All Hell Let Loose – Max Hastings on the ‘Good War’

This book comes tantalisingly close to being right. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. But first, a general introduction:

By far the best popular history book of the season is Max Hastings’s  ‘All Hell Let Loose’,  his summing up of the Second World War. The book, dealing with the whole war, military, political and social, is deeply informed by several previous works by Sir Max on detailed aspects of the war. There are no doubt small things with which one might quibble. But it is a powerful, tightly-packed and skilfully written judgement which tugs the reader on to the end and actually distracted me, on an uncomfortable and ill-lit aeroplane, from theoretically easier reading.  Unless this is a subject that simply doesn’t interest you, this is a book worth reading.

I should note here that I do not know Sir Max, have spoken to him once in my life (in an exchange on the BBC ‘Moral Maze’ programme), have never worked for him, and have for years disagreed strongly with many of his opinions on domestic politics. Even so I should also note that he is willing to admit to past mistakes and misjudgements, and recently did so, much to his credit, on the issue of the European Union. He has for most of his life been a clear spokesman of centrist, conventional Toryism. But I wonder if his detailed knowledge of the truth about the alleged ‘Good War’ has caused him over time to wonder about this view.

When I say that the book comes close to being right, I refer to two features of it. First, Sir Max’s treatment of the Anglo-French ‘guarantee’ to Poland is properly contemptuous.

He sums it up thus: ‘France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them’.

I might add that the Germans, more sensibly, treated them as the worthless rubbish they were. A pity it wasn’t the other way round, really.

He also notes that the London and Paris declarations of war were ‘gestures which even some anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile’.
The withering account of the betrayal of Poland surely points an accusing finger at those who made a promise they had no intention of keeping. But it does not go deeply into the reasoning behind this disastrous policy or explore the possible alternatives.

Maybe this will happen in Sir Max’s next book. The great clay edifice of the ‘We Won the War’ cult has been eroded into shapelessness, and much diminished, by the downpour of truthful revelations which has washed over it since it was erected in 1945.

But, as readers here well know, it is still historically dangerous to challenge the view that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable in 1939. Indeed, to say this is almost always to be immediately misunderstood and misrepresented by the legions of people who still fear the truth.

For the keepers of conventional wisdom will instantly assert that anyone who says this thinks that Britain should never under any circumstances have gone to war with Germany. They also usually claim that opposition to the 1939 declaration of war implies opposition to Churchill’s decision to fight on at all cost in 1940. The unstated implication of these arguments is that people who take my position are motivated by a secret sympathy for German National Socialism, a libel they dare not state openly but seek to insinuate by subtle signals. 

Speaking for myself, I suspect that Britain might well have needed to go to war with Germany in 1941 or 1942, much as the USA did. It would then have been in our interests to do so, and we would have been capable of fighting effectively, which we weren’t in 1939. The same goes for France.

As for 1940, once you have started a war then you must fight it to the end. To declare war on a country, and then make peace with it, is to invite humiliation, subjugation and enslavement. The position would have been quite different if we had not started the war in the first place, but as we had, Churchill did the right thing. The choice was pretty awful – Churchill had the sense to see that it would cost us the Empire and most of our accumulated wealth. But he was right to believe that this was a price worth paying to avoid a Hitlerian peace.

As for the unspoken suggestion that conservatives are some sort of National Socialist fellow-travellers, as so many socialists are or were Communist fellow-travellers, it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatives believe and value. And it is also based on a failure to grasp that conservatism is intensely patriotic, whereas socialism has always been intensely internationalist.  It is a false equivalence of opposites.

Sir Max also addresses the question of the bombing of German civilians, fairly realistically. But he makes two classic mistakes, commonly made by defenders of this action. He accuses those, like me, who think the bombing was morally wrong, of arguing that it was *as bad as* and in some way equivalent to the mass-murder of Jews by the Hitler state.

But most rational critics of the Arthur Harris bombing campaign do not think this at all. They think that the bombing was morally wrong on its own account.

It was not remotely comparable to the mass-murder of Jews (and others), a unique crime whose culprits probably caused the excavation of a new pit in the deepest parts of Hell to hold them.

But it was still utterly wrong. 

As for the supposed military argument for it, that it diverted artillery and men from the Eastern Front, this wasn’t its intention.

And it must be stressed that a campaign of bombing properly directed at military targets would also have caused this diversion. I doubt very much whether the appalling losses inflicted on his men by Harris would have been much greater if he had followed this course. But, as we know, Harris hated to be distracted from his attacks on civilians and was most reluctant to allow his bombers to be used for anything else.

Such properly targeted bombing might also have done far greater damage to the Reich’s war effort than incinerating, suffocating, roasting and dismembering lots of innocent women and children, who cannot conceivably be blamed for Hitler.

In any case, it is pretty clear from Sir Max’s account that the Soviet Forces would have won anyway, even without this help. The decisive moment on the Eastern front came in the winter of 1941-2, when we had not begun bombing Germany on a grand scale. After Hitler failed before Moscow, he was doomed to lose in the end.

All kinds of thoughts intrude here, not least about the unspeakable savagery of the Soviet advance into Central Europe, and whether we should have got ourselves into a position where the Soviets were our principal ally.  Their cruelty to each other and to those they conquered must once again be judged to be frightful *in itself*, not in comparison to national Socialist barbarism, but on universal grounds.

I repeat, this is not to say that it was equivalent to Hitler’s savagery. It was not. But because Stalin was not as evil as Hitler,  or evil in the same way as Hitler, it does not mean that he was not profoundly evil.

But the overwhelming message from this book is that the comforting fantasy of the ‘Good War’, with which British people have sustained themselves for so long, is insupportable.
His spare but terrible descriptions of warfare, many of them culled from poignant letters home found on the corpses of dead soldiers, make it clear that for most people, most of the time, this ‘Good War’ was Hell. It broke lives and spirits,  reduced strong, confident men to whimpering, snot-bedabbled wrecks, voiding their bladders and bowels, tore apart loving homes, compelled gentle people into acts of unspeakable barbarism, laid waste great monuments of civilisation, betrayed most of those for whom it was supposedly fought, was marred by ceaseless incompetence and self-aggrandisement by military and political leaders and was on many occasions futile *on its own terms*. The conduct of the troops of the civilised countries, though never nearly so base as that of the Germans or the Red Army, was often disgraceful.

Between the lines, and sometimes explicitly, Hastings also gives the impression that several major campaigns were fought for reasons of domestic morale, propaganda, diplomatic advantage or plain folly.  They made little difference to the outcome of the war. Those who died or were maimed for life in the course of them might as well have stayed at home, for all the material good they did to the causes they fought for. Those who were bereaved by them, if they knew this, might be even more heartbroken than they already were.

Of course, this is part of the problem. There are still many people living who took part in the Second World War or who were deprived by it of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. As long as they survive, it will be difficult to confront the truth head-on, for these people need their myths to make their sacrifices bearable.  That is reasonable and right. Personally, I deplore the modern habit of revealing the intolerable truth when our own troops are killed by so-called ‘Friendly Fire’, that stupid phrase. This is terribly common in all modern wars, and is inevitable as long as artillery and aerial bombing and strafing are employed in war. But who wants to know that a family member has died in this awful way? Leave them at least to believe that they were killed by their enemies. There is some small comfort in that.

A few small quotations serve to remind us of the fact that Man, when he chooses to be, is the most terrible creature on the planet, and also capable of the most extraordinary endurance and kindness. Make what you will of that. I know what I think.

Sir Max quotes a German soldier in Stalingrad who wrote: ‘When night arrives - one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights -  the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them .Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.’

And much later he records an incident in Holland as the Americans clawed their way towards the Rhine.

‘Airborne soldier Pfc Bill True was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.’

I cannot myself read these words without weeping, though when I think about it I am unable to explain exactly why, of all the horrors and dramas of this vast book, this one short passage should have such an effect. But there it is. It took me ages to transcribe, because I kept having to stop and wipe my eyes.

I might also quote this brilliantly economical description of modern war’s true, unavoidable cost. During the Battle of the Bulge, ‘twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angele, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renee, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette; nine; Lucien, eight; and Noel, six.’

The bombardment, though this is not entirely clear, was almost certainly ours, the good side’s.


There is a strange and slightly guilty pleasure for an Englishman of my generation, in reading books about the Second World War, a bit like eating bully beef sandwiches accompanied by mugs of strong, sweet tea.  For me, it has always been safely in the past, a great saga of valour and justice. To read, in warmth and well-fed safety, about its privations is a little like coming into a warm, firelit room at dusk on a snowy winter afternoon. 

 
I still feel this. But since a long ago December dawn on the Hungarian-Romanian border (why, it must be more than 20 years ago now), when I began a journey that would bring me close to real gunfire and real corpses, more than once,  I also feel something else. It is our duty to imagine this event not as the buried past but as the blazing present, and to question all decisions which might take us back towards it, with all the intelligence and scepticism at our command. Yes, war is sometimes necessary. But the calculation of whether it is a fit price to pay should be made in the knowledge of what that price really is.