Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory
by Norman Davies
Macmillan, £25, pp544
'No Simple Victory,' says the subtitle to this history of the Second World War in Europe, and inherent in those three words is a fundamental weakness of the work. Dear God, is there any intelligent reader who supposes it was a simple victory? But Norman Davies, the brilliant and original author of Europe: A History 10 years ago, seems now to have developed a weakness for truisms and teaching grandmothers to suck eggs His twin hobby-horses are tremendous, but almost knackered: the iniquity of Stalin's Soviet Union, just as evil as Hitler's Germany, and the predominant part played by the Red Army in the Allied victory. There may be people still unaware of these fundamental truths about the Second World War, but I doubt many of them will be readers of this book.
That said, let us consider its merits. Davies succeeds in making a historical whole of the two main elements of the European War - the war in the west, fought by Britain, America and a host of allies; the war in the east conducted by the Soviets with a multitude of ancillaries willing and unwilling. This unifying emphasis is justified, because even now historians, film-makers, authors and journalists are apt to treat 1939-45 as two separate conflicts. Davies treats the two campaigns more or less as one, but he has no doubts about their relative strategic importance. The battle of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history, rightly gets far more space than El Alamein, or even D-Day. This is salutary, not because it tells us anything new, but because it does chip away at deeply ingrained national myths and stereotypes. Davies surely underplays the Anglo-American contribution to victory as a mere supporting role, but it is fair to be reminded that while 200,000 British military personnel died in the European war, the Russians lost nearly 9 million. On the other hand the conception is weakened by Davies's reluctance to recognise that the war in the Far East was, for the Anglo-Americans, indivisibly part of the European war too. You would hardly know from his account, if you are as simple as he evidently supposes you to be, that the Americans were simultaneously fighting their colossal campaigns in the Pacific, and the British Army slogging its way through Burma.
But another plus of the book is its anthology value. This is a speciality of Davies - the assembling of vastly varied facts, anecdotes and opinions that may not fit into a historical narrative, but are illuminating in themselves. They occupy much of this volume, are arranged in quirky categories - Aristocrats, Music Lovers, Assassins, Saints, Bankers, Cartoons - and are often fascinating. Were we ever taught that 54 separate non-aggression treaties were signed in inter-war Europe? Have you heard Marshal Zhukov's bon mot about the shooting of Soviet soldiers for cowardice - 'In the Red Army it takes a very brave man to be a coward'? Tanks and aircraft, spies and traitors, Glenn Miller and 'Lili Marleen' make this immense hodgepodge excellent bedtime reading, while, of course, excusing the author the laborious task of working it all into his main text ...
Alas, if this is perhaps an endearing sign of advancing years, not so forgivable is the slipshod nature of this book. The French fleet was certainly not sunk with all hands at Mers-el-Kebir. Trevor-Roper surely never wrote a book called The Last Days of the Reich. Geoffrey Lawrence was not the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and Lindbergh was not the first man to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. The wartime British women's military force was called the ATS, not the WRAC. Commercial journalism was decidedly not 'in its infancy' during the Second World War. And how are these for a few Davies truisms, plucked from a cornucopia? 'War is concerned, above all, with fighting and killing.' 'Courage and virtue were not the preserve of Allied fighters.' 'Every single one of the 10 million [POWs] was an individual person.' 'Soldiering is a profession whose participants have always risked death, wounds and mutilation.' 'All soldiers have to be trained.' 'All countries maintain prisons to detain criminals.' You don't say, Professor!
But it would be unfair to end this review with a sneer. Its underlying themes are grand and terrible - the evil of totalitarianism, whether of the left or the right , and the wrong that false or biased history can do to posterity. The Good War was only good in parts, and the highest morality must be indivisible. These major premises Professor Davies nobly develops: the didactic manner and the editorial jumble sadly weakens what might have been a great book.
And if I dare end upon an anachronistic note: Davies certainly does not beat the drum for Britain, or any other nation (except perhaps his beloved Poland, and who could resent that?). Our generals, it appears, were mediocre, our strategies too cautious, our soldiers had an easy time compared with the Red Army, our navy never fought a Trafalgar, our tanks were outclassed by the Panzers and were no good to the Russians. Yet even to an iconoclastic Welsh nationalist, reading this work seems to show that, on the whole, the impoverished British came out of the war in Europe the most honourably victorious of the lot.