightened than our own (…) But that such things could be done by contemporary western Europeans, heirs of the humanist tradition, seems hardly possible. Our scepticism has been fortified by our experience of ‘atrocity stories’ during the last war (…) We were told of the rape of nuns, the forced prostitution of young Belgian girls, of German soldiers spearing infants on their bayonets, or deliberately and wantonly cutting off their hands. Later, when the bitterness of war had subsided (…) most of these atrocities were found to have been invented. The natural reaction was to label all atrocity stories ‘propaganda’ and refuse to believe them.19 Fry nevertheless cast his readers’ minds back to a specific situation within the Great War – the experience of the occupied territories. There, while outright atrocities may only have taken place during the actual 1914 invasion, acts against civilians and their property continued long afterwards, in the shape of requisitions, forced labour, and deportation of populations, culminating in the retreat of 1918. Fry’s stance was similar to that of the Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin, who after reaching the United States in 1941 gave a number of talks on the suffering 18 19

New York Times, 26 November 1942, 16. Fry, “Massacre”, 816.

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of the Poles in which he compared the horror and suffering of the two world wars. But when it came to the destruction of whole peoples, the ‘atrocity lies’ of the Great War were systematically deployed against him. In 1942, reports of murders were emerging from all parts of occupied Europe but many thought them greatly exaggerated. Worse still was the total inability to differentiate between Nazi atrocities in general and the extermination of the Jews. Both Fry and Lemkin thought that violence against civilians in 1914 had been greatly underestimated. This was true both for the prolonged atrocities witnessed in the different occupations – from Belgium and northern France to Serbia and Lithuania – and for the extermination of the Armenians, whose scale was not yet appreciated. Lemkin had studied Nazi occupation policies side-by-side with those of the First World War, gathering the documents which formed the basis for his 1944 masterpiece, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he coined the word ‘genocide’.20 In this work Lemkin demonstrated that extermination, far from an accidental cruelty, was in fact the very essence of this new type of war against civilians, characterized by the desire to homogenize peoples and religions. During 1914–1918, attempts at internal reordering of populations had been at their most serious in the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Population displacements had taken the shape of social or ethnic reconstructions, from whence resulted the extermination of the Armenians and the deportations of allegedly suspect populations in Russia. These started with the Jews, the majority of whom (at a European level) resided precisely in the Pale of Settlement assigned to them by the Tsars. In 1915, Lemkin had seen his hometown of Wolkowysk – then in Russian territory – occupied and its inhabitants forced to work in the surrounding forests by the Germans. At least 600,000 Jews had been deported, victims of violence and of pogroms. They were housed in provisional camps or simply forced to start over further to the East, with no support whatsoever. Thanks to the uncompromising drawings of Abel Pann, one can today visualize these wartime pogroms: the neglect of civilians pursued into the forests covered in snow, starving, and then deported in cattle trucks. Hands are held out through uneven boards; Cossacks loot, rape, and strike women, children, and the old.21 From 1916 onwards Almanacs and War Chronicles began to be published to celebrate the resilience of the Eastern Jews. Their intimate accounts detailing everyday life played an important role in the collective realization by Jews that 20 21

Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Laws of Occupation. Analysis of Government. Proposals for Redress (Washington DC, 1944). The book’s preface was written in 1943. Abel Pann, In the Name of the Czar, 24 Original Pictures (New York NY, 1918). See also Annette Becker, Voir la Grande Guerre, un autre récit (Paris, 2014), 89–91.

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they formed a people singled out for attack during the First World War. Such works detailed the singularity of the Jews’ secular existence, describing their schools and their self-help organizations. But in the face of these, anti-Semitic violence became a generalized practice among their countrymen. Founded on the longstanding idea of the Jew as ‘treacherous, infidel, hoarder, speculator’, it thrived on the impunity generated by the war; one was free to ‘smash the yid’. These were ‘war crimes’ committed by regular units, which added to the pogroms a new form of violence unknown before 1917; with the two revolutions and the civil war, it acquired an ‘exterminationist’ character.22 All over this region, Memorial Books chronicled the extermination of the Jews from 1941 onwards, harking back to the German and/or Russian demands of earlier years. This was not surprising, given the way that the Jews’ situation worsened during the Russian Civil War.23 The anti-Jewish radicalization of 1918–1920 was evident all along the border between the new state of Poland (at war with Russia), the Ukraine and Byelorussia – in effect, the old Austrian Galicia – and it presaged the future Nazi extermination aktionen. Ukrainians fighting the Red Army launched themselves against the Jews, seen as Judeobolsheviks and impure organisms who were destroying the healthy (or even holy) body of Russia. In 1918, the military struggles around the city of Lwow (once Lemberg, now Lviv) culminated in a three-day pogrom. President Wilson was forced to reflect on the violence specific to these far-flung regions of Eastern Europe where the Great War’s unwelcome innovations refused to come to an end: there, more civilians had been roughly handled, deported and killed than soldiers. The modernity of total war had carried all before it between 1914 and the 1920s, and in these ‘bloodlands’, to borrow Timothy Snyder’s term, the Jews had already paid a higher price than the rest of the population, given the fatal conjunction which had linked them to the Bolsheviks.24 Even if the British were reticent about a strict protection of minorities, which would apply to them, beginning in Ireland, they could not in the end oppose Article 93 of the Treaty of Versailles, which stated that: Poland accepts and agrees to embody in a Treaty with the Principal Allied and Associated Powers such provisions as may be deemed necessary 22

23 24

See Alexandre Sumpf, La Grande Guerre oubliée: Russie, 1914–1918 (Paris, 2014); Nicolas Werth, “Dans l’ombre de la Shoah, les pogroms des guerres civiles russes”, Introduction. to Le livre des pogroms, Antichambre d’un génocide, Ukraine, Russie, Biélorussie,1917–1922, ed., Calmann Lévy (Paris, 2010), 36–37; and Nicolas Werth, “Les déportations des ‘populations suspectes’ dans les espaces russes et soviétiques, 1914–1953: violences de guerre, ingénierie sociale, excision ethno-historique”, Communisme 78/79 (2004), 11–43. Jacob Solomon Berger, ed., The Volkovysk Memorial Book (Mahwah NJ, 2002), 107–09. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London, 2010).

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by the said Powers to protect the interests of inhabitants of Poland who differ from the majority of the population in race, language, or religion. The new Poland was thereby obliged to protect its religious and linguistic minorities and to give Polish nationality to all those who came from the Lwow region. In order to accelerate the Treaty’s enforcement, President Wilson established a commission of inquiry on the status of Jews in Poland, whose presidency was entrusted to Henry Morgenthau, formerly U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and therefore a witness to the extermination of part of the now disintegrated Empire’s Christian minorities, beginning with the Armenians. 4

“When such things occur in our own times, like the Armenian massacres, we put them down in the account of still half-barbarous peoples”. (Varian Fry)

The ‘annihilation’ or ‘total extermination’ of the Armenians in 1915 was, in the etymological sense, unheard of. The crimes perpetrated by the Young Turks were, however, well known to public opinion, having been relayed in real time. Still, they were badly understood, since they were seized upon by the Entente’s propaganda, and their punishment became a new war aim, a way of striking at the Central Powers via their Ottoman allies. By the time Turkey rallied to the Central Powers in November 1914, atrocities against civilians had already become one of the conflict’s hallmarks. While the deportations and massacres of Armenians were taking place, in 1915 and 1916, various commissions of inquiry were publishing their white papers on the atrocities committed in Belgium, Serbia and East Prussia. The deportation of Lille’s civilian population in Easter 1916, for example, was denounced in a contemporary cartoon in the following terms: As brutish German soldiers led away women and children, one, wearing a spiked helmet, commented acidly, “They complain. But what would they say if they were in Armenia?”25 A more thorough comparison between German atrocities in Belgium and the north of France, on the one hand, and the antiArmenian terror, on the other, reveals that some had concluded that something extraordinary was happening in the Ottoman Empire. In the eyes of the Young Turks, ‘the Armenian’ was in effect a potential traitor, a sniper, generally harmful. This internal enemy was turned into a beast and his human characteristics were denied. All that remained to be done was 25

La Baïonnette (Paris), n. 62, 7 September 1916.

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to ‘separate’ him, to use the murderers’ own euphemism.26 In 1918, when it was all over, the Turks did not hesitate to denounce the barbarism of the Armenians: “The Armenian organisations systematically applied their plan for the obliteration of the Turkish race (…)”27 Using the mirror effect so typical of mass murderers, the Turks attributed their own infamies to their victims, claiming to be defending themselves from these ‘civilized criminals’, an oxymoron which in fact perfectly defined their own persons. They displayed an ‘apocalyptic racism’ as they exterminated the greater part of the Armenians.28 By thinking themselves the victims, the killers were living in denial. The Ottomans lost the war, but, in this respect, achieved their aim: the obliteration of Armenian identity. Those who escaped physical extermination were destroyed in other ways. The rapes, conversions, and forced marriages, alongside the theft of children subsequently raised as Muslims, wiped the Armenians out as a people and as Christians, while their millenary culture was ravaged and their churches and libraries burned down. Meanwhile, the seizure of homes and goods allowed an economic peace to be reached in Turkey – an Armenian-free Turkey. Few observers were able, at the time, to transcend the label of ‘tragedy’ and their condemnation in order to put into words what had actually happened. Raphäel Lemkin, taking enormous care, arrived at a definition of genocide during the international debates of 1945–1948. But he was passionate about the crimes committed during the Great War and the contemporary debates that surrounded them. Searching for a legal and conceptual answer to this enigma, the young philologist turned towards criminal law which alone, he thought, might furnish the tools with which these particular criminals might be punished. In November 1918 Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior (and then Grand Vizier) widely regarded as the architect of the Armenian genocide, fled to Berlin. In 1921 he was murdered there by Soghomon Tehlirian. In an almost exact parallel, in 1926 Shalom Schwartzbard, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, executed in France Simon Petlioura, the general widely considered to be largely responsible for the 1918–1920 pogroms in Ukraine. Lemkin’s interest in the two cases grew, since he realized that an Armenian and a Jew whose families had been the victims of collective crimes had carried out justice in the countries where they had found refuge, Germany and France. 26 27 28

Vatican Secret Archives, Guerra 14–18 244, fasc. 110, Anonymous, Vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales (Constantinople, 1916), 15 pages, document in French sent to pope Benedict xv. Hilal (Constantinople), 14 March 1918. This was a French-language newspaper published in the Ottoman Empire. Philippe Burrin, Ressentiment et apocalypse, Essai sur l’antisémitisme nazi (Paris, 2004), 71–75.

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The German and French societies which then sat in judgement of them could neither condemn nor acquit the two men; in both cases, they were found not to be responsible for their actions.29 After the trial of Tehlirian, acquitted in part thanks to the testimony of pastor Johannes Lepsius, Lemkin wrote an article in which he regretted the absence of a body of international law capable of unifying moral standards in relation to the destruction of national, racial and religious groups. In a 1949 television interview, Lemkin returned to the roots of his work: Later on I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after(wards) the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference because the criminals guilty of genocide weren’t punished. You know that they organized an organization, a terroristic organization which took justice in their own hands. The trial of Talaat Pasha in 1921 in Berlin is very instructive. A man whose mother was killed in (the Armenian) genocide case killed Talaat Pasha and he told the court that he did it because his mother came in his sleep and incited him many times (…) So you see, as a lawyer I thought that a crime should not be punished by the victims but it should be punished by a court, by international law.30 5

The Required Words: ‘Atrocities’, ‘Crimes of Vandalism and Barbarism’, ‘Genocide’.

Raphaël Lemkin first made a name for himself in 1931 at the Fourth International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law, where he was tasked with producing a report on “offences which create a common danger”. Jurists had been working hard to establish the basis for an international law since the start of the century. At the 1899 and 1907 Congresses, in The Hague, an attempt was made to regulate war and peace. The Russian jurist Friedrich (Fyodor) Martens, who presided over the commission entrusted with laws and ­practices of war, became an advocate for the ‘Laws of Humanity’ in the 29

30

Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York NY & Oxford, 2011). Lemkin ignored the real role played by the communist (and probably gpu) agent Schwartzbard in the ‘Jewish revenge’ or that of Armenian militant Tehlirian in Operation Nemesis. This interview was broadcast by cbs on 13 February 1949. It can be viewed at https:// vimeo.com/125514772. Accessed 2017 Oct 12.

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d­ eclaration – henceforth known as Martens Clause – subsequently taken up in the preamble to the Second Hague Convention of 1899. The clause was reiterated with minor alterations in the preamble to the 1907 Convention which would become, once ratified in 1909, the basis for the international law in place in 1914. All of this was jettisoned during the Great War, notably on the war fronts, during invasions, occupations, pogroms and the extermination of Armenians and Syriacs. A personal report was commissioned from Lemkin in advance of the Fifth International Conference on the Unification of Criminal Law, due to be held in Madrid in 1933. The resulting text marks a defining moment of rupture when it comes to the classification of assaults on the rights of peoples. It proposed to turn the question on itself: since the problem pertained to the international character of the crimes, one had to begin by retaining its most international aspects. The modernity of the crimes must be met by the modernity of the law, in a constantly updated paradox: while communications lie at the heart of international life, it is only too easy to interrupt them: Catastrophic interruptions in international communications, wilful destruction of works of art and of culture, acts of barbarism carried out against a defenceless population, are envisaged as offences against international law (…) the destruction of any nation’s works of art must be regarded as an act of vandalism directed against world culture. The author of such a crime causes an immediate and irreversible loss not only to the owner of those works and to the culture of the country directly concerned (whose unique genius contributed to the creation of the works), but also to the whole of humanity, which will experience a loss by this act of vandalism (…) In the acts of barbarism, as well as those of vandalism, the asocial and destructive spirit of the author is made evident. This spirit, by definition, is the opposite of the culture and progress of humanity.31 Lemkin then moved on from crimes committed by certain individuals to their consequences for the whole of humanity. Citing the destruction of libraries, which hampered all scientific inquiry, he proposed that art and culture be protected in wartime, alongside Red Cross hospitals. The influence of Great War language was made clear when he established a link between humanitarian international law founded on the Geneva Convention and international criminal law. Finally he moved on to human beings themselves:

31

Luis Jiménez de Asúa, Manuel de López-Rey y Arrojo and Vespasien Pella, eds., ve conférence pour l’unification du droit pénal, (Paris, 1935), 48–56. Translated by the author.

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‘Barbarous acts’: Acts perpetrated against a defenceless population. These include massacres, pogroms, collective cruelties against women and children, the treatment of men in a way that wounds their dignity (…) If these attacks and ferocious actions are carried out in a particularly cruel manner and if they manifest themselves in such a way as to confirm their savage character, then they can provoke a strong reaction from the conscience of the whole of civilized humanity. The opinion of the whole world will be touched by horror and fear for the future of world culture. (…) The man who has participated in such barbaric acts in his own country cannot be left in peace and unpunished when abroad, but should be pursued and punished wherever he is found.32 Lemkin’s genius lay in having linked, in 1933, two crimes, vandalism and barbarism. More importantly still, when the Madrid Conference’s proceedings were published, the order of the two crimes was reversed, so that barbarism appeared first. Lemkin had decided to place human beings before culture. Lemkin had gone as far as he could in the search for a juridical formula capable of encompassing crimes against individuals belonging to certain groups and against cultures. He had sought out the missing juridical link that might permit punishing those actions – by him designated barbarism and vandalism – which since the First World War had rendered obsolete the work begun at The Hague.33 As a Pole and as a Jew, Lemkin was convinced that this type of crime repeated itself. However, he was, for the time being, on his own; nobody in 1933 thought that this conceptual innovation should be pursued. The commonalities between the First and Second World Wars were rendered opaque by a succession of losses of memory and deliberate acts of camouflage. We know today that the majority of atrocity accounts from 1914–1918 were true or, more precisely, that myths, in the aftermath of the war, had displaced reality – the reality of the murders and rapes that marked invasions; of the deportations and forced labour that characterized occupations; and, of course, of the suppression and obfuscation of the extermination of the Armenians. One of the reasons for the impossibility of understanding the extermination of the Jews in real time was in part the epistemological blockage which had arisen during the previous war. One contradiction remains: while the mental universe born out of the First World War for the most part prevented the real-time understanding of the 32 Asúa et al, ve conférence, 55. 33 The Third Hague Conference should have taken place in 1915. See Maartje Abbenhuis’ complete works, especially her The Hague Conferences and International Politics, 1­ 898–1915, (London, 2018).

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Jewish genocide, it also contributed to the precocious understanding demonstrated by certain observers and intermediaries in Great Britain and the United States: some Members of Parliament, Lemkin, Fry, Werfel, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, a personal friend of President Roosevelt. At that precise moment, within the Polish ghettoes, trapped beings bore witness to that same culture rooted in the precedent of 1914–1918. Calel Perechodnik recalled with energy born of despair that this time the Greuelpropaganda of the Great War had been well and truly overtaken. Killing did take place; his wife and child really had been crammed into the wagons headed for Treblinka.34 Franz Werfel’s powerful novel about the extermination of the Armenians, The Forty Days of Musa-Dagh, had been read in Poland, as is made clear by historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who noted the intensity of intellectual life in the ghetto and the interest in the First World War. Ringelblum read Maxence Ven der Meersch’s Invasion 14 and was struck by the parallels between the two wars, even if the second was clearly more terrible than the first: Every stage of the occupation simply begged for comparison with the present, far crueller war. But one thing was common to both wars: the cold, merciless pillage, robbing the civilian populations of the occupied countries of all their possessions (…) The occupied countries were completely devastated, their population enslaved and forced to work for the Germans. Having read this book though, one asks: ‘But what was done to avoid a new Hun mastery of Europe?’35 The question posed by Ringelblum from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 resurfaced two years later in Washington DC. A memo dated 16 January 1944 recounts an important meeting held at the White House to “discuss the problem of saving the remaining Jews in Europe”. This meeting took place immediately after the creation of the War Refugee Board, defended by Henry Morgenthau Jr, the Treasury Secretary, ever more critical of the State Department’s inaction. It was precisely Morgenthau who raised the first point: he “referred to the results that his father, Henry Morgenthau Senior, had obtained when he was Ambassador to Turkey in getting the Armenians out of Turkey and saved their lives”.36 Some 34 35 36

Calel Perechodnik, Suis-je un meurtrier? (Paris, 1995). Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed., trans. Jacob Sloan (1958, repr. New York NY, 2006), 299. 700,000 Poles emigrated to work in the mines of northern France in the wake of the First World War, hence the interest in the occupation of 1914–1918. Library of Congress, Washington DC, microfilm 23,392–73P, Volume 694, Document 190– 192, Pehle, John, Memorandum for the Secretary’s Files, 1944 January 16; The Morgenthau Diaries (Bethesda MD, c1995–1997). See also Rebecca Erbelding, About Time: The History

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days later Randolph E. Paul, one of Morgenthau Jr’s key advisors, would note that the Treasury Secretary’s engagement with the Committee was not just the result of personal interest; he was following in his father’s footsteps. In effect, Morgenthau Sr had done all he could, in 1915–16 in situ and in 1917–1918 from the United States, to alert his compatriots to the ongoing massacre of Christians, be they Armenians, Greeks or Syriacs. But we know what this meant at the time for the Armenians: more words than actions. In the preface to the 1943 book where he coined the term ‘genocide’, Raphaël Lemkin did not hesitate to resort to a form of linguistic barbarism – a mix of Latin and Greek – to define with greater precision the ‘crime of barbarism’. After examining the Nazi occupation of Europe, country by country, Lemkin brought his readers back to the First World War, focusing on issues such as occupations, deportations, and forced labour. In the introduction to Chapter 7, “Labour”, he cited General Erich Ludendorff, who in 1917 had written of the need for the forced removal of unemployed labourers, if needs be across national borders, to wherever there was work – not least out of security concerns: The existence of a large mass of unemployed labour is a danger to public safety. With a view to averting that danger, men may be sent compulsorily to any place where they are needed; whether at home or abroad is immaterial.37 Lemkin had access to the work of American jurists who concluded, from their work in Belgian archives of the Great War, that the United States, in 1917, had entered the conflict on the right side, that is, that of the law in a war about the law. President Wilson had used this kind of rhetoric when recalling that the United States was not driven by territorial or material ambition. As early as 1917 Wilson claimed that the United States of America was fighting for universal values against a Germany waging a war of atrocities against international law and humanitarian values. Deportations from Belgium and the Northern French occupied territories supplied all the needed proof of this: They have dealt a mortal blow to any prospect they may ever have had of being tolerated by the population of Flanders; in tearing away from ­nearly every humble home in the land a husband and a father or a son

37

of the War Refugee Board, PhD thesis, George Mason University, 2015. General (Erich) Ludendorff, The General Staff and Its Problems: The History of the Relations Between the High Command and the German Imperial Government as Revealed by Official Documents vol. 1 (London, 1920), 156–57; quoted in Lemkin, Axis Rule, 67.

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and a brother, they have lighted a fire of hatred that will never go out. They have brought home to every heart in the land in a way that will impress its horror indelibly on the memory of three generations, a realization of what German methods mean, not as with the early atrocities in the heat of passion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed.38 This verdict by an American diplomat was reproduced in James Wilford Garner’s International Law and the World War, published in 1920. Lemkin, when detailing the practice of deportations, turned to Garner’s work and reproduced the American Professor’s unflinching conclusion: Whatever may be the technical merits of the German case, the enormous scale on which the policy of deportation was carried out and the harsh and indiscriminate, not to say cruel, way in which it was executed, makes it comparable to the slave raids on the Gold Coast of Africa in the seventeenth century. It appears to be without precedent in modern wars. In ancient times it was the practice of the Roman conquerors to carry back to Italy a portion of the inhabitants and hold them in captivity, and it is said to have been the practice of Attila to force the conquered tribes into his army, but not since the beginning of the modern age – not even during the Thirty Years’ war – has any invader seized and virtually enslaved a large part of the civil population in order to carry on his own industries at home and to release his own able-bodied men for military service.39 The events of 1917 were being used here to explain a book published in 1944. Since the First World War, Lemkin explained, the laws of war and of occupation had been violated – in this the Germans were not alone – and a novelty had been introduced of which the Second World War was the extreme consequence: war was no longer just waged by uniformed men who were themselves protected by international humanitarian law when they were not involved in combat, having been wounded or taken prisoner. Now civilians were at the 38

New York Times, 22 April 1917, reproducing a report of the American Minister to Belgium. Cited in James Wilford Garner, International Law and the World War vol. ii (London, 1920), 184–85. 39 Garner, International Law, 183, cited in Lemkin, Axis Rule, 72.

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very heart of the war and no-one could protect them. From the start of his juridical career, Lemkin kept alive the intellectual essence of the Great War; it made possible his gestation of the term ‘genocide’. Lemkin foretold what the Second World War would eventually confirm, which he would examine in detail during the rest of his work: that the exterminations of human groups was not an accidental cruelty but rather the very essence of policies of occupation. The fate of civilians had become the heart of war and death.

Chapter 8

Mobility and Immobility in Civilian Experiences of the First World War: Refugees and Occupied Populations in Europe, 1914–1918 Alex Dowdall Writing in the introduction to State, Society and Mobilization, John Horne argued that the relationship between national mobilization and ‘total war’ was an essential dynamic of the First World War, which needs to be studied “comparatively across national cases, in order for the nature and significance of the war to be better understood”.1 ‘Total war’ or, perhaps more accurately, the process of ‘totalization’ which characterized the First World War, generated a new and more extensive variant of mobilization which was both cultural and social, occurring on an imaginative level through collective representations, and organizationally, through the state and civil society. But while the war expanded the nature of mobilization, integrating the entire national communities of the belligerents, the scale of the violence simultaneously “tested the legitimacy of pre-war states and the sense of national community to the limits”.2 One of the principal findings of Horne’s edited volume was that certain states were better capable of weathering this tension than others. Both in liberal democratic states, such as France and Britain, and in more authoritarian regimes, such as Germany and Russia, the state expanded its powers of repression through emergency wartime legislation. But successfully mobilizing for ‘total war’ required much more than an expanded state repressive apparatus. In most cases, the adaptability of the governing structures and political cultures of states as they entered war determined the resilience of their social and cultural ­mobilization for war. France and Britain, unlike their more authoritarian and politically inflexible allies and opponents, were able to draw on reserves of democratic legitimacy and broad political participation in order to sustain their national mobilizations even in the face of serious tensions in 1917–18.3 1 John Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War’, 1914–1918”, in State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the First World War, ed., John Horne (Cambridge, 1997), 1. 2 Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War’,” 5. 3 John Horne, “Remobilizing for ‘Total War’: France and Britain, 1917–1918”, in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed., John Horne, 195–211.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_010

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This chapter seeks to build upon these lines of inquiry by examining how one of the primary markers of the totalisation of warfare between 1914 and 1918 – the exposure of civilian populations to military violence – impacted the social and cultural mobilizations of the various belligerents. It focuses on two key features of the civilian experience of war – forced displacement and its opposite, the forced immobility that accompanied military occupation. Across Europe, the fighting passed through populated regions – from industrial northern France and Belgium, to agricultural western Russia, and the mountains and plateaus of northern Italy. As a result, millions of civilians faced either military occupation, forced displacement, or both. Numerous historians have studied occupation and displacement, demonstrating the extent to which these experiences blurred the lines between the civilian and military spheres. This chapter develops this approach by suggesting that the linked experiences of forced mobility and immobility situated the civilian populations of the warzones alongside soldiers, but also distinguished them from other civilians sheltered from the fighting. Sophie de Schaepdrijver and Tammy Proctor have ­argued that “living under occupation was a war experience pertaining to neither battlefront nor home front”.4 The same may be said of forced displacement, as refugees entered a distinct matrix of administrative practices, social relations, experiences, and cultural representations termed ‘refugeedom’.5 By drawing together the somewhat segregated historiographies of occupation and forced displacement, this chapter shows that civilians in and from Europe’s combat zones became distinct social groups characterized by particular experiences. It suggests that by examining how the various belligerent states engaged with these groups, we can glean fresh insights into the variable impact of the war on European states, and the relative successes and failures of their processes of social and cultural mobilization. This is because forced mobility and immobility affected all theatres of war in Europe, thus allowing for a comparative analysis of civilian experiences across the continent. The chapter’s aim is to understand whether occupation and displacement impacted the social stability of some belligerents more than others. Focusing on the civilian populations of the Western Front, and drawing comparative perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe, it explores whether occupation and displacement had different consequences for liberal democratic nation states, such as France, or multinational, authoritarian empires, such as Austria-Hungary and Russia. 4 Sophie de Schaepdrijver and Tammy Proctor, An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp (Oxford, 2017), 1. 5 Peter Gatrell, “Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?”, Journal of Refugee Studies 30 (2017), 170–89, 170.

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Civilian Immobility: Occupation Regimes East and West

German occupation policy during the First World War was not a unitary whole. Important differences remained between the multiple types of German occupation instituted across Europe – from the harsh discipline enforced in the battle zones immediately behind the front in France and Eastern Europe, to the (relatively) more benign civilian administrations of Belgium and Poland. Nonetheless, these were variations on a common theme as, across Europe, civilian freedoms were subordinated to military concerns. This is evident when considering the restrictions German authorities placed on civilians’ freedom of movement. The occupied territories were sealed off from the outside world, both by German policies – such as erecting an electrified fence the length of the Belgian-Dutch border – and by the Allied naval blockade. Within the occupied territories, movement was difficult. In Belgium and Poland – controlled by German civilian authorities – passes were required for movement between locations, with the result that most civilians were confined to their own towns and villages. A surveillance apparatus was implemented, with check-points and military patrols operating on major roads, while in Belgium adult men of military age were required to register with the authorities. Movement between the civilian-administered General Governments of Belgium and Poland and the military-controlled Etappen in France and Eastern Europe was prohibited entirely.6 Within the Etappen, controls on civilian movement were stricter still, and were designed to make even local travel as difficult as possible. Most decisions regarding civilians’ movements were devolved to local commanders, with the result that a patchwork of regulations of varying degrees of severity developed in Europe’s battle-zones. In France, those in the town of Lens, in the Pas-deCalais, were typical. In summer 1915, the local army command ordered all civilians over 14 to carry a German-issued residency pass at all times, while passes allowing travel between locations were only issued in exceptional cases. In general, the local commander could not issue such passes without the approval of higher authorities.7 Passes were subject to a fee, ranging from 50 pfennigs for a one-day pass for travel by foot, to three marks for a week-long rail pass.8 These fees ensured travel was only open to the wealthy, such as Léon Tacquet, 6 de Schaepdrijver and Proctor, English Governess, 13–14. 7 Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich (bha), Abt. iv, Kriegsarchiv (bha), Gen. Kdo. I B. Arm. Korps, 1124, “Zusammenstellung der im Okupationsgebiet der Armee-Abteilung geltenden Bestimmungen über Personenverkehr”, 10 June 1915. 8 bha, iii B. Inf. Div., 1919, A.O.K. vi to Etappen-Inspektion vi, 11 August 1916.

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a lawyer who made infrequent trips to Lille.9 Charles Bourgeois, the local police chief, reported after his repatriation to unoccupied France that, in general, a curfew existed between 4pm and 7am, with no movement permitted during these hours. At times, this was punitively extended to 2pm, meaning that locals could only leave their homes for two hours a day. Some areas of town, notably the cemetery, were out of bounds entirely, and residents had to obtain passes to attend funerals of relatives.10 Some exceptions to the rules were made for those engaged in essential occupations that required them to travel to work outside the town, including miners, farmers, and those operating Commission for Relief in Belgium (crb) supply convoys. Supervision of those engaged in such activities remained strict, however.11 Civilians operating the crb supply convoys were, for instance, forbidden from entering shops and cafés, from communicating with other civilians, and were accompanied by German escorts.12 These measures meant there were few opportunities to travel, and even fewer to travel unsupervised. As was the case elsewhere, the horizons of most Lensois contracted to the limits of their town.13 Even more severe were the restrictions on movement in the zones of military occupation in Eastern Europe, known as Ober Ost. Here, the German Army was motivated by a colonial mind-set, and implemented a ‘mobility policy’ (Verkehrspolitik) in an attempt to reshape what it saw as confused and disorganized “lands and people, making them over for permanent possession”.14 Like the Western Front, this region witnessed large-scale population displacement during the fighting in 1914. As a result, the occupying authorities were determined to control what they perceived as a highly unstable population. The mobility policy aimed to restrict and channel all movement in the area as a means of restructuring the local economy, making it more rational and efficient, and diverting it towards military requirements. The German Army perceived a “demographic vacuum”, and in response sought to control ­population ­movements, 9 10 11

12 13 14

Léon Tacquet, Dans la fournaise de Lens, 1915–1917: journal du notaire Léon Tacquet, (Lens, 2004), 26 April 1915, 27 May 1915, 30 June 1915, 23 September 1916. Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais, Arras (ADPdC), 11 R 857, Report of Chief of Police Bourgeois. For the supervision of civilians engaged in agricultural work see bha, Gen. Kdo. I B. Arm. Korps, 1124, “Zusammenstellung…über Personenverkehr”, 10 June 1915. For the control of miners see bha iv B. Inf. Div., 2561, Ortskommandantur Libercourt, to iv Inf. Div., “Kontrolle das Verkehrs der Minenarbeiter”, 31 January 1916. bha, 4 B. Inf. Div., 2561, Instructions from Ortskommandantur Epinoy, 23 March 1916. Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale (Brussels, 2006), 116; Philippe Nivet, La France occupée, 1914–1918 (Paris, 2011), 117–24. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War 1 (Cambridge, 2000), 8–9.

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repopulate towns, and restructure the region into a military state.15 The attempt was far from successful. German “mobility policy” further disrupted the economy of a region scarred by war, and had drastic consequences for locals. Rather than helping to bring about a much-vaunted military utopia, the “mobility policy” prompted locals to draw back “into themselves and their households, frustrating German expectations of revitalized economic activity”.16 In practice, Ober Ost’s “mobility policy” constituted a more extreme manifestation of the measures introduced in France, with curfews, prohibitions on movement, and passes for journeys all hampering the population’s freedom of movement. The starting point was what Liulevicius has described as a severe “grid of control”.17 In order to be better controlled, the region was ‘ordered’ by a hierarchical bureaucracy. There were three military administrations of Courland, Lithuania, and Grodno, each subdivided into rural and municipal districts which, in turn, were divided into administrative districts.18 The borders between these districts paid scant attention to historical borders, local communities, and economies and, rather than generating a rational local economy, they created further disruption. Civilians sometimes found themselves cut-off by new borders from traditional market towns, while unfamiliar towns became new district centres. Passports technically allowed free movement within districts, but in reality all movement was hampered by a variety of measures – such as the requirement to register with local authorities if staying more than six hours in a locality, or the need to apply for a permit to travel by cart, on horseback, by car or train. Travel between districts required a permit which could take between four and seven weeks to process. Given that many people crossed a border once they left their home or farm, a journey of several hundred metres could become a major logistical operation. One peasant, for instance, had to wait five weeks before being granted a permit to travel to an adjacent district to collect a cow he had inherited.19 The arbitrarily drawn internal borders of Ober Ost had the opposite of the desired effect, serving to obstruct rather than promote economic revitalisation. The strict measures enforced in Ober Ost, and Germany’s colonial ambitions in the region, ensured that forced civilian immobility in Eastern Europe had lasting repercussions. Liulevicius has convincingly demonstrated that German attitudes towards Eastern Europe during this first occupation prefigured 15

Klaus Richter, “‘Go with the Hare’s Ticket’: Mobility and Territorial Policies in Ober Ost (1915–1918)”, First World War Studies 6 (2015), 150–70, 154–55. 16 Liulevicius, War Land, 93. 17 Liulevicius, War Land, 93. 18 Richter, “Hare’s Ticket”, 155. 19 Richter, “Hare’s Ticket”’, 157–58.

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later Nazi attitudes.20 More recently, Klaus Richter has argued that German occupation policies in Eastern Europe constituted “a process of deterritorialization under a regime of transformative occupation”. He shows that occupation policy, and especially Verkehrspolitik, “disengaged the region from the Russian imperial infrastructure, providing the emerging independent states in Poland and the Baltics with territories to ascribe new meaning to”.21 Germany’s aim was to disengage these regions from Russian imperial space, with a view to reforming them for permanent colonization. When this permanent colonization failed to materialize, new nation states including Poland and Lithuania stepped into the void. German restrictions on movement in occupied France did not have such lasting consequences. Here, the occupation was neither “transformative” nor a process of “deterritorialization”. There is little evidence to suggest that as in Ober Ost, or to a lesser extent Belgium and Poland, Germany sought to transform northern France to exert lasting control. Indeed, rather than attempting to permanently annex French industrial capacity, Germany simply hampered the region’s economy by destroying or expropriating industrial equipment, to give German industrialists a competitive edge in the post-war period.22 Furthermore, restrictions on movement, although similar in content to those implemented in Ober Ost, were incapable of ‘deterritorializing’ the region, given the strength of French local government structures. Although the region was cut-off from the rest of France and, with the exception of the department of the Nord, prefects did not remain in place, local power structures functioned and helped civilians navigate occupation. Indeed, here the German Army’s ‘grid of control’ mapped onto, rather than over-rode, local government structures. Most French communes hosted ortskommandanturen – the occupation’s smallest administrative unit – while German commanders depended on mayors and local councils to enforce regulations, and organize requisitions and forced labour call-ups. As James E. Connolly has shown, many French mayors, with a view to the post-war period, used their interactions with the Germans to maintain their legitimacy through performative demonstrations of “respectable resistance”.23 In Lens, the mayor, Émile Basly, served as the primary point of contact for local German authorities throughout the occupation. Most local 20 Liulevicius, War Land, 278–81. 21 Richter, “Hare’s Ticket”, 152. 22 Nivet, France occupée, 96–107; Laure Hannequin-Lecomte, “Réalité et mythologie de l’occupation allemande durant la Grande Guerre: les cas des établissements Arbel”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 236 (2009), 5–25. 23 James E. Connolly, “Notable Protests: Respectable Resistance in Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918”, Historical Research 88 (2015), 693–715.

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residents were happy with his conduct, with several repatriated Lensois asserting that he defended the town’s interests in the face of German aggression.24 The fact that the German occupiers turned to him, and other mayors, to implement the occupation regime demonstrates their acceptance of the legitimacy of local government structures, while ostentatious campaigns of “respectable resistance” allowed many notables to emerge from the occupation as good French citizens. All this stands in marked contrast to the policy of “deterritorialization” enacted in Ober Ost. With this in mind, it may be more instructive to compare civilian immobility in German-occupied France not with the situation in Ober Ost, but with the Allied ‘friendly’ occupations on the other side-of-the Western Front. Following the stabilization of the front, the state-of-siege legislation granted the French army wide-ranging powers over the civilian inhabitants of its rear-echelon a­ reas, known as the zone des armées, while a French-staffed military mission attached to the British Expeditionary Force (the mmf) allowed the Allies to overcome a legal obstacle by ensuring that restrictions placed on French civilians in the British area were implemented by French personnel. As the mmf claimed in its official history, it aimed to ensure “that the presence of a foreign army on our territory would not constitute a heavier burden than that imposed by the French army”.25 In the event, the ‘burdens’ placed on civilians at the front, whether by the French or British armies, were heavy. As was the case in German-occupied France, limiting movement to a minimum was a primary concern. While the restrictions imposed were not as all-encompassing as on the German side, movement was difficult. Originally, all travel by foot, bicycle, and cart required a pass issued by the local mayor or police commissioner. Travel by car was more restricted, and required a pass issued by the military. In areas closest to the front, only government officials could use bicycles, and a curfew prevented all movement between 7pm and 6am.26 As the war progressed restrictions expanded. From September 1915 the military began issuing all passes itself and, from 1917, required civilians to carry identity cards at all times. These passes were often difficult to procure. In the British area, the mmf only processed an

24

25 26

ADPdC, 11 R 857, Statements of Mme Duflot and Mme Boulanger. Others were less satisfied, and local lawyer Léon Tacquet claimed in his diary that Basly failed to oppose the requisition of labourers. He was, however, isolated in his claims. See Tacquet, Dans la fournaise, 17 June 1915. ADPdC, 11 R 1086, “Mission militaire française attachée à l’armée britannique”, 3. Service historique de la défense, Vincennes (shd), 16 N 272, “Ministère de la Guerre: ­Réglementation sur la circulation”, 26 February 1915.

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average of 100 each day.27 Additionally, some military commanders remained suspicious of local civilians, believing them to be a source of instability or potential spies.28 The military police closely observed suspect individuals. In Arras, military patrols tasked with identifying houses signalling to the enemy functioned from December 1914.29 Infractions of rules could be punished by arrest and deportation from the zone des armées.30 Such measures demonstrate that Allied military commanders viewed friendly civilians as potential security threats. In the interests of military effectiveness, they were to be controlled, disciplined and, if required, forcibly removed from their homes. The ‘friendly’ military occupations on the Allied side of the lines were, therefore, rigorous, and had the potential to antagonize the local population. When grievances arose, the French army could at least appeal to the patriotism of the population, asking it to endure restrictions in the national interest. The bef, as a foreign army, could not. The French government and French and British military commanders were keenly aware that the subjection of the local population to the authority of a foreign, albeit allied, army on French soil was potentially highly volatile. To combat this, the Frenchstaffed mmf was tasked with managing interactions between the British army and locals. British military police controlled policing in the British zone. But they worked closely with mmf interpreters, as well as local police and gendarmes, who mediated between French civilians and British units concerning billeting, requisitioning, and the implementation of regulations.31 In a lecture delivered to a group of military police officers about to embark for France, one senior British officer was clear on the benefits of this system. He instructed his men “wherever possible (…) work through the French, and so avoid friction”.32 In practice, this meant using mmf interpreters and French gendarmes to publicize regulations, make arrests, and conduct house searches. The attempts of Allied authorities to minimize conflicts with the local civilian population were not always successful. Four years of constant military presence grated, and tensions sometimes flared. In June and July 1916, for instance, Mayor Cham of Armentières repeatedly wrote to the mmf, the prefect and 27 28 29 30 31 32

ADPdC, 11 R 1086, “Mission militaire française attachée à l’armée britannique”, 21. Craig Gibson, Behind the Front: British Soldiers and French Civilians, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2014), 157–67. ADPdC, M 5569, Commissaire Central Arras to Mayor Arras, 3 December 1914. shd, 16 N 272, General Commandant en Chef to War Ministry, 15 September 1915; shd, 19 N 869, “Arrêté réglementant la circulation dans la zone avancée de l’armée”, 15 July 1917. shd, 17 N 394, “How to deal with French civilians and local authorities”, 20 May 1916. The National Archives, London (tna), WO/158/982, “Control of the Civilian Population in France and Belgium”, January 1916.

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the Prime Minister when a 19-year-old corporal in the local intelligence office proved overly scrupulous in conducting background checks for travel passes. He had denied local food suppliers passes to travel to collect provisions, while Cham himself protested “energetically” that the corporal had enquired into the reasons for a recent trip he had made to Paris, insinuating that Cham may, in fact, have been worthy of suspicion.33 Such episodes demonstrate that despite the efforts of Allied authorities, conflicts resulted from the imposition of military control on civilians. Unlike the situation on the German side of the lines, however, these conflicts were not driven by a patriotic imperative, and did not question the legitimacy of the occupation. The prefect of the Pas-de-Calais reported in March 1916, for instance, that the department had witnessed “frequent incidents between military commanders and the municipalities”. Despite this, he was confident that civilians had, in general, welcomed both French and British troops and had shown distinct “moral discipline”. Furthermore, those complaints that arose most often resulted from the actions of “inexperienced and negligent” officers.34 The improper attitudes of those implementing the regulations, rather than the regulations themselves, were the source of tensions. On both sides of the Western Front curfews, restrictions on movement, house searches and policies of summary arrest and deportation existed, and civilian freedoms were curtailed to meet the needs of the army. This is not to equate the situations directly, as important differences remained. In Germanoccupied France, restrictions on movement were more severe, curfews tighter, and the authorities inflicted punishments more frequently. The German army also exploited the economic potential of the occupied regions, including the use of forced labour, in ways the Allies did not.35 But both the similarities and the differences between the German and Allied treatment of civilians in the battle-zones of Eastern and Western Europe demonstrate the need for a clear understanding of the differentiated geography of civil-military encounters across the continent during the First World War, as well as the ways by which these encounters impacted the national mobilizations of the belligerents. In all cases, interactions between local populations and armies in the field saw civilian freedoms subordinated to military concerns. Examining the problem of immobility therefore reveals how this 33

Archives départementales du Nord, Lille (adn), 9 R 954, “Permis de circulation, délivrance par les maires, Armentières, correspondance”, June-July 1916. 34 ADPdC, M 5569, Prefect Pas-de-Calais to Interior Ministry, 14 March 1916. 35 Nivet, France occupée, 85–116, 133–49; Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris, 2010), Ch. 6.

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conflict subjected ever greater numbers of civilians to military control and discipline. But it also reveals that this process had very different consequences for a liberal democracy such as France on the one hand, and an authoritarian empire such as Russia on the other. In Ober Ost, the German Army’s Verkehrspolitik quickened the uncoupling of the region from the Russian Empire, and provided a space within which new nation states could emerge, thereby further weakening Russia’s national mobilization. In the West, similar policies were enacted on both sides of the lines, but this time by engaging with local authorities, and so did not seriously undermine the stability of the French state. We can see similar trends when examining the problem of forced civilian mobility. 2

Civilian Mobility: Forced Displacement East and West

The First World War generated unprecedented levels of population displacement across Europe. In the West, the German invasion of 1914, followed by four years of static warfare, sent almost 1.56 million French to the interior of the country by September 1918.36 More than 1.5 million Belgians left their occupied homeland for France, Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands.37 On the other side of Europe, population displacement was of an even greater magnitude. In late 1914, Russian advances into East Prussia prompted 870,000 Germans to flee westwards.38 Further south, the Russian advance into Austrian Galicia and Bukovina sent over a million into the heartlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.39 Worse came later in 1915, when the German Army pressed into Russia’s north-western territories, and Austro-Hungarian troops reconquered Galicia. At this time, the retreating Russian high command adopted a scorched-earth policy, forcing supposedly suspect Tsarist subjects, including ethnic Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and Jews, towards the Russian interior. By 1917, there were at least six million refugees in the Russian Empire.40 Add to these almost 100,000 displaced from the Italian front, 500,000 who fled the AustrianBulgarian invasion of Serbia, and perhaps 250,000 Armenians who fled the 36 37 38 39 40

Michel Huber, La population de la France pendant la guerre (Paris, 1931), 173. Michaël Amara, Des Belges à l’épreuve de l’exil: les réfugiés de la Première Guerre Mondiale, France, Grande-Bretagne, Pays-Bas (Brussels, 2008), 48. Alexander Watson, “‘Unheard-of Brutality’: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914–1915”, Journal of Modern History 86 (2014), 780–825. Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London, 2014), 199. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War i (Bloomington IN, 1999), 3.

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Ottoman Empire to Russia to avoid genocide, and an estimate of 12 million displaced persons during the war appears reasonable.41 Between 1914 and 1918, forced mobility was a truly European phenomenon, impacting nearly all belligerents. Like occupation and forced immobility, the history of forced civilian mobility during the First World War readily lends itself to comparative analysis, and prompts a number of reflections on the similarities and differences between the responses of nation states and multi-­national empires. In all cases, forced displacement presented similar challenges. How and to what extent should refugees be assisted? Was assistance the duty of the state, or of private humanitarian actors? How was forced displacement interpreted, and how were refugees represented? And were democratic nationstates or autocratic empires better at dealing with refugees? The French case reveals the interactions between refugees and a democratic nation state.42 Prevailing historiographical interpretations paint a hostile picture of interactions between host communities and refugees. The latter were, supposedly, castigated as economic burdens, or as “Boches du Nord” – ­suspect elements having been in intimate contact with the enemy.43 This has led Philippe Nivet to conclude that “the often negative reactions – both of host populations towards refugees and refugees themselves towards their compatriots from other regions – contradict the idea that the First World War was a determining moment for the unification of the nation”.44 Such interpretations, however, overlook the fact that refugees remained French citizens, and that their interactions with the state were part of a much broader renegotiation of the reciprocal obligations of state and citizen in wartime. The war had a profound effect on the nature of the French state and its reach into the lives of citizens.45 Not only did the industrial mobilization result in increased public intervention in the management and planning of the economy, but wartime pressure on incomes prompted authorities to expand France’s welfare provisions. The most notable was the separation allowance

41 42

Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford, 2013), 26–31. Alex Dowdall, “Citizenship on the Move: Refugee Communities and the State in France, 1914–1918”, in Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War, eds., Peter Gatrell and Liubov Zhvanko (Manchester, 2017), 215–35. 43 Philippe Nivet, Les réfugiés français de la Grande Guerre: les ‘Boches du Nord” (Paris, 2004), 293–329, 377–82; Pierre Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice et citoyenneté: Angleterre-France 1900–1918 (Paris, 2013), 288–300. 44 Nivet, Réfugiés français, 556–58. 45 Fabienne Bock, “L’exubérance de l’état en France de 1914 à 1918”, Vingtième siècle: revue d’histoire 3 (1984), 41–51.

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for soldiers’ dependents.46 Although the effectiveness of such social transfer payments varied, their introduction was important, and pointed towards the later creation of the French welfare state.47 The introduction of provisions for French refugees was an integral part of this process, as they received entitlements on the basis of their ­citizenship. Refugees were particularly exposed to material hardships, having been forced to leave behind houses, jobs, and fixed incomes. Many only had the possessions they could carry by hand and even those who found employment struggled. In the opening stages of the war, French authorities were caught off-guard by the sheer number of refugees and devolved much responsibility for their aid to local councils and private charities.48 But the government soon acted, introducing a means-tested allocation in December 1914, fixed at 1.25 francs per adult per day, plus half a franc per dependent child. This figure was the same as the military separation allowance, implying that refugees were also suffering for the nation.49 In addition, the government introduced free housing, rent supplements, and medical assistance.50 Although means-tested, these provisions had significant reach, and like the military separation allowance, brought larger sections of the French population into the public welfare system. The principles underlying these welfare distributions were most clearly articulated in February 1918, when the Interior Ministry brought a set of instructions known as the “Refugees’ Charter” before parliament. This codified the benefits in existence, and reaffirmed that refugees were entitled to aid on the basis of their citizenship. The nation had, it claimed, contracted a “genuine debt (…) towards a category of citizens who have had to bear the heaviest part of the miseries provoked by the war and the sacrifices demanded by the national defence”. As a result, refugee aid “does not constitute a favour that can be accorded or refused to those affected in an arbitrary manner, but a genuine right”. The Minister instructed civil servants and the public to act according to this “essential notion” and show “real sympathy and active devotion” in their dealings with refugees, “who have suffered more than others”. The Charter’s

46 47 48 49 50

Thierry Bonzon, “Transfer Payments and Social Policy”, in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1918, 1, eds., Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge, 1997), 286–302. Bonzon, “Transfer Payments and Social Policy”, 299–302; Timothy B. Smith, Creating the Welfare State in France, 1880–1940 (London, 2003), 13–91. For descriptions of the public offering spontaneous charity to refugees arriving into the Gare de l’Est in Paris, see Le Petit Parisien, 29 August 1914. Archives nationales, Paris (AN), F/23/3, Interior Ministry to mayors of France, “Allocation et régime général”, 1 December 1914. AN, F/23/3, Interior Ministry to prefects, “Secours sur fonds de concours”, 13 March 1915.

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assertion that refugee aid was accorded by right as a component of French ­citizenship was unambiguous.51 This is not to say the French welfare system fully catered to the material needs of refugees. The language of social rights permeating government rhetoric should not hide the poor living conditions many refugees faced throughout the war. Reports in the refugee press regularly focused on the insufficient allocation, poor housing, high rents, evictions, and the indifference of local officials.52 Such problems show that historians are right to highlight the hostility that some of the displaced felt.53 But the fact that the French state purported to see refugees as citizens with a right to aid forces us to consider how refugees in turn saw the state and, in particular, whether they actively engaged with it as citizens. Refugees were not content to passively accept whatever benefits they were granted. They viewed their displacement through the lens of democratic citizenship, and acted to secure their rights and improve their conditions. To do so, they created a network of representative organizations within host communities across the country. This was facilitated by the fact that in most cases displacement was collective, with refugees from the same location travelling together into the interior. Refugees were thus able to look to other members of their pre-war local communities for support. Refugees from Reims and the Marne, for instance, formed associations in Lyon, Dijon, Toulouse, Marseille, Vichy, Nice, Bordeaux, Saint-Etienne, and Orléans.54 Many of these committees were small and represented from a handful to several hundred individuals, but they increased their effectiveness by affiliating with national committees operating out of Paris. Ten such committees, one for each invaded department, existed. These national committees, in turn, combined into the Union des comités centraux de réfugiés, a pressure group which worked closely with parliamentarians from the front-line regions to ensure refugee welfare remained an issue of national importance through parliamentary speeches, debates, and public meetings.55 The activities of the representative committees – both local and ­national – reveal how refugees navigated displacement as French citizens. The committees were organized on the basis of region of origin rather than region of 51

Journal Officiel de la République Française, “Instructions portant fixation du régime des réfugiés”, 17 February 1918. 52 Reims à Paris, 28 June 1916, 17 February 1917; Bulletin des Réfugiés du Pas-de-Calais, 28 July 1915, 16 July 1916, 20 September 1916. 53 Nivet, Réfugiés français, 237–54. 54 Jules Matot, Reims et la Marne: almanach de la guerre (Reims, 1916), 579–86. 55 Nivet, Réfugiés français, 153–66.

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r­efuge, with refugees working together because they were from the Marne, rather than in Marseille. This helped promote sociability and maintain local identities among refugees in exile. In Paris, for instance, the national organizations hosted regular events, from large conferences on the topic of reconstruction, to a stream of lower-key events including children’s parties, cinema screenings, guided museum visits, lectures examining local history, art and architecture, and monthly social evenings.56 Each committee also published a newspaper for refugees from its region, and maintained offices where refugees could meet, talk, and exchange information. Outside Paris, the provincial committees were also highly active.57 Taken together, their activities reveal the continued strength of refugees’ community ties in exile. The committees also fulfilled a further vital function, providing material assistance in the form of cash, clothing, and medical care to their constituencies.58 These distributions supplemented insufficient state welfare provisions. But they also further cemented local identity among refugees. The committees distributed aid on the basis of region of origin, with each only providing assistance to refugees from its department. Individual refugees were aware of this, and regularly wrote to their committees soliciting aid. In their letters they reveal how, even while displaced, French refugees identified as members of their home communities, and used these identities to legitimize claims for assistance. One woman from the bombarded town of Reims appealed to the Marne committee after the mayor of her host village stopped her allocation. She did so “because during these hard times I have come to miss Reims despite its bombardments”.59 French refugees were, therefore, motivated by a sense of local community identity while in exile. Such local identities were an established part of early 20th century French concepts of citizenship. The locality, or the petite patrie, was a building-block of a greater national whole, and France was represented as a diverse but unified nation. Stéphane Gerson has described how, in this way, the petite patrie became “a keystone of civil participation and national identification”.60 During the war, these local identities proved particularly 56

See for instance, Reims à Paris, 23 December 1914, 3 March 1915, 1 May 1915, 9 January 1915, 3 November 1917. 57 For the activities of the Marne committee in Dijon see ibid., 4 March 1916, 15 November 1916, 17 February 1917, 15 June 1918. 58 Nivet, Réfugiés français, 162. 59 Archives Départementales de la Marne, Reims (adm), 10 R 508, illegibly signed letter to Amicale de la Marne, 21 December 1916. 60 Stéphane Gerson, “The Local’, in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, eds., Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca NY, 2011), 215–16.

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i­mportant, as local elites articulated the symbols, languages, and discourses that structured local engagement with the national and international war efforts.61 For soldiers and civilians alike, the defence of their home communities was a strong motivation for continued support for the war. This was especially the case for refugees, whose home communities became actual battlegrounds. As John Horne has demonstrated, the German invasion of August 1914 was, in part, represented as a violation of space, a series of attacks on individual, local communities and, through them, the nation itself.62 French society’s resilience over the course of almost four and a half years of brutal conflict depended in large part on the continued successful mobilization of such local identities. When refugees expressed local solidarity, they were drawing on forms of identity that supported France’s national mobilization. Not only, therefore, did the French state respond to refugees by treating them like citizens, but in responding to displacement by relying on their local identities, refugees were acting upon an essential component of their citizenship. The relationships that developed between the displaced and the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe were quite different. This may partly be attributed to the fact that it was not just the enemy that caused displacement, but Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian troops. The Russian Army forced large numbers of those it considered suspect eastwards during the retreat of 1915, while Austro-Hungarian forces acted punitively towards local populations in Galicia, targeting the empire’s Ruthenian subjects, who were presented as Russophile and treasonous.63 Once they reached the Russian and Austro-Hungarian interiors, refugees were no longer subject to such outright violence. Indeed, the ­Austro-Hungarian Empire’s official pronouncements presented refugees as citizens of a multinational state, entitled to solidarity and aid. As Julia Thorpe has demonstrated, Austrian authorities saw displacement as an opportunity to implement a sort of ‘civilizing mission’ towards refugees. The displaced, coming from the empire’s peripheries, would be civilized by support received at the heart of the empire, and “return to their homelands after the war with minds, bodies, and souls improved”.64 Heeding such calls, some private charitable o­ rganizations 61 Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice et citoyenneté, passim. 62 John Horne, “Corps, lieux et nation: la France et l’invasion de 1914”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 55 (2000), 73–109, 74. 63 Watson, Ring of Steel, 148–57. 64 Julia Thorpe, “Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War”, in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, eds., Pippa Virdee and Panikos Panayi (Basingstoke, 2011), 110.

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worked hard to assist refugees. A Vienna-based Central Welfare Bureau for Refugees was established, while Jewish committees, both in Vienna and local host communities, supported their co-religionists.65 The reality experienced by refugees differed from this ideal model, however. Official pronouncements on the need for solidarity could not bridge the empire’s deep-seated ethno-nationalist rivalries. Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, and Hungarians in the interior were likely to consider destitute Jewish, Polish, and Ruthenian arrivals from the periphery as unwelcome, foreign burdens. Distrust of ‘primitive’ and peripheral easterners by the Empire’s self-declared civilized core was compounded by tensions generated by extreme shortages of food and resurgent antisemitism.66 As a result, many refugees experienced hostility of a kind unknown in France. Many refugees were, therefore, alienated within their host communities. But matters were made worse by the alienation of refugees towards the state. The authorities demonstrated strong desires to control the movements of the displaced, for fear of infiltration by Tsarist spies, and that refugees were a source of diseases such as typhus and cholera.67 Refugees wealthy enough to support themselves could travel where they wished, but the impoverished majority was sent to ‘inspection stations’ where they were registered, divided by ethnicity and religion, and quarantined for two weeks. After this, they were distributed by ethnic and religious group to reception centres across the empire. More than 200,000 spent the war in hastily-built concentration camps. Conditions were squalid, and in one camp for Poles near Chotzen, a third of those incarcerated died.68 Such treatment was compounded by the inadequate state refugee allowance which barely covered a third of minimum living costs, and was readily withdrawn from refugees who complained.69 But the most alienating factor proved to be the deep political divisions between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the empire. Many refugees came from Galicia, in the Austrian part of the empire, and proceeded due south, into Hungary. But regulations only allowed refugees from the Austrian territories to receive aid in Austria, and those from Hungarian regions to receive aid in Hungary.70 Those who arrived into Hungary from Galicia encountered outright hostility from what seemed like a 65 Watson, Ring of Steel, 205; Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, “Beyond the ‘Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy’: Jewish Refugee Policy from Wartime Austria-Hungary to Interwar Czechoslovakia”, Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014), 150–66. 66 Watson, Ring of Steel, 203–04. 67 Watson, Ring of Steel, 200. 68 Watson, Ring of Steel, 200–02. 69 Watson, Ring of Steel, 204. 70 Klein-Pejšová, “Infamous Concentration Camps”, 157.

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foreign and uncaring state. The Hungarian government resented the presence of Galician refugees, and insisted they were an Austrian problem. Many were forcibly moved over the border to Austria or, after September 1915, returned to their devastated homelands.71 Such actions testify to the lack of solidarity that characterized Austro-Hungarian responses to displacement. Refugees, divided by nationality and faith, were overwhelmingly viewed as suspect. Rather than rallying to the state, the treatment they received exacerbated the social tensions undermining the Dual Monarchy’s war effort. Similar forces were at play in the Russian Empire. Unlike Austria-Hungary, however, where the state took an active, if antagonistic role in refugee aid, in Russia the government devolved refugee assistance into the hands of private charities and civil society groups. At first, there was a serious and genuine charitable mobilization in favour of Russia’s refugees. This was undertaken by diocesan committees, private charities, and provincial and local zemstva (rural local authorities), who organized food, clothing, and other items for refugees.72 Although such committees were ostensibly unpolitical, the autocratic empire perceived them as a threatening vehicle for democratic opposition, given they were often coordinated by Russia’s young, educated professionals.73 Yet, if such active societal engagement threatened the autocratic monarchy, so too would a French-style statist response treating refugees as citizens. A partial solution was found in the Tatiana Committee for the Relief of War Victims, a semi-official agency established under the patronage of the Tsar’s daughter. Relying on state grants and private donations, and divided into local committees across the country, this organization brought together the aristocracy, nobility, governors, members of the judiciary and other notables. It played a vital role in distributing refugee relief, but also undermined the activities of rival public organizations.74 Russia’s response to displacement was, therefore, inconsistent and plagued by the empire’s political insecurities. It was also inadequate, as depleting resources generated tensions between refugees and host communities.75 Refugees’ material suffering was severe. But it would have been significantly worse were it not for a further form of assistance. Tsarist authorities were happy to allow Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and other national elites to organize committees to aid ‘their’ refugees. To the government, these committees may have 71 Klein-Pejšová, “Infamous Concentration Camps”, 158. 72 Gatrell, Making of the Modern Refugee, 33. 73 Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 37–40. 74 Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 40–42. 75 Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 63.

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seemed appealing as a further alternative to the zemstva and public organizations controlling refugee assistance. But the national committees also had a further, perhaps unintended consequence. Peter Gatrell has explained how, although refugees were “by definition deprived of membership of a close-knit local community”, displacement also offered them “an opportunity to gain access to a new, much broader national community”.76 The committees provided assistance to refugees on the basis of their membership of a national community, and thus helped foster a sense of national belonging that many, in the pre-war years, may not have felt. This was a stated aim of the committees, and the nationally-minded elites running them deliberately sought to invoke a sense of belonging among refugees. One Polish activist, for instance, spoke of “preserving the refugee on behalf of the motherland”.77 To do this, they adopted similar tactics to their locally-oriented counterparts in France, and engaged in active cultural and educational campaigns through clubs, newspapers, and lectures. However, unlike in France, where refugee committees reinforced a sense of local belonging that complemented national identity, in Russia the activities of the national committees undermined the social basis of the multinational empire. In the case of the Latvian committee, for instance, refugee assistance coincided with a radicalization of nationalist thought, which moved from envisioning self-rule within a Russian federal structure, to demanding outright independence.78 As early as September 1915, the editor of one refugee newspaper asserted that “most of those who hitherto called themselves ‘Russian’ are now beginning to think of themselves as Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians, Latvians”.79 According to Gatrell, such radical developments undermined “established notions of social status and social control ( … and) challenged established political, social, and cultural practices”, thereby contributing to a broader process of social disruption in the lead-up to the 1917 revolution.80 The Tsarist Empire was incapable of categorizing refugees as citizens with a right to aid, as to do so would undermine the autocratic principles of the state. As a result, refugees began to self-identify as members of national communities.

76

Peter Gatrell, “Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War”, Immigrants and Minorities 26 (2008), 82–110, 95. 77 Peter Gatrell, “War, Population Displacement and State Formation in the Russian Borderlands, 1914–24”, in War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924, eds., Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (London, 2004), 10–34, 14. 78 Aija Priedite, “Latvian Refugees and the Latvian Nation State during and after World War One”, in War, Population and Statehood, eds., Baron and Gatrell, 35–52. 79 Gatrell, Making of the Modern Refugee, 46. 80 Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 4.

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3 Conclusion Like the forced immobility of civilians, the history of forced civilian mobility during the First World War reveals both similarities and differences between the social and cultural mobilizations of the belligerents. In all cases, refugees drew on collective identities – either local or national – in navigating displacement. But the consequences of this differed. In France, the state’s relative success in dealing with the refugee crisis was symptomatic of the strength of the social and cultural mobilizations for war overseen by the Republican regime, and studied by John Horne.81 By relying on local forms of solidarity, and actively engaging with the state as citizens, French refugees ‘self-mobilized’ for war just like other sections of the population. This was in contrast to the situation in Central and Eastern Europe, where large-scale forced displacement compounded wartime social fragmentation. The extent of this contrast is revealed by the fact that both France and Russia faced refugee crises of similar magnitude. In both cases, roughly five per cent of the population was displaced.82 Yet in France, unlike in Russia, there is no evidence that refugees acted as a destabilizing force, even during the crisis year of 1917 which saw widespread strikes in factories and mutinies in the army. This was at least partly due to the strength of the French brand of Republican citizenship to which refugees had access. Occupation and forced displacement – experiences which affected millions of civilians across Europe during the First World War – thus contributed to the starkly different outcomes of the war for states in Western and Eastern ­Europe. In drawing attention to the similarities of civilians’ experiences in combat zones across Europe, as well as the differing impacts of these experiences for belligerent societies, this chapter hopes to have built upon Horne’s work into the inter-relationship of national mobilizations and total war. Ultimately France, as a democratic nation state with long-established and stable local government structures and concepts of participative citizenship, weathered the social pressures generated by mass civilian mobility and immobility relatively well. In contrast, in Austria-Hungary and Russia, these same social pressures, mainly affecting ethnically diverse and ‘peripheral’ borderlands, helped precipitate the decline of the imperial state structure. The exposure of civilians to military violence is, therefore, an important point of comparison for studying the varying successes of the belligerents’ social and cultural mobilizations during the First World War. 81 82

Horne, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War’,” 1–17. France hosted 1.85 million refugees, of whom 1.5 million were French, in a pre-war population of 39.6 million. In Russia six million out of 120 million people were displaced. On Russia’s refugee population see Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 3.

Chapter 9

Occupation, Memory, and Cultural Demobilization: Paris as Case Study Michael S. Neiberg* 1

Occupation and the Uses of History

In “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919–1939”, John Horne addressed questions that merit a great deal more attention from historians of war than they normally receive.1 How and under what circumstances do long-term enemies learn to live peacefully alongside one another? When and how do they transition from hatred to genuine and long-lasting friendship? A traditional answer might focus on the role of politics and the evolving nature of state interests, along the line of the old diplomatic adage that yesterday’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend. But Horne posited that there might well be a socio-cultural dimension to this question. He argued that one key to the process lies, as his title suggests, in demobilizing the collective minds of the belligerent societies by dismantling the war cultures developed during times of conflict. The first part of this chapter lays out parts of the cultural demobilization thesis that Horne advanced. Then the chapter uses the German occupation of Paris from 1940 to 1944 as a case study, briefly surveying the scholarly literature on the topic and suggesting ways to link it to Horne’s cultural demobilization thesis. Recognizing that this chapter stretches Horne’s ideas further than the article itself suggests, it ends by linking the lived experience and post-war memory of occupation to the cultural demobilization that has in fact developed between France and Germany since 1945.

* The views expressed herein are those of the author alone. They do not represent the views of the Department of Defense, the United States Army, or any part of the United States Government. My deep thanks to my friend Sophie de Schaepdrijver for her insightful comments on an earlier draft. 1 John Horne, “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919–1939”, French History and Civilization 2 (2009), 101–19.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_011

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Fully acknowledging the further risk of simplifying Horne’s complex argument too much, we can focus here on three aspects of the process of cultural demobilization. First, Horne argued that cultural demobilization can lead to an increased chance of durable peace when the two sides abandon the desire to sacrifice for their cause. Bitterness might still linger, and that bitterness might still find cultural expressions, but the two sides no longer wish to kill, or more importantly, die for the causes that had motivated them to go to war in the past. Second, the two sides must stop their dehumanization of one another. Again, bitterness and grievances might still linger, but those grievances do not lead the two sides to deny the basic humanity of the other. In the FrancoGerman case, the development of social exchanges and other forms of direct engagement undercut any attempt to dehumanize the other. Perhaps more importantly, a common pan-European identity developed through mechanisms like the European Union, a common currency, and the opening of a shared border. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly for our purposes, Horne posited that the two sides must come to a basic, shared history of the events in question. This history, or perhaps more accurately this memory, need not be accurate. It can be a convenient fiction that grossly simplifies or distorts the past; the key is that this version of events allows the two sides to move forward with little abiding hatred. The European conventional (if not scholarly) wisdom that the First World War was a product of excess nationalism serves as a case in point. Historically, it is problematic as an explanation for the outbreak of war, but it helps to end the shared acrimony and also ends the quest to assign blame (and therefore punishment) for the events of 1914–1918.2 The focus of Horne’s article was on the demobilization of the war culture of 1914–1918 in France. The remainder of this chapter posits that such a model, adapted to the occupation of Paris and the end the Second World War, can help us to understand one small part of the cultural demobilization between France and Germany after that war. To be sure, many other factors played key roles in the warming of relations between the two former enemies, including the shared common enemy between France and (West) Germany represented by the Soviet Union; the presence of American occupation forces in Germany; and the integration of the French and (West) German militaries into nato. 2 This development of a shared history that blames no state in particular might also help to account for the warm reception given, especially in Germany, to Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York NY, 2013). As its title implies, it does not assign blame disproportionately to any one European state.

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Still, a cultural component to this discussion might help illuminate how a period of Franco-German enmity morphed so quickly and seemingly so permanently into one of the closest state-to-state relationships in the world. It can also help us develop narratives other than the largely political one that begins the period of Franco-German hostility with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 or even, in the clearly overstated argument of the popular writer Alistair Horne, all the way back to Charlemagne’s division of his empire into what became France, Germany, and the middle ground of Alsace-Lorraine.3 From this standard political narrative of enduring hatred between France and Germany, it would be easy to see the German defeat of France in 1940, and the subsequent German occupation of the country, as the third modern panel in a bloody historical triptych that began in 1870. Symbols like the Nazi destruction of the railway car that hosted the armistice signing in 1918, the extinguishing of the flame under the Arc de Triomphe, and the daily German military march down the avenue des Champs Élysées during the occupation reinforce the images of a cycle of hatred and vengeance. Exactly such images dominated the first generation of occupation scholarship. It focused on the heroism of the French “sous la botte des Nazis” (under the Nazi boot), as one of the first books on the subject pronounced.4 From the 1940s into the 1970s, the main themes of studies of the occupation were the unity of the French people in the face of Nazi oppression and the importance of the French resistance in maintaining not only French opposition to the Nazis but in sustaining French pride as well. As a book on the origins of the French resistance by the noted American historian Martin Blumenson summarized, “Most Frenchmen, long before the liberation, and many as early as 1940, were united secretly in the war against the occupation”.5 This historical view reflected an official one, put forward by no less a figure than Charles de Gaulle himself, that membership of the resistance was widespread and represented a broad cross-section of French society. France, though occupied and, in de Gaulle’s own words, “martyred”, was nonetheless unified in its outrage and opposition to Nazi tyranny.6 3 Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (New York NY, 1962). For a rebuttal of Alistair Horne’s thesis, see Paul Jankowski, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War (New York NY, 2013). There is no relationship between John and Alistair Horne. 4 Jean Eparvier, À Paris sous la botte des Nazis (Paris, 1944). 5 Martin Blumenson, The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance (Boston MA, 1977), 273. 6 De Gaulle used the words “Paris outragé ! Paris brisé ! Paris matryrisé ! Mais Paris libéré !” in his speech at the Hôtel de Ville shortly after the liberation. The words appear today on the de Gaulle statue on the Champs Élysées.

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Robert Aron, later to be elected to the Académie Française, had an e­ normous influence on this generation of scholarship. In 1959, he published Histoire de la libération de la France as part of Gallimard’s “Les grands études contemporaines” series.7 The book helped to establish three foundational themes. First, that the French people as a whole suffered under the Nazi occupation regardless of class or region of origin. The result was a “black misery” for the anguished French people, manifested most clearly in the lack of food and the repression of French politics and culture.8 As a people, he argued, the French responded by engaging in widespread acts of collective passive and active resistance to Nazi rule, reinforcing the Gaullist view noted above. Second, Aron, like all writers in this period, drew careful distinctions between the ‘Germans’ and the ‘Nazis’. By assigning guilt to the latter, Aron could put the blame for the occupation on a political group that had already received punishments from the international community and that no longer existed as such. This rhetorical trick (not used in the case of either the Japanese or the Italians) could not withstand close scrutiny for the obvious reason that the two categories were not neatly divisible. Still, doing so allowed the French to excuse the German people as a whole in a way that did not happen in 1919. In this view, the Nazis, a group distinguishable from the Germans, were the criminals of the 1940–1945 period. Thus did careful use of language contribute in no small way to breaking the cycle of vengeance. Third, the first generation of scholarship took this distinction even further by pushing the myth of the ‘good Nazi’, mainly in the person of the German military commander of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz. Choltitz soon became an ironic hero of sorts to the French for his supposed refusal to destroy Paris at the end of the occupation, defying orders from Hitler himself to do so. Choltitz, Aron wrote, could not “compromise his honour as a soldier by such a tragedy”.9 This idea of the honourable and ‘good’ Choltitz standing up to the evil Hitler became an article of faith after the popular book and film Is Paris Burning? made it a part of almost any history of the occupation and liberation.10 The title itself came from an angry utterance allegedly made by Hitler demanding that the French capital be left a pile of ruins before the Germans surrendered it. 7

Robert Aron, Histoire de la libération de la France, juin 1944-mai 1945 (Paris, 1959), published in English as France Reborn (New York NY, 1964). 8 Aron, Histoire de la libération, 226. 9 Aron, Histoire de la libération, 238. 10 Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York NY, 1965). A popular film based on the book appeared in 1966 with Gert Froebe (who had played Goldfinger in the eponymous James Bond movie two years before) as Dietrich von Choltitz.

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Historians like Aron were both influencing the national mood more generally and reflecting it. Alan Resnais’ 1956 documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) shocked France by exposing the horrors of Auschwitz, but it located the Holocaust in the context of the Nazi rise to power. Official memory played a role as well. Censors objected to a scene in the movie that obliquely showed Jewish victims being herded into cattle cars not by German soldiers, but by French policemen, who most commonly appeared in this literature either as unwilling participants in the face of German power or as a buffer between the murderous Nazi occupiers and the French people. Vichy French leaders like Henri-Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval used the latter rationale in their postwar defences of their actions. American historian Robert Paxton demolished this first generation of scholarship when he published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 in 1972.11 Paxton thoroughly undermined the basic assumptions of the Aron school in a book as influential in its field as perhaps any scholarly work ever published. The book, whose cover featured a photograph of Pétain meeting with Hitler, proved conclusively that collaboration between the French and the German occupiers was deep, widespread, and pervasive. After Paxton, the debates in French history on both sides of the Atlantic changed to a discussion not of what the Nazis did to the French, but of what the French did to one another. In some versions, the collaborationist French appear as the true villains, going even further than their Nazi masters had asked them to go, especially in rounding up Jews and communists. British historian Ian Ousby, for example, concluded that “the majority of French citizens welcomed the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Laval, who used France’s defeat to launch their own right-wing revolution”.12 Paxton helped to initiate an intense period of self-examination in France. He himself frequently debated former Vichy officials, devotees of the Aron school, and those who could not accept his allegations of widespread French complicity in the occupation. These debates soon went beyond the academic; French journalists and politicians began to ask deep and probing questions about the wartime actions of government officials and candidates for public office. War crimes trials resulted, most famously in 1973 against a leader of the pro-Vichy Milice Paul Touvier.13 11 12 13

Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York NY, 1972). Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944 (New York NY, 1997), quotation is from the back cover. For more see Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1987), ­published in English as The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge MA, 1994), Chapter three. In 1994, Touvier became the first Frenchman

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Paxton’s work shook France because it challenged the entire political spectrum. The right and its main institutions, including the Catholic Church, had to face the allegation that it not only collaborated with the Nazis, but did so enthusiastically in order to impose its conservative views on French society. These views were deeply informed by anti-Semitism, anti-Republicanism, and even monarchism. After Paxton, the French left could no longer argue that collaboration was exclusively a phenomenon of the right because Paxton’s work had shown how deeply collaboration had stained all elements of French society. And, as Marc Ferro argued, followers of Charles de Gaulle had to accept that the French Fourth Republic they created was built to a large extent on Vichy models, sometimes by former Vichy officials.14 This second generation of scholarship usually overlooked the Germans as the focus shifted to investigations of the actions of French officials instead. Henry Rousso argued in 1987 that a “Vichy syndrome” distorted and refracted both France’s present and its past. The syndrome, for Rousso, was more important than the lived experience of occupation because of the poisonous social and political legacies it bequeathed to post-war France. The Aron school’s focus on resistance and national unity had only made the syndrome worse by imposing a kind of national amnesia on France and making it that much harder for the French people to accept what Paxton and his followers had argued.15 Paxton’s breaking of the silence about the deep involvement of French collaborationists in the crimes of the occupation led to fundamental changes in public memory. Memorials to the deportations of French Jews increasingly blamed Vichy and French collaborators. In 2001, for example, Paris erected a plaque in the 4th arrondissement to the 11,000 Jewish children of the city killed in the Holocaust. It reads “Arrested by the police of the Vichy government, accomplices of the Nazi occupation, more than 11,000 children were deported from France from 1942 to 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz because they were born Jewish”. Note that the plaque blames Vichy before it blames the Nazis, and note also that the plaque carefully says “Nazis” not “Germans”, two elements of memory to which I will return. The Vichy syndrome and competing memories of the occupation continue to impact French politics. During the 2017 presidential election, the far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen said that France was not responsible for the infamous roundup of 13,000 Jews (one-third of them children) into the c­ onvicted of crimes against humanity. He was first charged in 1973, two years after the publication of Paxton’s book. 14 Marc Ferro, “Maréchal, nous sommes toujours là”, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16 February 1973. 15 Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy.

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Vel d’Hiv bicycle racetrack in July 1942.16 Scholars of the Paxton school had shown conclusively the extent of French complicity in the arrests. In 1995 then-President Jacques Chirac offered a formal apology.17 Le Pen’s statement was not only an attempt to rewrite history, but definitive proof that the Vichy syndrome that Rousso identified continues to shape the way that the French talk about the past and how it relates to their present. A third generation of scholarship has tried to offer some balance between the two extremes of French unity in resistance and French complicity in collaboration. Julian Jackson’s comprehensive and authoritative France: The Dark Years, published in 2001, shifted emphasis to the complexity and ambiguity of life under occupation. Jackson, in the first scholarly look at the topic since the 1970s, moved the focus away from debates over the legacies of Vichy and back to the experience of occupation itself.18 This generation tends to deemphasize the politics of the early 1940s in favour of longer historical patterns in French history; Jackson’s periodization begins in 1890. This kind of analysis makes the nature of the occupation more a consequence of patterns in French history than the triptych of Franco-German military rivalry. This newest generation of scholarship also emphasizes elements of the occupation beyond the control of the French. The destabilizing end of the First World War, the sudden collapse of the Third Republic in 1940, bitterness at the British, German military failure in the east, and American entry into the war all affected the nature of the occupation. With little hope of an AngloAmerican victory in Europe until 1944, organized resistance became difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Thus does Matthew Cobb, an historian of the French resistance, account for early French acquiescence in the establishment of Pétain’s regime as “numb support of much of the population simply because he [Pétain] ended the war”.19 Most importantly, recent works argue that the occupation provided few black and white answers to a world of greys. As Allan Mitchell has argued, the Germans could never have occupied and governed France without French help, but that did not mean that the French acted as the Germans wished them to do. Referring to the police, Mitchell wrote that “generally, the French always did as they were instructed, although often not with enough efficiency 16 17 18 19

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/09/marine-le-pen-denies-french-role -wartime-roundup-paris-jews. Accessed 2018 Mar 1. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/17/world/chirac-affirms-france-s-guilt-in-fate-of-jews .html. Accessed 2018 Mar 1. Julian Jackson, The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (New York NY, 2001) and Jean-Pierre Azéma, De Munich à la liberation, 1938–1944 (Paris, 1979). Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London, 2009), 35.

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to suit their prompters”.20 That statement damns with faint praise but Mitchell and others contend that collaboration and resistance were neither complete opposites nor absolute categories. Life under occupation created ambiguity, confusion, and few easy answers, a theme reinforced in Jean-Pierre Azéma and Olivier Wieviorka’s Vichy, 1940–1944.21 Mitchell and others of this generation of scholarship emphasize the need to study the structure, or lack thereof, in the occupation. The Germans, Mitchell argues, had never expected France to fall as quickly and as completely as it did. Nor did the Germans expect the French to offer such a level of support to the occupiers, even if it was sometimes done only half-willingly. As a result, he argues, we need to see the occupation not as something planned and informed by Nazi ideology, but instead as something more or less improvised as the war developed and as the situation on the ground in Paris changed. Exogenous factors mattered as well, most importantly the declining fortunes of German forces in other theatres of the war. Above all, recent scholarship has tended not to draw sharp lines and harsh judgments, recognizing that the people of Paris had to make difficult choices every day that balanced patriotism, personal advancement, and even survival (for both themselves and their loved ones).22 Some scholars of this generation take their lead from the observation of British foreign minister Sir Anthony Eden in the 1969 documentary about the occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity, when Eden said, “If one hasn’t been through the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that”.23 Eden certainly did not mean to excuse all manner of excess and collaboration during the occupation. Rather, he wanted to introduce a sense of relativism into discussions of life under extreme circumstances like wartime ­occupation. Debates over the estimated 20,000 women who had their heads shaved during the liberation as punishment for collaboration are a case in point. While it appears such punishments were sometimes unfairly applied based on rumours or neighbourhood gossip, there does appear to have been a kind of moral economy at work. Women who engaged in ‘horizontal collaboration’ in order to keep their families alive seem generally to have avoided this p ­ ublic 20 21 22 23

Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York NY, 2008), 7. Jean-Pierre Azéma and Olivier Wieviorka, Vichy, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1997). See, for example, Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York NY, 2002) and Anne Sebba, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (New York NY, 2016). Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York NY, 2010), xiii, cites Eden directly.

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­ umiliation. The shavings appear to have been reserved mainly for women h who made excessive profits at the hands of fellow Frenchmen and women, denounced a neighbour to the German authorities, or actively belonged to a collaborationist organization.24 Anne Shebba illustrates the phenomenon by citing the case of a secretary named Lisette who quit working when she became the mistress of a married German officer. Lisette’s parents were avowedly pro-German concierges who took advantage of the deportation of their Jewish tenants to sell their possessions.25 If it is true that the shavings strike us today as misogynistic and at times unfairly applied, it is also true that in 1944 few members of the neighbourhood would have felt that having one’s head shaved in public was unduly harsh punishment for crimes committed by French women like Lisette against fellow Frenchmen and women. 2

Stage One of the Occupation: 1940 to the Invasion of the ussr

For the purposes of this brief analysis, the occupation of Paris, and of France more generally, can be divided into three periods. The occupation began with the shocking and unexpected fall of France in May and June 1940. Irène Némirovsky, a Jewish writer herself soon to die in the gas chambers, captured the trauma of these weeks with heart-rendering prose.26 Allan Mitchell, Julian Jackson, and other scholars highlight the truly disorienting chaos of that period as a way of explaining much that followed. The Germans suddenly found themselves needing to set up a low-cost, reliable, and stable occupation, while the French needed some semblance of normalcy after the truly disorienting shock of the defeat and the anxiety the occupied French felt toward their uncertain future. In the shocking days of 1940, the new arrangement between the conquering Germans and the defeated French looked permanent. The United States and Soviet Union were both still neutral, the London-based Free France movement of Charles de Gaulle was in its infancy, and the British looked to be as much 24

See Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford, 2002). Of course wealthy and famous collaborationist women like Coco Chanel and the actress Arletty (who famously said “My heart is French but my ass is international”) escaped punishment. See also the links to John Horne’s “Social Identity in War: France, 1914–1918”, in Irish Historical Studies 20 (1993), pp. 119–35. 25 Shebba, Les Parisiennes, p. 228. 26 Irène Némirovsky, Suite française (Paris, 2004). The book came from notebooks written by Némirovsky in 1940 but not discovered until 1998. Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942.

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an enemy of France as an ally, a status symbolized by the surprise British attack on the French fleet at Mers el Kébir in Algeria in July 1940 that killed 1297 French sailors. In short, most French saw little choice other than to accept the occupation and endure life under the new circumstances. From the German perspective, a light occupation of France meant that fewer German resources needed to be devoted to its internal security. Thus, in this early phase German soldiers paid for the goods they purchased in French shops (aided, to be sure, by favourable exchange rates between the mark and the franc), handed out candy to children, and even obeyed speed limits lest they face the wrath of their officers. Paris became a kind of haven for G ­ erman soldiers, especially in contrast to the combat in North Africa and the B ­ alkans, to say nothing of the Soviet front later on; Germans in Paris wanted to do as little as possible to disrupt the rather pleasant war they were enjoying. ­Fraternization between French women and German soldiers became a serious enough problem to merit attention from German officers, an indication of how smoothly the occupation went in the early days, at least from one perspective. The face of the German administration in Paris became that of Otto Abetz, an admirer of French culture since his childhood. A leftist in the 1920s, he converted to Nazism in the 1930s and established links with French fascists like the anti-Semitic writer and leader of the French fascist party, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Abetz had a French wife and saw himself as an arbiter of French culture. He lavishly supported fascist sympathizers and pro-German writers and artists like Drieu la Rochelle and Marcel Jouhandeau, giving them funding, sponsoring exhibitions of their work, and paying for them to embark on highly-publicized trips to Germany to foster new models of Franco-German cultural association.27 Occupied Paris became a centre of European wartime art and culture, as long as that art fitted with Abetz’s vision. Ernst Jünger, the playboy author of Storm of Steel, spent much of the war in Paris, hobnobbing with Picasso and Jean Cocteau, among others. All three of those men had well-deserved reputations as anti-Nazis, yet worked more or less freely in France in the early years of the occupation. A biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in these years uses the title Une si douce occupation (A very gentle occupation) to highlight the famous couple’s ability to work and write in this period

27 Riding, And the Show Went On, 246–49, is the best analysis of this phenomenon. See also Martin Mauthner, Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes: French Writers Who Flirted with Fascism (Eastbourne, 2016).

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with minimal interference.28 The Germans also engaged in a series of symbolic gestures, like the transfer of the remains of Napoleon’s son, the duc de Reichstadt, from Vienna to Les Invalides in Paris as a gift from the new regime to the people of Paris.29 To be sure, these gestures may not have meant much to the average Parisian, and the German occupiers and their French allies certainly did not tolerate open dissent. At Abetz’s direction, they confiscated Jewish and ‘degenerate’ art, and seized valuable art works owned by Jews.30 If the Germans tolerated their men fraternizing with most Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, they severely punished all fraternization with Jews and Africans living in Paris. Ever-growing restrictions on Jews both increased their misery and forced French civilians to choose between standing up for the rights of Jews and at least acquiescing, if not actively assisting, the occupation authorities. But it remains noteworthy that with the exception of their attitudes towards Jews, the Germans did not come to Paris with the highly racialized and ideological views with which they later governed cities of the east like Warsaw and Lvov.31 Despite an outward appearance of a minimum of cooperation, even in this period one must stress the unequal and uneven relationships that the occupation imposed. France paid Germany approximately 400 million French francs (20 million German marks) per day as an indemnity, and the Germans held thousands of French prisoners of war from the 1940 campaign as hostages to ensure proper behaviour from their families back in France. French officials willing to collaborate actively with the Germans were rewarded with apartments, many of them seized from Jewish owners, and access to luxuries like cars, fuel, gourmet food, and vintage wine. For average Parisians, even in this period, long lines and rationing became the norm for food and tobacco. Most Parisian drivers had to give up their cars for the metro or bicycles. 28 29

30 31

Gilbert Joseph, Une si douce occupation: Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1991). John Horne argues that it would be wrong to link the demobilizing of the mind in the 1920s in France to the defeat in 1940, though there are some interesting linkages worth considering. Némirovsky included sympathetic German characters in Suite française (indeed the Germans are often more sympathetic than the French) and Marc Bloch’s memoir L’étrange défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris, 1946) certainly shows evidence of French unwillingness to die, summed up by the phrase “Better Vichy than Verdun”. A full explanation of this thesis would, however, require another paper. Anne Sinclair wrote a book about the confiscation of the art gallery owned by her grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, in 21, rue La Boétie (Paris, 2012). See, for example, Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (New York NY, 2016) and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York NY, 2010).

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French policing and administration on the whole functioned well enough under German control. This basic appearance of competence, Azéma argued, gave French authorities a reasonable degree of credibility among the French people, despite the evident disparity in the power relationship between the French and the Germans.32 As long as the French could convince themselves that they controlled much of their own destiny, they could accept some of the aspects of what was still, for most, a relatively light German presence. This period also corresponds to the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, signed in 1939. As long as the pact operated, and Germany and the Soviet Union remained at peace, communist groups inside Paris remained quiescent. These groups, often containing highly organized men and veterans of the anti-fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War, might have formed the core of an early French resistance. But, under pressure from Moscow and French communist leader Maurice Thorez not to undermine what was then a Soviet ally, they did not offer much opposition to the German occupation. 3

Stage Two of the Occupation: The Invasion of the ussr, the sto, and the Vel d’Hiv (1941–1943)

The German invasion of the Soviet Union, although occurring hundreds of kilometres away from Paris, had a dramatic effect on the occupation of France. In Suite française, Némirovsky recognized the watershed. The second book of what she intended to be a five-book suite ends with the German celebrations of their first year of the occupation. The novel then shifts to book three, which begins with the momentous news that the Germans have invaded the Soviet Union. Némirovsky appropriately titled book two “Dolce”, revealing with just one word that the “sweet” period of the first phase of the occupation had come to a crashing end in June 1941. The third book she titled “Captivity”.33 The invasion of the Soviet Union meant that the communist resistance cells in the large cities now had orders to disrupt the Nazi war machine when and where they could. Although they knew that they could not succeed without some reasonable hope of help from the outside, the communists did begin to organize and prepare. Communists like Henri Rol-Tanguy formed the core of the resistance in Paris and led at least the first phase of the uprising in the city in August 1944. The Soviet invasion also led the Germans to demand more of France. They began to think of their new conquest as a place from which 32 Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 180. 33 She titled Book One “Tempête” (Tempest).

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the German war machine could extract food, industrial goods, and natural resources. At the upper levels of the economic and social strata, that meant making deals with willing French industrialists. At the lower ends, it meant reducing the levels of food and fuel that the French people consumed. Most importantly, the Germans tried, and largely failed, to use France as a labour pool. Offers of employment in German factories had, before 1942, only produced minimal numbers of workers, many of them long out of work and, in German eyes, not sufficiently eager or skilled. Schemes to release French prisoners of war in exchange for workers volunteering to go to Germany also failed to yield the numbers the Germans sought. Thus, in September 1942 the Vichy state announced that all French men aged 18 to 50 and all single women aged 21 to 35 would be required to perform any work that the government deemed necessary. The evident fact that this work would disproportionately occur in German factories proved to be enormously unpopular and, in the eyes of many French, dispelled the myth that Vichy was acting as a buffer between the German occupiers and the French people. Vichy’s stature with the mass of the French population never fully recovered. The introduction of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (sto) led to the growth of the resistance, as young men fled to the forests or hid underground in the cities. One resistance cell assassinated SS Colonel Julius Ritter, the German head of the sto, in broad daylight in western Paris in September 1943. In response, the Germans selected 50 French prisoners of war at random and executed them at the Mont Valérien fort in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. The incident led to a marked, but temporary, increase in tension. This second phase also witnessed the rafles, roundups of Jews by the French police. There had been periodic roundups of Jews, most of them foreign-born, before the summer of 1942, but throughout the spring Vichy and German officials had begun to plan for wholesale arrests. The Germans initially wanted to arrest only Jewish men aged 16 to 40 in the hopes of maintaining a fiction that they were being sent to labour camps in Germany; Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval personally extended the order to women, children, and the elderly. In the last few months of the year, Vichy police deported tens of thousands of Jews first to the Vel d’Hiv bicycle racing stadium, then to the transit camp at Drancy, outside Paris, then finally to Auschwitz, where nearly all of them died.34 Just a few months later, in November, Anglo-American forces invaded French North Africa, as part of Operation Torch. Morocco and Algeria, the 34 Jackson, Dark Years, 217–19. For more, see André Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l’occupation (Paris, 1991); Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York NY, 1981); and Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York NY, 1999).

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e­ mbarkation sites of Allied forces, sat in territory directly administered by Vichy France. American general Mark Clark had bravely landed on the North African coast before the landings in order to negotiate with French military officials, some of whom sought the end of the Vichy regime, but most of whom worried about possible German retaliation inside France if the Vichy army and navy did not offer sufficient resistance to the Americans and the British. In the end, Vichy forces fought for approximately one week before surrendering, at a cost of 500 Allied dead.35 The Germans, who caught wind of the dealings between Clark and French Admiral François Darlan, were furious. They ordered German troops to Tunisia and, more importantly, sent occupation troops into Vichy France, ending the agreement that they had put in place in 1940. Thereafter, Vichy became a full German puppet. The German occupation of the south also led to break-up of the powerful resistance cell based in Lyon. Thereafter, Paris became the centre of the French resistance, with all of the German surveillance and Vichy policing that came with it. 4

Stage Three of the Occupation: Hunger, Suffering, and Liberation (1943–1944)

Paris, and France more generally, suffered its greatest traumas in the months leading up to the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. From the ­German perspective, massive defeats in the east increased the pressure on Nazi administrators in the West to take resources, especially food, from the territories they occupied. As a result, the Germans seized even more food from the French, leading many Parisians to worry about the possibility of famine in the city. American soldiers who liberated Paris in August frequently remarked on how thin the Parisians looked. One of them wrote home to his family about how pretty the girls of Paris were, but also how thin they were. “I suppose they don’t eat so much”, he wrote.36 German fears about a forthcoming Allied invasion of France also led to more direct oversight from the occupation and collaborationist authorities. 35 36

There is a surprising dearth of good scholarship on Operation Torch and the complexities surrounding it. See Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn (New York NY, 2002) and Alfred Salinas, Les Américains en Algérie 1942–1945 (Paris, 2013). Charles Codman, “The Americans Arrive”, Atlantic Monthly 174 (1944), 45. Andrzej Bobkowski, a Polish exile living in Paris, kept a journal detailing the deteriorating food supply in the city. In one entry he wrote “not a cat to be seen on the streets”. See Andrzej Bobkowski, En guerre et en paix: Journal, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1991), 571–80.

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I­ ncreases in labour requisitions began in order to find the manpower needed to build coastal defences. Since these requisitions were extremely unpopular, the Germans preferred where possible to force the dirty work onto collaborationist French paramilitary units known as the milice. Espionage activity also grew much more aggressive as the Germans and their Vichy allies tried to forestall any attempt by resistance groups to aid an Allied landing. With all these tensions came an increase in violence. In July 1944 German authorities released the Jewish politician Georges Mandel from Buchenwald on the pretext of returning him to France. Instead, they handed him over to the milice, who took him to the Fontainebleau forest and murdered him in cold blood. The killing was in response to the resistance’s assassination of Vichy propaganda chief Philippe Henriot (one of the most prominent voices of the collaborationist Radio Paris) in Henriot’s own home. Notably, most of this highly-publicized violence was between Frenchmen. At the same time, France’s ostensible allies were making life difficult for Parisians. In the months before the Normandy landings, American and British bombers pummelled the French railway network in order to deny German ground forces the ability to respond quickly to the Allied landings. The Paris region, the centre of French railway communications, was a major target for these attacks. Thus, in a supremely cruel irony, the same allies who were coming to liberate the French were also bombing them. In all, an estimated 67,000 French civilians died in these attacks. One spring air raid in suburban Paris killed 380 and wounded another 446 in a single day. The northern Paris neighbourhood of La Chapelle, near the marshalling yards and station houses of both the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, had 565 people killed from Allied raids.37 This sense of suffering from both sides led to a narrative of France, and Paris in particular, as a place trapped between two warring parties. In this narrative, especially popular among many French collaborationists, the innocent and neutral French people were suffering from the depredations committed against them from both sides. At their most extreme, Vichy propagandists and apologists argued that Germany was protecting France from further Allied assaults by the British and Americans, who were in turn acting as the agents of global Jewry and Soviet communism. Philippe Henriot’s broadcasting of exactly these kinds of conspiratorial plots made him a target for assassination. The air raids gave the Germans and their French allies a chance to bolster their flagging support among the French people. In April 1944 Pétain made his first visit to Paris since 1940 in order to lead a memorial service for those killed 37

Eddy Florentin, Quand les alliés bombardaient la France (Paris, 1997).

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in the La Chapelle raids. Enormous and enthusiastic crowds came out to greet him, a clear indication that his narrative of French victimhood at the hands of the Anglo-Saxons had struck an important chord. Although he did not defend the Nazis, he did depict the French as caught in the middle of other peoples’ wars. Ironically, the D-Day landings, designed at least in part to liberate France from Nazi oppression, initially caused even greater hardships for Paris. The invasion cut the city off from Normandy, Paris’s main supplier of fruit, dairy, seafood, and meat. Food conditions, already at subsistence levels, decreased yet again, leaving those French unable to afford the black market to survive on dried vegetables and coarse brown bread. The invasion of Normandy also turned Paris into a military front. Far from wanting to destroy it, Choltitz sought to keep Paris open in order to use it as a giant roundhouse, moving fresh troops into the battlegrounds to the capital’s west, while evacuating wounded and worn out units back to Germany via the city’s rail and road systems.38 The French resistance had other ideas, setting up barricades and trapping German units as they tried to move through the city’s narrow streets. By mid-August 1944 large parts of the city had become a full fledged war zone.39 Parisians worried about what this combat might do to their beloved city. Their letters and diaries indicate that they knew full well of the destruction of Warsaw just a few days earlier. They also had in their minds the terrifying example of the Paris Commune of 1871, when the city was surrounded and cut off from the outside world. In the end, a combination of the French resistance’s effectiveness, the American army’s belated decision to send troops to Paris, and Choltitz’s awareness of his own hopeless position led to a quick surrender. Paris, like Rome, was spared the fate of Warsaw and so many other European cities. Charles de Gaulle’s triumphal entry into the city on 25 August confirmed that the occupation was over. The battle for control over its history, however, had already begun. 5

History and Memory

Memory of the occupation has focused on themes relevant to John Horne’s theory of cultural demobilization. The first, set in motion by Aron and others 38 39

James Wood, ed., Army of the West: The Weekly Reports of German Army Group B from Normandy to the West Wall (Mechanicsburg PA, 2007). Michael S. Neiberg, The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (New York NY, 2012).

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early on, emphasizes the division between German and Nazi. The persistent belief in the ‘good Nazi’, General Dietrich von Choltitz, despite there being no evidence to sustain it, is a case in point. Choltitz, who was in reality a dedicated Nazi himself, appears in memory as the man who saved Paris from the maniacal destructive impulses of Hitler and the okw high command. In reality Choltitz neither cared about Paris nor had the means to destroy even if he had wanted to, but the myth has mattered more to people since 1945 than the truth. By blaming the ‘Nazis’, the French and Germans could move forward, believing that only good Germans like Choltitz remained.40 Second, the most important focus of French memory over the years has been on what the French did to one another from 1940 to 1945. This obsession partly accounts for the enthusiastic reception that followed the discovery and publication of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in 2004. The novel showed the French people under the stress of war not to be heroes at all. Némirovsky focused on the Péricand family, connected to both industry and the Catholic Church. The family proves to be selfish, greedy, and deceitful. They even forget to rescue the ailing former patriarch of the family in their haste to leave Paris. The post-war importance to France of Charles de Gaulle has kept a spotlight shining on him and the role he played in reuniting France in 1944 and 1945. With that discussion has come debate over the justice meted out to Vichy figures like Pierre Laval, executed by firing squad in October 1945 after a perfunctory trial, and Henri-Philippe Pétain, whose own death sentence de Gaulle commuted to life in prison. In 1973, extremist supporters dug up Pétain’s grave with the idea of reburying it in the massive Douaumont cemetery at Verdun, but the French government broke up the plot and seized Pétain’s coffin in a garage outside Paris. The reburial of the coffin in its original location in southwest France came, controversially, with full honours and even a presidential wreath. At times over the years, events in the news, like the bizarre opéra bouffe surrounding Pétain’s coffin and the posthumous publication of Némirovsky’s 40

I took aim at the Choltitz myth in my Blood of Free Men (New York NY, 2010). There is an often retold anecdote that has Choltitz inspecting enormous caches of explosives placed underneath the Palais du Luxembourg, his men ready to demolish the palace on his orders. Rumours to that effect did spread around Paris in 1944, forcing evacuations in the adjacent Odéon neighborhood. But I found not one single piece of evidence to prove that the story was anything more than wartime rumour. Even the historian at the Palais du Luxembourg (home of the French Senate) told me he could produce no evidence that the Germans had ever planted explosives there except for a photograph of Choltitz inspecting what appears to be a door that could be in any building in Europe. There are no explosives in the picture.

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­ ovel, have brought the occupation back into French public conscience, but n rarely in ways that increased the tension between France and Germany. The most recent controversy surrounding Marine Le Pen’s denial of French involvement in the 1942 roundups of Jews, is a case in point. Le Pen wished not to reopen old debates between France and Germany, but to change French historical memory about the role of the French right from 1940 to 1944. This chapter has stretched the conclusions of John Horne’s cultural demobilization argument further, perhaps, than he ever intended them to go. Nevertheless, this analysis of the occupation of Paris during the Second World War and the memory of it that has endured ever since, can serve as a case in point to support his general thesis. By focusing not on what the Germans did to the French, but on what the French did to each other, French memory of the occupation has played a small but important cultural role in helping to create a general shared history, reduce dehumanization, and eliminate any desire of the French and Germans to go to war against one another again. The history and memory of the occupation may not reflect reality, but it is hard to argue with the outcome, a nearly complete demobilization of the war cultures of France and Germany between 1914 and 1945.

part 4 Victory and Defeat

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Chapter 10

Post-wars and Violence: Europe between 1918 and the Later 1940s Robert Gerwarth One hundred years ago, on 11 November 1918, the world officially emerged from a conflict that has been aptly described as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.1 Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the Middle East in particular experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, and bearing in mind the devastating legacies of that conflict, this verdict seems more than justified. Estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and ten million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thousands of men who were permanently disfigured or psychologically damaged.2 The horrors of that war were only surpassed by the (in many ways) connected Second World War – the deadliest conflict in human history – which killed some 80 million people, most of them civilians. The intensity and ‘totality’ of these two conflicts left most post-war societies visibly scarred and devastated. In all major combatant countries of both world wars, a substantial part of the able-bodied male population had been mobilized for service, many of them never to return while others came home physically or psychologically damaged. Mass conscription, on a scale never seen ­before, left tens of millions of soldiers to be demobilized in 1918 and again in 1945, often returning to home fronts that had also endured severe hardship for years and societies which had been fundamentally transformed by the strains of war. Obviously, the nature and timing of post-war transitions from war to peace in Europe depended on geography and political contexts. ‘Post-war’ meant something very different in Russia in 1918 than it did in Britain after the Great War had ended, just like the ‘post-war’ experiences after 1945 were very 1 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. Franco-Russian Relations, 1875– 1890 (Princeton NJ, 1979), 3–4. Most standard textbooks of the period follow that notion. See, for example: Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994); and Europe 1900–1945, ed., Julian Jackson (Oxford, 2002). 2 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York NY, 1998), ix; David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004), xix. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_012

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d­ issimilar in, say, Greece in 1945 and in France at the same time. In many countries war and bloodshed did not end with the formal conclusion of hostilities in 1918 and 1945, and the ‘overspill’ of violence in Europe (or its absence in some places) in this period will be the main focus of this essay. Between 1918 and 1923 alone, inter-state wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars and putsches claimed the lives of well over four million people, notably, but by no means exclusively, in Russia and its former western borderlands.3 Despite the relative political and economic stabilization of the years 1924–29, Europe soon plunged into crisis again, with all but a handful of democracies surviving the challenge posed by the Great Depression and the ensuing rise of extremist movements of the Left and Right. Violence – if not open civil war – returned to the streets of many European cities while international tensions eventually escalated into the Second World War.4 The defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 did not lead to an immediate peace everywhere either. While Western Europe returned to some semblance of stability after years of fighting, civil wars continued to rage in Greece and Yugoslavia for several years after the official end of hostilities. Violence also ­outlasted the defeat of Hitler in other parts of Eastern Europe, notably in the Baltic States and Ukraine, where nationalist partisans continued to fight the occupying Soviet troops well into the 1950s.5 The picture of a post-1945 ‘peace period’ becomes even more blurred when we employ a global perspective which – although not the focus of the essay – shows some parallels that are worth exploring elsewhere: in those territories previously occupied by ­Imperial Japan, anti-colonial movements resisted the attempts of Western imperial powers to return to the pre-1941 status quo while in French Algeria, violence remained endemic for years to come.6 The body of scholarship devoted to the two world wars, their origins and legacies, is unsurprisingly large, but its coverage remains somewhat uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the outbreak of war in 1914 and 1939, the major battles of both wars, or the peace 3 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford & New York NY, 2011); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (London, 2016). 4 There are too many books on that conflict to list here, but for a competent survey, see Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (London, 2011) or, with a stronger focus on Europe, Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–49 (London, 2015). 5 Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York NY, 2013); Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War ii (London, 2012). 6 On Africa, see Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization (London, 2014); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge and New York NY, 1996). With a broader geographical focus: John Springhall, Decolonization Since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires (New York NY, 2001).

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conferences of 1919 and 1945 have received considerable attention over the decades, historians have only more recently begun to explore more fully the ‘post-war’ paths of transition of societies from total war to ‘peace’. This is most emphatically the case in relation to the First World War, where, over the past ten years or so, historians have investigated more systematically both the continuum of violence and the reintegration of ex-servicemen into peace-time society.7 Simultaneously, some pan-European and even global surveys now exist on the aftermath of the Second World War.8 Yet while the ‘aftermaths’ of war have become a fashionable topic – not least because of John Horne’s pioneering work on demobilization as an analytical category9 – diachronically comparative histories of how Europe exited the two total wars of the 20th century are still largely absent, even if a number of anthologies have emphasized the subject as one worthy of further examination.10 In trying to understand how the approach to the subject of 20th century post-war conflicts has changed over time, it is instructive to go back as far as 1968, when the Journal of Contemporary History published an important 7

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On the aftermath of the First World War, see, among others: Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge MA, 2002); Dietrich Beyrau, “Der Erste Weltkrieg als Bewährungsprobe: Bolschewistische Lernprozesse aus dem ‘Imperialistischen’ Krieg”, Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 96–124; Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford & New York NY, 1993); Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923 (Oxford, 2006); Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillée: La sortie de guerre des soldats français (1918–1920) (Paris, 2004); Gerwarth, The Vanquished. On Germany, see Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York NY, 2009). Ian Kershaw, The End: Germany, 1944–45 (London, 2011) deals with the final months of the war, but not its immediate aftermath. Specialist studies exist, of course, on the expulsions of Germans from East-Central Europe, the mass rapes by Red Army troops, or the Greek and Yugoslav civil wars, but few surveys are available. The exceptions are: Ian Buruma, Year Zero and Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War ii (London, 2012). For a brilliant more general exploration of the post-1945 period, see Tony Judt, Post-War: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005). See, for example, John Horne, “Guerres et réconciliations européennes au 20e siècle”, in Les 27 leçons d’histoire, ed., Jean-Noël Jeanneney (Paris, 2009), 137–45 (abridged version) and in Vingtième siècle, 104 (2009), 3–15 (full version). For its relevance for the First World War, see Horne, “Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919–1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?”, in Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit, 1918–1939, ed., Wolfgang Hardtwig (Göttingen, 2005), 129–50, and “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919–1939”, French History and Civilization 2 (2009), 101–19. See, for example, Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western European 1918-1945-1989, eds., Carl Levy and Mark Roseman (Basingstoke, 2002), and, more recently, Europe’s Post-War Periods, 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards, eds., Martin Conway, Pieter Lagrou and Henry Rousso (London, 2018), which goes beyond the focus on Western Europe by including Eastern Europe and Russia in its reflections. Of particular relevance to this essay is, in this last volume, John Horne, “Demobilizations”.

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s­ pecial issue on the transition “from war to peace” in 1918–19, a series of stimulating essays on the primarily political challenges formerly combatant societies across the globe faced when the guns fell silent on the Western Front in November 1918.11 The contributions to the special issue notably addressed the relevant issues involved in making peace in Paris in 1919, and the question of why the transition from war to peace was so difficult. Half a century later, the same question is still relevant in relation to both 1918 and 1945, even if the ways in which historians today address and answer them are quite different as a result of new empirical findings and novel methodological approaches. The rise of comparative or transnational cultural history, for example, has somewhat shifted the focus of historical enquiry away from the political and diplomatic decisions that led to war and peace in 1914/1918 and 1939/1945 (even if books on those subjects, and on the major generals and battles of the war continue to dominate the shelves of bookstores). Instead, many historians today are more concerned about the people and societies affected by these decisions: the ­millions of mobilized and demobilized men as well as the men, women, and children on the various home fronts (all of whom were largely absent in the 1968 special issue of Journal of Contemporary History and many other ‘classic’ accounts of the two world wars). It is precisely because of the work of comparative cultural historians of war like John Horne that we now view the transition from war to peace and postwar periods as crucial for our understanding of wars’ legacies and how they shape the future. “Unless men and women resumed civilian life and until the economy returned to normal production (from housing to consumer goods)”, Horne writes in one of his most recent essays on the subject, “demobilization was incomplete. Yet demobilization in this material sense was also shaped by the hard politics of the war’s outcome. It depended on whether a state was victor or vanquished, occupier or occupied, and on whether the defeated accepted their lot”.12 Any refusal of the militarily demobilized societies to engage in cultural and political demobilization, or the urge to remobilize for a new war (for whatever reason) helps to explain why some societies failed to return to peace in 1918 and in 1945. Pertinent observations like these also drive the general intellectual direction of this essay, which endeavours to contribute to the discussion about the differences and similarities between the two world wars’ aftermaths. 11 12

Journal of Contemporary History 3 / 4 (1968). Horne, “Demobilization”. See also From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the Twentieth Century, eds., Paul Kennedy and William Hitchcock (New Haven CT & London, 2000).

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An analytical survey of mobilization, demobilization, and remobilization in Europe between 1918 and the later 1940s attempted in this essay might allow us to explain the different levels and different geographical distribution of postwar violence in the aftermaths of the two world wars. One obvious difference between the situation in 1918 and 1945 lies in the level of physical destruction in Central Europe in 1945 (compared to virtually no destruction of cities and infrastructures in Germany or Austria-Hungary in 1918, with the exception of Galicia and East Prussia). Another related difference lies in the fundamentally dissimilar experiences of defeat in 1918 and 1945: a total defeat, coupled with vicious street fighting in Germany and Hungary towards the end of the conflict and a perceived ‘incomplete defeat’ in the autumn of 1918, when German troops in particular were still controlling large swathes of enemy territory in both Eastern and Western Europe. The situation in 1945 was very different indeed as the victorious Allies conquered all of Germany and imposed an ‘unconditional surrender’, followed by the country’s division into four Allied occupation zones that was to last until the end of the Cold War. And while the Allies had left it to Germany post-1918 to ‘de-imperialize’ itself and to bring to justice German war-criminals (none of whom served prison sentences), they decided in favour of a more hands-on approach to ‘democratization’ in 1945 when ‘deNazification’ and the sentencing of surviving leaders of the Nazi movement (notably through the Nuremberg trials in 1945–46) were high up on the Allies’ agenda. Although there are no major comparative studies on the two post-war periods in question, historians have, of course, looked for connections between the two wars ever since 1945 – some of them suggesting a unity of both conflicts or, a kind of “Second Thirty Years’ War”.13 The transformation in 1918/19 of an interstate war into pogroms, revolutions, and civil wars in the collapsed Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the rise of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust during the Second World War, convinced many that the front experience of the Great War had opened a Pandora’s box for a whole range of issues which the peacemakers in Paris were unable to resolve and which continued to haunt Europe for decades. This ‘brutalization thesis’, most famously developed for the case of Germany in George Mosse’s 1990 classic Fallen Soldiers,14 has since 13 14

This notion was first articulated by Charles de Gaulle in a famous speech delivered in Bar-le-Duc on 28 July 1946: http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/textes/degaulle28071946.htm. Accessed 2017 Sept 8. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford & New York NY, 1990).

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been extended to Eastern Europe,15 and even to the entire European continent in the years up until 1945.16 The gist of this argument is that the First World War and the experience of the trenches and industrial warfare generated a ‘brutalization’ of soldiers and combatant societies more generally by establishing new and unprecedented levels of acceptable violence which prepared the way for, and were only surpassed by, the horrors of the Second World War, during which the number of killed civilians exceeded that of combatants. Other historians, such as Michael Geyer, have used the concept of the ‘militarization’ of European society in this period to account for the ways in which the organization of violence permeated and destabilized the first post-war period of the 20th century.17 However, the ‘brutalization thesis’ has not remained uncontested. After all, the ‘front experience’ itself (that is the experience of killing and witnessing the killing of fellow soldiers), was not fundamentally dissimilar for German, Hungarian, Russian, British, or French soldiers. Hence, the brutalization thesis does not explain why some societies experienced much more post-war violence than others. Even within those societies most often cited as having been brutalized by the war, the empirical reality is considerably more complex than sometimes assumed. Empirical studies on Germany after 1918 have, for example, suggested that the vast majority of soldiers returned to peaceful civilian lives while the often referenced Freikorps only contained a small proportion of ex-frontline soldiers.18 Comparative studies of the Great War’s impact also show that generalized statements about the war’s brutalizing effect cannot be sustained. Indeed, in some places, such as the United Kingdom (with the notable exception of Ireland), the war seems to have led to a decrease in the level of violence in politics compared to the period before 1914, while other victorious societies, such as France, were able to contain whatever violence there was within existing structures, traditions, and rituals. Once removed from the military context, most soldiers became regular civilians and behaved as such.19 15

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War i (Cambridge & New York NY, 2000), and Piotr Wróbel, “The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921”, Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 125–49. 16 Enzo Traverso, A feu et à san: De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 (Paris, 2007), published in English as Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (London, 2017). 17 Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe 1914–1945”, in The Militarization of the Western World, ed., John R. Gillis (New Brunswick, 1989), 65–102. 18 Bessel, Germany after the First World War; Richard Bessel, “The Great War in German Memory: The Soldiers of the First World War, Demobilization and Weimar Political Culture”, German History 6 (1988), 20–34; Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany. 19 Antoine Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation. Tuer sur le front occidental 1914–1918”, Vingtième siècle 81 (2000), 5–20; “Violence and Society after the First World War”, s­ pecial

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Even in the yet more extreme case of Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS veterans of Operation Barbarossa, there are few indications that the ex-servicemen’s ‘brutalization’ outlasted the Second World War. To be sure, there are no systematic studies (for lack of data) on a potential increase of domestic violence post1945, but at least in public life, there was no continuum of violence as there had been, in some parts of Germany, after 1918. Instead, Germany (and notably the frg) became a remarkably non-violent society, for reasons we will return to. The idea that war-induced brutalization may be temporary and dependent on the context of war itself was first formulated by Sigmund Freud in his e­ ssay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915). In response to contemporary concerns about the long-term effects of industrialized warfare on soldiers, the ‘father’ of psychoanalysis rejected the notion that war might lead to long-term ‘barbarization’. Instead, he argued that the particular brutalization caused by war was likely to be temporary: “We need not deny susceptibility to culture to all who are at the present time behaving in an uncivilized way, and we may anticipate that the ennoblement of their instincts will be restored in more peaceful times”. Once the environment enabling killing was abandoned, once soldiers returned to their families, civil life would resume: “When the ­furious struggle of the present war has been decided, each one of the victorious fighters will return home joyfully to his wife and children, unchecked and undisturbed by thought of the enemies he has killed whether at close quarters or at long range”.20 These assumptions have been reinforced by a number of more recent ­studies on a wide range of conflicts. Joanna Bourke’s influential study of faceto-face combat, for example, reiterates Freud’s criticism of the widespread “assumption that men trained to kill in war would carry on killing after the war”. Once the circumstances changed and the “external props of the ‘theatre of war’ were removed”, she argues, “only a tiny minority of men could continue exulting in the slaughter”. For Bourke, what happened after a war – the nature of the “homecoming” and the ability of post-war societies to re-integrate v­ eterans – was more important than the experience of combat, however savage.21

20 21

issue of Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003); Jon Lawrence, “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and Fear of Brutalization in Post-First World War Britain”, Journal of Modern History 75 (2003), 557–89; Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005). Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. 14, ed., (London, 1957, 1st p ­ ublished 1915), 275–300, 277, 295. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare (New York NY, 1999), 349–53.

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So how, then, can we explain the overspill of violence or its absence post1918 and post-1945 across Europe, as well as the different levels of intensity and geographic distribution of outbursts of violence? This essay will try to address this question – not, obviously, in the form of a ‘total history’ of the transitions from war to peace in 1918 and 1945 but, rather, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion that owes much to the intellectual interventions by John Horne. It will do so by highlighting connections between demobilization / remobilization and violence in 1918, the inter-war period, and in 1945, before offering some tentative conclusions for further debate. 1

1918: The Peace that Failed to Pacify

The German signing of the armistice of Compiègne in November 1918 formally ended hostilities on the Western Front. Demobilizing war cultures across Europe was a separate issue and one that would prove to be a lot more difficult. While many surviving soldiers and dependents of the fallen in the victorious countries agitated for a draconian peace treaty for the defeated, the latter experienced a wave of remobilization in the wake of defeat. And while the peacemakers in Paris convened to establish a lasting new international order from January 1919 onwards, violence continued unabated in large parts of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. This continuation of violence had clearly identifiable causes.22 Five factors in particular, so one could argue, were decisive in this process. First, the intensity of post-war violence appears to have depended on the strength of the state to which the former combatants returned. Where the state monopoly on violence was successfully upheld, violence by non-state actors was unlikely. Second, the issue of the state’s monopoly on force was closely connected to the question of which side a state found itself on in 1918, i.e. whether a state emerged from the war victoriously or defeated, and hence delegitimized. Third, violence was particularly intense where preexisting conflicts along class or ethnic lines had been intensified by the war after 1914. Where, fourth, long-existing class and inter-ethnic tensions were coupled with the (real or perceived) threat of a Bolshevik revolution, violence took its most extreme forms. Fifth, the over-spilling of wartime violence also depended on the degree to which veterans could be reintegrated into civilian

22

For a more detailed exploration of these causes and a series of case studies, see: Gerwarth and Horne, eds., War in Peace.

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life, either through material or symbolic compensation, both of which proved much easier in the victor states of the Great War.23 A brief look at the geography of post-war violence and non-violence shows the centrality of this causal cluster. The epicentre of post-war conflict lay the Central and Eastern European “shatterzones” created by the defeat and disintegration of the vast European land empires.24 In these shatterzones we find the most far-reaching state breakdown, and with the transformation of war into civil war the deepest brutalization of post-war life. Similar (though less extreme) forms of violence occurred in the new and disputed borderlands of Italy and defeated Germany, where the state monopoly of violence was quickly restored after several months of revolutionary turmoil. Germany and Italy constitute intriguing case studies as future fascist societies in which the postwar period was overshadowed by fantasies of state breakdown and Bolshevik violence, both of which played a crucial role in the genesis of the Fascist and National Socialist movements.25 What we are confronted with in the immediate post-war period is a classic example of self-mobilization which had already been central to the Great War.26 Self-mobilization was arguably just as important in the numerous conflicts that followed the First World War, from the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 or the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 to the civil wars that raged in Russia, Finland, Hungary, and parts of Germany. In these ‘post-war’ conflicts, self-­mobilization mattered because there were no functioning states in large parts of Eastern and Central Europe when the great dynastic empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans collapsed – states that had played a central role in mobilizing their citizens through propaganda and the drafting of a majority of 23 24

25 26

Gerwarth and Horne, eds., War in Peace; see also Mark Edele and Robert Gerwarth, “The Limits of Demobilization”, Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015), 3–14. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford, 2009), 81; Gerwarth and Horne, eds., War in Peace Gerwarth and Horne; Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, ­Shatterzones of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington IN, 2013). Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014). Among the numerous books and essay collections on mobilization in the Great War, the following stand out: State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed., John Horne (Cambridge and New York NY, 1997), and La Grande Guerre, 14–18, eds., Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker (Paris, 1998). On France in particular, see also Bruno Cabanes, Août 14: La France entre en guerre (Paris, 2014), published in English as August 1914: France, the Great War and a Month that Changed the World Forever (New Haven CT, 2016). On Germany, see Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge MA, 2000).

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able-bodied men of military age. Instead, hundreds of thousands of men were self-motivated by different causes which ranged from ideological ambitions to create political utopias to adventurism and greed, the hope to expand national boundaries at the cost of one’s neighbour or simply by the desire to survive in a world of violence and food deprivation.27 To be sure, self-mobilization post-1918 was not confined to the defeated, nor was the continuum of crisis an issue that only affected the former Central Powers. The Great War’s total mobilization of resources and manpower had strained all combatant states. Even in those winner states like France or Britain that managed to exit the war without facing serious domestic post-war unrest or revolutions, the period after 1918 was filled with economic uncertainty and disruptions, soaring inflation and mass unemployment. The sudden transition from a war economy to a peacetime economy while reabsorbing millions of men into civilian life was a daunting proposition even for the victor states.28 Following the short-lived boom at the end of the war, the beginning of the 1920s witnessed a sharp post-war economic depression and increase in the number of people without jobs. In Britain, this post-war depression saw the rate of unemployment suddenly rise up to 12 per cent in 1920–1921 and ­unemployment rates remained high throughout the inter-war period.29 There was political disenchantment, too, largely caused by unrealistic expectations of what victory in the Great War might bring. While the majority of veterans returned to peaceful civilian existences, many of them still felt alienated by a post-war reality of broken political promises that the post-war world would be a better, safer place. Yet unlike in Eastern and Central Europe, these problems did not lead to a serious challenge of the state’s monopoly on violence. Ultimately, the reintegration of veterans into civilian life proved successful, and violence was transitory or absent altogether. Indeed, in metropolitan France and Britain and their empires, the war had the opposite effect: it strengthened the legitimacy of the state and enlarged the blue-water empires controlled by Paris and London through the League of Nations’ mandates. 27 28

29

Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–23 (London, 2016). Stéphane Le Bras, “Post-war Economies (France)”, in: 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed., by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-09-03. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10721. Timothy J. Hatton, “Unemployment and the Labour Market, 1870–1939”, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain vol. 2 Economic Maturity, 1860–1939, eds., Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (Cambridge, 2004), 347–48.

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In Russia, by contrast, the war acted as a “forcing-house for the seeds of revolution”.30 After the revolutionary turmoil of 1905, the Tsarist regime had been able to reassert itself and by 1914, the Romanov regime seemed to be more firmly in control than it had been for decades. Then came the war that changed everything. The exertions of wartime disintegrated state power, releasing the forces of revolution and civil war and reinforcing an economic crisis of epic proportions that eventually forced Lenin to change tactic by ­adopting the New Economic Policy (nep) in 1921.31 While the Russian case was both extreme and specific, it had a profound impact on remobilization in Europe and beyond. The Great War had opened the floodgates of social revolution and civic conflict, with the Tsarist regime as its first major casualty. In that sense, the Russian revolution was a key event, both as a game-changer in international politics, now confronted with the first Bolshevik regime openly hostile to Western liberal democracy and capitalism, and as a fantasy that mobilized anti-revolutionary forces well beyond those countries where a triumph of Bolshevism was probable.32 In Germany and Italy the perceived threat of an imminent Bolshevik-style revolution quickly injected a powerful new energy into politics and triggered the emergence of determined counter-revolutionary forces, for whom the violent repression of revolution, and more especially of revolutionaries, constituted their overriding goal. Fear of “Russian conditions” resulted in a right-wing counter-mobilization that bred charismatic leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.33 Even in countries like Britain, France, the United States, or Australia, where a Bolshevik revolution was highly unlikely, anti-Bolshevism became a strong factor in politics.34 Partly fantasy and partly a genuine concern for those who 30 31 32

33 34

E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 vol. 1 (London, 1978), 65. On the centrality of state breakdown for the ensuing violence see Joshua Sanborn, “The Genesis of Russian Warlordism: Violence and Governance During the First World War and the Civil War”, Contemporary European History 19 (2010), 195–213. On “remobilization” through anti-Bolshevism after 1918, see: Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, “Bolshevism as Fantasy: Fear of Revolution and Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 1917–1923”, in War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War, eds., Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (Oxford, 2012), 40–51. On Italy, see Emilio Gentile: “Paramilitary Violence in Italy: the Rationale of Fascism and the Origins of Totalitarianism”, in War in Peace, eds., Gerwarth and Horne, 85–106. Gentile, “Paramilitary Violence in Italy: the Rationale of Fascism and the Origins of Totalitarianism”. Patrick Renshaw, “The iww and the Red Scare 1917–1924”, Journal of Contemporary History 3 (1968), 63–72; Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St. Lucia, 1988). See also John Horne, “Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918–1926: A Counter-example”, in War in Peace, eds., Gerwarth and Horne, 216–34.

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had more to lose than their chains, Bolshevism quickly became synonymous with the elusive threats and underhand enemies that apparently menaced post-war societies. The morbid fantasy of encirclement by nihilistic forces of disorder inspired conservative and counter-revolutionary politics across the globe, but it played out in different ways. Where victory in the Great War had strengthened the state and its institutions, as was the case in Britain and France, anti-Bolshevik mythology also served to stabilize the existing system by rallying those prepared to defend it against looming ‘chaos’. In the defeated states of Europe, the allegedly ubiquitous threat of Bolshevism offered a convenient explanation why the war had been lost, why the old regimes had been toppled, and why chaos ruled over much of Eastern and Central Europe. AntiBolshevism – usually coupled with anti-Semitism – gave paramilitary responses to the perceived collapse of order a direction and a goal; it helped to make the illusive enemy identifiable, and drew on familiar resentments against the urban poor, the Jews, and disorder more generally. The precise role of anti-Bolshevism thus varied depending on the space and political context in which occurred. It found its most violent expressions in Central and Eastern European between late 1917 and the early 1920s.35 The Revolution had the potential to mobilize people for a civil war without any previous wartime brutalization. The case of Finland illustrates that point. Although not a combatant in the First World War, Finland experienced one of the bloodiest civil wars of the immediate post-war period. During the Great War, individual volunteers from Finland had fought in both the German and the Russian armies during the war, but the vast majority of the roughly 200,000 men engaged in the subsequent civil war that claimed some 36,000 lives had no war experience whatsoever. Much more crucial for the rapid escalation of violence was a combination of governmental collapse and the lingering threat that the Russian Revolution might ‘infect’ the formerly Imperial Russian and now newly independent Finnish state. The spectre of revolution was thus as important in bringing about mass violence as the collapse of the state monopoly of violence.36 The ability of the state to enforce that monopoly on violence is undoubtedly central to any analysis of the interconnection between demobilization and violence, in particular if we deal with the question of the relative success or failure of violent non-state actors to mount a challenge to established ­authority. 35 36

Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge, 2005). Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley CA, 1988); Tuomas Hoppu and Pertti Haapala, eds., Tampere 1918: A Town in the Civil War (Tampere, 2010).

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A functioning state is usually effective in limiting the over-spilling of violence – be it reabsorbing the returning veterans into a peacetime economy, their cooptation into the political system, or through effective policing. Riots or strikes were still quite prevalent in Britain, France, Australia, Canada and the United States, but they never turned into something comparable to the violence of Central and Eastern Europe.37 2

The ‘Inter-war’ Years: Demobilization or Remobilization?

Yet another factor that increased the potential for remobilization in the ‘interwar’ period was the perceived ambivalence of the defeat of 1918 – notably in Germany. The Allies assumed that they had won outright victory over Germany and acted accordingly in Paris when they did not invite Berlin, or indeed any other of the defeated, to participate in the peace negotiations. Yet, most Germans viewed the armistice as anything but an unconditional surrender as Germany remained unconquered. In fact, they often viewed the military collapse as a result of internal treason (articulated most powerfully in the German ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth but also through Mustafa Kemal’s successful remobilization of Turkish forces after the Greek invasion of Asia Minor in 1919).38 Herein lies a major difference of the very dissimilar “cultures of defeat” in 1918 and 1945 when the Allies insisted on an unconditional surrender.39 While after the Second World War defeat was so total that the vanquished could not but ‘embrace’ a total destruction of the institutions responsible for causing the war in the first place, the same was not true for the Great War.40 37

On Australia see, for example: D.W. Rawson, “Political Violence in Australia”, Dissent 22 (1968), 18–27; Bobbie Oliver, “Disputes, Diggers and Disillusionment: Social and Industrial Unrest in Perth and Kalgoorlie 1918–24”, Studies in Western Australian History 11 (1990), 19–28; and Andrew Moore, “Discredited Fascism: the New Guard after 1932”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 57 (2011), 188–206. On Canada, see Desmond Morton and Glenn Wright, Winning the Second Battle: Canadian Veterans and the Return to Civilian Life 1915–1930 (Toronto, 1987), 71 and 120–21. 38 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, “Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923”, The Journal of Modern History 83 (2011), 489–512, 3. 39 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York NY, 2003); John Horne, “Defeat and Memory since the French Revolution: Some Reflections”, in Defeat and Memory. Cultural Histories of Military Defeat since 1815, ed., Jenny Macleod (London, 2008), 11–29. 40 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War ii (New York NY, 1999); Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning pows and the Legacies of Defeat in Germany (Princeton NJ & Oxford, 2006).

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The Allies also wanted to see German military and political leaders convicted for wartime atrocities. In 1919 they demanded that close to two thousand perpetrators of war crimes should be extradited and made to stand ­international trial, though eventually they allowed the Weimar Republic to handle these trials. Most of those accused were exonerated by the Supreme Court in Leipzig.41 The fiasco made the Allies in the Second World War determined to hold international trials for unprecedented criminality on enemy territory at the war’s end.42 What went hand in hand with the perception of an ambivalent defeat was the common rejection among of the provisions of the Paris Peace Treaties by those who argued that the ‘Carthagian peace’ imposed on them in no way corresponded with the outcome of the war (or at least their own reading of it). There was not a single party in any of the defeated states of Europe, either right or left, that did not reject the main provisions of the Paris Peace Treaties. ‘Revisionism’ – the desire to overturn certain key aspects of the Paris peace settlement – remained a powerful cause in the politics of all defeated states of the First World War and a major source of political and cultural remobilization, notably after the onset of the Great Depression ended the brief period of cultural demobilization between 1923 and 1929. Revisionism was not only an issue in Germany – the best-known case. The successor states of the collapsed Habsburg Empire, created on the basis of US President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of national self-determination, were anything but ethnically homogenous and contained sizeable minorities whose loyalties lay with neighbouring (and often hostile) states. Inevitably, this fed irredentism and mobilized large sections of the population to vote for parties of the extreme right that promised to deliver a ‘re-unification’ of ‘exiled’ ethnic minorities with the homeland. For the Austrian Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the ‘return’ of these minorities under German rule was imperative and a crucial aspect of the imperial project that Nazi Germany embarked on during the Second World War. But Germany was not alone in this. Hungary – Germany’s past and future wartime ally – lost a staggering 75 per cent of its ‘historic’ territory in the Trianon settlement, and almost three million Hungarians were forced to live under Romanian, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav rule. Bulgaria, which had fought alongside Germany in the Great War, suffered a similar fate: one million ethnic Bulgarians lived under foreign rule after 1919. German Austria, 41 42

James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (London and Westport CT, 1982). Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945–46: A Documentary History (Boston MA and New York NY, 1997), 18–38.

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once the epicentre of power of the Habsburg Empire, became a small rump state in the Alps, its imperial territories absorbed by the successor states of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Only in the Ottoman Empire, destined for near-complete territorial disintegration in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, did a defeated state manage to completely overturn the provisions of peace through violence. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, tens of thousands of Turkish volunteers rallied to oppose the terms of the treaty and to repel a Greek invasion army that had landed in the coastal city of Smyrna and was beginning to move inland. The crushing defeat of the British-backed Greeks in 1922 allowed for a radical revision of the peace terms in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.43 Dissatisfaction with the new international order was not only a source of political remobilization in the defeated Central Powers. In contrast to the Ottoman Empire and the other Central Powers of the First World War, Italy and Japan were nominally victors of the Great War. But neither Italian nor Japanese nationalists were even remotely satisfied with the results of the Paris Peace Conference. Despite its minimal involvement in actual fighting, Japan had secured the formerly German-governed Shandong and control over the German Pacific islands north of the equator. Far less successful, however, was Tokyo’s proposal for the inclusion of a ‘racial equality’ clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations as it felt itself to be the victim of racial discrimination. Strident opposition from the US-government (concerned about Japanese immigration to California) and the British Dominions (notably from the Australians, fixated on maintaining Australia as a ‘white’ dominion) meant that Tokyo was left deeply alienated.44 Large sections of the Italian population felt that they were left even worse off. Italy had entered the Great War against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1915 in return for wide-reaching territorial promises made by Paris and London and paid a high price for doing so: over 600,000 men were killed and many Italians had high expectations for compensation once the Central Powers had been defeated in 1918. In the end, some former Habsburg territory was gained, most notably the partly German-speaking region of South Tyrol (Alto Adige), but nationalists were outraged by what the war poet Gabriele D’Annunzio called a “mutilated victory” that prevented the country from taking control over allegedly Italian territories in the Adriatic, now handed over to the new

43 44

Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide vol. 1 Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912–1938 (Oxford, 2014); Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference (Oxford, 2018). See the chapters by Richard Bosworth and Giusepppe Finaldi (Italy) and Frederick R. Dickinson (Japan) in Empires at War, 1911–23, eds., Gerwarth and Manela.

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­ ingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.45 None of this was a recipe for a lastK ing peace, as it provided nationalists across Europe with a common rallying point for future mobilization, notably after the onset of the Great Depression from 1929 onwards. Initially, however, and despite these numerous issues and challenges, there was hope for a lasting demobilization and it looked as if the principal victors of the war – Britain, France and the United States – would be able to guarantee the stability of the new international order created in Paris. Yet, when the American Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty and London’s policymakers became increasingly distracted by imperial matters, France remained the only power firmly committed to upholding the post-war order of 1919. Still, at least in the mid-1920s the international order seemed to function well, particularly after 1923 when – in return for Berlin’s acceptance of Germany’s new Western borders in the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, France allowed the country to enter the League of Nations the following year.46 Real peace-making and cultural demobilization in France and Germany thus occurred not at Paris in 1919 but after 1923 when tensions began to ease. The two foreign ministers, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, agreed that Germany would pay a reduced level of reparations and that in return the Allies would speed up withdrawal of their occupation troops from the Rhineland, which had been stationed there to guarantee German fulfilment of the peace treaty. Crucially, however, both Briand and Stresemann agreed that the Great War had been a disaster for both countries.47 This changed after the Wall Street Crash. Post-1929 political remobilization against the allegedly weak democratic form of state was very much a response to economic hardship and by no means specific to Germany. Instead, it was a pan-European – if not global – phenomenon. Remobilization trumped demobilization. The Great Depression ended the brief era of internationalist collaboration for which the treaties of Locarno and the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 stand. The immediate economic and social consequences of the depression undermined confidence in liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy and pushed populations in many economies towards anti-democratic parties and elites who drew on popular resentments by demanding some kind of New Order in domestic as well as international politics.48 45 46 47 48

Gabriele D’Annunzio used the words “Vittoria nostra, non sarai mutilata” (“Victory of ours, you will not be mutilated”) in an editorial for Corriere della Sera, 24 October 1918. Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2007). John Horne, “Locarno et la politique de la démobilisation culturelle, 1925–30”, in 14–18 Aujourd’hui-Heute-Today 5 (2002), 73–87. For a good survey of economic and political effects of the Great Depression on Europe, see Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe, 1929–1939 (New York NY, 2000).

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Liberal democracy was now no longer perceived by many as the form of state best suited to alleviate current challenges and turned instead to the more radical ‘solutions’ offered by Bolsheviks, Fascists, and authoritarian ‘statists’ who gradually ended Europe’s short-lived democratic spring that had begun in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. As a result, few of the democracies created across Europe in 1918 survived the Great Depression for long. The future, or so it seemed, belonged to autocratic rulers of different ideological guises, from Miklós Horthy in Hungary to Józef Piłsudski in Poland or Kurt Schuschnigg in Austria, who were united in their belief that ‘democracy’ required management from above. Of the republics established in Eastern and Central Europe in 1918, only Finland and Czechoslovakia remained democratic until the latter collapsed when the Nazis occupied first the Sudetenland and then the rest of the Czech state in 1938/39 – the year in which remobilization in Europe culminated. To be sure, the prospect of another major European war did not appeal to many. Compared to the (often staged, but sometimes genuine) expressions of patriotic sentiment on the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, the general mood in September 1939 was much more sombre, even in Germany, where the prospect of racialized warfare only mobilized small numbers of die-hard Nazis. While Germany’s early lightening victories of 1939–40 lifted the general mood in the country, most people had not forgotten about the terrible cost of war between 1914 and 1918. When Operation Barbarossa was launched in 1941, few Germans reacted with genuine enthusiasm.49 Hitler’s target during Operation Barbarossa – the Soviet Union – responded to the surprise attack with a combination of patriotic rhetoric and force, whereby soldiers were often sent into battle at gunpoint and shot by commissars when they were retreating. Yet mobilization for the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as it was called in reference to the ‘Patriotic War’ against Napoleon in 1812, was also achieved through other means: the economy was put on a war footing, with about 1000 factories relocated further east and tank and ammunition production increased dramatically. Morale was further boosted by a revival of Russian patriotism and the support of the Orthodox Church. Musicians, artists, and writers who had survived the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 joined the war effort by producing countless works glorifying the defence of the motherland.50 Many of them – including Boris Pasternak and the famous modernist poet Anna Andrejewna Akhmatova – seemed to have reacted to the

49 50

See Richard Evans, Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster (London, 2009) and Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms (New York NY, 2015). Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York NY, 2006).

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Nazi ­onslaught with genuine patriotic feeling even if their war poems were considered by the Soviet authorities too pure artistically to be considered of particular propaganda value. Instead, Soviet literary propaganda, orchestrated through the official Writers’ Union, placed emphasis more undiluted Communist messages or rousing poems such as Vera Inber’s Pulkovskij Meridian, published in 1943 during the Leningrad siege, or the writing of Ilya Ehrenburg, who became famous among the soldiers through his popular articles in the Red Army publication Krasnaja Swesda (Red Star).51 The need for a combination of propaganda and self-mobilization was even more keenly felt in the final phase of the war, notably by those governments that were clearly losing the war. While in Germany and Japan, the population generally continued to support publicly the war effort until the bitter end, war enthusiasm in Italy collapsed quickly. When Mussolini was eventually overthrown by the Fascist Grand Council following the Allied invasion of 1943, Italians greeted the news and the subsequent surrender of September 1943 with relief – even though the country was to experience years of revenge killings, and partisan warfare in the North, leaving at least 10,000 people dead.52 Hitler was more ‘successful’ in mobilizing the Germans to fight until the bitter end even after they had given up hope in military victory. A combination of brutal repression and propaganda, amplifying widespread fears of Soviet revenge and fatal loyalty to an ailing regime, led to soaring casualty rates in the endgame of Nazi Germany.53 While Hitler lived, there would be no surrender, no repeat of the November 1918 armistice to which the Fuehrer had referred to persistently in his speeches until the very end of his life in April 1945. The result was the devastation not only of much of Central Europe, but also of Germany itself. Over the course of the war, 5.3 million German soldiers died. Close to a million German civilians were killed in air raids and the ethnic cleansing that followed the war. Germany’s casualties, notably on the Eastern Front, far exceeded those of all of Western Europe put together. And the violence escalated as the war went on. The largest number died in the last desperate months, the worst 51 52

53

Hubertus Jahn, “Russia”, in Twisted Paths. Europe, 1914–1945, ed., Robert Gerwarth (Oxford, 2008), 297–324. Elena Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943 (Cambridge & New York NY, 2000); Luca Alessandrini, “The Option of Violence: Partisan Activity in the Emilia-Romagna Area, 1945–1948”, in After the War: Violence, Justice, Continuity and Renewal in Italian Society, ed., Dunnage Jonathan (Market Harborough, 1999), 59–73. Richard Bessel, “The War to End All Wars: The Shock of Violence in 1945 and its Aftermath in Germany”, in No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, eds., Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (Göttingen, 2006), 71–99; Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (London & New York NY, 2009).

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b­ eing January 1945, when the Wehrmacht lost 450,000 men – more in a matter of weeks than America would suffer in all of its wars of the 20th century.54 3

1945: A Defeat to End All Wars?

Germany and its Axis partners experienced a total defeat unparalleled in modern history: the near-complete destruction of their countries’ infrastructure, the collapse of public administration, the plummeting of economic activity, the breakdown of law and order, the detention of millions of men as prisoners of war, and the arrival of sizeable foreign occupation troops determined to tolerate no opposition from the defeated population. In the weeks leading up the Red Army’s conquest of Berlin, mass rapes of German women reinforced the impression of total defeat. In addition, and unlike after 1918, tens of thousands of former soldiers of the Wehrmacht remained in captivity as powS, most notably in the Soviet Union, from where the last surviving prisoners were only returned in the mid-1950s.55 The newly appointed Minister President of Thuringia, Dr Rudolf Paul, summarized a widespread perception of recent events when, in June 1946, he publicly described “the collapse of 9 November 1918” as “a storm in a teacup compared with the typhoon of the year 1945”.56 Paul’s comment points to an important fact: unlike in 1918, when the perceived ambiguity of the Allied victory left spaces for powerful conspiracy theories about a ‘stolen victory’ or a ‘stab in the back’ and subsequent remobilization, the unprecedented horrors of the Second World War and the experience of total defeat in 1945 had a pacifying effect on both the defeated and the victors, thereby ending a period of 30 years of near-continuous mobilization and opening up the path towards reconciliation between former enemies, at least in Western Europe. Other ‘appeasing’ factors were the result of the peace imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies. At the Yalta conference in February 1945 and again at Potsdam that summer, the Allied powers had decided to settle once and for all some of the issues that had continued to trouble Europe since 1918, notably the inter-related question of ‘durable’ borders in Eastern Europe and the 54 55

56

A vivid recent account is Nicholas Stargardt, The German War. Erika M. Hoerning, “Frauen als Kriegsbeute. Der Zwei-Fronten-Krieg. Beispiele aus Berlin”, in “Wir Kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’. Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern, eds., Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Platow (Bonn, 1985), 327–44. Paul as quoted in Richard Bessel, “Establishing Order in Post-War Eastern Germany”, Past Present 210 (2011), 139–57.

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‘un-mixing’ of peoples in the once ethnically diverse borderland territories of the former land empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollern. This process of deliberate ‘un-mixing’ had started after the First World War, when the Lausanne Convention of 1923 sanctioned the involuntary ‘population exchange’ of over one million Christian Ottomans and Muslim Greeks, and culminated during the Second World War, when the Nazis employed genocidal methods to ‘cleanse’ the newly occupied territories between Breslau and Moscow of Jews and other racially or politically ‘undesirable’ groups through mass executions. Simultaneously, the Soviets had murdered broadly defined ‘class enemies’ in the Baltic States, Belarus and eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. The radical reorganization of peoples and territories was completed between 1945 and 1948 when some 12 million ethnic Germans scattered around Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia, were forcibly ejected from their homes while Poles were expelled from the Soviet western Ukraine, which had been eastern Poland before the war. Allied support for the ‘un-­mixing’ sprang largely from the experiences of war, especially in response to German policies in the Second World War, and apparent earlier failures of more liberal policies of managing ethnic diversity after 1918.57 Yet the violent ethnic un-weaving of East-Central Europe was only one aspect of the post-1945 settlement, albeit the one which went furthest in ‘correcting’ the alleged mistakes of the international order created in Paris in 1919. Simultaneously, the rise of the Soviet Union as the now dominant European power and diverging geostrategic interests led to a rapid escalation of tensions between Moscow and the Western Allies, now under US leadership. Washington offered economic aid for the reconstruction of Western Germany, the territory that became the Federal Republic in 1949. Known as the Marshall Plan of 1948, the United States government directly learnt from the inter-war years when little economic or political support had been offered to the democratic regime e­ stablished in Germany in the late autumn of 1918. Fearing a possible ‘bolshevization’ of Germany, or a potential return of nationalism, Washington decided to back both the reconstruction of West Germany’s economy and those political parties and institutions that would enable the country’s democratization. In the context of the emerging Cold War, yesterday’s enemy became today’s ally.58 57

58

See Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge MA, 2002); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus (New Haven CT & London, 2004); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans (London, 2006); and The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–49, eds., Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth While (London, 2011). On the origins of the conflict see Martin McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War: 1941–1949

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This process was further aided by Franco-German reconciliation in particular, and European integration more generally. If, during the inter-war period, Franco-German reconciliation had been confined to the brief StresemannBriand era of the mid-1920s, it now became a hallmark of the post-war order, starting with Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, the Schumann Declaration of 1950, and continuing all the way through to the end of the Cold War when Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand renewed the bilateral bond forged through enmity in two world wars in their highly symbolic meeting at Verdun in September 1984. A very different trajectory emerged in Eastern and parts of South-Eastern Europe, notably in Greece, Yugoslavia and the Baltic States (Lithuania in particular), where conflict continued, either in the form of a full-blown civil war or as guerrilla activities against the Soviet occupation.59 In Poland, the end of the war was also followed by a series of violent incidents against those members of the now small Jewish community that had survived the Holocaust.60 Simultaneously, Stalin tightened his grip over those territories that had recently been liberated by the Red Army from the yoke of Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe. Apart from the threat or actual use of violence to suppress opposition, Moscow tightly integrated the new satellite states across Eastern Europe into its communist command economy, through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (comecon, founded in 1949), and an anti-Western defence system, the Warsaw Pact, to match the West’s foundation of nato. It was not without irony that the Soviet Union emerged from the brink of annihilation in the Second World War as a state that controlled more territory in direct and indirect ways than the bygone Tsarist Empire ever had. On both sides of the Cold War, the period post-1945 was thus characterized by both demobilization and remobilization, either against the ‘fascist’ and ‘capitalist’ West, or against the Communist East. Yet, in no small part because of the deterrence of nuclear warfare, this remobilization never led to an actualization of violence, at least not in Western Europe, as it had in the years after 1918. To be sure, violence was all too frequent in the decolonizing non-­European territories or in the proxy wars fought with American or Soviet support in countries such as Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan. For metropolitan Western Europe, by contrast, the Cold War years were exceptionally peaceful. (London, 2008), 10–29. 59 Buruma, Year Zero; Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War ii (London, 2012). 60 David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946”, Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998) 43–85; Jan Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York NY, 2007).

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The relative stability of the post-1945 order in Western Europe was largely the result of international political pressures and alliances. Yet there were domestic reasons for the pacification of politics as well. After two world wars, pacifism – expressed in the popular sentiment “Never again!” – was much more pronounced and widespread than it had been in the inter-war years, filtering through to the political and economic elites of Western Europe, and preventing violent remobilization of the kind witnessed post-1918. The experiences of the Second World War, which claimed at least four times as many lives as the First World War and caused much more wide-spread destuction, prevented militarism and revisionism to re-emerge, notably in Germany, where the nature of defeat in 1945 had been so fundamentally different from that in 1918. If the First World War had raised major issues that could not be contained in the post-war period and resurfaced in the 1930s, the Second World War’s even more catastrophic and ‘total’ end led to a radical – and lasting – re-ordering of Europe that paved the way for decades of relative stability.61 The apparent paradox of a more devastating war leading to a more peaceful post-war lies at the heart of any engagement with the two major post-war periods of Europe’s 20th century. While this essay was – by necessity – only able to offer a cursory discussion of some of the similarities and differences between these two periods of the 20th century, it has hopefully made a case for the need of further detailed engagement with the important question as to why some societies failed to return to peace in 1918 and in 1945 while others managed the transition successfully. Although the scholarly discussion about post-war periods is very much ongoing, it could benefit from further diachronic comparisons between 1918 and 1945, potentially even a triple-comparison between 1918, 1945 and 1990, thus including a third ‘demobilization’ period (and, in the case of Yugoslavia, a phase of remobilization) that followed the Cold War. While several scholars, including John Horne, have long advocated such a diachronic comparison that would allow us to see more clearly how and why societies demobilize culturally, it remains an underdeveloped line of enquiry. This is surprising given that diachronic comparisons may enable us to identify some ‘timeless’ factors that seem to determine the nature of the transition from total war to demobilization (without ignoring regional and time-specific factors). In any case, these hypotheses require further empirical testing – ­either in a regional, pan-European, or global context – which could allow us to see more clearly the commonalities and differences between mobilization and demobilization across time and space. 61

On this paradox, see Kershaw, To Hell and Back, 472ff.

Chapter 11

A Croat Iliad? Miroslav Krleža and the Refractions of Victory and Defeat in Central Europe John Paul Newman Miroslav Krleža, considered Croatia’s most important 20th century author, announced his arrival as a major literary talent soon after the end of the First World War with a collection of short stories and works published collectively as The Croatian God Mars, a work that has since served as a gateway for popular (and sometimes scholarly) understandings of ʻCroatia’s war’, much the way that Britain’s war poets have shaped the memory of war in their own country.1 But The Croatian God Mars is a multivalent source, and Krleža was by no means a typical soldier. As a young cadet, he trained at the Ludoviceum, a prestigious Habsburg military academy in Budapest. Soon he was drawn into the orbit of Balkan nationalism, culminating in two unsuccessful attempts to volunteer for the Serbian army in the Balkan wars of 1912–1913. Expelled from the Ludoviceum, he was remobilized in the First World War as a rank-and-file conscript, serving with a predominantly peasant force on the Eastern Front (in Galicia) and thereafter in a bureaucratic function on the home front in Zagreb, by which time he had become (and would remain throughout his life) a supporter of international communism. An unknown and virtually unpublished author in 1914, by 1918 Krleža was a rising literary star in the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and his reputation was cemented with the publication of The Croatian God Mars. This formative biography in many respects speaks to the mercurial attitudes of a prodigiously talented young author searching for his ideas and his identity. But it also speaks to the many complicated and cross-cutting currents that flowed through central Europe in the era of the great transformations of the pre-war and the wartime period. Krleža was exposed to – and embraced – ­multiple mobilizations: imperial, Balkan nationalist, Marxist-Leninist, a reflection of the multiple political and historical forces that bore down on the region before, during, and after, the First World War. Each of these could be said to exist on a spectrum of victory and defeat by war’s end. There are no simple categorizations that explain Krleža’s changing ideas at this time, just as 1 See Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History (London & New York NY, 1999). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_013

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there are no simple means of generalizing about the many mobilizations and cultures of victory and defeat that co-existed in the region as a result of the First World War. In this chapter, then, I want to use Krleža’s pre-war, wartime, and post-war career as a means of exploring the complicated layers of mobilizations and demobilizations to which Central Europe was subject in these years, using John Horne’s interpretation of mobilization as both a military and a cultural process – albeit with an emphasis on the latter.2 That concept has been applied with considerable gain to western European societies to explain how and why they organized and fought the war, how they reached the limits of their endurance for conflict, and how, eventually, they returned (or not) to peaceable societies in the post-war period. In existing examples, we have perhaps tended to think of mobilization and demobilization as taking place, approximately, at state level, concentrating on how French, British, or German societies were mobilized and thereafter demobilized during and after the First World War. This level of generalization is much more difficult in Central Europe: Krleža’s biography shows that there was not one single ʻAustro-Hungarian mobilization’, but, in fact, several (imperial, national, rural, communist, elite, demotic), and also several corresponding demobilizations. All of these overlapped and cross-cut the larger narratives of defeat and victory, of state collapse and state formation, through which the successor states of East-Central Europe interpreted the war and its aftermath. 1

Early Life and the Balkan Wars

Krleža was born in Zagreb, in 1893, the son of a police constable.3 He completed the first four grades of gymnasium (grammar school) in the Croatian capital, and in summer 1908 left Zagreb to attend a cadet school in Pécs, in southern Hungary. He spent three years in the small Hungarian town and completed three grades at the school. His marks were consistently amongst the highest in his class, and in recognition of this academic excellence he was, in summer 1911, awarded an imperial scholarship to study at the Ludoviceum military academy in Budapest. This academy, one of 15 throughout Austria-Hungary, was amongst the most prestigious military institutions in the monarchy, and for one thus inclined it offered a great opportunity for social advancement. 2 John Horne, ed., State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 2002). 3 For a short biography of Krleža in English, see Ralph Bogert, “Miroslav Krleža”, in European Writers: The Twentieth Century vol. 11 (New York NY, 1990), 1807–34.

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Krleža’s start in life, and especially his entry into the Ludoviceum, was relatively fortunate, although hardly unique. At the turn of the 20th century, the Croat lands were of course still part of the Habsburg Empire, divided, in fact, between the empire’s Austrian and Hungarian territories, with Zagreb, as part of so-called ‘Civil Croatia’, falling into the latter. Opportunities were not as abundant for non-Hungarian ethnicities in the Habsburgs’ ‘Transleithenian’ territories, whose leaders were increasingly thinking in national terms about the organization and the future of their realm. But his passage into the Ludoviceum is notable: the Habsburg army was still considered the royal road of social advancement in the late-Habsburg period, an imperial institution of virtually unparalleled prestige that offered young men an opportunity to move into the highest echelons of Habsburg society. Perhaps the notion of an army ‘beyond nationalism’ was and has been prone to idealization, but it is certainly true that there were many examples of Croats that reached the highest ranks of the imperial army.4 Krleža however, did not shine at the Ludoviceum as he had in Pécs. Along with academic studies, the academy provided training in the military sciences, and in these latter subjects he did not pass muster.5 His grades were mediocre in his first year and barely improved during his three years at the academy.6 Rather than spending time on prescribed studies, Krleža occupied himself by reading philosophy (especially Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and literature. His preference for such reading matter over drill manuals made a bad impression on his superiors. “He concerns himself with philosophy”, noted one captain, “although he will not be able to get anything out of this kind of study”.7 Another superior considered him “a know it all, a bad soldier”, whilst others still were frustrated that his obvious gifts were not being used: “Very talented, a lively understanding, [but] unsatisfactorily diligent, slightly slapdash, he concerns himself with abstract ideas, and not with military subjects”.8 This was not merely a matter of a restless and creative spirit bristling against the requirements of a formal military education. Krleža was at this time being

4 For example, Stjepan Sarkotić, governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina and military commander of Montenegro and Dalmatia in the First World War; or Svetozar Boroević, who achieved the rank of Field Marshal in the Austro-Hungarian army. 5 See Đorđe Zelmanović in Kadet Krleža: školovanje Miroslava Krleže u mađarskim vojnim učilištima (Zagreb, 1987). Krleža wrote his own account of his time at the Ludoviceum after the Second World War, in “Iz knjige: Izlet u Mađarske 1947”, Republika 9 (December, 1953). 6 Zelmanović, Kadet Krleža, 51. 7 Zelmanović, Kadet Krleža, 73. 8 Zelmanović, Kadet Krleža, 73.

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drawn to a new cause, allowing himself to be mobilized once more. At some point during his first year at the Ludoviceum, Krleža became fascinated with the Kingdom of Serbia and its possible role as the ‘Piedmont’ of South Slav unification.9 This, again, was not an unusual political attraction, especially not for young, educated Habsburg South Slavs. Throughout the 19th century, there had been a common interest and exchange between the Habsburg South Slav lands and Serbia, and national awakeners on both sides had pondered (and disagreed) over the optimal relationship between these lands. But the Serbian kingdom, with its successes of decolonization and national integration, was increasingly being seen as a lodestar for many in the Habsburg lands who hoped for a similar mobilization at home. This, apparently, included Krleža. It is a fascinating act of pivoting, not least because it shows the limits of an archetypal imperial institution – like the Ludoviceum – to mould a sense of dynastic loyalty onto its pupils, but also the potent appeal of the Serbian nationalizing revolution to a significant portion of a young generation of Habsburg South Slavs. Krleža’s fascination for Serbia was not merely academic. He acted upon it, impulsively, to be sure, but also decisively, by making two attempts to volunteer as a soldier in the Serbian army. He made the first of these in May 1912, during a clandestine trip to Belgrade whilst on leave from the Ludoviceum At the time, the Serbian government was involved in a series of negotiations that would lead to the formation of the anti-Ottoman Balkan Alliance, and it was probably this very public diplomatic activity that drew him towards Belgrade.10 The attempt was unsuccessful, however. With no documents or identity papers, the would-be volunteer was turned away, and Krleža later described how he returned to Budapest in dejection, in his own words, like a “rain-soaked sparrow”.11 The successes of the Balkan Alliance after the outbreak of the first Balkan War (October 1912) inspired a second attempt at volunteering. In April 1913, whilst on a two-week leave of absence, Krleža left the Ludoviceum for what would be the last time, and in June he arrived in Skopje, travelling via France and Greece. This second attempt ended more disastrously than the first. He was once again without official documents and papers and was this time arrested 9

10 11

Krleža was not alone in his fascination with Serbia. Many South Slav youths in the Habsburg lands were deeply impressed by that nation’s political and military successes. See Mirjana Gross, “Nacionalne ideje studentske omladine u Hrvatskoj uoći svetskog rata”, Historijski zbornik, 21–22 (1969), 75–144. See Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (London & New York NY, 2000), 11–13. Krleža, “Iz knjige: Izlet u Mađarske 1947”, 995.

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on suspicion of being an Austrian spy. The Serbian army passed him back over the border, where he was again arrested, this time by Austro-Hungarian authorities, and imprisoned in Zemun (a small Austro-Hungarian town on the bank of the Danube, at that time on the border between Austria-Hungary and Serbia) for desertion. Needless to say, news of his Balkan odyssey was not well received at the Ludoviceum. After a debriefing in Budapest, he was expelled from the academy and was soon back in Zagreb. It had been a circuitous course through the gathering storms of Balkan and European affairs: from promising military cadet to would-be volunteer of the Serbian national army, and now back to where he had begun, Zagreb. Even so, the real squall was still to come. 2

Krleža’s War

Despite his previous enthusiasm for Serbia and its wars, Krleža claimed that he greeted the news of the Sarajevo assassination with trepidation. Reporting on a conversation with his former schoolmate Vladimir Čerina, one of the leaders of the South Slav youth movement, he noted how “Our perspectives on numerous open questions were in principle far apart, if not diametrically opposed”, claiming that Čerina’s “Saint Vitus’s Day phrases” and “cult of national energy” struck him as “empty rhetoric”.12 Saint Vitus’s Day, 28 June, was the historic date of the Serbian medieval state’s defeat to the Ottoman forces in 1389, posited as the beginning of Serbian enslavement to the Ottomans, and also now, not incidentally, the day that Gavrilo Princip had assassinated Franz Ferdinand. It was also a by-word for the sacred belief in the national awakening of the Serbian people. Had Krleža already withdrawn from the Serbian cause? At the time, he was still not a major literary figure, although he had published some poetry and contributed articles to journals and newspapers. The most curious of these was titled “Baron Conrad”, published in spring 1915, apparently a homily to the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, in which Krleža called him a military genius, comparing him to Napoleon Bonaparte and ­feting him as a “soldier and a warrior”.13 Had Krleža put himself at the disposal of the Habsburg war effort? This was certainly the opinion of a number of his 12 13

Miroslav Krleža, “Deset krvavih godina: pacifističke refleksije između 1914–1924”, in Deset krvavih godina i drugi politički eseji (Belgrade, 1977), 18. Originally published in Književna republika no. 8, July 1924. The article was originally published in Obzor, 28 April 1915, and is reprinted in full in ­Miroslav Krleža, Moj obračun sa njima (Zagreb, 1932), 128–35.

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critics in Yugoslavia after the war. Authors such as Miloš Crnjanski and Ante Kovač, the latter a hero of the South Slav volunteer movement in Russia, accused Krleža of “Austrophilism”, a grave offense in a state which considered the Austro-Hungarian ancien regime to be a defeated enemy. In response to these accusations, Krleža claimed that the intention of the article had been satirical. Coming so soon after Conrad’s defeat, the piece juxtaposed grandiose appeals to history, and especially military history, with disastrous wartime reality.14 This was certainly a literary technique he would go on to develop more fully in The Croatian God Mars, whose stories repeatedly depict the ironic distance between an idealized Habsburg past and the depressing reality of the present war. In defending his article, Krleža also defended his own wartime record and credentials as an opponent of the Habsburg war, pointing out his association with a number of people who were “politically suspect in Austro-Hungarian eyes” (Vladimir Čerina, for example), and even that he himself had been interrogated as a “politically suspect person” by authorities. There is, however, no record of him being arrested or questioned for anti-war statements or activities, nor is there any record or dossier indicating that he was under police surveillance at any time during the war.15 Indeed, the army appear to have had few qualms about mobilizing the young writer, who in turn did not resist conscription and a return into the Habsburg army. In December 1915, he reported to the 25th Infantry Regiment in Zagreb, one of two regiments in the Croatian capital, and one of the Croatian territorial or Domobran (Homeguard) units established in the Hungarian-Croatian agreement of 1868 (the Nagodba).16 A number of notable Croats had already passed through the ranks of this regiment on their way to the front. The Zagreb journalist and publicist Josip Horvat, who wrote a memoir of his time in the Austro-Hungarian army and in captivity in Russia, had served in the 25th,17 as had Josip Broz ‘Tito’. The terms of the Nagodba, allowing for soldiers to be 14 15

16 17

For Krleža’s defence against his post-war critics, see ‘‘Panegrik à la minute” Barunu Konradu i o stvarima koje s tim “Panegrik à la minute” u neodvojivoj vezi”, in Moj obračun s njima, 124–60. For example, there is no file in the wartime “Central Defence Intelligence Service” on Krleža, although there are records for his friend, the artist Ljubo Babić, and the socialist leaders Vitomir Korać and Jure Demetrović, all people whom Krleža knew personally. See Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, Zagreb (hda), fond 79, “uozv – Središnja defensiva dojavna služba’. A description of the structure of the Austro-Hungarian army in Croatia after 1868 can be found in Milan Pojić, “Ustroj austrougarske vojske na ozemlju Hrvatske 1868–1914”, Arhivski vjesnik, 43 (2000), 147–69. See Josip Horvat, Živjeti u Hrvatskoj 1900–1941: Zapisci iz nepovrata (Zagreb, 1984).

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recruited locally (that is to say, in Croatia), meant that many Croatian soldiers flowed through the same channels, training in the same barracks, even under the same commanding officers. Krleža’s training in Zagreb lasted until March 1916. In July, after a short period of illness, he was sent to the front in Galicia.18 The summer of 1916 was an important turning point in the Habsburg war. Just a few weeks earlier, the Russians had begun a massive assault on Austro-Hungarian positions, the beginning of the so-called ‘Brusilov Offensive’ (June-September 1916) which resulted in the loss of almost a third of the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front (approximately 750,000 soldiers, including 380,000 prisoners of war).19 Croatian regiments, like most Austro-Hungarian regiments, were put under heavy pressure by the Russian army from the very beginning of the offensive (4 June).20 Within the first few days of the Russian assault, the 25th Infantry Regiment had sustained heavy losses (killed or captured), and Krleža would have arrived in a sector which was hard-pressed in the aftermath of the Russian army’s initial onslaught. Even so, there is little reason to doubt Krleža’s claim, made after the war, that he had neither been under fire nor fired a shot in anger whilst in Galicia.21 His recent illness may have prevented him from serving on the front line, or his commanding officers may have felt that his talents were better suited to the rear, or even that he might try to desert to the Russians.22 Vicarious and brief, Krleža’s ‘combat experience’ was over after only a few weeks. Taken ill once again, he had returned to Zagreb by the end of the year, after a short stay in hospital in Budapest, and was relieved from active duty. His time in uniform lasted barely a year, and he had spent less than two months at the front. Krleža’s career as a soldier was thus very different from those of writers such as Erich Maria Remarque or Henri Barbusse. The author acknowledged these differences when responding to reviewers of his own fiction about the First World War, The Croatian God Mars (see below). Krleža wrote: I personally never experienced any of the horrors of war (…) it was never so terrible for me that I would become an anti-militaristic writer through 18 19 20 21 22

See Stanko Lasić, Krleža: Kronologija života i rada (Zagreb, 1982), 124–27. Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette IN, 1976), 196. For the movements of Croatian units during the Brusilov Offensive, see Slavko Pavičić, Hrvatska ratna i vojna povijest (Split, 2009), 551–62. Miroslav Krleža, “Napomena u Hrvatskom bogu Marsu”, Književna republika, no. 2–3 (1923). Incidences of desertion by Croat soldiers during the Brusilov Offensive were, however, rare. See Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London, 2008), 240–41.

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personal revolt. Cannons and soldiers had always seemed rather funny to me and I don’t think I ever laughed as much at the stupidity of humanity as I did in Galicia during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916.23 But the cost was nevertheless personally felt: Krleža reckoned that 40 of his former colleagues at the Ludoviceum had been killed in combat, a loss of life which seemed, to him, entirely meaningless, but for which the act of writing could at least partially mitigate: It [The Croatian God Mars] was no kind of Barbusse (who the devil knew about Barbusse?) nor was it motivated by warlike sensationalism, nor anti-militarism, nor I don’t know what, it was for the deaths of 40 innocent martyrs, which gnawed at me like a wound day after day.24 Krleža’s perspective on all this was now rather singular. His detour to Serbia during the Balkan wars had also derailed his position amongst the military elites of the Habsburg war. For Krleža served at the front not as an officer of the imperial army (which he surely would have, had he graduated from the Ludoviceum), but as a common soldier. This, it seems, gave him a double insight, both into the mobilization of the Habsburg officer class, amongst whom were his former classmates from the Ludoviceum, but also his now fellow rankand-file soldiers with whom he was conscripted to the Eastern Front. In fact, we could add a third mobilization: the Zagreb intelligentsia of which Krleža was still decidedly a part, many of whom had been supportive of the ‘radical messianism’ of Serbia’s national wars and revolution, as he himself once had. The war, it seems, had eroded away all of these affiliations: Krleža was equally critical of the passive manner in which, he felt, Croat peasants were serving as soldiers in the Habsburg army’s war as he was the officers who were leading them into battle. Nor did the possibility of a Serbian victory any longer interest him, as it had during the two Balkan wars. By the final years of the war, a new political direction was beckoning Krleža, one that would also have a profound effect also on his homeland.

23 24

Krleža, “Napomena u Hrvatskom bogu Marsu”, 101. Krleža, “Napomena u Hrvatskom bogu Marsu”, 102.

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Communist Epiphany

The final year of the First World War seems to have been a significant turning point both in terms of Croat/South Slav loyalty to the Habsburg war, and, again, in Krleža’s political and social outlook. In February, a naval mutiny broke out at the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro) involving Czech and South Slav sailors.25 The following month, prisoners of war started to return home from revolutionary Russia. As many as 200,000 South Slavs had been captured there during the war, about 80 per cent of whom were peasant conscripts.26 Austro-Hungarian authorities, aware of the potential wildfire spread of Bolshevism, interned these men as soon as they crossed the monarchy’s frontiers and held them in special screening camps. The extent of Bolshevik proselytizing and the appeal of Lenin’s call to throw down arms proved too great to contain, however.27 The agitation of soldiers who were returned to the army often had a deleterious effect on the fighting spirit of their units. As a result of this kind of agitation, revolts broke out in spring at a barracks in Judenburg (Styria, involving mainly Slovene conscripts) and in Mostar (Herzegovina).28 The greatest wave of social unrest was caused by returnees who simply refused to re-join their units, and instead took to the forests to join the ‘Green Cadres’, the armed bands of peasants who attacked and looted the property of large landholders.29 In July 1918, an official in Zemun explained how it was hopeless to try to remobilize the returnees from Russia. He had been told by one soldier that “of all those returning from Russian captivity,

25

See Richard Georg Plaschka, Cattaro-Prag, Revolt und Revolution: Kriegsmarine und Heer Österreich-Ungarns im Feuer der Aufstandsbewegungen vom 1. Februar und 28. Oktober 1918 (Graz, 1963). 26 Ivo Banac, “South Slav pows in Revolutionary Russia”, in Essays on World War One: Origins and Prisoners of War, eds., Samuel Williamson, Peter Pastor (New York NY, 1983), 120. 27 Zbyněk Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire: A Study in National and Social Revolution (New York NY, 1977), 142–43. 28 Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, 143 and 163. 29 Ivo Banac, “‘Emperor Karl has become a Comitadji’: The Croatian Disturbances of A ­ utumn 1918”, The Slavonic and East European Review 70 (1992). An incident involving a large estate holder and the murder of several ‘Green Cadre’ members in autumn 1918 served as an important plot function in Krleža’s critique of middle class hypocrisy in inter-war Zagreb On The Edge of Reason. At a dinner party attended by Krleža’s protagonist, a wealthy land owner talks nonchalantly of how he shot and killed looters who were trying to burgle his estate during the unrest in 1918, claiming he did so in defence of law and order. Krleža’s protagonist upbraids him for suggesting that such order was possible at the time, and asserts that the real looters were war profiteers and land owners like him, who grew rich whilst the people that he shot were starving. He is rewarded for his candour by being ostracized from polite society.

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not a single [soldier] will fight on the front, whichever front that may be”.30 In August, a peasant reported to authorities in Osijek (Slavonia) on a meeting he had had with two armed members of the Green Cadres. The men told him they were preparing a popular revolution similar to that seen in Russia, and assured him they had the weapons and the numbers to do so.31 The Austro-Hungarian authorities were now feeling the delayed aftershock of the Brusilov Offensive, as so many of their soldiers who were captured during that battle had now been released from captivity and were causing havoc in the region. By the end of the war, the breakdown was general. In October, South Slav regiments were in mutiny even on the Italian Front, where they had previously fought with determination against a perceived foe.32 Less than one year after the October revolution, much of the countryside of Croatia was in a state of armed insurrection. This rural unrest was in large part a consequence of the rapid ‘demobilization’ of South Slav soldiers from the Habsburg war. With minimal training and preparation, it seems that the commitment to the imperial cause whittled away against the considerable challenges the Habsburg state and army faced in the final years of the war. This war fatigue and the consequent refusal on the part of many Habsburg South Slavs was surely more decisive than supposed longer-term weaknesses in the imperial state. Acknowledging the important changes caused by the experience of war, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party Stjepan Radić made pacifism a central tenet of his political programme in the interest of peasants who “were until now powerless, but are now victorious and repulsed by any kind of militarism and any kind of warfare”.33 For the vast majority of peasants coming home from the war, and despite the initial enthusiasm for Bolshevism, the real hero of the post-war period was not Lenin, but the Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić. His programme of agrarian populism and anti-militarism was far more appealing than potentially violent revolution and yet more fighting. It seems that in the final analysis, and in accordance with Benjamin Ziemann’s research into rural Bavaria, Croatian peasants came to be suspicious of the radical direction taken in Russia, were indifferent to highly politicized movements, and unwilling to take up arms once again for any cause.34 Ante Trumbić, Stjepan Radić’s political ally until 1925, felt that the peasant party leader was most in tune with the “post-war 30 31 32 33 34

hda, fond 1363 “Politička situacija”, box 3. hda, fond 1363 “Politička situacija”, box 3. See Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke, 2000), 133–40. Stjepan Radić, Korespondencija Stjepana Radića vol. 2, ed., Bogdan Krizman (Zagreb, 1973), 417. See Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923 (Oxford, 2006), especially 211–25.

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psychological situation in Croatia”. Trumbić claimed that he understood that the Croatian peasant “had returned home after four years of war-time suffering for foreign interests, full of disappointments”.35 There was, however, a small number of Habsburg South Slav soldiers returning from captivity in Russia who worked energetically towards the formation of the first Communist Party of Yugoslavia (including, of course, Tito himself).36 The impact of the war years, socially and on individuals, long outlasted the demise of Austria-Hungary. Krleža was amongst these individuals. His final and most lasting political mobilization occurred along a very similar timeline. Writing immediately after the Bolshevik coup, he reported cautiously on what was unfolding: “There is fog in Russia. Chaos (…) Whether the Bolshevik movement today is the ballast or the motor, that will be judged by the generation that arrives after us and who will look at this process from a better – that is, a more peaceful – perspective’’.37 He even went as far as to attack Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a play, Christopher Columbus, which he claimed to have written at the time of the revolution, but which was published (although not staged) in the summer of 1918. The work was highly critical, depicting the Bolshevik leader as a lone figure detached from the masses and the revolution he was leading.38 Surprising responses, since by the beginning of 1919 Krleža was working energetically to bring about a Marxist-Leninist revolution in Yugoslavia. The author’s transformation from sceptic to revolutionary took place over the course of 1918 and appears to be linked to the revolutionary mood which he saw around him. By the end of the war, Krleža was working full time for the cause of socialist revolution. In January 1919, the first edition of his short-lived journal Plamen (The Flame) was published. The journal, which he co-edited with fellow communist August Cesarec, called for revolution in both the political and the literary spheres, not an unusual union in inter-war Central Europe, wherein political and artistic radicalism typically went hand in hand.39 Krleža’s article “The Croatian Literary Lie”, published in the first edition of Plamen, provides a 35

Ante Trumbić, “Elaborat u hrvatskom pitanju”, in Izabrani spisi, ed., Ivo Petrinović (Split, 1986), 359. 36 See Ivan Očak, “Povratnici iz sovjetske Rusije u borbi za stvaranje ilegalnih komunističkih organizacija uoči prvog kongresa srpj (k)”, Historijski zbornik 27 (1974–1975), 1–26. Also Banac, “The Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the Period of Legality 1919–1921”, in War and Society in East Central Europe vol. 13 The Effects of the World War One: The Rise of Communist Parties, ed., Bela K. Kiraly (Boulder CO, 1983), 188–212. 37 Krleža, Ratne teme, 61. Originally Sloboda, 22 November 1917. 38 Originally titled Cristoval Colon in Croatian, later changed to Kristofor Kolumbo. 39 See, for example, Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven CT, 2009).

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striking example of the writer’s two-pronged assault on the new state. The article was a manifesto for the new epoch in which Krleža called for old, outmoded traditions in art, literature, and politics to be set ablaze.40 He often used fire as a metaphor for revolution (hence The Flame), and the authorities certainly agreed that this new journal was inflammatory. In summer 1919, just eight months after it started circulation, Plamen was permanently suppressed by the censors. The tipping point had been Krleža’s article “Eppur Si Muove”, a political tract in which he had explicitly called for a Bolshevik-style revolution in Yugoslavia.41 Here again, Krleža’s unusual biography – a former pupil of the military academy thrown into the war as a conscript soldier – sets him apart from rank and file Croats in the Habsburg army. More urbane and far better read than most peasants, Krleža must have found in Marxism-Leninism the intellectual grist he yearned for whilst a pupil at the Ludoviceum. He remained a revolutionary even after the majority of peasants had abandoned the Leninist route and embraced Radić’s pacifist programme. 4

The Croatian God Mars

Krleža had intended to publish the whole of The Croatian God Mars in Plamen, but the journal’s suppression placed the stories (briefly) in limbo. He instead shifted his focus to the political sphere, giving speeches in which he praised the October revolution and Lenin. His personal notes from this time clarify his pro-Bolshevik and anti-war stance. As much as he cherished Serbian freedom before the war, he now rejected that state’s perceived role in the “liberation and unification” of all South Slavs. “Nor”, he added, “was there any Serbian freedom. They were marionettes of Austria, and then of the Entente (Pašić et comp). We will not become a free people unless we are liberated from all imperialisms. And only socialism can achieve this”.42 Wars were directed by states, not by peoples (narod, the masses). He also broached the sensitive subject of postwar reconciliation amongst Habsburg South Slavs and Serbians, who had, after all, been on opposing sides during the war. While the war, he felt, had divided the South Slavs into two imperialist spheres, that of the Central Powers and that of the Entente, the post-war period had united, but not liberated them.

40 41 42

Miroslav Krleža, “Hrvatska književna laž”, Plamen 1 (January 1919). Miroslav Krleža, “Eppur Si Muove”, Plamen 1 (August 1919). Nationalna sveučilišna knjižnica u Zagrebu, Zagreb (nsk), R7970 “A”, “Rukopisi krležnih djela: 1. Bilješke Kraljevica-Duga Rijeka 1920–1921”.

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The world was sick today from its long period of conflict, and somehow needed to be cured.43 Given his politics and the suppression of Plamen, it is perhaps surprising that Krleža was able to publish his stories at all. However, during 1921–22, the largest part of The Croatian God Mars was published in various literary gazettes throughout the country. By the beginning of 1922, five short stories, Jambrek the Domobran, Barracks Five B, Three Domobrans, The Death of Franjo Kadaver, and The Royal Hungarian Domobran Novella, were in print, and in 1923, one last new story appeared, entitled The Battle by Bistrica Lesna. The stories of The Croatian God Mars are more a reflection of Krleža’s wartime opposition to the army and to the Habsburgs rather than of his post-1917 commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Because of their predominantly anti-war (rather than revolutionary) tenor, they were published and generally well received in proYugoslav journals. The literary gazette Savremenik (The Contemporary), for example, called the cycle “our nation’s Iliad”.44 Whilst it is most probably true that, as Krleža claimed, the stories were written whilst he was in uniform, during “foggy and rainy autumn days” after his time at the front in Galicia,45 it is likely that they were re-drafted to make The Croatian God Mars more responsive to post-war circumstances. In each of these stories, Krleža included details which he felt would illustrate the essence of the Croatian nation’s involvement in the Habsburg war. Each story shows the manner in which the military divided Croats against one another, as officers sent their co-nationals in the rank and file into certain death in order to advance their own careers. For Krleža, the officers were just as misguided as the soldiers, since they were fighting for ideals which had long been extinct. Krleža was attacking those Croats who believed that supporting the monarchy during the war would be beneficial to Croatia. For Krleža, this was really nothing more than national suicide, and was depicted in the blinkered way loyal officers marched scores of Croats to their deaths on the battlefield. But peasant soldiers were blinkered too, albeit in a different fashion. Their centuries’ long slavery meant they were sunk into unenlightened servility, passive to their exploitation at the hands of foreign masters. Like their commanding officers, they also marched without real protest (aside from impotent grumbling) to their deaths. In both cases, the author was concerned with the stagnation of Croatian national life under the Habsburgs and the absurdity of actually fighting to preserve this stagnation during the war. 43 44 45

nsk, R7970 “A”, “Rukopisi krležnih djela: 1. Bilješke Kraljevica-Duga Rijeka 1920–1921”. Savremenik, January 1921, 122–23. Also, the journal Nova Evropa (The New Europe) ­described Krleža as a “New Prophet”. See Nova Evropa, no. 13 (July 1921). Savremenik, January 1921, 99.

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It was far from the last word on the war. The Croatian God Mars ­immediately stood out as an early attempt – one of the earliest, in fact, in the inter-war South Slav state – to put into literary form the experiences of the First World War. The critical angle Krleža applied to the position of South Slavs in the Habsburg army, and particularly his ferocious satires of the Habsburg officer corps, was readily integrated into an emerging ‘canon’ of war writing that spoke first and foremost of the (predominantly) Serbian victory over its opponents in the war years. That, indeed, was the foundational narrative of the new state, and that victory was the subject of the largest part of the genre of writing in the inter-war kingdom. Krleža’s works offered the negative counterpoint to this narrative: the absence of a reason and a cause to fight for Austria-Hungary, the anachronistic mentality of its army’s officers, the exploitation of its peasant soldiers. In this respect, the complexity of Krleža’s own war experiences – his ambivalence to the grand social and political mobilizations forces that swept through central Europe at this time (including communism) – was lost in the reading and the reception of The Croatian God Mars. Krleža’s text itself arguably lent itself to these reductive readings: there was none of the ambiguous satire of a work like Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, published at about the same time. The Croatian God Mars offered a more direct take on the war and its costs. But they were there in Krleža’s own experiences: the rejection of empire and its values, but also of the nationalizing mission of the Serbian state, the pity of peasant soldiers at war in the east, and the ultimate belief that communism could salvage them. 5 Legacy The impression made on Krleža by the war remained with him throughout his life. The war had been his university and, as he himself professed, “Those three wars were important for me, they moulded my character”.46 Certainly the imprint left by the war can be seen in his subsequent career as a writer. Krleža kept working on The Croatian God Mars, for example, and a definitive text did not emerge until 1946, when he attached a mock glossary of military terms to the original stories, intended as a tongue-in-cheek exegesis of their history and vocabulary for a new generation of readers.47 The writer’s diaries of the ­period, 46 47

Miroslav Krleža, “Većina mojih djela još je anonimna”, Pobeda, 29 November 1966, cited in Lasić, Lasić, Krleža, 97. Krleža is refering to the first and second Balkan wars, and the First World War. In addition to numerous re-prints in Croatian, The Croatian God Mars has been translated

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entitled Bygone Days: Notes from 1914–1921, were not published until 1956. As the title suggests, the volumes are more valuable for their hindsight and ex post facto interpretation than for their historical authenticity.48 Krleža continued to work on these diaries until very late in his life, suggesting that he still found the period relevant and important. The plots of later novels such as The Return of Philip Latinowicz and On The Edge of Reason made numerous references to details and episodes from 1914–1918.49 However, Krleža’s most sustained engagement with the history of Croatia during and after the war can be found in his multivolume historical novel Banners, in which he addressed the great transformations brought about by the war, the demise of Austria-Hungary, and the creation of Yugoslavia.50 Ralph Bogert has asserted that throughout his career, Krleža’s writing was informed by an Austro-Hungarian aesthetic sensibility located between the Austrian “inclination for an apolitical, socially creative self to palliate its cultural dreams [Biedermeier]” and the “traditional Magyar aspiration (…) for the hyper-political, socially creative self to enact its dreams by personifying the Hungarian concept of délibáb (wish fulfilment)”.51 It is clear that Krleža did not consider 1918 a tabula rasa for Croatia and the Croats, and he hoped, in his writing, to come to terms with the historical legacies bequeathed to his nation by Austria-Hungary. In the context of The Croatian God Mars, one of the most enduring and unfortunate of those legacies was the Austro-Hungarian officer mentality, depicted with sardonic hostility in the stories, and which continued to play a role in public life after the end of the war. Krleža gained much notoriety in November 1918 when, at a function in Zagreb hosted by the National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs in honour of officers of the Serbian army, he shouted insults at Slavko Kvaternik, a former Habsburg lieutenant colonel who was also honoured that evening. In his own words (and in breathless style), Krleža spoke of his disgust at:

48

49 50 51

into a number of foreign languages, including German, French, and Italian. So far there has been no English translation. For an analysis of the literary modes used by Krleža in Bygone Days, see Suzana Marjanić, Glasovi Davnih dana: transgresija svetova u Krležinim zapisima 1914–1921 (Zagreb, 2005). For a recent attempt to gauge the value of the diaries as an historical document, see Ivan Bulić, “Mirloslav Krleža u prvome svetskom ratu (između kronike i interpretacije)”, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 3 (2007). The novels were first published in 1932 and 1938, respectively. First published in 1967. For a study of the concept of history in this novel, see Dubravka Juraga, “Miroslav Krleža’s Zastave: Socialism, Yugoslavia, and the Historical Novel”, South Atlantic Review 62 (1997), 32–56. Ralph Bogert, The Writer as Naysayer: Miroslav Krleža and the Aesthetic of Interwar Central Europe (Columbus OH, 1991), 26.

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colonel Kvaternik, chameleon-like, kissing royal officers of King P ­ etar Karadjordjević and who would that evening shoot anyone who was against King Petar Karadjordjević just as last night he hanged anyone who supported Petar Karadjordjević, just as at the first opportunity he would again hang people for the Habsburgs against Petar, or for Petar against the Habsburgs, or for whoever appeared on the Drava or in this town on a white horse as victor, this was not a man, but a caricature from my war-prose.52 By the time Krleža had written this, Slavko Kvaternik had saluted yet another new master in Zagreb, the Ustasha Poglavnik (leader, but with connotations of Führer) Ante Pavelić. Soon after 1918, Kvaternik resigned his commission from the Yugoslav army, and eventually found his way into the ranks of the Ustashe, issuing the declaration which informed the Croatian people of the establishment of the Nazi-backed Independent State of Croatia, in 1941. For Krleža, the presence of so many ex-officers like Kvaternik in the Croatian fascist movement was evidence that the spirit of the Ludoviceum lived on. He felt that a red thread ran from the Austro-Hungarian army, with its rigid hierarchy and its officers’ unthinking adherence to military values, to the militarized politics of fascism. On a trip to Budapest in 1947, he stopped at his old school in Pécs, visiting a military graveyard and claiming that “The whole problem of Horthyism and fascism in central Europe lies in these officers’ biographies”.53 Like Walter Benjamin, Krleža deplored the tendency to exalt the First World War and soldiering as sublime or noble, a path which, he felt, led to fascism.54 Both men would come to see in fascist mythology a sanitized, romanticized version of the mass killing of the war. Krleža himself remained loyal to communism until the end of his life (1981). He spent 1941–45 in Zagreb, refusing to publish anything, but relatively unmolested by the Ustasha regime.55 According to Milovan Djilas, the Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor, a fellow-traveller who had, in 1943, joined the Partisan antifascist struggle, enquired of Krleža as to why he, a communist, did not join one 52 53 54 55

Miroslav Krleža, “Čajanka u počast srpskih oficira”, in Davni dani: zapisi 1914–1921 (Zagreb, 1956), 505. For more details of the affair, see the entry by Vlaho Bogišić, “Crno-Žuti skandal”, in Dalibor Brozović, Krležijana vol. 1 (Zagreb, 1993), 103–04. Krleža, “Iz knjige izlet u Mađarske 1947”, 984. Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger”, New German Critique no. 17 (Spring 1979), 120–128. He was probably under the protection of fellow writer and Ustasha minister Mile Budak. Krleža’s friend and onetime collaborator August Ceserac was less fortunate, having been imprisoned, and then shot, by the Ustashe in 1941 following a botched escape attempt. See Tko je tko u ndh (Zagreb, 1997), 212–14.

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of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Krleža reportedly answered, “I have a horror of death, corpses, and stench. I had enough of it in Galicia during World War I”.56 It was possibly one of the author’s exaggerations, given what is known about his career as a soldier in the First World War. Nevertheless, horror and death was the experience of many Croatian peasant conscripts during the war, and Krleža bore witness to this in The Croatian God Mars. Yugoslav communist leader Tito, a close friend of Krleža, seems to have been willing to gloss over this part of the author’s biography after 1945. And indeed, when Tito broke with Stalin, and the Soviet bloc, in 1948, Krleža soon become one of the most prominent public figures in the regime’s new partially liberalized approach to culture and art, a position that befitted his own unorthodox stances in politics and art. 6 Conclusion Miroslav Krleža’s biography before, during, and immediately after the war was undoubtedly unusual. His social background as a middle-class Zagrebian who had gained entrance to a prestigious military academy set him on course for an upwardly mobile career through the Habsburg’s states institutions. But he essentially rejected this in favour of a quixotic attempt to ‘change sides’ and support the Serbian state in its wars of national independence. Again, it was an unusual, although not entirely unheard of, transition, one that shows the permeability of apparently antithetical categories of empire, nation, Habsburg, Serbian. Then the war itself forcibly mobilized Krleža once again into the Habsburg military, this time giving him a worm’s eye view of the peasants’ war on the Eastern Front, even if not giving him any direct combat experience. This was a rather singular ‘demotion’ that seems to have allowed Krleža to give voice both to the Habsburg officer corps, with whom he had trained as a cadet before the war, and now also the peasant conscript, with whom he served. And then, finally, the war itself, the new revolutionary forces emanating from the east, and the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 further shaped the young writer’s political and artistic sensibilities. All of these forces can be detected in his war fiction The Croatian God Mars, although, as we have seen, the ambiguities were often lost to a readership in Yugoslavia who saw the war as a more straightforward matter of victory and defeat. Krleža’s many mobilizations, his victories and his defeats in the war years and after, belie such easy generalizations, and offer a glimpse into the overlapping historical and social forces that shaped central European societies at this time. 56

See Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York NY, 1977), 303.

Chapter 12

“The Worst Disaster”: British Reactions to the Fall of Singapore Daniel Todman The fall of Singapore was, famously, “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.1 But what sort of defeat was it? In this chapter, I outline the course of the campaign that led up to Singapore’s surrender, discuss the place the defeat has taken in military, imperial and home front histories of the war, then explore its impact, first on public opinion in general, then on particular groups. In so doing, I draw out the importance of the specific military situation in shaping the discursive space in which the fall of Singapore was reported, and show the different ways in which this critical moment in the history of Britain’s South East Asian Empire was reported. Drawing on literature about other great defeats, I suggest that though British responses to Singapore displayed a distinctive mid-war mood, they were also conditioned by a longer-standing model of imperial anxiety, in which calamities on the periphery encouraged concerns about moral worth and national character without puncturing presumptions of British superiority. 1

“The whole reputation of our country and our race is at stake”

From 7 December 1941, Japanese forces attacked Western colonial possessions across South East Asia, China and the Pacific, including Sarawak, Hong Kong and Malaya. There, Japanese troops landing from the sea or advancing over the Thai border quickly demonstrated their tactical superiority in the battles of Khota Bharu (8-9 December 1941), Jitra (11–13 December and Gurun (14–16 December). Simultaneously, Japanese air attacks devastated raf Far East. On 10 December, after the British naval squadron sent to deter hostilities, Force Z, ventured out in search of the invasion fleet, Japanese aircraft caught and sank the British battleship hms Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser hms Repulse.2 1 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War vol. 4 The Hinge of Fate (Bungay, 1985), 81. 2 For this and what follows on the campaign, Brian Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940–1942 (Stroud, 2005); Alan Warren, Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (London,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_014

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By the end of December 1941, the Japanese had taken Sarawak and Hong Kong and landed in the Philippines. In Malaya, a dynamic but logistically reckless advance, which their officers termed ‘the driving charge’, carried them 200 miles south, about half way down the Malayan peninsula and close to Kuala Lumpur. An attempt to hold them at the Slim River, and protect the airfields of central Malaya, from where enemy fighters could over-fly Singapore, failed on 7 January 1942, when Japanese troops smashed through 11th Indian Division. General Sir Archibald Wavell, the newly-appointed Allied supreme commander of abda (the American-British-Dutch-Australian theatre that encompassed Malaya) then ordered a rapid withdrawal to the southern province of Johore. There, at the Battle of Muar (14–22 January 1942), the 8th Australian Division also proved unable to hold the Japanese advance. That sparked a quicker than anticipated retreat to the island of Singapore. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had long opposed the dissipation of the limited forces that the Empire could commit to Malaya in order to guard the whole peninsula. He presumed that Singapore was well enough fortified that it could withstand a prolonged siege even if the Japanese won air superiority. Only as the fighting on the Muar went on did Churchill check with Wavell about the state of the island’s defences. On 19 January 1942, Wavell revealed that there were effectively no defences on the northern shore. Churchill’s hope that the city would hold out for months now looked very much mistaken. So much political and diplomatic capital had been invested in Singapore, however, that the ‘fortress’ could not easily be abandoned. Instead, reinforcements already heading towards the doomed city kept on their way, while Churchill readied himself to give enough ground to his parliamentary critics to preserve his premiership in the aftermath of defeat. On 31 January 1942, the last British troops crossed onto the island. Nine days later, the Japanese launched their assault across the Johore Strait. Quickly establishing themselves ashore, they pushed towards Singapore. Churchill had told Wavell that he wanted a bloody but glorious last stand in the rubble of the city: “There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population (…) The honour of the British Empire and the British Army, (…) the whole reputation of our country and our race is at stake”.3 Yet he allowed himself to be persuaded not to insist on a bloodbath. On 15 February 1942, the city surrendered.

2002); Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (London, 2004). 3 Churchill, Second World War vol. 4, 100.

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The Japanese had completed a remarkable victory. In the space of eight weeks, at a cost of 9600 casualties, they had advanced 680 miles, defeated a larger army, and captured Britain’s most valuable colony, a naval base on which inter-war Far Eastern strategy had been based; about 130,000 prisoners; vast stockpiles of food, petrol, vehicles and munitions; and a jumping off point from which to complete their seizure of the East Indies.4 Of the more than 138,000 British Imperial personnel who were killed, wounded or became prisoners during the course of the campaign, 27 per cent were British, 13 per cent Australian, 11 per cent Malay and 49 per cent Indian. Many of the latter would be enlisted over the next two years in the Indian National Army, formed under Japanese aegis to invade the Raj. They would end up embroiled in the disintegration of the Japanese armies in 1944–45. While the surrender saved S­ ingapore from a horrendous house-to-house fight in the city centre, it exposed the city’s Chinese population to a wave of murderous violence by the Japanese occupiers, the so-called sook ching, in which at least 25,000 people died.5 2

Forgotten Armies?

The outcome of the struggle for Malaya is easy to understand: the result of inadequate allocation of Allied resources, British underestimation of the enemy and the time required to mount a proper defence, and the tactical superiority of the Japanese. It has nonetheless attracted an immense quantity of historical writing, much of it seeking to find explanations for the speed of the defeat.6 Like many difficult wartime episodes, the field was initially shaped by attempts to dodge or cast the blame. In a secret session of the Commons in April 1942, Churchill promised a future full public enquiry, but this was never held – primarily because of the investigation and criticism it would have required not just of the tactical handling of the Malayan campaign, but of the whole higher strategic direction of the war.7 As Cat Wilson has shown, in his own history of the war, Churchill underplayed the whole Far Eastern conflict, but particularly obscured his own role in taking the decisions that worsened the defeat.8 By 4 On the controversies over total number of Japanese and British Empire troops and prisoners involved, see Warren, Singapore 1942, 301–06. 5 Farrell, Defence and Fall, 417. 6 In a review of books including Farrell’s The Defence and Fall of Singapore in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35 (2007), 654, Anthony Stockwell suggested that 168 books had appeared in English on the fall and occupation of Singapore by 1998 alone. 7 Farrell, Defence and Fall of Singapore, 430–32. 8 Cat Wilson, Churchill on the Far East in the Second World War: Hiding the History of the “­ Special Relationship” (Basingstoke, 2014), particularly Chapter 4.

“The Worst Disaster”

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that point, many of the controversies that would dominate the literature for the next four decades were already in place: whether the military or civil leadership in Malaya was more at fault for the lack of military preparedness; the animosity aroused between Churchill and the Australian government during the campaign and the part it played in determining strategy; and the behaviour of Australian and British troops in Singapore before the surrender. From the 1990s, however, a wave of new scholarship on the campaign, initiated by the opening of British archives previously classified under the 50-year rule, saw examples of a more dispassionate tone. Among these books, Brian Farrell’s 2005 The Defence and Fall of Singapore still stands out as the definitive operational history, laying out clearly as it did the ways in which British commanders’ assumptions were undone by the speed of the Japanese advance.9 More recent interest has focused on the wider strategic situation in which Singapore sat, both in 1942 and at the end of the war. Andrew Boyd’s The Royal Navy in Far Eastern Waters has cast a new perspective not just on the fate of Force Z, but also on British naval strategy after Singapore fell. Boyd highlights not only the great and reasonable fears about the security of the Indian Ocean that assailed British strategists during 1942, but also makes a strong case about their continued willingness to mobilize significant armed power in the theatre if the necessity arose. To this extent, and contrary to much of the earlier literature, the loss of the naval base meant not a total collapse of British imperial power east of Suez, but rather a re-concentration on defending the vital seaborne lines of communication around the Indian Ocean. Though the force that Britain could send to do this in spring 1942 was relatively weak, if the Japanese threat had persisted into the autumn, it would have encountered a much more formidable fleet.10 Boyd’s work tends, however, to sideline the political consequences of the defeat – above all the way that, when followed by the rapid Japanese advance through Burma, the loss of Singapore compelled the British to contemplate an enemy assault on India. The result was both to force the pace of constitutional change and heighten the mood of imminent disintegration in India. Not least

9

10

See also Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, eds., Brian Farrell and Sandy Hunter (Singapore, 2002); Mark Connelly, “The Issue of Surrender in the Malayan Campaign, 1941–42”, in How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender, eds., Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan (Oxford, 2012); Brian Farrell, “‘The Dice Were Rather Heavily Loaded’: Wavell and the Fall of Singapore”, in Leadership and Responsibility in the Second World War, ed., Brian Farrell (Montreal, 2004). Andrew Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: Linchpin of Victory, 1935–1942 (Barnsley, 2017).

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because of Britain’s continued military power, the Empire could maintain its hold during the war, but as ministers (including, against his will, Churchill) recognized, the delicate balancing act that the British had been trying to sustain since the start of the century had been broken. Departure could not much longer be postponed, even if the British hoped to keep India – and its much needed manpower – as a defence partner in the region. As both Nicholas Sarantakes and Christopher Bell have explored, Churchill’s determination that British Imperial forces recapture Malaya and Singapore was an important factor shaping British strategy in the Far East during the ­final years of the war. During 1944, the question of whether Britain should prove itself useful to the Americans by accompanying an eventual invasion of Japan, or prioritize the re-conquest of its colonies, became the major bone of contention between the Prime Minister and his Chiefs of Staff – a dispute either minimized or ignored in most histories of the war in the West. Though the Chiefs successfully pressed for a naval commitment to the Pacific, by the time the conflict in the Far East drew to a close, Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command was readying itself for an opposed landing in Malaya. Fortunately for the personnel involved, the war ended before the re-invasion took place.11 A different historical strand has dealt with the effect of the war on colonial policy. Three classic texts set the agenda. In his Imperialism at Bay, William Roger Louis tracked the changes in British official rhetoric and policy-making as ministers and officials sought to ward off American proposals to put the whole empire under international administration.12 The reformist ambitions of colonial administrators – often despite Churchillian disdain – was a notable element in Christopher Thorne’s Allies of a Kind and The Issue of War.13 The specific case of Malaya was elucidated by Anthony Stockwell, who showed how quickly a new strategy of reconstruction and federation became the goal of exiled British colonial administrators.14 As Tim Harper

11 12 13 14

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Allies Against the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan (Lawrence KS, 2009), particularly 29–52; Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford, 2014), 283–307. William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 1941–1945: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford, 1977). Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (London, 1978) and The Issue of War: States, Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–45 (London, 1985). Anthony Stockwell, “Colonial Planning During World War ii: The Case of Malaya”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2 (1974), 333–51; Anthony Stockwell, “British Imperial Policy and Decolonization in Malaya, 1942–1952”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 13 (1984), 68–87; and British Documents on the End of Empire Series B, vol. 3, Malaya: Part i: The Malayan Union Experiment, 1942–1948, ed., Anthony Stockwell (London, 1995).

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d­ emonstrated in his The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, for all that the 1942 surrender became an iconic moment in imperial decline, the immediate consequence was to make British decision makers more aware of the importance of regaining and retaining the position they had lost.15 This was the case not only in Singapore and Malaya, where the immediate post-war period saw an influx of experts and officials amounting to a second colonial occupation, but across Thailand and Indochina. At its centre was a restored base at Singapore, from which powerful British forces continued to operate for a quarter century after 1945.16 The journey into wartime disaster and the implications for the often brutal attempts to reconstruct new forms of colonial rule after 1945 were charted in the diptych written by Harper with Christopher Bayly, Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars.17 Bayly and Harper integrated the story of Singapore’s fall into a wider history of possible colonial futures cut off by catastrophe. Their exploration of the horrors, opportunities and challenges facing the inhabitants of ‘the great crescent’ from Bengal to Singapore, showed how their choices and experiences amidst the cataclysm helped chart a new course for the entire region. The temporary resurgence of British power notwithstanding, Forgotten Armies made it very clear that the Japanese onslaught had marked the end of an era. When the British tried to re-establish their control of Malaya, they failed to restore the basic security that had departed in 1941 or to reform the viciously exploitative mode of colonial capitalism, and were then confounded by a political situation transformed by the war. In 1942, Clement Attlee had talked of the war entailing a new, more equal relationship between the British and the people of Asia. In post-war Malaya, his government presided over the creation of a ruthless police state which proved, in the course of its campaign against the Malayan Communist Party, as racist and unjust, and more violent, than the colonial regime that had existed before the war.18 The Empire had never been entirely absent from histories of the British home front. In the introduction to his famous 1969 The People’s War, Angus Calder insisted that even “when Britain ‘stood alone’ in 1940, she stood on the

15 16 17 18

Tim Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge, 1998). Karl Hack, Defence and Decolonisation in South-East Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore, 1941–1968 (Richmond, 2001). Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London, 2005) and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London, 2007). Caroline Elkins, “The Re-Assertion of the British Empire in Southeast Asia”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39 (2009), 361–85.

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shoulders of several hundred million Asians” and demanded that his readers – unlike an earlier generation of nationally-minded democrats – should find their allies not only at home, but also “among the wretched of the earth” – a statement very much of its time.19 Events in the Far East, however, are sidelined on the basis that the British “called it a ‘world war’, yet thought of it as a European squabble in which the Japs had irrelevantly intervened”.20 The book ends with British forces returning to Singapore, but the conclusion that Britain’s “imperial pretensions (…) were finished”.21 Since the 1990s, concerted efforts to write the Empire back into wartime Britain have followed two broad lines. One focuses on the presence and experience of non-white servicemen and civilian workers, primarily from the Caribbean, emphasising the presence of the imperial in the metropolis.22 The other – drawing out of a historical fascination with imperial propaganda – has explored the ways in which the Empire was represented in the public sphere and how these shifted during the war.23 As I explain below, these often identify 1942 as a watershed, but do not look closely at the detail of reactions to news of the defeat. This absence is not untypical. Perhaps because, unlike their First World War colleagues, historians of the Second World War in Britain have been relatively little interested in ‘consent’, they have not tended to engage in the forensic analysis of reactions to wartime events that has taken place for parts of the earlier conflict, most obviously 1914.24 One exception is Garry Campion’s very 19

Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London, 1969), 19. The reference is to Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la Terre (Paris, 1961). 20 Calder, People’s War, 18–19. 21 Calder, People’s War, 586. 22 Stephen Bourne, The Motherland Calls: Britain’s Black Servicemen and Women, 1939–1945 (London, 2012); Gavin Schaffer, “Fighting Racism: Black Soldiers and Workers in Britain during the Second World War”, Immigrants and Minorities 28 (2010), 246–65. 23 Thomas Hajkowski, “The bbc, the Empire and the Second World War, 1939–1945”, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 22 (2002), 135–56; Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005); Thomas Hajkowski, The bbc and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester, 2013); John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984); Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004); and Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). 24 Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012). A notable exception is Paul Norman Horsler, “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Nation: Local-Level Opinion and Defence Preparations Prior to the Second World War, November 1937-September 1939”, PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 2016. On the importance of consent in First World War studies see

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detailed study of the reporting of the Battle of Britain, The Good Fight, which shows how the timescales of official communiques, bbc radio reports, newspaper headlines and newsreel companies all had an effect on what people thought they knew when.25 First World War studies show how important that sense of chronological specificity and military contingency is to understanding ‘war culture’, and to bridging the artificial gap between the fighting fronts and home. 3

“‘Resigned rather than reconciled’ to the fall of Singapore”

Comparing the First World War to its sequel, however, there are important differences in the sources available for reconstructing developments of public opinion. Thanks to the expansion of social research and an obsession with measuring popular morale, those attempting to assess British responses to the Second World War have access to a range of survey data, diaries, accounts of overhead conversations and official attempts to sum up the popular mood to which there is no real equivalent for 1914-18.26 These include the polls conducted by the British Institute of Public Opinion (hereafter bipo, the British branch of the Gallup organization), the bbc’s assessment of audience reactions and the investigations of Mass-Observation (M-O), and the daily, then weekly, reports produced by the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information. Though extensive, this material is far from uncomplicated, but it does makes it easier to chart the boundaries of what was said in wartime

25 26

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, “Violence et consentement: La ‘culture de guerre’ du premier conflit mondial”, in Pour une histoire culturelle, eds., Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean François Sirinelli (Paris, 1997); Pierre Purseigle, “Warfare and Belligerence: Approaches to the First World War”, in Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed., Pierre Purseigle (Leiden, 2005), 1–37. Compare the interest in the “rush to the colours” in 1914 and the subsequent “remobilization” of 1917–18 in Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008) with the ­absence of similar discussions in Geoffrey Field’s Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking the ­British Working Class, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2011). Garry Campion, The Good Fight: Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few (Basingstoke, 2010). Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War ii (London 1979), 250–60; James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History ­1937–1949 (Oxford, 2013), 212–13 and 225; Mark Roodhouse, “‘Fish-and-Chip Intelligence’: Henry Durant and the British Institute of Public Opinion, 1936–63”, Twentieth Century British History 24 (2012), 224–48; Laura Beers, “Whose Opinion? Changing Attitudes towards Opinion Polling in British Politics, 1937–1964”, Twentieth Century British History 17 (2006), 177–205.

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and to get a sense of how different aspects of a complex, international conflict loomed up on the British home front over time. Study of the Home Intelligence reports and M-O diaries and file reports all suggest the visceral shock of the outbreak of war in the Far East, the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse, and the speedy surrender of Hong Kong. Though reports of rising tensions in the region had been in the papers for months, so too had the presumption that the Japanese would back down or be held off by the might of the British Empire. Not for the first time, the public’s sense of attachment to iconic ships resulted in an emotional impact much greater than the strategic consequences when they went down.27 One consequence of this, however, was that expectations of defeat had grown well before the final retreat onto the island of Singapore. On the final day of 1941, Home Intelligence reported that retreats in Malaya were “causing dismal memories of Crete and Dunkirk (…) anxiety has already been expressed as to our ability to hold Singapore”.28 A week into January 1942, “large sections of the public” were thought “not to share Mr Churchill’s confidence in the ability of Singapore to hold out”.29 A week after that, Home Intelligence explained that: While there is not in general a very vivid awareness of the position in Malaya, there is a fairly wide and growing conviction that Singapore is seriously threatened. Many people seem to think that the Government is preparing the public for the loss of Singapore; and dissatisfaction at having been misled over the strength of the Hong Kong defences is leading them to ask ‘When will Singapore go?’30 By the end of the following week, “even (…) those people whose knowledge of geography is vague” seemed to have grasped that defeat was “a foregone conclusion”.31 Though the drama of the final battle demanded attention, there was “little real hope that we shall be able to hold the place”.32 As the surrender approached, Nina Masel, a former paid observer for M-O, who had become a

27 28 29 30 31 32

Ralph Harrington, “‘The Mighty Hood’: Navy, Empire, War at Sea and the British National Imagination, 1920–60”, Journal of Contemporary History 38 (2003), 171–85. The National Archives, London (tna), INF1/292, Ministry of Information Home Intelligence Weekly Report (hereafter, hiwr) 65, 31 December 1941, 3. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 66, 7 January 1942, 2. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 67, 14 January 1942, 2. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 68, 21 January 1942, 1. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 71, 11 February 1942, 2.

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s­ ervicewoman in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, described “the feeling” at the raf station at which she was based, at Digby in Lincolnshire as: “one of depression. (Not tension, everyone knew Singapore would fall)”.33 According to Home Intelligence: “The great majority of the public appear to have been ‘resigned rather than reconciled’ to the fall of Singapore, which has been received, according to some accounts, ‘with a silence too deep for words’”.34 Importantly, however, Malaya was just one of the fronts on which the war was being fought, and news from elsewhere helped to set the context in which bulletins from the Far East were received. At the start of January 1942, the combination of Soviet successes on the Eastern Front (where the Red Army had launched a colossal counter-attack), Eighth Army’s relief of Tobruk in Libya as part of Operation ‘Crusader’, and reports of inter-Allied conferences in Moscow and Washington all contributed to a mood of confidence. Enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was already high in Britain, and “Russian successes (…) offset the Far Eastern situation to a considerable extent”.35 At the end of January, however, Axis forces in Libya recovered and chased back their pursuers. On 13–14 February 1942, just before Singapore surrendered, a squadron of German warships escaped the French port of Brest and raced safely home, untouched by poorly coordinated attacks by the Fleet Air Arm, Royal Navy and raf. This so-called ‘Channel Dash’ represented a strategic reverse for Germany – the ships were moving further away from the crucial sea lines of communication across the Atlantic (though closer to the Arctic convoy route to the Soviet Union). Yet the public reaction in Britain seemed to contemporaries as severe as that to the much more grievous strategic calamity in the Far East. As Home Intelligence explained, it was “the most bitter failure of the whole war”: “The passage of the German warships through the Channel appears to have shocked the public far more than the fall of Singapore, which was expected by the majority. This is described as having been ‘the blackest week since Dunkirk’”.36 Singapore therefore appeared not as an isolated event, but as part of a wider series of defeats that occurred after two and a half years of strategic and political upheaval. Although it occasioned bitter criticism of military commanders (“there is ‘hopeless muddle everywhere’”, “a murderous act to send so many men” and “the ‘sacrifice of men and junior officers to inefficiency higher up’”),37 the search for blame went right to the top, and focused on the government in 33 34 35 36 37

Mass Observation Archive, File Report (mofr) 1091, “waaf Morale”, 12 February 1942, 1–3. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 72, 18 February 1942, 2–3. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 66, 7 January 1942, 1. tna, INF1/292, hiwr 72, 18 February 1942, 1–2. tna, INF1/292, hiwr74, 4 March 1942, 1; hiwr 73, 2 February 1942, 3.

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London. The crisis of summer 1940 had unleashed a mood of patriotic radicalism, which condemned the apparent failures of inter-war administrations and called for urgent renewal in order to ensure victory. After June 1941, this mood had been characterized by comparisons with the defensive endeavours of the Soviet Union, which was portrayed as more efficient, less compromising and better able to enlist the total effort of its people. The day after Singapore surrendered, a 30-year-old woman in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, recorded reactions to the news from the Far East in the diary she was keeping for M-O. In the butcher’s shop in which she worked: Everyone gloomy (…) The policeman and Mr H and B discussed it all morning. B said it was always alike, we were always too late, and who was it started this disarming business anyway. (…) The old man also said we hadn’t the brains in the Gov we need to have (…) Yes said B. ‘That’s the whole trouble. There’s too much argument and falling out in our parliament. They don’t do it in Germany or Russia. They get on wi’t job’. Mr H said ‘Well he didn’t know what we could do about it, except keep our heads and keep going’.38 As that perhaps suggests, how far resentment at military failure represented a fundamental loss of confidence in the whole ruling elite is open to debate,39 but further defeats fed existing arguments about government inefficiency and the organization of production to encourage, according to Home Intelligence: “a feeling that things are not right” and a desire for the “replacement of those ministers who are thought to lack the necessary drive, and who, it is felt, are still taking about being prepared, rather than seeing that it is an actual fact”.40 4

“Those necessary qualities of greatness are not lost”

As that survey suggests, reactions to events in Malaya were more complex than the astonishment at a defeat to an Asian power often emphasized in histories of the campaign. For all that Singapore had been celebrated as a keystone of 38 39

40

Mass Observation Archive, Diarist 5331, 16 February 1942. Compare James Hinton, Shop Floor Citizens: Engineering Democracy in 1940s Britain (Aldershot, 1994), especially 27–28 and Steven Fielding “The Second World War and Popular Radicalism: The Significance of the “Movement away from Party””, History 80, 258 (1995), 38–58 with Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain (Oxford, 2009), 11–12 and 24–25, and David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London, 2012). tna, INF1/292, hiwr 68, 21 January 1942, 2–3.

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imperial defence, Home Intelligence’s vague allusions to a lack of “vivid awareness” or poor knowledge of geography indicate how unfamiliar the Eastern Empire was to much of the British public. Early pessimism moved through growing focus to eventual disappointment, but surprise was less dominant in February 1942 than anger. Existing experience of the war was crucial to framing the public discussion of the disaster, not just in terms of military incompetence, but also as a product of an othered Britain. As the military situation deteriorated, the British press seized on the weaknesses of colonial society as an explanation for defeat. This reflected not only the striking contrast felt by new arrivals between an increasingly austere, highly mobilized Britain and the apparent determination to preserve pre-war standards for the colonial elite in Singapore, but also a wider moral and political narrative that had become established in response to defeat in Europe in 1940: the failure of an inefficient older order that needed to be replaced by a tougher, more modern way of doing things before victory could be achieved. One significant vector for the transmission of this idea was the stable of newspapers controlled by Churchill’s mischievous ally Lord Beaverbrook, who over the winter of 1941–42 was engaged in a struggle for control of the British war economy. This included the Daily Express, still at this point the highest circulation daily paper in Britain. On 14 January 1942, the Express led with an account by the American journalist Cecil Brown that criticized white settlers’ “apathy in all affairs except making tin and rubber and money, having stengahs (whiskies) between five and eight o’clock of an evening, keeping fit, being known as a ‘good chap’ and getting thoroughly ‘plastered’ on Saturday night”. It was headlined “CITY OF BLIMPS” – a reference to Colonel Blimp, the famous caricature of ruddy-faced, imperialist arch-conservatism created for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard by the cartoonist David Low in 1934. As that suggested, the stereotype of colonial society pre-dated the conflict, but took on additional meaning when it was loaded with responsibility for defeat. As Brown told readers: “a civil administration marked by inactivity (…) is now reaping bitter and terrifying fruits. Singapore thus far represents the pinnacle of examples of countries which are physically and mentally unprepared for war”.41 The effect of such reporting was apparent in the Home Intelligence morale report for that week: “‘It looks as if our people in the Far East, Service and civilians alike, have been living in a fool’s paradise, and anyone attempting to

41

Cecil Brown, “The City of Blimps”, Daily Express, 14 January 1942, 1. See also Cecil Brown, Suez to Singapore (London, 1942).

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rouse them has been silenced”.42 Colonial complacency and racism had certainly played a part in accelerating the defeat, though given the imbalance of air and sea power, it seems unlikely that they determined the final outcome of the campaign. Yet the exact accuracy of the analysis mattered less than the explanatory power of the story – which also, of course, deflected rising criticism of failures in military production and strategic allocation in which Beaverbrook was strongly implicated. Like many defeats, therefore, the Malayan disaster created a stab in the back myth.43 In this case, it was characterized by a combination of class antagonism and anti-establishment sentiment that fitted the mood of the ‘People’s War’. It also fed, however, off longer-running tensions about the nature of colonial rule, in which Liberal and Labour critiques of imperialism in general intersected with a widespread acceptance of British exceptionalism.44 As a member of M-O’s ‘national panel’ of diarists put it in response to a query on “Feelings about the British Empire” in spring 1942: “one’s pride is hurt at being forced into the position of ‘letting down’ the colonies (...) But one feels that the Empire has been maintained for the benefit of vested interest and that there is justice in the present disgorgement (…)”.45 As the bbc’s audience researchers concluded after a survey of listeners the following spring: The vast majority of the British public consider the Colonial Empire to be an economic asset to Great Britain – a view which the war has driven home – but there is abundant evidence of uneasiness, at any rate among that section of the public which has a sense of social responsibility, about the present state of the economic and social development of the Colonial Empire. It is clear that nothing has done more to bring this about than the fall of Malaya, which occasioned widespread questioning of our ­colonial policy (…) 42 43

44

45

tna, INF1/292, hiwr 68, 21 January 1942, 1. Contrast Jeffrey Kimball, “The Enduring Paradigm of the “Lost Cause”: Defeat in Vietnam, the Stab-in-the-Back Legend, and the Construction of a Myth”, in Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era, ed., Jenny Macleod (Basingstoke, 2009), 233–50 with Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (London, 2003), particularly 1–35, which argues for the specificity of circumstances required to create such myths. Nicholas Owen, “Critics of Empire in Britain”, in Oxford History of the British Empire vol. 4 The Twentieth Century, eds., Judith Brown and William Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 188–211, 208–10; Richard Whiting, “The Empire in British Politics”, in The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series: Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, ed., Andrew Thompson (Oxford, 2012), 161–79. Mass-Observation File Report 1168, “Feelings about the British Empire”, 16 March 1942, 3.

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These misgivings, however, have not been such as to cause wholesale condemnation of British Colonial policy in the past. By far the most typical reaction to this is a feeling that, although our Colonial record is a mixed one, it is a record in which the good exceeds the bad.46 In two famous articles in The Times in March 1942, the Oxford don Margery Perham – a historian with a passion for Africa, an expert in imperial government, and an educator of colonial administrators – used the loss of Malaya to argue for reform. Placed under psychological stress by the war, during which one of her nephews was killed in action and another taken prisoner in Germany, Perham was in the middle of a dramatic revival of her Christian faith, which encouraged the revision of her views about colonial rule.47 Perham accused herself and her readers of complacency. The failure to rouse colonial populations against the Japanese showed that benign neglect was no longer enough. Britain must undertake a new policy of “partnership”, in which regional planning and state investment would spread economic improvement, while British officials reached across racial divides to build links with local politicians who would soon (though the timescale remained vague) be ruling themselves. “Events such as we have known in the last few weeks are rough teachers”, declared Perham, “but our survival as a great power may depend on our being able to learn their lesson”.48 The echo of Rudyard Kipling’s response to the Boer War was unmistakable. Not least to ward off American proposals to put every colony under international control, “partnership” would become a tenet of Colonial Office thinking for the rest of the war.49 It is possible to position Perham’s articles as evidence of changing British attitudes that would eventually ease the departure from formal empire. Calls for national revival in response to defeat, however, encompassed a much harder edge. The Times correspondent Ian Morrison, whose pen portraits skewered many of those directing the colony’s defence, ended his 1942 book Malayan Postscript by claiming that all “those who had been residing” in Malaya, “and making profits out of it, and those others who had been responsible for the ­formulation of its policies and the ensuring of its defence”, had been found:

46 47

tna, INF1/292, hiwr 127, 11 March 1943, “Appendix: The British Empire”, 11–12. C. Brad Faught, Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (London, 2011), 93–95; Roland Oliver, “Prologue: The Two Miss Perhams”, in Margery Perham and British Rule in Africa, eds., Alison Smith and Mary Bull (Cambridge, 1991), 21–26. 48 Margery Perham, “The Colonial Empire: The Need for Stocktaking and Review” and “Capital, Labour and the Colour Bar”, The Times, 13–14 March 1942. 49 Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 137–46.

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“wanting in vigour, in ruthlessness, in aggressiveness. They had allowed ­themselves to go soft”. Back in the UK, he asserted: Those necessary qualities of greatness are not lost. I get the impression (from the other side of the world) that there is a new upsurge of them amongst the people of Great Britain. We must incorporate them into our national life if we are to maintain our greatness as a nation and reassert our power in the East.50 Recent work on culture and politics in mid-war has emphasized the extent to which Britons sought to project an aura of toughness and modernity: it would also become a key element in colonial reconstruction.51 5

“No news once Singapore fell (…), except of terrible atrocities in the camps”

Losing Singapore had a much more limited effect on the British home front than the last great defeat of the war, the fall of France. Whereas 1940 had sparked invasion fears, spurred on a hunt for fifth columnists, accelerated conscription, and led to an unleashing of air and sea attack on Britain and its trade, the most widespread consequence of the disaster in 1942 was a tightening of controls on raw materials. Thanks to the capture of Malaya’s tin and rubber production, toys, balls, some shoes and bicycle tyres disappeared from the shops. Greater restrictions were placed on petrol use, driving even more civilian cars from the road. Leaving aside for the moment arguments about the pervasive presence of the Empire in British life – if not the sugar in their tea, then the rubber beneath their feet – it was a far cry from the Blitz, let alone the sook ching.52 In February 1942, with the Japanese onslaught at full bore, respondents to a bipo survey picked Germany over Japan as the greater threat to the security of “the British Empire” by a ratio of 5:3.53 This probably represented the height 50 Ian Morrison, Malayan Postscript, (London, 1942), 189–90. 51 Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, passim; Christina L. Baade, Victory through Harmony: The bbc and Popular Music in World War ii (Oxford, 2012), 131–52. 52 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities”, in Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed., ­Anthony B. King (Minneapolis MN, 1997), 48. 53 James Hinton, Paul Thompson, Ian Liddell, British Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup) Polls, 1938–1946 [data collection], British Institute of Public Opinion, [original data p ­ roducers],

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of concern about Japan. In response to a question on “the most important war problem the Government must solve during the next few months”, “Far Eastern situation” had been nominated by 5.42 per cent of respondents in December 1941. In later repetitions of the same question, that answer was selected by just 0.26 per cent of people in August 1942; 0.05 per cent in January 1943 and 0.4 per cent in September 1943 – making it the least popular of the 18 answer types available in each case.54 This did not imply opposition to the war in the Far East. In response to a December 1942 question: “Mr Churchill says that if Germany is beaten first we shall continue to fight until Japan is defeated. Do you approve or disapprove of this course?” – 88 per cent of respondents expressed their approval.55 Rather, it was not a constant feature of their lives. Significantly, given that the bipo’s commercial purpose was to respond to and to make the news, among the hundreds of questions it asked in the period 1942–1945, these were the only ones about the Far East.56 Some people, however, could not ignore the consequences of the defeat. The total number of British personnel committed to Malaya was, by the standards of other campaigns, relatively small, but unusually, almost all of them were killed or captured. Though 50 per cent more soldiers had become casualties during the fighting in France in 1940, the 38,000 posted missing after the end of the Malayan campaign was close to the total number of British army casualties in the entire first two years of the fighting around the Middle East and Mediterranean from June 1940, and the equivalent of about one per cent of the entire strength of the British armed forces in spring 1942.57 With approximately one in a hundred servicemen involved – as well as a much smaller number of expatriate British settlers and administrators, most people in most parts of the UK might have known of someone affected by the calamity. In fact, the burden of separation and bereavement fell disproportionately on East Anglia. About 15,000 of the British soldiers listed as missing belonged to the 18th Infantry Division – a second-line Territorial Army ­Division

54 55 56

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UK Data Service SN:3331, http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-3331-1, BIPO84, February 1942, Question 7. BIPO82, December 1941, Question 3; BIPO90, August 1942, Question 4; BIPO95, January 1943, Question 4; bipo September 1943, Question 8. BIPO94, December 1942, Question 7. Roodhouse, “Fish-and-Chip Intelligence”. It could be argued that questions about the British government’s policy in India (which was both a possible choice for “most important war problem” and the subject of three direct questions in 1942), were also about the war against Japan. Henry Michael Denne Parker, Manpower: A Study of Wartime Policy and Adminstration (London, 1957), 484; tna, cab106/1207, “British and Allied Battle Casualties, 1939–1946, compiled by AG Stats from Hot Spot Messages”.

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raised just before the war. Like most such formations, its battalions had been topped up with conscripts from other parts of the country, but having remained in the UK to this point it had retained many of its original recruits. A sample of one unit, drawn from the casualty database of 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, developed by the Adam Park Project to aid its archaeological investigations of the site of the unit’s last stand in Singapore, suggests that about a third of the 177 soldiers killed and wounded as a result of the fighting on 13-15 February 1942 had an identifiable address in Cambridgeshire, with about another third from adjacent counties of East Anglia, including a substantial number from Newmarket, and the rest drawn predominantly from London, the Midlands and South West England.58 The corollary of this relative concentration was that elsewhere, the number of those personally affected by the defeat was less dense. For those whose loved ones had been caught up in the maelstrom, information about their fate was sparse. Around 2000 of the missing British troops had been killed in action, mostly during the final battles of the campaign.59 The Japanese took a long time to provide notification of those who had been taken prisoner: only 2200 British soldiers had been identified as captives by 7 December 1942.60 In every theatre of war, confusion abounded after mass surrenders as administrative systems collapsed under the strain. Expecting that their own soldiers would not surrender, however, the Japanese had done little to address the issue, let alone to ensure that their prisoners could make contact with their families. Relatives of the missing were stuck in limbo. Iris Strange’s husband Bob was taken prisoner on 15 February 1942. She kept writing letters to him, but as she later remembered: “For me, as with so many others, there was no news once Singapore fell to the Japanese, except of terrible atrocities in the camps”. Even that was scarce – though in March 1942 the government publicized evidence of Japanese atrocities during the taking of Hong Kong and Singapore, press reports of conditions in Far Eastern POWS camps were usually censored. Only very occasional postcards or letters got through. Gunner Robert Strange died on 5 March 1943: Iris, after struggling for years to make ends meet with a young son and a paltry pension, later became a leading campaigner for war widows’ rights.61 58

“The Adam Park Project: Casualty Database Search”, http://www.adamparkproject.com/ database-search/. Accessed 2017 Oct 18. 59 Farrell, Defence and Fall, 451–52. Farrell estimates total Malaya Command dead at 7,500– 8,000, which would suggest about 2,000 British fatalities in action. 60 Barbara Hately-Broad, War and Welfare: British PoW Families, 1939–45 (Manchester, 2009), 150. 61 Staffordshire University Special Collections, Iris Strange Collection, ‘Letters Iris to ­Robert Strange, 1941–42’, quoted in Barbara Hately-Broad, “Prisoner of War Families and the

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Civilians were not the only ones caught up by personal loss. Enoch Powell, then an intelligence officer at General Headquarters Middle East in Cairo, was devastated to discover in the spring of 1942 that the love of his life, a junior Colonial Office administrator called Albert ‘Tommy’ Thomas, was missing, presumed dead, just north of Singapore. Powell was highly unusual in many ways, not least his determination and ability to exert agency over his own life: few subalterns in the British army modelled their moustache on that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Singapore was not a far-off and imagined place for him, but somewhere he knew from stop offs on the journey to and from his post as professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. Haunted by his memories, in 1943 Powell resolved to head eastwards – securing a posting to India, whence he hoped to lead a return to Malaya, avenge Thomas, and seek his own death in battle. This made too him deeply untypical. Though resigned enough to submission to the military machine, most British service personnel and their families loathed the idea of a posting to the distant and disease-ridden to which they felt little attachment. Powell’s mission failed: too valuable to allow near the front line, he served out the rest of the war in India. His inability to die a warrior’s death marked him for the remaining five and a half decades of his life. As Camilla Schofield has argued, the whole of Powell’s post-war political career can be interpreted as an interaction with different versions of the Second World War, including not only his personal tragedy, but also the unresolved tensions of a collective memory that incorporated both pride in national survival and victory and anger at declining national power and the loss of Empire.62 6

Conclusion: Singapore as Multi-faceted Defeat

In a typically wide-ranging and field-defining 2008 essay on “Defeat and Memory in Modern History”, John Horne suggested a pentarchic typology, of temporary, definitive, total, internal and partial defeats, with the latter defined as one that did not include a threat to the territory of the defeated nation.63 It is a

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­ ritish Government during the Second World War”, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, B 2002, 166; Jane Lomas, “‘So I Married Again’: Letters from British Widows of the First and Second World Wars”, History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 218–27. Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London, 2014), 54–85; Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge, 2013), particularly 52–54. John Horne, “Defeat and Memory in Modern History”, in Macleod, ed., Defeat and Memory, 11–29.

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sign of the complexity of analyzing Britain’s Second World War that Singapore seems to fit at least three of these types – temporary in the sense that it did not determine the outcome of the contest with Japan; definitive in the sense that it eventually spelled the end of the British Empire in South East Asia; partial in the sense that while part of the mental world of a colonially-connected elite, it was distant from the British home front. Like other defeats, the palimpsest of meanings around Singapore was re-inscribed and altered over time, reflecting first the shifting course of the war, then the changing history of the Empire. Horne pointed to the importance of memory in understanding the cultural history of defeat: it would be a good thing if historians of Britain’s Second World War focused as much on the remembrance of 1942 as they have done on that of 1940. In considering memory, Horne focused on the role played by collective memory in settling on the “consolatory tropes” adopted by communities in the aftermath of defeat. In the same collection, Stephen Tyre examined the way in which the memory of a recent defeat, at Dien Bien Phu, was remobilized during the defence of French Algeria.64 Examination of British reactions to Singapore suggests a further field of study related in particular to the “partial” defeats identified by Horne. As Ian Morrison and Margery Perham’s responses in 1942 suggested, the script of imperial response to peripheral calamity was well-established: self-scrutiny, debate over national character, reform and reconstruction to ward off decline. Here, the memory of past defeats provided consolation, but whether they helped or hindered policy deserves greater exploration. Did past recoveries encourage adaptability or condemn hubristic nations to still worse defeats, by convincing them that any disaster could be overcome?

64

Stephen Tyre, “The Memory of French Military Defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Defence of French Algeria”, in Macleod, ed., Defeat and Memory, 214–32.

A World at War: 1911–1949: Conclusion John Horne The editors have paid me the compliment of asking me to write a conclusion to this book, giving me the opportunity to engage with the authors. It shows there is nothing honorific about the volume. It is a real dialogue on a big subject: the two world wars, their connections and their links to a longer arc of history that runs from 1911 to 1949 – from the wars before the Great War (the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya and the Balkan Wars of 1912–13) to the first Soviet atom bomb, in August 1949. The latter put a fitting full stop to the two world wars by Mutually Assured Destruction (mad), which ensured that the Cold War, despite its hotspots, stayed mainly cold. I have spent many years working on these issues. If I have forged some of the concepts and arguments that have contributed to the debate, I am acutely aware how much I owe to the ideas and research of colleagues and also how much pleasure, intellectual and personal, it has given me to engage with many of them (not least the contributors to this book) at various stages of their careers, from postgraduate to professor. Being an historian is both individual and collaborative. I hope the reader has found both qualities in this book since together they are a real strength of our profession. No conclusion is final or the dialogue would end. The most I can do is suggest some ways in which this book indicates new lines of enquiry and themes for debate. Like a prism, it focuses a number of subjects by splitting them into new combinations or projecting them onto hitherto understudied fields, suggesting comparisons, connections and continuities (or discontinuities) across its chosen time-span. In this, as in the exemplary scholarship it displays, lies the book’s originality. All the authors, whether they introduce one of the four sections (on cultural mobilization; the nature and representation of combat; the impact of war on civilians; or victory, defeat and post-war periods) or whether they provide a case study, use their topics to look outwards and so to make connections between the world wars and their contexts. All of them are also alive to comparative and transnational approaches. Many deal with more than one country and those concentrating on one alone use insights from others. All are part of a wave of historiography that has been especially (but not solely) evident in the history of the Great War since the turning point of the late 1980s.1 This saw the end of Communism, the 1 Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004393547_015

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r­ econfiguration of Europe, and the engagement of the ‘West’ (initially triumphant at the end of the Cold War) with a multi-polar world. It cried out for a de-centring of national and western perspectives on history. How to overcome a divided continent and write a European and even global history of the world wars and their impact, including on colonial empires and their demise, has been a new trend in contemporary history.2 It informs this book. At the heart of the volume, then, is the relationship between the two world wars – that ‘slow’ dialogue identified by the editors whose potential is still largely unrealized but which has been made easier by the emergence of cultural history as the dominant (though never exclusive) paradigm in the study of the Great War.3 For the latter has raised questions about how societies were mobilized for war, how they demobilized (or failed to do so), how and why soldiers kept fighting in the violent world of industrialized warfare, and how the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was regressively breached until civilians became central victims and actors of both conflicts, their deaths outnumbering those of soldiers in the Second World War.4 All these issues and more provide fertile ground for cultivating connections between the two wars and placing both in wider frameworks of analysis. Yet how we do this, how we even pose the problem, turns on deeper issues of theory and method. Are we concerned with war as a phenomenon, studying similarities and differences in the world wars as variants of war itself and inviting comparison with earlier wars or indeed more recent ones? Or is it more a matter of grasping the internal dynamics of warfare in these two conflicts as a single whole? For irrespective of their causes, we might suggest that the industrialized combat waged by modern mass societies resulted in key features that evolved across the two wars, linking them intrinsically. Seeing warfare in terms of the arc of history from 1911 to 1949, the world went in half a lifetime from infantry charges that Napoleon would have recognized (though already 2 Comparison is facilitated by two new collaborative works on each war: John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War i (Chichester, 2010) and Thomas W. Zeiler and Daniel M. Dubois, eds., A Companion to World War ii 2 vols (Chichester, 2013); and Jay Winter, ed, The Cambridge History of the First World War 3 vols (Cambridge, 2014), and The Cambridge History of the Second World War 3 vols (Cambridge, 2015), whose volumes are edited, in turn by John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley (Fighting the War); Richard Bosworth and Joseph Maiolo (Politics and Ideology) and Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (Total War: Economy and Society). 3 John Horne, “End of a Paradigm? The Cultural History of the Great War”, Past and Present 242 (2019), 155–92. 4 Richard Bessel, “Death and Survival in the Second World War”, in The Cambridge History of the Second World War vol. 3 Total War, eds., Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (Cambridge 2015), 252–76.

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they were being mown down by machine-guns and rapid-fire field artillery) to humankind’s ability to annihilate itself – the nuclear reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that hung over the Cold War. Never has warfare been so dramatically transformed. But what were the inner features, the continuities or discontinuities, of this process? Or do we wish instead to establish patterns of cause and consequence between the two world wars as larger political and cultural as well as military episodes? Were they linked by some other process, such as a new 30-year war, an age of extremes or Europe’s ‘hell’, to refer to some influential accounts mentioned by the editors in the introduction? Here, post-war periods are as vital as the wars in making links. All of the above are valid lines of enquiry but they are likely to result in different answers, as befits something as central to human societies as war. Let me use each in turn in responding to the contributors and suggesting further questions. Comparing the two world wars as variants of a generic phenomenon has most frequently been done in the debate on ‘total war’, a term coined by the French near the end of the First World War to explain the ever greater energy and resources needed for victory and later used by the Germans to explain why they lost. Scholarly debate on the concept has presumed a linear path towards the totality of the Second World War on which the First marks a less than total way station. Yet one may doubt whether anything in history is ‘total’.5 There is always resistance – what Clausewitz called “friction” – always slippage between aim and execution. Nor does any leader or regime, however powerful, exercise total control, which is why many scholars contest the related term ‘totalitarian’ as applied to some of the major belligerent states in the Second World War. Robert Dale and Anthony McElligott illustrate the point in their respective chapters on Red Army soldiers on the Eastern Front and Wehrmacht soldiers in Greece during the latter conflict. For they show that even in the ussr and Nazi Germany, soldiers had some autonomy and agency in how they dealt with the violence they both faced and inflicted in situations that were far from uniform. In this regard, what matters more is how the violence of some wars escalates, as do the resources put behind them, to the point that contemporaries experience them as extreme. They breach previous norms and expectations but it is the process that counts rather than some final destination of abstract totality. It has long seemed to me that ‘totalizing logics’ better captures this ­tendency, 5 Roger Chickering, “World War i and the Theory of Total War: Reflections on the British and German Cases, 1914–1915”, in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, eds., Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge, 2000), 35–53.

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which marks certain wars (or even particular antagonists within them) whereas in others it is checked by restraints, internal and external.6 Both world wars displayed several ‘totalizing logics’ because they expanded the groups targeted while vastly intensifying the violence used against them, on and off the battlefield, in the vertiginous process referred to. Yet historians have also made claims for the ‘total’ (or ‘totalizing’) nature of earlier wars, such as the Thirty Years War, long remembered as Germany’s most destructive conflict, and the Napoleonic Wars.7 If those conflicts did not have the massively destructive firepower available to 20th century armies, they were equally capable of ravaging vulnerable populations closer to subsistence by famine and disease as well as by combat and mass displacement. One might conclude that all societies have the capacity to wage ‘total war’ within the constraints of their economies, cultures, politics, technologies and historical epochs, though most of them do not and most wars, crucially, are not of this kind. So if both world wars were like this, we need to ask whether they were marked by a similar kind of warfare and combat experience. Conventionally, the limited comparisons of the two conflicts in military terms underline ­differences – the one bogged down in trench warfare for much of its duration, the other characterized by more sweeping movement, albeit with some fierce siege episodes (Stalingrad, Leningrad, the Normandy beachhead, German defences in Italy, etc.) which echoed the fronts of 1914–18. Yet the question of how, and why, soldiers continued to fight most of the time in the First World War is not posed in the same way for the Second, either because the latter is seen as more ideologically driven or (contradictorily) because military discipline and constraint in the Soviet, German and Japanese cases were far harsher than anything in the First World War. There is truth in all this but the contributors to this volume suggest, rightly in my view, that the similarities between the two wars are as important as the differences and that there is much to be gained from looking at the soldier’s point of view in what Dale calls a “wider world at war”. In part this is a question of sources. Curiously, the soldiers of the Great War did not become the object of scholarly enquiry until the advent of the cultural history of the 1980s.8 Of course, the soldiers, especially the most literate, had 6 John Horne, “Introduction”, State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed., John Horne (Cambridge, 1997), 1–18. 7 See Peter Wilson, “Was the Thirty Years” War a ‘Total War’?”, in Civilians and War in Europe 1618–1815, eds., Erica Charters, Eve Rosenhaft and Hannah Smith (Liverpool, 2012), 21–34, and David Bell, The First Total War. Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston MA, 2007). 8 Among the earliest into the field was a specialist in English literature who had, significantly, fought in the US Army in the Second World War: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

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published diaries, memoirs, poetry and novels since the war itself but historians had largely confined themselves to classic works of military, diplomatic and political history, while the social history of the war, in full flood from the 1960s to the 1980s, focused more on home front societies and economies. Yet high literacy rates for many armies in the Great War resulted in multiple sources (letters, diaries, trench newspapers) while the importance of military morale led the state to monitor the soldiers’ opinion, including their correspondence. Unsurprisingly, since it happened only a quarter of a century later, the Second World War produced similar sources, thus opening up combat in both conflicts to the kind of analysis made in this book. As Alan Kramer points out, various factors shaped the experiences of soldiers in both wars. Many understood their purpose in terms of patriotism, the defence of a local or national community and ideologies. Yet once they embarked on the fighting, getting the job done and sheer survival prevailed. They relied on the small group dynamics identified by American psychologists in the Second World War (the ‘buddy system’) but which operated throughout, especially because the direct command and control of smaller battlefields in earlier periods was impossible in the “physical wilderness” of the two world wars, as John Keegan put it in his classic study, The Face of Battle.9 Unit pride, comradeship and officer-man relations (especially the role of junior officers) were vital in navigating this wilderness. So, too, were discipline and constraint, with courts martial or even summary execution, not to mention the blocking detachments and penal battalions described by Dale in the case of the Red Army. But by themselves, they could not have kept men in the field, as the admittedly very different cases of the French and Russian armies in the First World War show. In the French case, the 60,000 odd mutineers of the early summer of 1917, despite a strong vein of war weariness, protested less against the war than against the apparent futility of renewed frontal assaults such as that of General Nivelle in April of that year. The Russian case, by contrast, shows a widespread breakdown of the ordinary soldiers’ belief in the war itself, at least beyond the basic defence of the fatherland and the Revolution.10 The point in both cases, however, is that pure repression was impossible. M ­ orale and combat motivation turned on much else.

9 10

John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London, 1976, new edition, 1991), 322. See Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the Fifth French Infantry Division during World War i (Princeton NJ, 1994), 175–214; Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army vol. 1 The Old Army and the Soldiers” Revolt, March–April 1917 (Princeton NJ, 1980).

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In other respects, too, there was a continuum in the nature of warfare. Keegan went on to argue in The Face of Battle that what distinguished both wars by comparison with all preceding ones was the exponential growth of battlefield violence to which I have referred, and which came in essence from the technical developments brought about by the second industrial revolution of the later 19th century (high explosives, cheap steel, the internal combustion engine, powered flight etc.). Industrialized firepower was infinitely more violent than that of the earlier ‘gunpowder’ wars (the American Civil War being transitional) and the First World War was its proving ground. As Keegan also noted, there was little in the depersonalized violence of modern battle that had not been invented by 1918, the Second World War in this respect bringing merely refinements and variants.11 This was also largely true of naval warfare. Aerial bombing, while foreshadowed by the First World War, was the one major difference in the kind of military violence delivered by the Second, but here the principal contrast lay in its massive use against civilians. Strategic bombing (including atomic weapons) targeted cities, not soldiers. The world wars were also alike (compared to most wars before and after) in being fought by entire national and imperial populations, representing the culmination of the French Revolution’s invention of the ‘nation in arms’. True, the industrial mobilization resulted in a division of labour between the civil and military efforts and also within the military effort itself as the dedicated units, support-services and military bureaucracy required by mass armies imposed their own specialisation of function. The idea that all younger adult men would make an equal military sacrifice (as citizens, subjects, or members of the Volk) was a myth increasingly flouted by complex war efforts.12 Nonetheless, a large cross-section of adult men was put into uniform and sent into combat in both wars, so that (as Lord Moran noted in his study of courage), the average man rather than selected professionals made up the armed forces, including much of the officer corps. With a few exceptions (the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Israeli Defence Forces today), this has not been the case since. Both world wars thus saw mass armies confront unparalleled battlefield violence. As many came to recognize, psychological trauma was built into an experience that was always shocking and which (to borrow Lord Moran’s metaphor) used up the ‘bank balance’ of courage that the average soldier (neither fearless hero nor abject coward) had at his disposal – or her disposal, too, in the

11 Keegan, Face of Battle, 314–24. 12 Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms: Military Myth and Political Legitimacy since the French Revolution (New York NY & Cambridge, 2002).

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­ ussian case in both wars.13 ‘Shell shock’, and how different armies dealt with R it, thus becomes one of the clearest symptoms (and proofs) of the common arc of combat underlying the two world wars.14 Does this mean that similarities outweighed differences in the soldier’s experiences of the two world wars? This is one of the most important questions brought into focus by this volume. Extreme ideological and racial antagonism was far more pronounced in the second than in the first conflict, especially on the Eastern Front between the Red Army and the forces arrayed behind Nazi Germany but also between the Allies and the Japanese in the Pacific and South East Asian theatres, not to mention China.15 The fate of prisoners suggests the difference. While the latter were mistreated more than we used to think in the First World War (with variations according to the front), there is no comparison with the killing or starvation of over three million Soviet prisoners whom the Nazis considered racially inferior or the systematic brutality of the Japanese camps in the Second World War and Japanese massacres in China. Yet the treatment of prisoners in the war between the Axis powers and the western democracies was closer to that in 1914–18, being covered by the 1929 Geneva Convention (which neither the ussr nor Japan had signed).16 However, this does not mean that national enmity in the First World War (an enmity already infused with ideological values) was not already powerful even if it was less polarized. Most belligerent societies experienced each of the world wars as an existential struggle. Whether on the Somme in 1916 or after Stalingrad in 1942–43, German soldiers believed they were defending both Reich and Heimat from a foe that threatened to bring the war home. Albeit in different ways, French soldiers and the resistance fought after 1940 as the 13 14

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Charles Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (London, 1966). Moran, Churchill’s physician, drew on his experience as a medic on the Western Front in the First World War and as an adviser to the Royal Air Force on aircrew battle fatigue in the Second. Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychologists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA, 2003); Jay Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present, Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2017), 172–202, on the underestimation of combat trauma for the First World War. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London, 1985); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945 (London, 2005), 133–62; John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York NY, 1986). Anne-Marie Pathé and Fabien Théofilakis, eds., Wartime Captivity in the 20th Century: Archives, Stories, Memories (New York NY & Oxford, 2016), esp. 13–24; Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914– 1920 (Cambridge, 2011).

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poilus had done in 1914–18 in order to free a patrie that in part or whole actually was occupied. Heather Jones and Edward Madigan show in their portrait of the Irish Catholic and nationalist soldier how the meaning of the First World War changed around him with the polarization provoked by the Easter Rising in Dublin and its repression, leading via a war of independence to the formal absence of nationalist Ireland from the Second World War. Perhaps the least well-equipped soldier in either conflict, the Anatolian peasant who made up the core of the Ottoman army, fought a bitter and surprisingly tough war of survival which became the crucible in which a Turkish national identity was forged and the ground laid for a successful War of Independence against the Greeks and the western powers in 1919–23.17 Imperial, national and ideological values infused both wars. There were, likewise, both similarities and real differences in the experience of battle. In this context, one might describe the long arc of 1911–1949 as the slow coming to terms by armies and military cultures imbued with the lessons of the last major climacteric in European affairs, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, with the realities of industrialized conflict on a scale that could not be determined by the single decisive battle of Napoleonic myth, but only by a war of attrition. Not surprisingly, generals and soldiers grappled with cognitive dissonance as they tried to adjust their mental battlefield to this new reality. As the ‘totalizing logic’ of mobilizing all available resources was brought to bear on the enemy in a test of mutual endurance, battle itself dissolved into the ongoing fighting. Yet belief in the decisive encounter persisted beyond the First World War. In late autumn 1941, Hitler understood better than his top brass that there would be no one ‘battle of annihilation’ and that victory would turn (as in the First World War) on the control of vital fuel and food in a war of attrition. For him, conquest of the Ukraine and Caucasus was to make Germany self-sufficient, an autarkic empire in Europe and Eurasia.18 In the Great War, the logic of attrition gradually imposed itself on the battlefield as on the naval conflict over global resources. But it had to contend with military tactics premised on the holy grail of a decisive offensive – a ‘breakthrough’ – something that never happened, even in the ‘final hundred days’. The ‘learning curve’ identified by some historians in 1914–18 was a fragmented affair. ‘Attrition’ as a conscious military strategy (wearing down the enemy by the losses inflicted on him) emerged by default from the failure of planned offensives, such as that still conducted in 1917 by Haig (in the Third Battle of 17 18

Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport CNT & London, 2000). Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms (New York NY & London, 2015), 175–76.

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Ypres) as well as by Nivelle. Arguably, the ‘learning curve’ by which commanders and soldiers worked out how to survive and apply industrialized firepower in order to win victory spanned both world wars, as well as the fierce debates in between them over the lessons of the first.19 Yet precisely because warfare evolved across the period, soldiers never experienced it in quite the same way. In 1914–18, firepower massively favoured the defensive. Faced with machine guns and field artillery, frontal attacks produced the highest French and German casualties of the war in the autumn of 1914 (and in 1916 for the British at the Somme). This resulted on both sides in a radically new kind of siege warfare that stretched on different fronts around the inner perimeter of Europe, each side both defending and attacking. The attempt to starve the enemy by indirect means (naval blockade and U-boat warfare) scaled the conflict up to a global level. But it never replaced (only reinforced) the renewal of assaults on the different fronts, which proved costly and led to the residual logic of attrition already referred to. Globally, the Second World War was no less a conflict of siege and attrition. But the military advantage swung back to the offensive (with tanks, aircraft and at sea the aircraft carrier), making it more a war of movement than its predecessor had been even if it was also too big to be won by any single battle. Yet while firepower was no less violent, it did not reproduce the static mutual siege warfare of the fronts of the Great War let alone the cognitive dissonance that arose from grappling with the novelty of industrial firepower in that peculiarly intractable form. This might explain why a pacifist revulsion against the horror of the Great War (and its ‘futility’) became widespread (though never total) in the inter-war period whereas equivalent but different battlefield violence in the Second World War produced no such post-war pacifism in the Soviet Union or usa, let alone Britain and France, which suffered greater military losses in the First World War. Even in Germany and Japan, official pacifism had as much to do with civilian suffering (including the atom bomb and the Holocaust) as the violence of battle, and it was the horror of nuclear war that drove the limited peace movements in the West from the 1950s to the 1980s.20

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Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myth and Realities (London, 2001), for the learning curve; William Philpott, Attrition: Fighting the First World War (London, 2014), who sees attrition as more intentional than I do; Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford, 2001), 648–63, on inter-war lessons from the Great War. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London, 1995); Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford CA, 1997).

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The place of civilians in this arc of warfare from 1911 to 1949 provides a second comparative theme. The First World War was long seen as a soldier’s rather than a civilian’s war whereas the Second clearly brought the war home to non-combatants by massive aerial bombardment, turning cities into battlegrounds.21 The war of movement also subjected civilian populations to invasion and occupation on a huge scale in Europe, China and South East Asia, thereby exposing them to forms of military and state brutality that culminated in the Holocaust. Civilian experience in the Great War, by contrast, seemed more a matter of the ‘home front’, a term invented in that conflict. This was shaped by political and cultural mobilization (with the state playing a key but not exclusive role), by economic mobilization for the war of attrition, and by a wartime society with its own values of equality and sacrifice but which faced worsening conditions as the economic siege afflicted both camps (albeit unevenly).22 All this applied in many ways to the Second World War, and I shall return to the comparative study of the home fronts when looking at mobilization. However, one of the strengths of this volume is that it draws on more recent scholarship on the Great War that tackles civilians in the very different settings of occupation, flight, deportation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. All these issues, clearly central to the Second World War, were long ignored for the First because they did not fit the dominant military and national narratives. Occupation was self-evidently central to the history of France in the Second World War in a way it was not to the First because in the latter case it involved only two million people and was redeemed by the army and military victory, not by the myth of armed resistance. Yet it affected the entire north east of the country.23 In Belgium, occupation (exceptionally) provided the dominant war experience.24 Civilian suffering was most acute in the three dynastic empires 21 22

23

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Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New York NY, 2009); Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (London, 2013). Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1965); Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918, trans. Barbara Weinberger (Leamington Spa, 1984); Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (London, 2005). See among other studies Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris, 2010); Philippe Nivet, La France occupée, 1914–1918 (Paris, 2011); James E. Connolly, The Experience of Occupation in the Nord, 1914–1918: Living with the Enemy in First World War France (Manchester, 2018). For prevalent understandings of the Second World War in France, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA, 1994), esp. Chapters 1–3. Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale, trans. Claudine Spitaels and Marnix Vincent (Brussels, 2006). On making Second World War resistance into the equivalent of the national myths of the First World War in Belgium and France, see

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destroyed by the war (Austria-Hungary, Romanov Russia and the Ottoman Empire).25 But these were replaced by new states with national or soviet commemorative cultures in which the war had only a limited place.26 Historians discovered these issues with the trans-European perspectives (and research cultures) opened up by the reunification of the continent following 1989 and also with the shock of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. These latter episodes revived the international human rights law founded after the Second World War as well as focusing attention on displaced and persecuted civilians. The consolidation of the Holocaust as the key episode of the Second World War in Europe played its part. The result was a new concern with the fate of civilians in the First World War, especially those beyond or between the ‘home fronts’.27 Annette Becker traces how the First World War preceded the Second in this regard in a rare example (her own work aside) of the attempt to establish such links.28 Both she and Alex Dowdall argue that the static nature of much of the fighting in the Great War does not mean that civilians entirely escaped battle, let alone military violence. Dowdall shows that civilians were embedded in combat zones where they lived under military rule and were exposed to bombardment. If we add those under occupation, millions of people were subject to enemy military rule. Again, there are clear differences from the Second World War. Except for Austria-Hungary’s determination to eliminate a sovereign Serbia, no power went to war in 1914 to annexe foreign lands, as did Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Yet military stalemate in 1914–15 resulted in the occupation by Germany and its allies of swathes of Europe (Belgium and north-eastern France, Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia and, later in the war, Romania and Ukraine). Austria-Hungary annexed not only Serbia (part of it going to Bulgaria) but also, after the Italian defeat at Caporetto, the eastern Veneto. The Russians took most of Austrian Poland in 1914–15 and north-eastern Anatolia

25

26 27 28

Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000), 38–58. See Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Exeter, 1990, expanded edition, 2002); Pieter M. ­Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge MA, 2016); and Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge, 2011). Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington IN, 2011), 289–92. For an overview that considers civilians both on and beyond the home front, see Tammy R. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War 1914–1918 (New York NY, 2010). See in particular Annette Becker, Messagers du désastre: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les génocides (Paris, 2018).

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from the Ottoman Empire in 1915–17. Although enemy-occupied Europe was not as extensive in the First World War as it was in the Second, it was still very important. Yet we have few overall studies of it.29 Germany, in particular, directly ruled components of what, in the event of victory, would have been a broader empire over Europe.30 While it developed ethnic and racial policies for some of those territories with a view to their permanent incorporation or domination (e.g. Flemish Belgium, eastern Poland and Lithuania), there was no comparison with the biological racism of the Nazi regime or its plans for the ethnic reorganization of the east, including genocide.31 The catastrophe of defeat in 1918, and the radicalization of German politics (as Robert Gerwarth shows in his chapter), made all the difference. Still, faced with the loss of its overseas colonies in 1914–16, and, more importantly (since the scattered German possessions were of limited value), when confronted with the Allies’ access to the global economy and their naval blockade, the Germans found occupied Europe a valuable asset. This meant intensified exploitation of civilians, with mobility regulated and a militarisation of labour that was harsh by contemporary standards even if it bore no resemblance to the extreme of Nazi slave labour of the Second World War. Whether such colonial-style control was linked to the practices of overseas empire is a much-debated question, as is that of the learning process (and continuities of personnel) between German occupations in the two wars. It is also worth noting that despite their access to the world economy, the British and French imposed more draconian labour policies on their own empires during the war. But it was the military extraction of resources from Europeans (especially in the West), and notably labour, that shocked contemporaries. It showed, as both Becker and Dowdall argue, that civilians were not only exposed to collateral damage but also became a key resource themselves (given the logic of total mobilization), especially where they fell under enemy or colonial rule beyond the national home front. The links and comparisons with the Second World War, when both Nazi Germany and Japan extracted labour and resources from all their subject peoples with varying degrees of severity, merit further study. Civilians were also swept up in the chaos of war as refugees and expellees. The story is familiar for the Second World War. Then, eight million French 29

30 31

See, however, Sophie de Schaepdrijver, “Populations under Occupation”, in The Cambridge History of the First World War vol. 3 Civil Society, ed., Jay Winter (Cambridge, 2014), 242–56, and, on the German East, Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War i (Cambridge, 2000). Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, trans. C.A. Macartney (London, 1967). Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster (London, 2009).

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people (a fifth of the population) joined the exodus of 1940, both the Nazi and Soviet regimes deported millions of people (to different ends), and some ten million Flüchtlingen (expellees and refugees from the east) made new homes in post-war Germany.32 After 1945, displaced persons (DPs) symbolized how the war had upended ordinary lives. Yet the Great War anticipated its successor as invasions and retreats triggered mass movements of civilians. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 already caused an outflow of Ottoman subjects to Anatolia, helping drive the Young Turks to seek national ‘regeneration’ by entering the Great War.33 As the Russian army retreated from Austrian Poland in summer 1915, it drove three million ‘refugees’ (many of them subjects of the Tsar) into the interior.34 When war between the great powers ended, it metamorphosed into a ‘greater war’ with revolution and civil war in Russia and ethnic conflicts, social upheaval, political revolution and inter-state wars in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Anatolia, Ireland and parts of the Middle East, only ending in 1923.35 Here the contrast that Dowdall draws between a French state able to support its refugees through solidarity based on citizenship and the more chaotic responses of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia was magnified as imperial power dissolved and new states struggled to establish territories and control their peoples (including minorities). The ethnic and anti-Semitic violence that accompanied the continued fighting in these “shatterzones” of empire prefigured the Second World War, with paramilitary violence providing one connecting link.36 Refugees and expellees characterized each of these conflicts, as they did on an even larger scale the Russian Civil War, from which some two million Whites fled into exile.37 32 33 34 35 36

37

Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford, 2007); Yasmin Khan, “Wars of Displacement: Exile and Uprooting in the 1940s”, in Geyer and Tooze, eds., 277–97. Mustapha Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), 19–41. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Bloomington IN, 1999); Peter Gatrell and Liubov Zhvanko, eds., Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War (Manchester, 2017). Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, “Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923”, Journal of Modern History, 83 (2011), 489–512. Mark Levene, “Frontiers of Genocide: Jews in the Eastern War Zones, 1914–1920 and 1941”, in Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars, ed., Panikos Panayi (Oxford, 1993), 26–40; Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds., War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012); Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzones of Empire: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington IN, 2013). Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (Oxford, 2017); Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford, 2002).

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The legacy was double. On the one hand, the international humanitarian response that dealt with the DPs after 1945 (notably the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) had its origins in the League of Nations’ answer to the refugee crisis after the First World War, notably in the person of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who was the League’s first High Commissioner for Refugees and who took charge of refugees from Bolshevik Russia.38 Yet ‘ethnic cleansing’ (as it would be dubbed in the 1990s) carried its own powerful message. In the “shatterzones” of the former imperial borderlands of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, heightened nationalism and antiSemitism left a legacy for the Holocaust later in the same regions.39 And when Kemal Attaturk defeated the Allied-backed Greeks in the Turkish War of Independence and overturned the Treaty of Sèvres by which the Allies had carved up the Ottoman Empire, the new Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 for the first time diplomatically ratified a forced population exchange – Greek ‘Turks’ for Turkish Greeks. Not only did German nationalists with their own dreams of revising the peace settlement note the precedent, it anticipated the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe after 1945, a policy again endorsed by the liberal democratic powers.40 In all this there is a paradox that lies at the heart of Annette Becker’s c­ hapter. As noted, religious or ethnic persecution and civilian suffering are nothing new in war, conflicts in the more distant past having had their own ‘totalizing tendencies’. The language of ‘atrocity’ that condemns such violence is produced by each era in its own way as an absolute moral yardstick – mainly religious in the early modern period, more secular and increasingly legal in the modern. But for that reason it also becomes part of the war itself, subject to myth, belief and propaganda. Contemporaries use it to stigmatize the enemy and are often reluctant to see what is actually happening, in part because they lack the language to address new kinds of violence. Each ‘totalizing war’ thus struggles to find the words for transgressions intrinsic to its own radicalism. With hindsight we can see that understandings of the extreme violence against civilians that lay at the heart of both world wars were deeply unstable at 38 39 40

Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford, 2013); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014). Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz (New York NY, 2018). Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge MA, 2001); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans (London, 2006); Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth While, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War ­Europe, 1944–49 (London, 2011).

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the time. The case of Raphaël Lemkin proves the point. For in order to address the cognitive dissonance created by the Nazi destruction of Europe’s Jews, he had to frame a new term that was at once a tool of public persuasion, a basis for future international law and a concept that the human sciences would later use to explain it. The fact that, as Becker shows, Lemkin was profoundly influenced by the earlier ‘genocide’ of the Ottoman Armenians, for which the term did not exist when it occurred and which (despite the perception that a nation was being ‘exterminated’) seemed marginal compared to the atrocity charges levelled by the main belligerents against each other in 1914–18, shows just how crucial it is to understand the history of genocide (and all ‘atrocities’) as a cognitive process. It indicates how various societies try to grasp a phenomenon for which the perpetrators have a different explanation. It also poses the question of how events such as genocides compare or relate to each other across time. That question is implicit in Annette Becker’s chapter. It goes beyond the scope of this book and these remarks, except to say that, along with the comparability of the soldiers’ experience of battlefield violence, the fact that genocide occurred in each world war is one of the most vital topics for further comparative investigation, including the issue of how ‘central’ we consider it to be when they were so different. As Zygmunt Bauman argued, the rational organization of Nazi mass killing that was designed not just to ‘cleanse’ Germany but also to create a racially based empire for all of Europe signalled the ‘modernity’ of the enterprise. Yet others have pointed out that much of the killing was conducted by basic massacre and that the drain on the resources of the Reich was marginal (“low-cost and low-tech”), especially when offset by the slave labour referred to earlier.41 The genocide of the Ottoman Armenians was certainly more primitive and limited to one state. It was in that sense less ‘central’ to the Great War as a whole. Yet (and this leads us to home fronts) it displayed its own kind of modernity – which is precisely what interested German nationalists. For if a critical dynamic of the Great War was how the power of nationality emerged not just in established nation-states but also in the three dynastic empires, nowhere did it do so more violently than in the Ottoman case where ­mobilization radicalized the figure of the ‘enemy within’ – the disloyal ­religious or ethnic minority which, in an existential war, is held to be a mortal threat to national survival. The war thus provided the spur for its elimination, sealing the fate of a million Armenians as individuals and as a living community. If we discard contemporary perceptions of Turkey as a peripheral theatre, the 41

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989), 6–12; David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (London, 2016), 795 (the quote).

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genocide places it at the centre of the process of national mobilization (which was core to both world wars) in its most lethal form.42 The question of home fronts, and more generally of how national and imperial cultures related to the wars, provides a third comparative theme in this book. Here, the focus shifts from warfare in a military sense to the nature of the two conflicts as larger political, cultural and diplomatic entities, though the fate of the soldiers and hopes of victory or fear of defeat meant that the two were always closely linked. As suggested, the cultural history that has been so important in renewing study of the Great War has generated a remarkable body of work (to which the editors and authors of this volume have notably contributed) on how that conflict produced war cultures and processes of cultural and political mobilization (and self-mobilization) that involved much of civil society as well as the state (and which also extended to the armed forces).43 One key reason for this is that in states that were by no means ‘totalitarian’ even where they were authoritarian, non-state agencies proved vital to the mobilization of support for the war – from the press to the churches and a host of civil society bodies, including labour movements. Despite repression, they also voiced war weariness and even opposition to the conflict from pacifists, feminists, socialists and nationalists – hence the significance of Ireland.44 This inevitably raises issues of consent and refusal. The Great War, in short, unleashed the societal forces that proved crucial to its prosecution just as much as it controlled and concerted them. State propaganda and coercion played a role but they did so in tandem with (not in opposition to) energies ‘from below’ without which the scale of death and mourning, not to mention civilian as well as military sacrifice, could not have been sustained. Languages of community and moral economy that sought to acknowledge and regulate the unequal burdens of sacrifice were part of that process. The states that found it hardest to accommodate them (Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary) were those that succumbed to the challenges of war. 42

43

44

The literature is huge, but see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (Oxford, 2005); Ronald Suny et al, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2011); Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton NJ, 2012). For a summary, see Horne, “End of a Paradigm?” and Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First World War vol. 3 Civil Society; for an influential formulation of the concept of ‘war culture’, see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18. Understanding the Great War (London, 2002). John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics”, in Horne, ed., Companion to World War One, 279–94. On the global resonance of the Irish Easter Rising, see 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment, eds., Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy and Gearóid Barry (London, 2018).

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Even those like Britain and France that enjoyed a more favourable economic position in the global siege (plus the support of the usa) only sustained their war efforts by virtue of renewed mobilization ‘from above’ in 1917–18.45 Key to the languages of community and sacrifice activated by wartime mobilization in 1914–18 was nationality because it best articulated the sense of equality and community within which the social relations of sacrifice could be negotiated. Nationality incorporated differences based on gender, class, ethnicity, region and religion. It was inclusive and exclusive. Republican France incorporated Jews into the national war effort after the Dreyfus affair whereas German Jews were both included yet also excluded – by the ‘Jewish census’ of 1916 (checking their military service) and an anti-Semitism that found its voice in the ‘stab in the back’ legend after defeat. A Tsarist war effort caught between reaction and liberalisation (promoted by the Duma) pivoted on the inclusion or exclusion of ethnic minorities.46 As we have seen, the most extreme form of negative mobilization was that against the Ottoman Armenians (and other Christian minorities) by the Young Turks, leading to genocide, though we still lack a study of its place in Ottoman ‘war culture’.47 Historians have rightly drawn attention to the Great War as an imperial conflict.48 Nationality in various guises was compatible with empires and with imperial mobilization for war. Yet the explosive energy of nationality faced with the challenges and traumas of the conflict suggests that the war played a vital role in the evolution of European nationalities more generally because the sacrifices it exacted posed questions of both community and sovereignty – of who belonged to the body politic that decided on the sacrifice and of what the sacrifice was for. Nations were a compelling answer. They underwrote mobilization, often by enlarging the meaning of the nation and who owned it. Where the state failed to cope with the stress of war, especially in the context of empire, they provided an alternative to empire, again often in conjunction with other causes and identities, such as gender, religion and class.49 45 46

47 48 49

On these issues, see Horne ed., State, Society and Mobilization. Philippe Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: un patriotisme républicain (Paris, 1999); Christhard Hoffmann, “Between Integration and Rejection: The Jewish Community in Germany, 1914–1918”, in Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization, 89–104; Peter Holquist, “Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en 1915: causes et limites”, in Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–15, ed., John Horne (Paris, 2010), 191–219; Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2014), 74–87. For the best overview, see Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York NY, 2015). Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014). Nico Wouters and Laurence Van Ypersele, eds., Nations, Identities and the First World War: Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland (London, 2018); Pierre Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice

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Jones and Madigan show in their study of Irish nationalist soldiers how the Easter Rising opened the breach to a counter-mobilization against the British imperial war effort in the name of a more radical nationality (infused by all these subordinate identities) that eventually took the form of a guerrilla struggle. The comparable impulse from 1917 within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (which up to that point had reconciled national patriotisms with imperial loyalty) was a growing rejection of the imperial effort in the name of nationality. For some, this meant switching to the enemy camp, thus creating the ‘legionaries’ who provided such crucial national foundation myths for post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia. John Paul Newman, in his chapter, traces the remarkable alternative path taken in defeated Croatia (where the war had fostered hopes of home rule within Austria-Hungary) by Miroslav Krleža. The intellectual and novelist rejected the pre-eminence of the Serb war myth in post-war Yugoslavia in favour of Croatian nationalism, anti-war pacifism and Bolshevism, the first two of these elements echoing (as Newman explains) the stance of the Croat peasant leader, Stjepan Radić.50 In large parts of Europe and also in Turkey, the protean nature of nationality made it an answer to both acceptance and rejection of the war, to defeat as well as victory. This also extended to the colonial sphere.51 Tomás Irish points in his chapter to the international dimension of national mobilization. He has been in the forefront of historians showing how the Allies developed an inter-Allied sphere in economic co-operation, legal preparation of the peace, propaganda and, as here, intellectual exchange.52 As he argues, it took the war to generalize features of the modern intellectual that had first emerged in the France of the Dreyfus affair. It may not be going too far to suggest that the ideas and practices associated with liberal democracies

50

51 52

et citoyenneté: Angleterre-France, 1900–1918 (Paris, 2013); Melissa K. Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge, 2016). For Austria-Hungary’s relative resilience as an empire at war, Lawrence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2014) and Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge MA, 2016); for a bleaker analysis, Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basingstoke, 2000); for tensions between Croatian defeat and Serbian victory in post-war ­Yugoslavia, John Paul Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903–1945 (Cambridge, 2015), 113–209. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007); Gerwarth and Manela, eds., Empires at War: 1911–1923. Tomás Irish, The University at War, 1914–1925: Britain, France and the United States (Basingstoke, 2015); Marie-Ève Chagnon and Tomás Irish, eds., The Academic World in the Era of World War One (Basingstoke, 2017).

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­ nderwrote the reconfiguration of the Entente as a democratic western alliu ance (once the usa entered the war and Bolshevik Russia left it in 1917), so that it owed its resilience to these ideas within each of the nations concerned rather than only, or mainly, to their formulation by Woodrow Wilson as American war aims. Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, each in their own way, embodied a new figure – the resolutely civilian leader of a liberal democratic war effort. That same collaboration provided one foundation for the attempt to restructure a liberal international sphere (based on the League of Nations) between the wars.53 In this sense, the divergence of war cultures as the strain of the conflict grew (that of Germany polarising between an aggressive militarized nationalism and the nascent liberal democracy of Weimar, that of Russia being reinvented by the Bolsheviks in the Revolution and Civil war) remains a key issue for comparison in understanding the political and cultural legacies of the war.54 It also begs the question of the comparisons and connections with political mobilization and home fronts in the Second World War, in whose historiography they have occupied a much less prominent place, owing perhaps to the preoccupations with ‘totalitarian’ ideologies and state coercion mentioned in relation to soldiers.55 Jay Winter and Daniel Todman’s chapters both use approaches derived from the First World War to consider the British home front and war culture in the Second. Both show in different ways the legacy of the one for the other as well as the differences. Winter points out that the Second World War was existential in a way its predecessor was not because the Blitz brought the war home and because defeat was a real possibility. As Todman also shows with Singapore in 1942, actual defeats were not absolute but partial, a calibration of failure that allowed (with the help of home-front mobilization) for eventual victory. Yet if the Great War was less existential, its memory loomed large because losses had been higher and also because many men now on the home front had fought in it. Just as individualistically as Miroslav Krleža with regard to Croatian defeat, Henry Moore took part as a veteran, man of faith and sculptor of (and for) ordinary folk in a cultural mobilization that he transcended, Winter argues, by his genius, but which he also absorbed into his wartime concerns as did so many others. 53 54 55

Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2007), 349–86; Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations (Oxford, 2013). Jorg Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich, 2014), 762–64; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York NY, 1989). Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, “Introduction”, in Geyer and Tooze, eds., The Cambridge History of the Second World War vol. 3 Total War, 13.

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What we see clearly, once again, is the protean richness of nationality, which inhered in an idealized past as well as a utopian future (the Beveridge Report and a new social compact on the welfare state) and also in a heightened sense of locality and language. Todman reminds us too, with Singapore, how we can reconstruct the temporalities of war cultures for the Second as for the First World War – in this case the imagined future of a reconstructed empire after the war when in reality the war was ending empire. In the cases of France and the Netherlands, post-war planning (including in the resistance) led directly to vicious wars of re-colonization as soon as the war was won and the Japanese defeated in the east.56 The war cultures of the belligerent states differed sharply from each other, diverging more (as the editors say) than those of the First World War. But here, too, there is room for extended comparison.57 Not surprisingly, there was most continuity between the liberal democracies in the two wars given the strong learning process from the one war to the other (with added lessons drawn from the 1930s Depression) plus mainly unchanged economies, social structures and political systems. Winston Churchill and F.D. Roosevelt were recognisably successors to Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and both countries used the rhetoric of a democratic people’s war.58 In Britain (despite the Blitz) a relatively intact world at home, the limited and expeditionary nature of the military effort and the overwhelming need to mobilize all resources (including women) within the wartime constraints of a liberal state meant the home front was culturally the crucial front in this war. This was no less true of the usa, which also drew on the economic and social ideas of the New Deal.59 Nazi Germany, by contrast, emphasized a war effort based on the Wehrmacht in which military conquest accrued its own benefit to the Volk, including land, resources and labour, so that civilian society (still distrusted by state and party in view of the ‘stab in the back’ in 1918) was sheltered. Only in May 1943, after Stalingrad and with the Allied air campaign, did Goebbels make his 56 57

58 59

Peter Romijn, Der lange Krieg der Niederlande: Besatzung, Gewalt und Neuorientierung in den vierziger Jahren (Göttingen, 2017), 150–86; Martin Shipway, The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944–1947 (Oxford and Providence RI, 1996). For a rare comparative analysis in both senses, see Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, “Introduction” to part 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War vol. 3 Total War, 247–51 (“The Social Practice of People’s War, 1939–1945”) and also Jochen ­Hellbeck, “Battles for Morale: An Entangled History of Total War in Europe, 1939–1945”, in ibid., 329–62. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London, 1969), for a classic statement. For a remarkable contemporary portrait by the British journalist Alistair Cooke, see Alistair Cooke’s American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War (London, 2006). Written during the war, it was only published on Cooke’s death.

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famous ‘total war’ speech, by which time the Reich had lost precious years in mobilizing civilians, including women. It was a war culture that grew out of a fascist understanding of war as the ultimate militarisation of society, in which the army (subordinate to the party) became the active sword and shield of the Volk and in which the key front was that in the east. It targeted Jewry as the internal and external enemy – the puppet-master of the world. Awareness of the genocide may have been private and partial but the racial enmity on which it and the war culture pivoted was public and central. Occupied Europe, far more than in the First World War, supplied labour and resources as an alternative to ‘total’ home mobilization at least until the increasingly desperate and chaotic last phase of the conflict. Only then, faced with mass bombing and looming invasion, did a different home front emerge from below, including women and the young.60 Different again was the mobilization of the Soviet Union. The shock of invasion galvanized the support of civilians for a war in which they would die in greater numbers than soldiers (some 14 to 17 million out of a total 25 million war dead) and for which the precedent of the Revolution and Civil War, and above all Stalin’s ‘second revolution’ of the 1930s, had prepared them. “I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People’s War”, wrote Alexander Werth, British correspondent in wartime Russia; “The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among the civilians as among the soldiers”.61 The command economy and the party’s grip on society had prepared the ussr for the new war of attrition that the Second World War turned out to be. Additionally, however, the protean force of nationalism (especially Russian, but also that of the minority nations), plus a religious revival, powerfully underwrote a war culture that was shaped by much more than repression (strong though that was, including ethnic deportations and the Gulag system).62 To both the British and Germans, it was the ussr that represented total mobilization. It is clear from this brief comparison within and between the two world wars that war cultures and processes of cultural and political mobilization, in conjunction with war economies, are crucial to understanding both how the energies of the states involved could be harnessed to killing and suffering on such a scale and also how the particular forms taken by such mobilization 60 Stargardt, The German War, 383–418; Susan Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012). 61 Quoted in Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000), 273. 62 John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the ussr in World War ii (London, 1991); Merridale, Night of Stone, 269–306 (274 for the statistics).

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shaped, and were shaped by, the longer term histories of the societies concerned. The links between the wars are crucial. France, for example, mobilized like Britain in 1939–40 in a continuum of institutions and memories from the Great War but unlike Britain was actually defeated. Its wartime regime glorified the past and planned the future while appealing selectively to French nationality. Yet it did so under occupation and via collaboration, while the resistance and Free French took a contrasting view of the conflict. As Michael Neiberg reminds us in his chapter, France was bombed, but by friend or foe? In short, the comparison poses the question of whether ‘war cultures’ and ‘home fronts’ apply to occupied countries in the Second World War that are usually seen in other terms?63 This book has focused almost exclusively on Europe, but the same question applies to Japan, which had participated to a limited extent in the First World War but which also observed it intently and drew important lessons from it for its own future. What Japanese war culture and the home front in the Second World War owed to the First, and how they compared with other belligerent states, might help us grasp some of the different (but connected) ways in which each war was global.64 This is equally true of the colonial empires. For as noted, the British and French mobilized their colonies for both world wars, producing distinctive variants of the themes discussed so far. Colonial soldiers experienced the violence of battle and endured captivity in both conflicts but their cultural and political frameworks were not the same as those of Europeans. The war efforts of the British settler dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) enhanced distinctive variants of colonial nationhood that were compatible (despite frictions) with those of the mother country. But the coercion and constraint that underpinned the colonization of non-European peoples made wartime relationships much more fraught there.

63

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There is a dearth of reflection on the connection between the two world wars in French historiography. On the French experience of the Second World War as such, see Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2002) and, on the resistance, Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Cambridge MA, 2015). Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge MA, 1999); Sheldon Garon, “The Home Front and Food Insecurity in Wartime Japan: A Transnational Perspective”, in The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective, eds., Hartmut Berghoff, Jan Logemann and Felix Römer (Oxford, 2018), 29–53 (including Japanese learning from the First World War).

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Both the British and the French used colonial manpower on a large scale in both wars, with British India and French North and West Africa especially prominent. Many colonial soldiers drew on notions of military honour and imperial ‘loyalty’. Yet industrial warfare and the new kinds of army (and navy and air force) it produced generated a novel experience of modernity for millions of Africans and Asians that posed the question of recognition and reward.65 This fed the politics of the colonial home fronts during both world wars, and especially the Second, when demands for political reform as a reward for participation in the imperial effort vied with opposed expressions of nationalism aligned with the enemy. In India this produced a proto-national home front under the threat of Japanese invasion and also Subhas Bose’s ‘National Army’ fighting with the Japanese.66 In short, both the fighting and home fronts profoundly influenced European empires, creating distinct paths of colonial nationality across the post-war periods that culminated in decolonization after 1945.67 How to account for these disparate combinations of time and space seems crucial in thinking about the two world wars and the relations between them. Perhaps Todman’s chapter on Singapore provides a clue. For what he convincingly portrays as a distant, secondary defeat for the British was a key victory for the Japanese, second only to Pearl Harbour. For Australia and India, however, both of which contributed to the defence of Malaya, it proved pivotal in other ways. For Australia, it was the moment of imperial ‘betrayal’ when the Japanese captured thousands of its troops. It galvanized a new home front under threat of Japanese invasion and switched longer term Australian security from Britain to the usa. For Indians, 8000 of whom were captured in Singapore, it opened the way (with the Japanese invasion of Burma) to the proto-national war effort already mentioned.68 The fall of Singapore could be told in four ways (to which we should add Singapore itself), each from a different viewpoint. Plural narratives might be one way to open up global histories of the two world wars.

65 66 67 68

David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke, 1999); Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army (Baltimore MD and London, 2008). Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia 1939–1945 (London, 2016), 276–95 and 455–62. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. No equivalent work on the effects of the Second World War seems to have been written, let alone one that traces the process across both conflicts. David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1939–42 (Sydney, 1988), 234–60; Raghavan, India’s War, 176–208.

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The final comparative theme running through this volume is the connection between the two world wars in terms of cause and consequence. Here, of course, we encounter military and political history, notably the Allied victory in 1918 and the Paris peace conference. There is still much to be said on the classic issues of the sort of peace made and its impact on geo-politics, not just in Europe but also in East Asia, where both the precedent and the weakening of European imperialism inspired Japan, as well as in the usa, which despite not ratifying the peace remained the major power it had become in the war. These issues, churning through the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, changed perspectives on the Great War – not least through the demise of liberal internationalism and the League of Nations and the polarisation of pacifism, revanchist nationalism and anti-fascism. They contributed to the more violent Second World War and a very different peace after 1945.69 Yet the question of causality is focused rather differently in this volume by the wartime processes already referred to: the extreme violence of warfare, the suffering of civilians, the political and cultural energies of wartime mobilization, and the spatial and temporal variants of the non-European and colonial experiences of each war. Ideally, we would also take account of the intervening wars – the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China from 1937, Fascist Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War – all of which pointed to the greater violence of the Second World War, and in which the legacies of the Great War are an under explored issue.70 But the theme highlighted by Michael Neiberg and Robert Gerwarth in this book is the nature of post-war periods – victory and defeat, demobilization as a cultural and political as well as military and economic process (including where this failed to occur), and the translation of wartime violence into peacetime politics. These are some of the most fertile fields of research in the recent historiography of the First World War. They have implications both for causal links with the Second World War and for the comparison with the peace settlement after 1945. Ian Kershaw has highlighted the fundamental paradox, at least regarding Europe, namely that the greater violence of the Second World War was more easily and completely resolved than that of the First. For notwithstanding Civil War in Greece and ethnic expulsions and the tightening Soviet grip on eastern Europe (and continuing anti-Soviet partisan campaigns), there was no ­equivalent of the ‘greater war’ after 1918, which acted as the violent

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For this history in terms of Europe, see Steiner, The Lights that Failed and The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939 (Oxford, 2013). Javier Rodrigo, “A Fascist Warfare? Italian Fascism and War Experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39)”, War in History 26 (2019), 86-104.

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c­ ounter-point to the peace process – including in 1923 when French and Belgian troops enacted 1914 in reverse by occupying the Ruhr.71 True, the picture in Asia was different, with the Chinese revolution culminating in 1949 (as that of Russia did in 1920) and the violent onset of decolonization in the face of the wars of colonial re-occupation referred to above and with the partition of I­ndia and Palestine under the British (to which the heightened nationalisms of the Second World War contributed not a little). This shift of post-war violence away from Europe to Asia and the Middle East itself reflected the fact that Europe was no longer the only, or even the principal, pivot of global geo-politics. Yet as both Gerwarth and Kershaw point out, the ‘pacifying’ effect of total defeat and Allied occupation on the main Axis states of the Second World War, Japan as well as Germany, meant that neither in Asia nor in Europe did a deep instability emanate from the defeated powers as after the First World War. Then, Germany in particular had been vanquished sufficiently to be deeply resentful but not decisively enough for the victors to be able to shape its postwar reconstruction and political evolution, as they did with both Germany and Japan after 1945.72 MAD also meant that the legacies of violence after the Second World War were resolved within the opposed camps of the Cold War, to which remobilization for the latter (economic, political and cultural as well as military) contributed. As Michael Neiberg shows, in an excellent example, the double legacy of the two world wars for Franco-German relations was resolved through a process of cultural demobilization solely within the western camp, to which the internal French conflict over the divided memory of the Second World contributed by reducing the focus on Germany. All this suggests that the processes unleashed by the First World War, which so surprised most of those who decided on war in July 1914, were far more powerful than could possibly be resolved in the first post-war period, though without the Great Depression we shall never know what the real peace-making between 1924 and 1929 might have achieved. It also suggests that post-war periods are at least as important as the wars that produce them in resolving (or failing to resolve) the latter, and that their components and inner dynamics are ripe for further analysis across all three of the conflicts (the Cold War included) that structured the world in the 20th century.73 71 72

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Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 (London, 2015), 518–22. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London, 2016), 248–67; Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford, 2006), 19–101; John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War ii (London, 1999). John Horne, “Demobilizations”, in Europe’s Post-War Periods: 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards, eds., Martin Conway, Pieter Lagrou and Henry Rousso (London, 2018).

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Such comparative treatment across time may also help resolve one of the most disturbing debates in relation to the Great War, which has been that of the supposed ‘brutalization’ resulting from that conflict’s induction of whole societies into industrialized violence in the various ways indicated in this volume. While some have seen this as a generic outcome of the conflict, the actual pattern of political brutality in the inter-war years is much more specific, confined to particular societies and situations. Where victory and an orderly return to peacetime life occurred (Britain, France, the British dominions), the fact of having engaged in warfare of extreme violence does not seem to have unleashed paramilitary, political or other forms of public violence into daily life. The latter was far more prone to emerge in the context of defeat, revolution and the overthrow of the state; it is there, in the Soviet Union and the most troubled new states in eastern Europe, among dissatisfied nationalists in Italy, Germany, Austria and elsewhere, that it took root, turned into politics and then reemerged, supercharged, in the crises leading to the next world war.74 Not the least puzzling aspect, therefore, of the relatively stable second postwar period is how the equally great battlefield violence of the Second World War and its far greater brutality towards civilians were absorbed at an individual level in the relative calm (compared to the 1920s) of the 1950s.75 The persistence of trauma after both world wars (the ‘shell shock’ referred to above and its civilian equivalents), forgetting, remembering, and forging new lives in the reconstruction and economic ‘miracles’ of the second post-war period, are certainly part of the answer, as are the unresolved patterns of trauma that persisted long afterwards. In these regards, too, the history of the extended postwar periods remains ripe for comparison. Let me conclude where I began, on a more personal note. That is to thank Catriona Pennell and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses not just for their work in making this book possible and for giving me the opportunity to respond to their

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On brutalization, George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the Great War (New York ny, 1989), 159–81 and Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War, 235–37. Against its relevance for France and Britain, Antoine Prost, “Les limites de la brutalisation: tuer sur le front occidental, 1914–1918”, Vingtième siècle 81 (2000), 5–20 and Jon Lawrence, “‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalization in Post-War Britain”, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 557–89. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), 1–13.

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ideas and those of the other contributors but also for having encouraged me to raise my sights and look at the two world wars together. What finer tribute than to be asked to think afresh about such a central issue in 20th century history; and what better way to celebrate friendship, personal and academic, than by continuing the dialogue.

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Vatican Secret Archives (VSA), Guerra 14–18 244, fasc. 110.

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Index Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. 1984 (Orwell) 33 Abdulin, Mansur 142 Abetz, Otto 209, 210 Adam Park Project 276 Adenauer, Konrad 241 airmen, killing and 89–90, 91, 97, 104–105 Akhmatova, Anna Andrejewna 237 Alexievich, Svetlana 138 Allies of a Kind (Thorne) 264 anti-Bolshevism 231–232, 240 “Appeal to the Civilized World” 49, 51–53, 162–163 Appel, John 95–96, 97 Arletty 208n24 Armenian genocide 13, 165, 170, 172–178, 293, 295 Aron, Robert 203–205, 215 art and religion, cultural mobilization and 22, 25, 30–41 Ashworth, Tony 104 Asquith, Herbert 112, 125 At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Grayzel) 4 Atlantic Charter 40 atrocities in Belgium 165, 168, 170, 172, 178–179 in France 165, 170, 172, 178–179 German 48, 83, 117, 161–172, 177–179, 293 international law and 174–180, 293 Japanese 276 language of 292–293 perpetration of 105–106 propaganda and 105, 144–146, 161–170, 176–177 punishment of 161, 173–175, 234 Russian 163 unwillingness to believe in 105, 161–170, 176–177 in wwi and wwii as continuum 161, 164–165, 176, 177, 179–180 Attaturk, Kemal 292 Attlee, Clement 265 attrition 286

Auden, W.H. 39 Au-dessus de la mêlée (Rolland) 56, 58 Aufruf an die Europäer 53 Aulich, Jim 114 Austria-Hungary 243–259, 289 displacement of civilians and 182, 197, 199, 291 autocratic rulership post-wwi 225, 229, 237, 302 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin) 170, 178 Azéma, Jean-Pierre 207, 211 Baby Boom 30 Bacon, Francis 34 Bagnall, S. 99 Baldwin, Stanley 20, 26 Banners (Krleža) 257 barbarism German 88–92, 117, 161–163, 165, 168 civilization versus 21, 22, 48–53 international law and 174–176, 178, 293 See also atrocities barbarization. See brutalization Barbarossa, Operation 85, 90–91, 227, 237–238 Barbusse, Henri 59, 101, 249, 250 Barker, Ernest 54 “Baron Conrad” (Krleža) 247 Barracks Five B (Krleža) 255 Bartov, Omer 88, 90, 91, 102 Basly, Émile 186–187 Battle by Bistrica Lesna, The (Krleža) 255 Battle for Sevastopol, The 133 Bauman, Zygmunt 293 Bayly, Christopher 265 bayonet practice 25, 84–85 Beaunier, André 56 Beaverbrook, Lord 271–272 Beckmann, Max 100 Beebe, Gilbert 96, 97 Belgium atrocities in 13, 48, 51, 53, 163, 165, 168, 170, 172

347

Index deportations in 178–179 occupation regimes in 183, 184, 288 Bell, Christopher 264 Bell, George 32, 33, 34, 36 Bell, Vanessa 34 Belzec extermination camp 168 Benda, Julien 59 Benjamin, Walter 21, 258 Benson, A.C. 54–55 Bergson, Henri 48, 55, 59 Beveridge Report 21–22, 29, 298 bipo (British Institute of Public Opinion) 267, 274–275 Blimp, Colonel 33, 271 Blitz, the 4, 297 Henry Moore’s sketches of 22, 23–24, 39 Bloch, Marc 161, 165, 168, 210n29 blocking detachments 139–140, 142–143, 283 Blumenson, Martin 202 Boer War. See South African War Bogert, Ralph 257 Böhler, Jochen 88 Bolshevik revolution Austria-Hungary and 251–254 post-war violence and 228, 229, 231–232, 237, 251–254 See also anti-Bolshevism Bondarchuk, Fedor 133 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 32 Bose, Subhas 301 Bourgeois, Charles 184 Bourke, Joanna 91–92, 94–95, 96, 103, 119, 227 Bourne, Randolph 58 Boyd, Andrew 263 Brandenberger, David 151 Brenner, First Lieutenant Dr. 69, 71, 73, 75 Briand, Aristide 236, 241 Briand-Kellogg Pact 236 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) 23 Britten, Benjamin 31, 36 Brown, Cecil 271 Broz, Josip. See Tito Brusilov Offensive 249–250, 252 brutalization 84–85, 88–92, 96, 106, 107, 140, 147, 227, 304 brutalization thesis 225–227 Buber, Martin 37 buddy system 283 Budnitskii, Oleg 156–157 Buek, Otto 53

Bulgaria 234–235, 289 Bygone Days: Notes from 1914–1921 (Krleža) 256–257 Byrne, General 130 Calder, Angus 4, 265–266 Calley, Lieutenant 86 Campbell, R.J. 130 Campion, Garry 266–267 Campioni, Admiral 65 Capus, Alfred 57 Carden-Coyne, Ana 4 Carson, Edward 111, 125, 130 casualties German 238–239 psychiatric 97–100, 139 Red Army 136–137, 155–156 high rate of 141, 149, 155–156 Singapore, fall of and 262, 275–276 from wwi and wwii, comparison of 221 See also injury Catholic Irish soldiers. See Irish mobilization ccori (Central Council for the Organisation of Recruiting in Ireland) 115, 117 Cendrars, Blaise 100 Cenotaph (Lutyens) 37 Čerina, Vladimir 247, 248 Cesarec, August 253 Cham, Mayor 188–189 Chambers, John Whiteclay 103 Chanel, Coco 208n24 Channel Dash 269 Charteris, John 167 Chirac, Jacques 206 Choltitz, Dietrich von 203, 215, 216 Christian revival in wwii, art and 30–41 Christopher Columbus (Krleža) 253 Chuikov, Vasily 151 Chukrai, Grigorii 148 Church and the Artist conference 34, 36 Churchill, Winston continuity between wwi and wwii and 161, 298 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and 33 refusal to admit defeat of 20 Singapore and 261, 262–264, 268, 271, 275 welfare state and 29, 40 Citadel 133 City of Benares 105

348 civilians, violence against cross-conflict dialogue on 9–10, 13, 280, 288–292 by German army 161–172, 176–180 international law and 163, 174–175, 178–180, 293 myth of in wwi and unwillingness to believe in wwii 162–170, 176–177 punishment of 161, 173–176 by Red Army 146 in wwi and wwii as continuum 161, 164–165, 176, 177, 180 See also Jews, extermination of; refugees; occupied populations civil wars, post-war 222 Clark, Kenneth 23, 33, 36 Clark, Mark 213 Clausewitz, Carl von 281 Clemenceau, Georges 297 Cobb, Matthew 206 Cocteau, Jean 209 Cold War, post-war peace and 240–242, 279, 303 collaboration, in occupied France 204–208, 213–214 rewards for 210 women and 207–208 Collini, Stefan 44 Collins, Randall 88 colonial policy in Far East, British 263–266, 270–274 colonial soldiers, mobilization of 127, 300–301 combat experience, cross-conflict dialogue on 10, 12, 280, 282–286 combat motivation comradeship 155–157 conscription and 124–132 cross-conflict dialogue on 280, 283 cultural mobilization and 62–64, 71, 74–80, 136, 153, 237–238 discipline 139–143 fear 137–142 hatred 144–147 ideology 147–152, 153 of Irish troops 108–132 patriotism 114, 121, 152–155 propaganda 114–132, 145–146, 150–153

Index of Red Army 133–158 religion 117, 119 training and 143–144 vengeance 117, 144–147 See also killing combat preparedness maintaining 62–65, 69–76, 80 training and 84–86, 103–104, 143–144 commemorative art 23, 26, 31–32, 39 Connolly, James E. 186 conscription crisis in Ireland in wwi 110, 121, 124–132 corpse factories 165–167 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (comecon) 241 Country Houses scheme 23 Coventry Cathedral 31 Crnjanski, Miloš 248 Croatia 243–259, 296 Croatian God Mars, The (Krleža) 243, 248, 249–250, 254–257, 259 “Croatian Literary Lie, The” (Krleža) 253 cross-conflict dialogue 1–15, 279–305 brutalization 304 civilian suffering 9–10, 13, 280, 288–292 colonial soldiers, mobilization of 300–301 combat, experience of 10, 12, 280, 282–287 combat motivation 280, 283 continuum of violence 83, 221, 225, 228, 230, 280–282 defeat, expectation of 19–21, 40, 297 demobilization 12, 224, 225–226, 228, 233–234, 237–242, 280 enmity, racial and ideological 285–286, 293–294 historiography and 2–4, 6–9, 280, 282–283, 297 home fronts 294–295, 297–301 genocide 293–294 ideology 8–9, 285–286 Jews, extermination of 225, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292 mobilization 11–12, 294–299 nationalism 286, 293–296, 297 occupation 289–290 peace 302–303 refugees 290–292

Index total war 8, 13, 281–282, 290, 292 warfare, nature of 20, 280–282, 284, 286–287 welfare state, prospect of 20–22, 27–30, 39–40 wwi as “romantic adventure” 25, 39 wwi, outcome of and legacy for wwii 12, 14, 302 Crucifixion (1946) (Sutherland) 34, 35 cultural demobilization 8, 59, 223, 224, 242 Franco-German (post-wwi) 236, 303 memory and 201, 215–217 occupation and 13, 200–217 cultural history of modern war 2–14, 134, 224, 278, 280, 282, 294 cultural legitimation of war 63, 71, 75–76, 78 cultural mobilization art and 19–41, 297 combat motivation and 62–64, 71, 76, 134 concept of 6–7, 11–12, 19, 47, 244 family and 22, 27–30, 38, 41 home fronts and 7, 297, 300–301 imagined futures and 20–22, 27–30, 39–40, 298 of intellectuals 42–60 John Horne on 19n1, 47, 80, 134, 244 landscape and 22–27, 38, 41 religion and 22, 25, 30–41 of troops German occupying forces in Greece 61–64, 71, 75–80 Red Army on Eastern Front 136, 147–148, 153, 237–238 welfare state, promise of and 20, 21–22, 27–29, 39–40, 298 cultural phenomenon, war as 48 cultural turn, the 2, 6, 7, 10–11, 14 cultural vandalism 48, 50, 79, 175–176 Curie, Marie 59 Daily Express 271 Dallin, Alexander 142 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 235–236 Darlan, François 213 David-Fox, Michael 147 Davidson, Randall 50 Davis, H.W.C 54

349 death accounts of 101 fear of 102 Death of Franjo Kadaver, The (Krleža) 255 de Beauvoir, Simone 209 “Declaration of the Independence of the Mind” (Rolland) 58–59 defeat culture of 8n31, 233 experience of Germany 8n31, 224, 233–234, 239 Singapore 260–278, 297 memory of 278 prospect of artistic cultural mobilization and 21, 39, 40 cross-conflict dialogue on 19–20, 297 fall of Singapore and 268–270 victory and different meanings of 11, 12, 14, 233–234 pathways to peace and 224, 228, 230, 232, 303 post-war violence and 224–225, 228, 230, 232–234, 304 defeats, typology of 277–278 Defence and Fall of Singapore, The (Farrell) 263 de Gaulle, Charles 161, 202, 205, 208, 215, 216, 225n13, 241 dehumanization of enemy combat motivation and 145–146 cultural demobilization and 201 killing and 91, 107, 145–146 de Man, Henri 86, 94 de Mazenod, Pierre 94 demobilization cross-conflict dialogue on 12, 224, 225–226, 228, 233–234, 237–242 cultural 8n31, 59, 200–201, 215–217 of enmity 13, 147, 200–202, 215–217, 241 John Horne on 11, 200–201, 215–217, 223–224, 228, 242 memory and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 occupying troops and danger of 62–80 peace and 223–224, 234–241, 303 post-war 222–242 See also self-demobilization

350 “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919–1939” (Horne) 200 Denman, Terence 119 Depression, Great 222, 234, 236–237, 302, 303 de Schaepdrijver, Sophie 182 deterritorialization, occupation as process of 186, 187 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 59 Dien Bien Phu 278 Dillon, John 112, 121, 123, 165 displacement of civilians. See refugees Dix, Otto 100 Djilas, Milovan 258 Doumergue, Emile 57 Dreyfus affair 42, 43–44, 57, 295, 296 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre 209 Duke, H.E. 128, 130 Dungan, Myles 109 Eastern Front barbarism and 88–92, 227 Brusilov Offensive 249 German casualties on 85, 238 Operation Barbarossa 85, 90–91, 227, 237–238 Red Army on 133–158 Easter Rising 108, 110, 121, 123–124, 127, 130, 286, 294n44, 296 Edele, Mark 134, 137, 144, 149, 150 Eden, Anthony 207 effectiveness of troops. See peak effectiveness thesis Ehrenburg, Ilya 145–146, 238 Einstein, Albert 53, 59 Eley, Geoff 2 Eliot, T.S. 31–32, 36 Ellis, John 83, 103 Emergency Rescue Committee 169 End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, The (Harper) 265 Engen, Robert 103 Enola Gay 97 “Eppur Si Muove” (Krleža) 254 ethnic cleansing. See genocide ethnic minorities, revisionism and 234 Eucken, Rudolf 50

Index European Civil War 1, 83 Ewald, Lieutenant 71, 75 extremist movements, post-war 225, 229, 231, 237–238, 240 Face of Battle, The (Keegan) 283, 284 fake news 162–170, 176–177 Fallen Soldiers (Mosse) 225 family, cultural mobilization and 22, 27–30, 38, 41 Family Group (Moore) 30 Far Eastern conflict 260–278 Farrell, Brian 263 fascist states, post-war violence and 107, 225, 229, 237, 302 fascist warfare 9, 12, 105–106, 162, 238, 299 Feibusch, Hans 33 female soldiers, Red Army 154 Ferdinand, Franz 247 Ferro, Marc 205 film representations of war 33, 95, 133–134, 148, 203 Finland, civil war in 229, 232 Finney, Patrick 3 Foerster, Wilhelm Julius 53 Force Z 260, 263 Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars (Bayly and Harper) 265 Forty Days of Musa-Dagh, The (Werfel) 177 forward panic 88 Four Quartets (Eliot) 31 France atrocities in 165, 170, 172, 178–179 displacement of civilians and 182, 190–195 German invasion of in wwi 195, 199 refugees and 190–195 wwi occupation of 183, 186–190 wwii occupation of 200, 201, 202–217, 300 Allied air raids and 214–215 deprivations and 210 economic exploitation and 212, 213–214 food shortages and 213–215 German invasion of Soviet Union and 211–212 historiography of 202–208

Index memory and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 persecution of Jews and 210, 212, 217 resistance and 202–203, 206–207, 211, 212–214 stages of 208–217 See also Vichy regime France: The Dark Years (Jackson) 206 Francis, Martin 3 Franco-German reconciliation 201–203, 236, 241, 303 Free France movement 208–209 Freud, Sigmund 99, 227 Fried, Alfred 59 Friedrich, Ernst 100 front, the 62–63 See also Eastern Front; home front; quiet front, troops on the Fry, Varian 169, 170, 172, 177 Fussell, Paul 39 futures, imagined and mobilization 20–22, 27–30, 39–40, 298 Games, Abram 27 Garner, James Wilford 179 Gefter, Mikhail 149 Gelfand, Vladimir 142, 148 gender and warfare 3–5, 30, 154 See also women Genevoix, Maurice 104 genocide 106, 170, 173–174, 178, 180, 292–293 See also Armenian genocide; Jews,  extermination of German atrocities 48, 83, 117, 161–172, 177–179, 293 See also German violence against civilians German barbarism 88–89, 91, 92, 117, 161–163, 165, 168 civilization versus 21, 22, 48–53 German casualties 238–239 German cultural vandalism 48, 79 German experience of defeat 8n31, 224, 233–234, 239 German invasion of France in wwi 195, 199 German invasion of Soviet Union in wwii 211–212 German mobilization 298–299

351 German occupation of island of Rhodes 61– 80, 281 cultural mobilization and 61–64, 71, 75–80 discipline and 69–70, 73–74 education and 71–72 entertainment and 71–72 maintaining combat readiness and 62– 65, 69, 73, 74–76, 80 morale and 67–69, 72, 73 German occupation of France wwi 183, 186–190 wwii 200, 201, 202–217, 300 Allied air raids and 214–215 deprivations and 210 economic exploitation and 212, 213–214 food shortages and 213–215 German invasion of Soviet Union and 211–212 historiography of 202–208 memory and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 persecution of Jews and 210, 212, 217 resistance and 202–203, 206–207, 211, 212–214 stages of 208–217 Germans and Nazis, distinction made between 203, 205, 216 German territorial revisionism 234 German violence against civilians 105, 161–172, 176–180 myth of in wwi and unwillingness to believe in wwii 162–170, 176–177 Germany rebuilding of post-wwii 240 peace-making with France 236, 241, 303 post-war violence and 226–234 Gerson, Stéphane 194 Gerwarth, Robert 10, 303 Geyer, Michael 85, 137, 144, 226 Gill, H.V. 119 Glavpur 150–151 Gleeson, Francis 119 Goebbels, Joseph 61, 298–299 Gollancz, Victor 169 Good, Joseph 130

352 Good Fight, The (Campion) 267 good Nazi, the 203, 216 Good Soldier Švejk, The (Hašek) 256 Government of Ireland Act 111 Gramsci, Antonio 21, 59 Grant, Duncan 33–34 Graves, Robert 84 Grayzel, Susan R. 4 Great Patriotic War. See Red Army on the Eastern Front Greece Classical heritage, defence of as legitimation of occupation 63, 71, 75–76, 78 victory and 14 wwii occupation of 61–80, 281 Greece. A Book from the War (Kästner) 77 Green Cadres 251–252 Gregory, Adrian 125, 132 Grenfell, Julian 92 Greuelpropaganda 165–169, 177 Griechische Inseln (Kästner) 77 Grossman, Vasily 141 Grosz, George 100 Gwynn, Stephen 112 Habermas, Jurgen 44–45 Habsburg empire, collapse of 225, 229, 234–236, 240, 245 Habsburg war 247–252, 255–256 Haeckel, Ernst 50 Haig, Douglas 19, 131, 167, 286 Halifax, Lord 20 hands, severed, myth of 163, 164, 165 Harberton, Viscount 55 Harper, Tim 264–265 Hašek, Jaroslav 256 hate propaganda 145–147 hate training 85 hatred combat motivation and 144–146 demobilization of 13, 147, 200, 201, 202, 215–217 of Japanese army 105–106 killing and 91–93, 105–106, 144–147 racial and ideological 285–286, 293–294 Hauptmann, Gerhart 77 Hellbeck, Jochen 136, 151, 155 Henriot, Philippe 214

Index Hesse, Hermann 59 Hewitt, John 114 Heydrich, Reinhard 168 Hiroshima 31, 97, 281 Histoire de la Libération de la France (Aron) 203 historiography cross-conflict dialogue and 2–4, 6–9, 279, 280, 282–283, 297, 300n63 of intellectuals 46 of Irish experience of war 109–110 of occupation of France 202–208 of post-war periods 223–226 of Soviet combat motivation 135–136, 144, 147–149, 157–158 History of Warfare (Keegan) 84 Hitler, Adolf assassination attempt on 32, 70 attrition and 286 fear of Bolshevik-style revolution and 231 irredentism and 234 loyalty to 70 Paris and 203, 204, 216 propaganda and 167 surrender, refusal to 238 hm 6 (Moore) 30 hm 7 (Moore) 30 Hodges, Paul 85n8 Hofstadter, Richard 45 Holocaust. See Jews, extermination of Holquist, Peter 139 home front and battlefront 13, 19, 30, 267 British 298 cross-conflict dialogue on 288, 294–295, 297–301 cultural mobilization and 7, 297, 300–301 empire and 265–266 German 298–299 Home Intelligence reports 267–272 horizontal collaboration 207–208 Horne, Alistair 202 Horne, John on cultural demobilization 200–201, 210n29, 215–217, 223, 224, 228, 242 on cultural mobilization 19n1, 47, 80, 134, 244

Index on the front 62–63 on German atrocities 83, 164 on German invasion of France in wwi 195, 199 on Ireland in wwi 109 on memory and defeat 278 on propaganda and myth 162, 164 on total war 181, 195, 199 typology of defeats 277–278 volume as tribute to 10–11, 15 Horthy, Miklós 237, 258 Horvat, Josip 248 Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von 247–248 Hussey, Walter 36 Hynes, Samuel 84, 95, 104 Imperialism at Bay (Louis) 264 Inber, Vera 238 India, British imperial power and 263–264 Indian National Army 262, 301 industrialized warfare 6, 280–281, 284, 287 brutalization and 92, 226–227, 304 colonial participation and 6, 301 injury experience of 99–100 taboo on talking about 100–101 intellectuals, engagement of during wwi 42–60 critiquing of 54–58 cultural authority and 44, 50, 54–57 development of concept of intellectual and use of term 43–46, 51, 55–58 international nature of 46, 49–53, 56–57, 59–60 League of Nations and 59–60 petitionary activity of 49–53 role of in war 55–59 Intellectuals and French Society (Lote) 57 International Experience and Legacy of the Two World Wars workshop 10 international law cultural vandalism and 175–176 violence against civilians and 163, 174–175, 178–180, 293 International Law and the World War (Garner) 179 Intimate History of Killing (Bourke) 91–92, 227 Invasion 14 (Ven der Meersch) 177

353 Irish at the Front, The (MacDonagh) 126 Irish troop mobilization in wwi 108–132, 286 Catholic Church and 113, 117–118 conscription crisis and 110, 121, 124–132 Easter Rising and 110, 121, 123–124, 127, 130, 286, 296 Home Rule and 115, 129, 132 image/representation of Irish troops 109–132 negative 126–132 loyalty to uk government and 110–112, 124–125 martial qualities of Irish and 112, 119, 126 nationalism and 111–114, 121, 123–130, 286, 296 portrayal of war as Irish war and 112, 115–124, 126, 130 posters and 114–124 propaganda and 114–132 recruitment and 112–131 Is Paris Burning? 203 Issue of War, The (Thorne) 264 Italy occupation of Greece in wwii and 65, 69, 73, 74, 80 peace negotiations post-wwi and 235–236 post-war violence and 229, 231 J’accuse letter (Zola) 43 Jackson, Julian 206, 208 J’ai tué (Cendrars) 100 Jambrek the Domobran (Krleža) 255 James, G.W.B. 96 Japan connections between wwi and wwii and 300 imperial forces and 301–302 post-war periods and 235, 303 Japanese army atrocities against 106 atrocities by 276, 285 fall of Singapore and 260–263, 274–276 hatred of 105–106 Jews, extermination of 2, 9, 162, 168–170 cross-conflict dialogue and 225, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292

354 Jews, extermination of (cont.) unwillingness to believe in 168–170, 176–177, 293 Vichy regime and 204, 205–206, 212, 217 Johnson, Samuel 21 Jones, Edgar 97 Jones, Gareth Stedman 21 Jouhandeau, Marcel 209 Jug, Steven 138 Jünger, Ernst 75, 78, 86, 87, 94, 101, 209 “Justice in War-Time: An Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe” (Russell) 55–56 Karski, Jan 163–164 Kästner, Erhart 63, 75, 76–77, 78, 80 Keegan, John 84, 94, 283, 284 Kemal, Mustafa 233, 235 Kern, Robert 75 Kershaw, Ian 302–303 Keswick, William 27 Kettle, Tom 112 killing airmen and 89–90, 91, 97, 104–105 barbarization and 84, 88–91, 96, 106, 147 dehumanization of victims and 91, 107, 145–146 emotion and 87–88 hatred and 91–93, 105–106, 144–147 ideological indoctrination and 88–91, 105–107 impersonal 95, 97–98, 104 intensification of 90–91 language use and 87 narratives of 83, 89, 94–95, 104–106 naval personnel and 105 normalization of 86, 89, 90, 106 orders and 90 overcoming societal prohibition of 84– 85, 102–104 for pleasure 88–95 psychological breakdown and 95–97 sportsmanship of shooting and 93–94 tank operators and 95, 97–98 training as adequate preparation for 84–86 as work 86–88 King, Anthony 103

Index Kipling, Rudyard 84, 273 Kirsten, Ernst 78 Kleemann, Ulrich 64–65, 70, 73–74, 79–80 Kleinschmidt, Captain 73 Klemperer, Viktor 168 Kobylanskiy, Isaak 138–139 Kobylyanskiy, Ilya 144–145 Kohl, Helmut 241 Komsomol 149, 150, 154 Kondriatev, Viacheslav 148 Kovač, Ante 248 Kraiker, Wilhelm 76 Kramer, Alan 10–11, 164, 283 Krleža, Miroslav 243–259, 296, 297 Kronbein, Major 73 Kühne, Thomas 107 Kvaternik, Slavko 257–258 landscape, cultural mobilization and 22–27, 38, 41 Langhamer, Claire 3 Languages of Class (Jones) 21 Lanz, General 70 Lanzmann, Claude 164 Lasch, Christopher 45 Lausanne, Treaty of 235, 240, 292 Laval, Pierre 204, 212, 216 law. See international law Lazarev, Lazar 149 League of Nations 59–60, 230, 235, 236, 292, 297, 302 Le Feu (Barbusse) 101 Lemkin, Raphaël 169, 170, 173–180, 293 Lenin, Vladimir 231, 251, 252, 253, 254 Lens 183–184, 186–187 Lenz, Erwin 67 Le Pen, Marine 205–206, 217 Lepsius, Johannes 174 L’Étrange défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (Bloch) 210n29 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 33 Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel 185 Llorentz, Hendrik 59 Lloyd George, David 127, 128, 129, 132, 297, 298 Locarno, Treaty of 236 Londonderry, Lord 127 Lote, René 57 Louis, William Roger 264

Index Louvain, cultural vandalism at 48, 50 Low, David 271 Ludendorff, Erich 178 Ludendorff Offensive 129, 131, 132 Lusitania, sinking of 117, 118 Lutyens, Edwin 37 Lwow 171–172, 210 MacDonagh, Michael 126 Mahon, General 130 Malaya, struggle for 260–278 Malayan Postscript (Morrison) 273–274 Mandel, Georges 214 Manela, Erez 5 Mann, Thomas 42, 57 Mannheim, Karl 59 Markov, Nikolai 143, 150–151, 156 Marshall, S.L.A. 102–103, 104 Marshall Plan 240 Martens, Friedrich (Fyodor) 174–175 Martens Clause 175 Martin, Christopher 26 Masel, Nina 268–269 “Massacre of the Jews, The” (Fry) 169 Matrosov, Alexander 138 Mawdsley, Evan 137 McConnel, James 111 Mein Kampf (Hitler) 167 memory cultural demobilization and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 defeat and 277–278 German occupation of France in wwii and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 study of 2, 3 Men Against Fire (Marshall) 102 Merridale, Catherine 135, 143, 150, 153, 157 Mikhalkov, Nikita 133 milice 214 Milner, Alfred 127 missing troops, in Far East 276–277 Mitchell, Allan 206–207, 208 Mitchell, George 34 Mitterrand, François 241 M-O (Mass-Observation) 267–270, 272 mobilization. See cultural mobilization Mokritskii, Sergei 133 Molotov, Vyacheslav 152 Moran, Lord 284

355 Moore, Henry 21–27, 30, 34, 36–41, 297 Blitz, illustrations of 23–24 family, cultural mobilization and 22, 27–30, 38, 41 Family Group 30 feminine iconography and 22, 39 gendered images and 22 hm 6 30 hm 7 30 landscape, cultural mobilization and 22–27, 38, 41 military experience of 24–25, 39 Mother and Child on Ladderback Chair 30 Northampton Madonna and Child  36–37, 38 Reclining Figure 26, 27 religious outlook of 25 the sacred, cultural mobilization and 22, 30–41 Standing Figure 27, 28 war, influence of on art of 25–26, 30, 37, 39–41 as war artist 23–26, 39, 41 Morgenthau, Henry Jr 177, 178 Morgenthau, Henry Sr 172, 177, 178 Morris, William 21 Morrison, Ian 273–274, 278 Mosse, George 225 Mother and Child on Ladderback Chair (Moore) 30 Müller, Lieutenant-General 79, 80 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot) 32 Murray, Gilbert 59 Mussolini, Benito 231, 238 Mutually Assured Destruction (mad) 279, 303 My Lai massacre 86, 107 Mylona, Nafsika 76 Nansen, Fridtjof 292 Napoleon ii (duc de Reichstadt) 210 narratives of injury 100–102 of killing 83, 89, 94–95, 104–106 personal as history 84 National Health Service, cultural mobilization and 21–22, 27–29

356 nationalism Balkan 243–259 cross-conflict dialogue on 286, 293–296, 297 Irish 111–114, 121, 123–130, 286, 296 Turkish 296 National Trust 22–23, 26 nato 201, 241 naval personnel, killing and 105 Nazi, the good 203, 216 Nazis and Germans, distinction made between 203, 205, 216 Nazor, Vladimir 258 Neitzel, Sönke 94, 105 Némirovsky, Irène 208, 210n29, 211, 216 Newbould, Frank 27 New National Land Fund 23 Nicolai, Georg Friedrich 53, 59 Nikulin, Nikolai 137–138, 146, 148 Nivelle, General 283, 287 Nivet, Philippe 191 Noakes, Lucy 3, 4 Northampton Madonna and Child (Moore) 34, 36–37, 38 nuclear deterrent, post-war violence and 241, 279, 303 Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais) 204 Ober Ost, occupation of 184–186, 187, 190 occupation of Belgium 288 collaboration and 204–208, 214 cross-conflict dialogue on 289–290 demobilization and 13, 200–217 exploitation of resources and 290 See also under France occupied populations 182–190, 288 Allied occupation 187–189 Belgium 288 German occupation 182–187, 189–190, 289–290 restrictions of movement and 183–190 Russian occupation 289–290 occupying troops on Greek island of Rhodes 61–80 cultural mobilization and 61–64, 71, 75–80 discipline and 69–70, 73–74 education and 71–72

Index entertainment and 71–72 maintaining combat readiness and  62–65, 69, 73, 74–76, 80 morale and 67–69, 72, 73 Office for Protection of Art (Referat Kunstschutz) 76 O’Leary, Michael 121 O’Meara, Corporal 114 Omelchenko, Olga 138 On the Edge of Reason (Krleža) 251n29, 257 Orr, Philip 131 Orwell, George 33, 40, 161 Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Horne) 109 Ousby, Ian 204 Overy, Richard 142 pacifism, post-war 242, 252, 287, 296 Panfilov Men 138 Pann, Abel 170 Paris, German occupation and 200, 201, 202–217, 300 Allied air raids and 214 collaboration and 204–208, 214 deprivations and 210 economic exploitation and 212, 213–214 food shortages and 213–215 invasion of Soviet Union and 211–212 memory and 201, 204–205, 215–217, 303 persecution of Jews and 210, 212, 217 resistance and 202–203, 206–207, 211, 212–214 stages of 208–217 Paris Peace Treaties 233–236, 302 Parsons, Lawrence 126 partisan, use of term 168 Pasha, Talaat 173, 174 Pasternak, Boris 237 Pattinson, Juliette 3 Paul, Randolph E. 178 Paul, Rudolf 239 Pavelić, Ante 258 Paxton, Robert 204–206 peace Cold War and 240–242, 279, 303 cross-conflict dialogue on 302–303 demobilization and 201, 223–224, 234–241, 303

357

Index post-war pathways to 222–236, 239–242, 303 peace-making, Franco-German 236, 241, 303 peace negotiations post-wwi 233–236 peak effectiveness thesis 96 Peckham Health Centre 27–28 penal battalions German Army 66–67, 69, 74 Red Army 139, 140, 141, 143, 283 Pennell, Catriona 110 People’s War, The (Calder) 265 Perechodnik, Calel 177 Perham, Margery 273, 278 Peri, Alexis 157 personal narratives as history 84 Pétain, Henri-Philippe 204, 206, 214, 216 Petlioura, Simon 173 Petter, E. 129 Picasso, Pablo 209 Piłsudski, Józef 237 Plamen (Krleža) 253–255 pogroms, anti-Jewish 170–171, 173, 175, 176 Poland invasion of 88–89 minorities in 172 occupation of 183 victory and 14 violence against civilians in 168 posters, Irish troop mobilization and 114–124 post-traumatic stress disorder 96 post-war demobilization 222–242 post-war extremist movements 225, 229, 231, 237–238, 240 post-war pacifism 242, 252, 287, 296 post-war peace Cold War and 240–242, 279, 303 nuclear deterrent and 241, 279, 303 pathways to 222–236, 239–242, 303 post-war periods historiography of 223–226 varying concepts of 221–222 post-war violence 221–242, 281 anti-Bolshevism and 231–232 Bolshevism and 228, 229, 231–232, 237, 251–254 civil wars 222 geographical distribution of 225–227, 229–232 Germany and 226–234

Italy and 229, 231 pre-existing tensions and 228 reintegration and 229, 230 revisionism and 234–235 Russia and 231 self-mobilization and 229–230 state monopoly on 228, 232–233 victory and defeat and 224–225, 228, 230, 233–234, 304 Powell, Enoch 277 Powell, Michael 33 Pressberger, Emeric 33 Prince of Wales, hms 260, 268 Princip, Gavrilo 247 Proctor, Tammy 182 propaganda atrocities and 161–170, 176–177 combat motivation of Red Army and 145–146, 150–153, 237–238 Irish troop mobilization in wwi and 114–132 John Horne on 162, 164 posters as 114–124 See also Greuelpropaganda; hate propaganda Prost, Antione 94, 96, 104 psychological trauma, combat and 95–100, 102, 284–285, 304 public opinion of war, British 267–274 Pulkovskij Meridian (Inber) 238 punishment battalions. See penal battalions quiet front, troops on the 61–80 race, wwi and 8n30 racism, wwi and 163, 173 Radić, Stjepan 252, 254, 296 rafles 212 Read, Herbert 25 Reclining Figure (Moore) 26, 27 recruitment, of Irish troops in wwi 112–131 Red Army on the Eastern Front 133–158, 281 blocking detachments 139–140, 142–143, 283 brutalization and 147 casualties of 136–137, 155–156 civilians, violence against and 146 coercion and 136, 140–142 combat motivation of 133–158

358 Red Army (cont.) commissars and 150–151, 153 cultural mobilization and 136, 147–148, 153, 237–238 dehumanization of enemy and 145–146 desertion and 142–143 discipline and 139–143, 158 fear and 137–142 female soldiers and 154 film representations of 133 frontline bonds and 155–157 hatred and 144–146 historiography of 135–136, 144, 147–149, 157–158 ideology and 135–136, 147–152 myth and 133–134, 140 non-Russians and 154–155 patriotism and 147, 152–154 penal battalions 141, 142, 283 political education and 150–153 propaganda and 145–146, 150–153, 237–238 socialism and 147–148 songs and 153 Stalinism and 134–136, 139–143, 147–150, 152, 154, 158 training and 143–144 vengeance and 144–146, 156 violence and 137, 139–142 Redmond, John 111, 112, 115, 124, 132 Redmond, Willie 112 Reese, Roger 135, 140, 141, 143, 150, 154, 156 Reese, Willy Peter 92 Referat Kunstschutz 76 Reflections of a Non-Political Man (Mann) 57 refugees 182, 190–199, 291 aid and 192–198 Austria-Hungary and 195–197 cross-conflict dialogue on 290–292 France and 190–195 hostility and 191, 196 local identities and, importance of 194– 195, 198 national committees and 193–194, 197–198 reception centres and 196 Russian empire and 197–198 “Refugees’ Charter” 192–193 Reichstadt, duc de (Napoleon ii) 210 Reitz, Denys 90

Index Rejoice in the Lamb (Britten) 36 Remarque, Erich Maria 249 Remembering the Second World War (Finney) 3 remobilization post-wwi 233–237 Repulse, hms 260, 268 resistance, French 186–187, 202–203, 205–207, 211, 212–215, 285, 288, 298, 300 Resnais, Alan 204 Return of Philip Latinowicz, The (Krleža)  257 revisionism, post-war violence and  234–235 revolution, Russian. See Bolshevik revolution Rheims Cathedral 48, 119 Rhodes, occupying forces in 61–80 Ringelblum, Emmanuel 177 Ringer, Fritz 45 Ritter, Julius 212 Robinson, Michael 109 Rolland, Romain 55, 56, 58–59 Rol-Tanguy, Henri 211 Romania, defeat and 14 romanticized view of combat 25, 39, 92, 104, 258 Roman warfare, killing and 84 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 177, 298 Rose, Sonya O. 3–4 Rosenberg, Paul 210n30 Rousso, Henry 205 Royal Hungarian Domobran Novella (Krleža) 255 Royal Navy in Far Eastern Waters, The (Boyd) 263 Russell, Bertrand 55–56, 167 Russell, John 37 Russia defeat and 14 displacement of civilians and 182, 197–198 occupation of 190 post-war violence in (wwi) 231 See also Bolshevik revolution; Red Army on the Eastern Front; Soviet Union Sarajevo assassination 247 Sarantakes, Nicholas 264 Sartre, Jean-Paul 209 self-demobilization 62, 74

Index self-mobilization, post-war violence and 229–230 Serbia annexation of 289 nationalism in 246–247, 256 Service du Travail Obligatoire (sto) 212 severed hands, myth of 163, 164, 165 Sèvres, Treaty of 235, 292 Schechter, Brandon 155 Schlieffen Plan 13 Schoenebeck, Hans-Ulrich von 76 Schofield, Camilla 277 Schumann Declaration 241 Schuschnigg, Kurt 237 Schwartzbard, Shalom 173 Seniavskaia, Elena 135 shatterzones 229, 291, 292 Shebba, Anne 208 shell shock 96, 99–100, 102, 285, 304 Shirer, William 169 Shoah 164 Simonov, Konstantin 146 Sinclair, Anne 210n30 Singapore, fall of 260–278 Australia and 301 British imperialism and 263–266, 270–274, 298 British public response to 260, 267–270, 274–275, 278 casualties and 262, 275–276 defeat, expectations of and 268–270 India and 301 Japanese army and 260–263, 274–276 missing troops and 276–277 naval strategy and 263 scholarship on 263–267 Smart, Christopher 36 Smith, Len 83 Snyder, Timothy 171 social mobilization 19 See also cultural mobilization Sofsky, Wolfgang 86, 88, 90 sook ching 262, 274 Sorrow and the Pity, The 207 Sous Verdun (Genevoix) 104 South African War 84, 86, 90, 127, 273 Soviet Union German invasion of (wwii) 211–212 as shared enemy, cultural demobilization and 201

359 See also Red Army on the Eastern Front; Russia Spence, Basil 31 Stalin, Joseph 145, 241, 299 Stalingrad 133 Stalinism 134–136, 139–143, 147–150, 152, 154, 158 Standing Figure (Moore) 27, 28 stately homes, mobilization of 23 state monopoly on violence, peace and 228, 232–233 State, Society and Mobilization (Horne) 181 Stenker, Otto 61–64, 67, 68, 72–73, 77, 78–80 sto (Service du Travail Obligatoire) 212 Stockwell, Anthony 262n6, 264 Stonehenge 26 Storm of Steel (Jünger) 101, 209 Strange, Iris 276 Strange, Robert 276 Stresemann, Gustav 236, 241 Ströer, Alfred 66, 67, 73 Sturmdivision Rhodos 64–68 Punishment Battalion 999 66–69, 74 Suite Française (Némirovsky) 208n26, 210n29, 211, 216 Summerfield, Penny 3 Sutherland, Graham 34, 35 Svirin, Afanasy 153 Tacquet, Léon 183 Tawney, R.H. 93, 101 Taylor, Paul 109 Tehlirian, Soghomon 173, 174 Temkin, Gabriel 139, 147 Temple, William 31, 162, 163 Third Home Rule Bill (Ireland) 110 Thirty Years’ War, Second 225, 281 Thomas, Albert “Tommy” 277 Thorez, Maurice 211 Thorne, Christopher 264 Thorpe, Julia 195 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (Freud) 99, 227 Three Domobrans (Krleža) 255 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Bacon) 34 Tito (Josip Broz) 248, 253, 259 “To the Evangelical Christians Abroad” 50 Todman, Daniel 3n10

360 Torch, Operation 212–213 totalitarian regimes and mobilization 12 totalizing logics 281–282, 290, 292 total war 8, 13, 171, 181–182, 281–282, 292, 299 tourism, war as 61–62, 75–79 Touvier, Paul 204 travel, opportunity for offered by war 61–62, 78–79 trench warfare 6, 7, 62–63, 282 Trumbić, Ante 252 Turkey Armenian genocide and 172–173, 177, 293–294 nationalism and 296 as victor 14 Turkish War of Independence 292 Tyre, Stephen 278 Ulianov, Vitaly 143–144 Une Si Douce Occupation (Joseph) 209–210 Unification of Criminal Law, International Conferences for the 174–176 “un-mixing” post-wwii 240 Ustasha 258 utopian futures and mobilization 20–22, 27–30, 39–40, 298 vandalism, cultural by German army 48, 79 international law and 175–176 Vel d’Hiv bicycle racetrack 206, 212 Ven der Meersch, Maxence 177 Verkehrspolitik 184–186, 190 Versailles, Treaty of 171, 174, 236 Vichy, 1940–1944 (Azéma and Wieviorka) 207 Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (Paxton) 204 Vichy regime army of 213 collaboration and 204–208, 209, 212, 214 continued impact of 205–206, 217 deportation of Jews and 204, 205–206, 212, 217 policemen of 204 punishment of officials of 216 resistance and 202–203, 206–207, 211, 212–215

Index Vichy syndrome 205–206 victory and defeat different meanings of 11, 12, 14, 233–234 pathways to peace and 224, 228, 230, 232, 303 post-war violence and 224–225, 228, 230, 232–234, 304 Victory of Calvary, The (Grant) 34 Vietnam War 84, 86, 91, 95, 107, 278 violence experience of 99–101 perpetrating 83–86 World Wars as continuum of 83, 221–222, 225, 228, 230, 280–282 See also civilians, violence against; injury; killing; post-war violence Wacht auf Rhodos 74–75 Wagener, Otto 67, 70, 74, 80 Wall Street Crash 236 See also Depression, Great “War and the Intellectuals, The” (Bourne) 58 warfare fascist 9, 12, 105–106, 162, 238, 299 gender and 3–5, 30, 154 industrialized 6, 280–281, 284, 287 brutalization and 92, 226–227, 304 colonial participation and 6, 301 nature of and cross-conflict dialogue 20, 280–282, 284, 286–287 trench 62–63 War Requiem (Britten) 31 Warsaw Ghetto 177 Warsaw Pact 241 war worker, soldier as 86–88 Wasteland, The (Eliot) 31 Wavell, Archibald 261 Weber, Alfred 59 Weber, Max 57–58 welfare state, promise of and cultural mobilization 20, 21–22, 27–29, 39–40, 298 Welzer, Harald 94, 105 Werfel, Franz 177 Werth, Alexander 299 Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case (Davis and Barker) 54

361

Index Wiel, Jérôme aan de 113 Wieviorka, Olivier 207 Wilhelm ii, Kaiser 167 Wills, Clair 123 Wilson, Cat 262 Wilson, Woodrow 171, 172, 178, 234, 297, 298 Wimborne, Lord 115 Winter, Major 66 Wise, Stephen 177 women collaboration and 207–208 cultural mobilization and 22, 30

involvement in conflict of 4–5 in Red Army 154 work, war as 86–88 Yalta peace conference 239 Your Britain: Fight For It Now 27 Yugoslavia 14, 241, 242, 243–259, 289, 296 Ziemann, Benjamin 252 Zola, Emile 43