Review: The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture, by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies

In The Italian Navy in World War II James Sadkovich argues that the common view of the Mediterranean theater and Italian arms in it is deeply distorted by American and British prejudices of the time (particularly a racist disdain for Italians), as well as the prejudices of the German officers who had a surprisingly large impact onthe formation of that image. In the Myth of the Eastern Front Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies make a comparable case with regard to the conduct of World War II in Eastern Europe--that American prejudice, and the post-war influence of the German generals--have had such distorting influence, even more consequential for the understanding of the war, and with greater effect.

Sadkovich argues (as many have before and since) that had the Germans lent Italy a small proportion of their resources to pursue the "Mediterranean strategy" properly, events in this region could have been decisive. However, it would have been decisive because of what it meant for the Nazi-Soviet conflict, to which the book by Smelser and Davies speaks directly, a conflict that in our own history rather than some counterfactual actually was decisive for the war and all that could or did come from it. And the distortion to which they point has, in their view, also had more profound implications for the way the war as a whole is viewed. Rather than contemptuous dismissal of Benito Mussolini's armed forces, and the prejudices into which this plays, Smelser and Davies argue that this tendency has led to a whitewashing of Axis crimes, and even a cult of the World War II German army in the United States itself comparable to the "lost cause" mythology of the Confederacy.

Smelser and Davies, more interested in cultural history than military history per se, do not attempt to offer a corrected reconstruction of World War II in the East the way Sadkovich does (persuasively) with the war's course in the Mediterranean, but rather the history of how that war has been understood. They begin at the beginning, with an account of the brief and now forgotten "love affair" American public opinion had with the Soviet Union, a virtual selling of the Soviet Union on Main Street, laid out at length and in detail to show how different the situation was before the Cold War put an end to it.

That post-war conflict quickly led to the plans for a thoroughly de-Nazified, demilitarized Germany being set aside in favor of Germany's conservative Establishment, implicated as it was in Nazism's crimes, being rehabilitated and put in charge of a West Germany not only under non-Communist rule but contributing substantially to the industrial base and military might of the Western alliance. Which, naturally, meant taking a softer line.

This was further encouraged by the turn to German generals for insight into the Soviet armed forces and their capabilities, the Germans having fought them for four years. Naturally there was a more forgiving attitude toward the record of particular German figures (clemency for many and all of whom were to be right-wing cause celebres, with Joseph McCarthy championing war criminal Joachim Peiper, for example), and plenty of opportunity for the German generals to tell their side of the story--particularly the very senior Franz Halder, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian of World War II fame. Halder oversaw the production of a vast amount of military history and analysis by German officers for study by U.S. forces, while the latter two penned widely read memoirs that were just the leading edge of a barrage of memoir, history and fiction presenting their side's account.

These accounts, fiction and nonfiction, took a variety of courses. Some not only excused but justified the war--stressing the evils of Communism from which Nazi Germany was supposedly defending the West; the welcome of German forces as liberators by ethnic minorities and others in the Soviet Union; or even arguing that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike that saved the West from conquest by Stalin. Amid all this they treated as marginal or incidental the issues of aggression, atrocity, genocide, not only slighting the reality that these were the motive for Barbarossa, but distancing the German armed forces from them--depicting the soldiers as innocent patriots doing their duty by their country, utterly unaware of the crimes that others committed, and horrified at or opposed to them when they found out about them, with higher officers emphasizing their conflicts with a fanatical, interfering Hitler. Others delinked the experience of individual soldiers from the larger political context altogether--the reader encouraged to not think about those troublesome matters and instead admire the courage, professionalism, dutifulness to country displayed by men who were often presented as family-oriented, religious (in the term's most positive sense), humane. Whether the larger cause was held to be valiant, or merely the individuals who fought in it, they also contended that German forces were defeated by bad weather, by the sheer overwhelming numbers of the enemy, by the enemy's "subhuman" indifference to life and decency, by American Lend-Lease, or by the meddling in operational decisions by Hitler, rather than genuinely "military" failures on the part of the virtually superheroic German soldiers and their commanders, or any military skill on the part of their Soviet opponent (not unlike the "lost cause" view of the Civil War, which attributes Northern victory solely to numbers and industrial weight).

Smelser and Davies also devote a considerable portion of the book to showing why a significant swath of American opinion was open to such a view. American occupation troops in Europe, they note, were rather more inclined to identify with German civilians, or even former German soldiers, than with the inmates of Displaced Persons camps (or the Soviets, from whom they were increasingly isolated)--and if this had its effect on George Patton, the effect was still greater on cohorts of new draftees coming in after the fighting was over. All this reflected and fed into widespread prejudices that the Cold War each exacerbated--racial as well as ideological (the anti-Slav feeling that was often bound up with anti-Semitism and anti-Asian feeling, and all of which interacted with militant anti-Communism), all as the earlier, sympathetic attention to the Soviet experience virtually vanished from memory, and with which much of the pro-Nazi writing (or simple apologism) was all too consistent. In subsequent years the extent to which German historiography, official and popular, colored American perceptions was, in time, to be taken for granted, unnoticed--making the more distinctly German view more acceptable.

The result is that the "German" view of the war in the United States was far from limited to people espousing blatanly Neo-Nazi opinions, but has substantially colored the general understanding of the war, and found wide enough currency to produce a surprisingly sizable, widespread coterie of American "romancers" of the Nazi-era German armed forces and their war in the east. Avid consumers of books and magazines devoted to the theme, many of them participate in wargaming and even public recreations of Eastern Front battles, in which they find pleasure in personally playing the roles of Wehrmacht soldiers they regard as exemplars of military and other virtues.

Reflecting on this book's argument I recalled my own reading of World War II historiography, and many of the works they cited prominently--the works by Trevor Dupuy and Martin Van Creveld and Basil Liddell Hart, particularly The German Generals Speak--and had to concede that the notion of a cult of the German army coloring the historiography is not so far-fetched. Reflecting on Hart's interviews with the surviving German generals and subsequent commentary in The German Generals, I now find myself thinking of Hart as not merely respectful to his subjects, but taking them totally at their word--the more so given his uncritically reusing in copy-and-paste fashion much of what they had to say in that book in his later Defence of the West (in which he was, notably, very hard on Winston Churchill). Still, that Smelser and Davies say relatively little about the facts of the war that contradict the "cult" image leaves a reader forming their impressions from this book with little basis for judging just how much such assessments diverge from the reality.

Reflecting on the treatment of World War II in popular culture, it struck me that they could actually have said much more of evidences of such a cult. Detailed as the authors' attention is to some of the relevant aspects of pop culture, they virtually ignore others that seem far more conspicuous--for example, the vast body of alternate history fiction, which years before Smelser and Davies published, already led to a massive, noteworthy study (Gavriel Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made). Instead his discussion of "What if" material is limited to two counterfactual histories, by R.H.S. Stolfi and Samuel Newlands. Similarly there is no reference to other science fiction novels like John Ringo and Tom Kratman's Watch on the Rhine, or for that matter mainstream fiction like George Robert Elford's The Devil's Guard, which certainly seem germane to such a discussion.

Still, if the book's coverage of the subjects could have been more comprehensive, what it does cover it treats in detail, and is more than ample to make the point--and leave me convinced (as I was, after reading Sadkovich) that what we all think we know about a very large part of the war (the biggest part of it) may need to be rethought. It leaves me convinced, too, that much more may remain to be said about this most seemingly exhausted of subjects.