Clash Of Evils

To the historian of Poland, the history of all Europe looks different. Ordinarily, Eastern Europe is thought to begin somewhere around Prague, with everything beyond relegated to mystery and backwardness. Half a century behind the Iron Curtain only deepened the traditional estrangement, making it seem natural to regard countries with very different identities as part of a monolithic Eastern Bloc. People who instinctively recognize the difference between the Germans and the Dutch feel no need to understand the difference between Ukrainians and Poles, or between Serbs and Croats — until they start to kill one another, whereupon they become examples of "age-old," unchangeable hatreds. This state of affairs has been decried over and over again by writers such as Milan Kundera, who once protested the way "a Western country like Czechoslovakia has been part of a certain history, a certain civilization, for a thousand years and now, suddenly, it has been torn from its history and rechristened ‘The East.'"

The career of Norman Davies, the popular and sometimes controversial British historian, has been devoted to hammering home that same point, for the benefit of readers who think of "the West" as beginning in California and extending to about the Elbe. Mr. Davies made his reputation as the leading English-language historian of Poland. His survey of Polish history, "God's Playground" (1982), is the standard work on the subject, and is very popular in Poland itself, where it was first distributed clandestinely by Samizdat in the early 1980s. Over the last decade, Mr. Davies has branched out, producing wideranging, synethetic books on big subjects: "The Isles" (1999) dealt with the history of Great Britain and Ireland, "Europe: A History" (1996) took on the whole continent.

But the outsider's perspective that he developed as a scholar of Poland is always in evidence. The very fact that Mr. Davies' history of Britain is not a history of Britain, but a history of "The Isles," suggests how he uses the facts of geography to unsettle the myths of history. Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England are no more Britain, Mr. Davies argues, than Poland and the Czech Republic are "the East." To understand history correctly, we must first rid of ourselves of such illusions, even comforting and comfortable ones.

"No Simple Victory" (Viking, 490 pages, $30), Mr. Davies's new book, is the latest installment in his project of illusion-demolition. This is a revisionist history of World War II, designed to shake the complacency of British and American readers who are accustomed to thinking of it as "the good war." It is not that Mr. Davies has uncovered any important new facts, or even launched any shocking reinterpretations. His purpose, rather, is to remind the world of two truths that, while well-established, he believes are not sufficiently reckoned with.

The first is that, in military terms, World War II in Europe was predominantly a war between Germany and the Soviet Union; the contributions of Britain and America, while crucial, were not of the same order. The second is that, when Nazism and Communism fought over control of Eastern Europe, there was little moral difference between them. The Soviet Union was one of the Allies, but it had less in common with Anglo-American democracy than it did with Nazi tyranny.

The first of these points is inarguable, and indeed unargued. By any reckoning — soldiers killed, battles fought, territory lost, suffering inflicted on civilians — the eastern front of World War II was much more terrible than the fronts later opened by the Anglo-Americans in North Africa, Italy, and France. Mr. Davies offers several possible metrics, all of which tell the same story. Soviet military deaths in 1939-45 were approximately 11 million; British and American deaths in Europe were about 144,000 for each country. (Mr. Davies does not count Allied casualties in the Pacific theater.) In other words, for every American who died in the fighting in Europe, about 76 Russians died.

If you consider civilian casualties, the disproportion is much starker, since neither Britain nor America was ever invaded by the enemy. Some 60,000 Britons died in German bombing raids, and even this figure is too large to be comprehended: How can you imagine so many terrifying deaths? Yet the British civilian death toll must be set against the Soviet toll of roughly 18 million — a figure that includes Jews, Poles, Byelorussians, and many other ethnicities in addition to Russians. For each British civilian, in other words, some 300 civilians from the Soviet Union died.

And that is not to begin to consider all the other categories of suffering Mr. Davies enumerates, in a series of short entries: deportations, executions, slave labor, starvation, concentration camps — even child-stealing. There is, for instance, the unspeakable story of the SS Lebensborn or "Fountain of Life" organization, which kidnapped Nordic-looking Polish children and brought them to Germany to "improve" the racial stock. Those who were deemed insufficiently Aryan were abandoned or killed; the rest were assigned to German families and given new names. Tens of thousands of German citizens now in their 60s must have started life as the children of Polish mothers — each one has a story too deep for tears.

The worst form of violence during World War II, of course, was the Holocaust. In the past, Mr. Davies's treatment of the Holocaust has been criticized by some historians as so Polono-centric as to be false to the realities of Jewish experience. I do not know enough about Mr. Davies's previous writing on this subject to take a side in the debate, though there are powerful voices on both sides. (Mr. Davies's book on Europe was criticized on this score by Theodore K. Rabb, and passionately defended by Anne Applebaum.)

In "No Simple War," his treatment of the Holocaust is generally straightforward and unobjectionable. Yet he evidently still feels bruised by past criticism and cannot refrain from marring the book with obnoxious, defensive asides. He takes a potshot at the "socalled ‘Holocaust enforcers,' who try to insist not merely that the Holocaust was a reality but also that it was attended by a variety of ancillary realities of a less convincing kind" — a thoroughly obscure remark that suggests but does not explain some animus on Mr. Davies's part. One would like to know which "ancillary realities" Mr. Davies thinks it necessary to deny, and why.

Elsewhere, under the rubric "Survivors," he goes out of his way to cite Norman Finkelstein, who has "bitterly denounced organizations which purport to be helping survivors but in fact may be acting from motives of financial gain or political interest." This ominous sentence is not only dubious on its own, it is utterly irrelevant to the history of World War II, and once again leaves the reader feeling that the Jewish response to the Holocaust evokes some obscure hostility in Mr. Davies.

One might speculate that, as a Polish historian, he is frustrated by the way the Nazi persecution of the Jews is so much better known than the Soviet persecution of the Poles. For Mr. Davies's second major contention is that Nazi barbarism, which the world is accustomed to hearing about, must be set alongside the Stalinist barbarism that Allied propaganda assiduously concealed. "All sound moral judgments," he writes, "operate on the basis that the standards applied to one side of a relationship must be applied to all sides. It is not acceptable that certain acts by an ill-favored party be condemned as ‘foul murder' if similar acts by a more favored party be somehow excused or overlooked."

It follows that Mr. Davies argues against what he calls the "Allied Scheme of History," which portrays the alliance of the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans as a unified "anti-Fascist" struggle. Americans, especially, are inclined to this view, since our memory of World War II usually begins at Pearl Harbor, six months after Hitler invaded Russia and turned the Soviet Union into an enemy. But as Mr. Davies reminds us, the first act of the war was the joint invasion of Poland by Hitler and Stalin, and for two years thereafter, the totalitarian dictators worked in tandem to achieve their goals. Early in 1940, in fact, Britain and France considered sending an expeditionary force to Finland to fight the Soviet invasion.

After Operation Barbarossa — the code name for the German invasion of Russia — the Soviet Union officially became one of the Allies. But the evil of Stalin's regime, while it was decently forgotten in the West, did not diminish in wartime. On the contrary, the Red Army was in some ways the natural culmination of the communist experiment, which had already militarized society and treated human lives as means to an end.

After Stalin's own incompetence prevented the Red Army from anticipating the German invasion, the Soviet Union could only compensate for huge initial losses by treating its soldiers as cannon fodder, overwhelming the Germans with sheer numbers. Soviet commanders wasted lives in a way that no American general would even have considered. It was necessary to deploy "blocking regiments" behind the front lines, expressly tasked with shooting any comrade who tried to retreat.

Worse, because totally irrational, the Soviet state continued to destroy its own people even when the war was at its height. During the first year of the invasion, the Red Army issued 800,000 death sentences to its own soldiers. Every unit had its commissar, who had to countersign all military orders, and who could condemn anyone to death for an impolitic word. No wonder that, as Mr. Davies writes, "the front-line zone of maximum physical danger" became for the Red Army troops "a zone of psychological liberation, even of gay abandon, which no doubt contributed to the willingness of the ‘Ivans' to rush to their deaths with a hurrah on their lips."

Clearly, no one who reads "No Simple Victory" will ever again be tempted to refer to World War II as a "good war." Yet if Mr. Davies's goal is to chasten his Anglo-American readers, it is not clear that his book really serves his purpose. On the contrary, the war records of America and the United Kingdom emerge as honorable and glorious, next to the clash of evils that was the war on the Eastern front. Not that even the Anglo-American war was free from moral ambiguities. The "area bombing" of German cities, we now know, was of very limited military value, but it inflicted huge suffering on German civilians, some 650,000 of whom were killed. By leaving out the Pacific theater of the war, Mr. Davies avoids addressing some of the hardest American memories — including the dropping of the atomic bomb and the outright racism of our propaganda against the Japanese. But all in all, "No Simple Victory" leaves the reader glad to belong to a country where World War II can be called, if not a good war, at least a decent one.

akirsch@nysun.com