It is easy to understand why such a dashing young naval officer, or Winston Churchill and Gen.George Patton, the pilots who flew Spitfires and Mustangs, some German panzer officers, had the time of their lives in World War II. For a vastly larger number of people, however, for hundreds of millions around the world who never had the opportunity or inclination to be heroes, the conflict required acceptance of miseries, hardships and sacrifices- matched by a sense of personal impotence- which made the experience wretched. Consider, for instance, a pathetic letter home written by William Crawford, a seventeen year-old boy second class serving aboard the battlecruiser Hood: Dearest Mum…I know it’s wrong to say but I sure am fed up. I feel kind of sick, I can’nae eat and my heart’s in my mouth. We’ve struck bad weather today. Talk about waves as big as houses, they’re crashing over our bows…I wonder if it would do any good Mum if you wrote to the Admiralty and asked them if there was no chance of me getting a shore job at Rosyth. You know, tell them you have got two sons away and that. Be sure to tell them my age. If only I could get off this ship it would not be so bad’. Crawford, however, was still aboard Hood when she was sunk with almost all hands in May 1941. He was just one of sixty million people of all ages, and both sexes for whom the conflict became a personal tragedy.
When I first explored the war in Bomber Command, published in 1979, I would never have guessed that the period would retain its grip on popular imagination around the world into this 21st Century. There seem three reasons. This was the greatest event in human experience. Most people perceive it as that rare thing, a conflict in which good was pitted against indisputable evil. And finally, there seems inexhaustible scope for finding new things to say about it.
Even after countless books, films and TV documentaries, it is amazing how easy it is to surprise people with facts known to historians, but little recognised by a wider public. I mentioned recently to a former head of the British Army that I had written a new study of the war. He responded sceptically: ‘What on earth can you tell us that we don’t know ?’. I asked him to guess what proportion of Germany’s military dead were killed by the Russians. He suggested 60%. I told him that the true figure is over 90%. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was the defining event of World War II: after his 1940 triumphs over Britain and France, it never occurred to him that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalized society, inured to suffering, than democracies in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues. I next asked my military friend what percentage of total allied military casualties he supposed to have been British or American. He said: maybe 20% each. The real figure was just 2% British, a further 2% American. The Russians suffered 65%, the Chinese 23%, the Yugoslavs 3%. At least 15 million Chinese died in the war, though such statistics are constantly being reviewed and revised, sometimes upwards, sometimes down. For instance, the death toll in the February 1945 bombing of Dresden has been drastically reduced by recent research, from a figure of 150,000 much-cited a generation ago, to 20,000 or even fewer- far less than died in the 1943 Hamburg raids, or March 1945 Tokyo firestorm. Mere numbers are, of course, only part of the story, but they help to emphasise how far many people still have to travel, to achieve a sense of perspective about what happened to mankind between 1939 and 1945. Some modern nations are stunningly ignorant, or wilfully misinformed. A few years ago Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, who survived the Tokyo firestorm, lectured to a women’s college. He told me: ‘I asked fifty students to list countries which have not fought Japan in modern times: eleven included America’.
Because the Soviet Union ended up in the allied camp, not only most modern Russians, but also many Westerners, are unaware that between 1939 and June 1941, Stalin was seen around the world as Hitler’s partner in tyranny and aggression, the rapist of Finland, east Poland and eastern Romania. At least 350,000 Poles died as victims of Russian rather than Nazi oppression and imprisonment. In my view, only the single enormity of the Holocaust justifies judging Hitler a more dreadful and murderous tyrant than Stalin. Yet Russia was supposedly joined with Britain and America in a ‘crusade for freedom’.
Confusing, isn’t it ? Many Westerners’ view of the war remains dominated by nationalistic perspectives, cherished myths and legends. Everybody knows about the gallant fighters of the French Resistance, supported by British agents of SOE. Rather fewer people appreciate how fiercely French troops fought against the British in Syria in 1941, as they did also in Madagascar and briefly in North Africa the following year. A French soldier scrawled a graffiti on the wall of a fort in Syria before his unit abandoned it in the face of advancing British troops: ‘Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, but so will you soon’. Few people have heard of the French fighter pilot Pierre Le Gloan, who became an ace by shooting down seven RAF aircraft over Syria in 1941. The writer Roald Dahl, who flew a Hurricane in that campaign, wrote later: ‘I for one have never forgiven the Vichy French for the unnecessary slaughter they caused’.