Some aspects of wartime experience were almost universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women obliged to endure new existences utterly remote from those of their choice, often under arms and at worst as slaves. A boom in prostitution was a tragic global phenomenon which deserves a book of its own. The conflict provoked many mass migrations. Some of these were orderly: half the population of Britain moved home in the course of the war, and many Americans took new jobs in unfamiliar places. Elsewhere, however, millions were wrenched from their communities in dreadful circumstances, and faced ordeals which often killed them. ‘These are strange times,’ wrote an anonymous Berlin woman on 22 April 1945 in one of the great diaries of the war, ‘history experienced first hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen close-up, history is much more troublesome – nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal.’
The nature of battlefield experience varied from nation to nation, service to service. Within armies, riflemen experienced far higher levels of risk and hardship than millions of support troops. The US armed forces suffered an overall death rate of just five per thousand men enlisted; the vast majority of those who served faced perils no greater than those of ordinary civilian life. While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents. Men who found themselves on battlefields when their nations were in retreat suffered more heavily than others who served in times of victories; Allied warriors who saw action only in 1944– 45 had a far better statistical prospect of survival than, say, aircrew or submariners who began operational service earlier, when their cause was faring badly.
My story emphasises bottom-up views and experiences, the voices of little people rather than big ones; I have written extensively elsewhere about the warlords of 1939–45. Contemporary diaries and letters record what people did or what was done to them, but often tell us little about what they thought; the latter is more interesting, but more elusive. The obvious explanation is that most warriors are young and immature: they experience extremes of excitement, terror or hardship, but only a small minority have the emotional energy for reflection, because they are absorbed in their immediate physical surroundings, needs and desires.
It was fundamental that only a tiny number of national leaders and commanders knew much about anything beyond their immediate line of sight. Civilians existed in a fog of propaganda and uncertainty, scarcely less dense in Britain and the US than in Germany or Russia. Front-line combatants assessed the success or failure of their side chiefly through counting casualties and noticing whether they were moving forwards or backwards. These were, however, sometimes inadequate indicators: Pfc Eric Diller’s battalion was cut off from the main American army for seventeen days during the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, but he realised the seriousness of his unit’s predicament only when this was explained to him by his company commander after the war.
Even those with privileged access to secrets were confined to their own fragments of knowledge in a vast jigsaw puzzle. For instance Roy Jenkins, who later became a British statesman, decrypted German signals at Bletchley Park. He and his colleagues knew the importance and urgency of the work they were doing, but, contrary to the impression given in sensational films about Bletchley, they were told nothing about the significance or impact of their contributions. Such constraints were greater, unsurprisingly, on the other side of the hill: in January 1942 Hitler became convinced that too many people in Berlin knew too much. He decreed that even officials of the Abwehr should receive only such information as was necessary for their own work. They were forbidden to monitor enemy broadcasts, a considerable handicap for an intelligence service.
I am fascinated by the complex interplay of loyalties and sympathies around the world. In Britain and America, confidence that our parents and grandparents were fighting ‘the good war’ is so deeply ingrained that we often forget that people in many countries adopted more equivocal attitudes: colonial subjects, and above all India’s four hundred millions, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty. Many Frenchmen fought vigorously against the Allies. In Yugoslavia, rival factions were far more strongly committed to waging civil war against each other than to advancing the interests of either the Allies or the Axis. Large numbers of Stalin’s subjects embraced the opportunity offered by German occupation to take up arms against a hated Moscow regime. None of this implies doubt that the Allied cause deserved to triumph, but it should emphasise the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes.
It may be useful to explain how this book was written. I began by rereading Gerhard Weinburg’s A World at Arms and Total War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, probably the two best single-volume histories of the war. I then composed a skeleton narrative, setting the most important events in sequence, and laid upon it the flesh of anecdotage and my own reflections. When I had completed a draft, I revisited some other outstanding recent accounts of the conflict: Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray’s There’s a War to be Won and Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat. I thus reviewed my own comments and conclusions in the light of theirs.
Wherever possible, I have favoured relatively obscure anecdotage at the expense of justly celebrated personal recollections – omitting, for instance, the likes of Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy and George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe out Here. Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, who has researched my Russian material for the past decade, for this work once again identified and translated personal narratives, diaries and letters. Serena Sissons has translated thousands of words from Italian memoirs and diaries, because Mussolini’s people seem to me inadequately represented in most Anglo-Saxon narratives. I have explored unpublished Polish accounts in the Imperial War Museum archive and London’s Sikorski Institute. I am once again indebted to Dr Tami Biddle of the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for insights and documents derived from her own researches, which she has generously shared with me. Various friends, notable among them Professor Sir Michael Howard, Dr Williamson Murray and Don Berry, have been kind enough to read my draft manuscript and make invaluable corrections, suggestions and comments. The doyen of British naval historians, Professor Nicholas Rodger of All Souls College, Oxford, read the chapter on the British experience at sea, much to the advantage of my final text. Richard Frank, doyen of US Pacific historians, identified an alarming catalogue of egregious mistakes in my draft, for which I am deeply grateful. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for my judgements and errors.
Any writer’s highest aspiration, more than sixty-five years after the war’s ending, is to offer a personal view rather than a comprehensive account of this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences, which never fails to inspire humility in its modern students, inspired by gratitude that we have been spared anything comparable. In 1920, when Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, published a best-selling account of the recent conflict, it was considered sinister and tasteless that he chose as his title The First World War, for it presumed another. To call this book The Last World War might tempt providence, but it is at least certain that never again will millions of armed men clash on European battlefields such as those of 1939–45. The conflicts of the future will be quite different, and it may not be rashly optimistic to suggest that they will be less terrible.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Kamogi, Kenya, June 2011
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