Sir Max Hastings FRSL FRHist was born as the Second World War came to an end. He went on to become a distinguished British journalist, foreign correspondent for the BBC, prolific author, and historian of World War II.
In his mammoth All Hell Let Loose, Hastings mostly just recounts the story of The World At War 1939-1945. But on the last page he allows himself a moment to reflect on the fascination this terrible chapter of the world’s history continues to hold for so many people for whom the events are now in the distant past. Hastings writes:
Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the
tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension.
Practically all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises. It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, nor rationally to celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many.
Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who had taken part.
All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.
(Hastings, Max. All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939-1945. London: HarperPress, 2011, p. 675)
It is true Hastings and I (he is nine years my senior) are among the most privileged generation in history. By some unexplainable miracle, our generation has for the most part avoided directly confronting the terrible atrocities of war. I have never personally known anyone who died as a result of violent conflict between nations. Except in movies, I have never seen a gun shot at an enemy. I have not witnessed a person dying on the battle field.
So, as Hastings says, for me “the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension.”
I cannot begin to understand the complexities of trying to function in the midst of war. It is hard to imagine what choices I might have made confronted with the dilemmas that assaulted military personnel and civilians alike during dark angry years of war. I am in no position to sit in judgment on the moral choices made by those who have been forced to live through the twisted unpredictable realities war always creates. In the frightful horror house that is armed conflict, everyone makes choices that they believe are for the best. But there are no perfect decisions and no absolutely pure actions. No one comes out of war unscathed by the treachery they have been forced to endure.
Many survivors of Nazi terror attest to their conviction that in fact it was almost always the best who died and those who survived were guilty of the greatest compromise.
In the end, I wonder if even the one small line of certainty that Hastings feels able to eke out of the dark shadows of this inhuman tragedy, bears the weight of certitude he tries to give it. Is it true that
All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan?
Even if it is true that the Second World War saved the world from a fate “much worse”, is it also true that the deaths of over 60 million people and the expense in 1945 dollars of nearly two trillion dollars, was the necessary price to prevent “the triumph of Germany and Japan”?
It is of course foolish to try to second-guess history. There is no way to know today what the outcome of different decisions might have been in the past. But it might at least be worthwhile stopping for a moment to ask the question whether there might have been alternatives to the total war that we now call “The Second World War”.
Is it possible that the better nature of the German people might eventually have risen up against Nazism and dealt with Hitler in a way that incurred less carnage and in a shorter time than the six years it took the Allies to finally deal with this menace to civilization? Of course, no one can know, but it seems that as we remember the horror of war, it might be worthwhile to at least ask the question if there might be alternatives to the violent means of resolving human conflict.
In A Spacious Place 
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November 6, 2017 at 7:02 am
vanvoorst
“By some unexplainable miracle, our generation has for the most part avoided directly confronting the terrible atrocities of war.”
However, that is not true for American and Australian young men who were in their late teens and twenties in the USA and Australia. Vietnam.
November 6, 2017 at 7:34 am
jaqueline
“Is it possible that the better nature of the German people might eventually have risen up against Nazism and dealt with Hitler in a way that incurred less carnage and in a shorter time than the six years it took the Allies to finally deal with this menace to civilization?”
I was dismayed to discover recently that the Allies were directed to not aid Germans who were resisting the Nazis in Germany. That small piece of eh story seems to indicate that the Allies were not interested in simply defeating Hitler, but in destroying Germany.
There are other pieces of the story that if we take them seriously might tell us that many many Germans were not so much fighting *for* Hitler but continued fighting-despite the obvious horribleness of the Nazis and the hopelessness of the war- to save themselves from the world that was in full force against them.
With the evidence of what the victors of WW1 inflicted on Germans after the war, destroying their industry and exports so their economy crumbled causing starvation, cold, hardship, (France even banned coal-miners from using coal to keep themselves warm in winter ); with the full on bombing campaign that destroyed 131 cities ( Dresden was the last, not the only ) with the Morgenthau Plan being seriously considered…..
One wonders would Hitler have even been able to arise without the help of the allies causing such devastating hardship post WW1.
Except for Russia, Germany lost more men in the war than anyone else. 12 million of them. Do we really think that millions of young men give their lives for evil? Those who were fighting for Hitler believed they were fighting for a saviour and what they thought would be a better world than the one they had been children in and many of them ended up questioning and rejecting the person and the cause they were fighting for – the rest were fighting to save their country from the rest of the world having been forced to war by a government they didn’t even vote for.
( it is sobering to realise that only 43% of voters had voted for Hitler during the last free election- that is the same percentage that had voted for Trump, )
November 6, 2017 at 8:03 am
jaqueline
correction “12 million” should be 12 percent.
Military 8 and half million and civilians more than 3 million. of a population of nearly 70 million
however looking at Wikipedia it states less than that.
There was an article about women taking over the population in Sweden in numbers recently and that article noted that not since Germany after the war had we seen more women than men in a country and that was due to Germany having had lost an “unnatural” number of men due to the War.
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It is curious to notice that since I have been looking at the war over the last ten years numbers for German casualties vary.
For instance when I first read about Dresden and casualties from the bombing ( in an American book btw ) it was 500,000 ( one extreme ) now it is supposed to be 20,000 ( to the other ) which makes no sense considering that Hamburg had lost 40,000 civilians in one campaign alone and Dresden had within its boundaries refugees that had come from all over Germany to escape the effects of the bombing raids ( 7 million were left homeless and in need of shelter )
When you think that 40,000 Britons died from German bombing in the whole of the war and children alone made up 70,000 of those who died in Germany by allied bombing, it makes you question a version of the War that speaks of “Coventry” as one the worst things about it.