Moral Combat
Sometimes you pick up a book that is so good, you just can't believe that you got it so cheap from the bargain table at your favourite bookshop. Such a books is one I've almost finished reading, Michael Burleigh's Moral Combat: a history of World War II.
It's been a long read, partly because it is quite a large book, partly because I've had to read lots of other stuff for uni, and also partly because I had to take a break from it now and again.
This is not to say it's a poor book. Quite the contrary, this is easily the best book on World War II I've ever read, and I've read a few.
It's just that it makes for pretty grim reading, and some chapters simply become almost overwhelming. One can only read about Einsatzgruppen murder squads matter-of-factly discussing the most efficient ways to commit mass murder - standing up, in the back of the head? Kneeling? Close up or from a distance? and this in front of their shivering victims, mind - for so long without having to simply take a break.
Moral Combat mostly eschews descriptions of the great battles, etc., so if you're wanting to know details of tank manoeuvres in the Battle of Kursk, don't bother.
Instead, Burleigh focusses on the moral dimensions of the War (he chides modern historians for whom evil has become an unfashionable word): why people did what they did, how they justified their actions, what they were thinking and hoped to achieve.
The book takes on the great themes - why did European nations pursue a seemingly craven policy of appeasement and pacifism, for instance - and moves from the highest - Churchill, Hitler, Stalin - to graphic descriptions of combat from ordinary soldiers and the hatchet-men of genocide. Its biggest theme, perhaps, is the moral (or immoral) equivalency of the Soviet and Nazi empires: 'one is moved to venture that it was a pity that both couldn't have lost'.
Burleigh also examines the moral complexities of themes so often dealt with in simplistic, binary fashion, such as resistance and collaboration. He shows, for instance, that the so-often romanticised Resistance was really a complex web of motives and culpability. French Communist Resisters, for instance, showed a callous disregard for the reprisals against innocent civilians that invariably followed Resistance operations. Collaborators in the Jewish ghettos were most often desperately trying to make the best of a thoroughly bad lot for their fellows, yet some were motivated by deluded self-importance, greed or plain self-survival.
Moral Combat doesn't shy away from detailing the failings of the Allies, while also dealing fairly brusquely with modern-day relativists and apologists. Those who righteously condemn the decision to wield the atomic bomb, he says, should ask themselves: how many millions of American and Russian soldiers would they rather have died, let alone the millions of Japanese civilians, who would have died perished either in a bloody invasion of the Home Islands or starved to death in the naval blockade that would have preceded it? There were also the victims of Japanese occupation who were dying by the hundred thousand or more a month in the interim.
All in all, to reiterate, this is definitely the best history of World War II that I've read.
Moral Combat: a History of World War II by Michael Burleigh Guardian review.
It's been a long read, partly because it is quite a large book, partly because I've had to read lots of other stuff for uni, and also partly because I had to take a break from it now and again.
This is not to say it's a poor book. Quite the contrary, this is easily the best book on World War II I've ever read, and I've read a few.
It's just that it makes for pretty grim reading, and some chapters simply become almost overwhelming. One can only read about Einsatzgruppen murder squads matter-of-factly discussing the most efficient ways to commit mass murder - standing up, in the back of the head? Kneeling? Close up or from a distance? and this in front of their shivering victims, mind - for so long without having to simply take a break.
Moral Combat mostly eschews descriptions of the great battles, etc., so if you're wanting to know details of tank manoeuvres in the Battle of Kursk, don't bother.
Instead, Burleigh focusses on the moral dimensions of the War (he chides modern historians for whom evil has become an unfashionable word): why people did what they did, how they justified their actions, what they were thinking and hoped to achieve.
The book takes on the great themes - why did European nations pursue a seemingly craven policy of appeasement and pacifism, for instance - and moves from the highest - Churchill, Hitler, Stalin - to graphic descriptions of combat from ordinary soldiers and the hatchet-men of genocide. Its biggest theme, perhaps, is the moral (or immoral) equivalency of the Soviet and Nazi empires: 'one is moved to venture that it was a pity that both couldn't have lost'.
Burleigh also examines the moral complexities of themes so often dealt with in simplistic, binary fashion, such as resistance and collaboration. He shows, for instance, that the so-often romanticised Resistance was really a complex web of motives and culpability. French Communist Resisters, for instance, showed a callous disregard for the reprisals against innocent civilians that invariably followed Resistance operations. Collaborators in the Jewish ghettos were most often desperately trying to make the best of a thoroughly bad lot for their fellows, yet some were motivated by deluded self-importance, greed or plain self-survival.
Moral Combat doesn't shy away from detailing the failings of the Allies, while also dealing fairly brusquely with modern-day relativists and apologists. Those who righteously condemn the decision to wield the atomic bomb, he says, should ask themselves: how many millions of American and Russian soldiers would they rather have died, let alone the millions of Japanese civilians, who would have died perished either in a bloody invasion of the Home Islands or starved to death in the naval blockade that would have preceded it? There were also the victims of Japanese occupation who were dying by the hundred thousand or more a month in the interim.
All in all, to reiterate, this is definitely the best history of World War II that I've read.
Moral Combat: a History of World War II by Michael Burleigh Guardian review.