Two Views of World War II: Some Thoughts

Considering the conduct of the two largest and most important of the Western Allies in World War II, the United States and Britain, certainly as it tends to be discussed in the English-speaking world, it seems plausible to speak of two broad understandings of the matter. One understanding holds that Britain and the United States entered the Second World War to defend freedom, peace and plain and simple human decency from the menace of the totalitarian and expansionist Axis regimes. Thus did a Britain that could have made a deal with a very willing Hitler, and an America protected by the breadth of the Atlantic, in spite of well-intentioned but essentially misguided pacifists and their ilk, nonetheless reject that course and make enormous sacrifices of blood and treasure (in the case of Britain, sacrificing even its Empire and first-rank power status with it) in the long but always steady and determined grind required to hold open the Atlantic sea lanes, deflect Axis ripostes in the direction of the Middle East, erode German might through the air, and keep continental resistance going--an earnestness reflected in the pragmatic wartime alliance with the Soviets--on the way to landing an invasion force within striking distance of Germany on D-Day, while holding the line in the Indo-Pacific until they were able to push Japan all the way back to its Home Islands. Thus did a historically isolationist America, after making its contribution to the Allies winning the war also make sure the Allies won the peace, facing up to its responsibilities as the world's greatest power by leading the establishment of the institutions (the United Nations, the organs of the Bretton Woods economic system, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and furnishing the resources (Marshall Aid) that underwrote a new order that, in spite of the ingrained malevolence of the Soviets, enabled the return of prosperity, the spread of democracy, and the prevention of the outbreak of any war to compare with the two that so warped the life of humanity in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, even if it was inevitable that a conflict so large and long and complex, so high in its stakes and fraught with so much uncertainty morally as in other ways, would see the Allies make mistakes, and take actions that remain controversial to this day (like the dropping of the atomic bomb), even the worst reading of them recedes into insignificance next to the far larger and more important fact of the defeat of regimes whose triumph would have spelled much, much worse for humanity, such that if any war can be spoken of as one in which good fought righteously and triumphed over evil, it is this war deservedly remembered as "the good war."

The other understanding of World War Two holds that, if the defense of freedom and other humane values moved many citizens of Britain and the U.S. to support the war, extending to their fighting in it, all this was quite irrelevant to the motives and actions of the governments of Britain and the U.S.. After all, totalitarian dictatorship with its colossal human rights abuses, racism and even aggression against weaker states did not distress them--all as, indeed, much of their elite supported fascism as a bulwark against the Communism they thought the likely alternative, and even hoped Hitler would attack and destroy the Soviet Union (such that rather than the pacifism of an at any rate powerless left appeasement was the product of the Anti-Communism of the right, which had them more enthusiastic about war with the Soviets than Germany well into 1940, even as Scandinavia was falling to Hitler). Accordingly, what really moved them was concern for the profits of their businessmen and the emergent threat to the balance of power with their own states (i.e. the aggressors forming closed economic blocs and becoming potential military challengers, the way Germany's European-wide New Order or Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere threatened), mean and grubby realpolitik, the logic of empire, guiding their conduct of those wars throughout.

Thus did the U.S. and Britain leave the Soviet Union to bear the brunt of fighting the Axis in Europe with only slight support from them as they maneuvered against each other for advantage around the world (with central to this America's desire for economic access to the British and other European empires after the war). Thus did the American and British governments' conception of "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live" in the Atlantic Charter mean the West maintaining control of Africa and Asia, by and large through old-fashioned colonialism, all as even in Europe what was uppermost in their minds was that resistance movements and popular revolts should not bring to power a government that was in any way left-leaning, or simply too strong-minded from the standpoint of their economic interests. Thus the American and British governments accepted that the price of their empty and broken promises to the Soviets to open a "Second Front" in the West meant risking Soviet domination of Eastern Europe (for which, at any rate, the West had set precedent with its own conduct in liberated European territory, starting with the U.S. and Britain cutting the Soviets out of any say in what was to happen in Italy)--all as when they did open a Second Front it was for the sake not of finishing Hitler's Empire, but to shut the Soviets out of Western Europe, even as, after this invasion, Western forces relied heavily on Soviet successes (and the extent to which the Germans hoped for an accommodation with the West, or at least preferred Anglo-American to Soviet occupation) to make headway, without which they would have held far less of Western Europe, and Germany, at war's end.

Moreover, the Allies' determined pursuit of these objectives was such that Cold War followed from world war, as the Western powers, no longer needing the Soviets as allies and regarding themselves as being in a more powerful position because of their occupation of Western Europe and the atom bomb (which they dropped not to defeat Japan but intimidate the Soviets), returned to their pre-war hostility to even the existence of the Soviet Union, as they refused to respect wartime agreements and the security interests of a Soviet Union horrifically mauled by the Nazis' invasion; overrode the desires of peoples everywhere (including America's own working class) else for something better than a return to the status quo ante; and fought to maintain control of the old colonial world, with indeed ex-Nazis and ex-fascists and their collaborators rehabilitated and rearmed to fight for them against their recent allies of the wartime anti-Axis struggle--a pattern exemplified by the three decade-long fighting in Vietnam after 1945. (In that war's earliest days the British rearmed Japanese troops for use against the Vietnamese who had declared the independence of their country--while in 1945 American and British leaders contemplated using German prisoners of war in the same fashion as part of a "preventive" war against the Soviet Union.) Amid all this, instead of the really fundamental reconstruction of the world order humanity needed (especially in the nuclear age) what we saw was patching up of the bad old order (with a bigger and more vigorous America taking charge of a global economy Britain was no longer equipped to oversee, etc.), and as a result the world going from crisis to crisis along the destructive path the world wars had already demonstrated to be untenable. Indeed, if proponents of this view will unhesitatingly say that the world is far better for the Allies having triumphed over the Axis, they are still far from seeing this war as having been a "good war" nonetheless--and certainly reject the self-congratulatory conventional wisdom in the English-speaking powers about the conflict given the cynicism they displayed, the limits of their contribution to victory, the too-little appreciated role and sacrifices of the Soviets and Chinese and peoples of the Axis-occupied lands, and the betrayal of the hopes, and need, for a really new and better world.

It is, of course, the case that the first view enjoys the status of orthodoxy--defining mainstream discourse, and popular understanding of the conflict--whereas the second, more critical vision, is apt to be called (often derisively) "revisionist," and fairly marginal within public life. Considering this I am not concerned with arguing for one view of the other, but rather more interested in how it has been a profoundly uneven contest. The orthodox understanding of the war has had the sanction of Authority--reported in the news media of the day, sanctified in public pronouncements, recorded in schoolbooks and popular histories, and dramatized in the great bulk of the popular fiction depicting the war from novels to video games, all as the essentially conservative and patriotic sensibility broadly promoted as the only respectable makes the public highly receptive to it, with exemplary of all this the reinforcement it got from the pop history of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and the History Channel (which was the "Hitler Channel"> before it identified itself with reality TV and aliens). By contrast the more critical understanding, if quite evident in the literature of the post-war years (when books like James Jones' From Here to Eternity were bestsellers), is something one is unlikely to see much today outside of comparatively academic works read mainly by intellectuals open to the kind of leftist view all but shut out of the mainstream, and which orthodoxy encourages the public to regard as beyond the pale in its premises, its conclusions, its impieties, not only about the war but things as they are generally. (Indeed, the knee-jerk reaction of many to hearing anything associated with this reading of the history is to accuse the speaker of "bleeding-heart" oversensitivity, an obliviousness to the harsh realities of life--and even a want of natural and proper feeling for their country, if not enmity toward it, summed up in the charge that they "hate" it.)

All this has its reflection in the fact that, in spite of a continuing outpouring of books critically assessing the conflict, no "revisionist" work approaches the popularity or influence of the works of Ambrose and Brokaw with the American public. All this also has its reflection in the very different reception of the other big World War II movie of 1998, Terence Malick's version of Jones' The Thin Red Line as compared with Spielberg's film. Much less celebrated by critics and seen by moviegoers (especially in America, where it grossed one-sixth what Ryan did in its initial release), it can seem comparatively obscure now, the more in as Ryan proved the first of a great wave of new World War II movies (and by way of adaptations like Ambrose's Spielberg-produced Band of Brothers, television as well) for which it set the tone, and which have contributed to that narrative's dominance all the way down to the present, leaving the narrative of the "good war" as unchallenged as it had ever been--while insofar as revisionism goes, it is the revisionism of the far right that the public is more likely to get today than the view from the left.