RAEL JEAN ISAAC INTERVIEWS ANDREW ROBERTS, AUTHOR OF “THE STORM OF WAR: A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10965/pub_detail.as
Even if you have read other histories of World War II you will want to read this book by the man The Economist calls Britain’s finest military historian. And if you haven’t, there is no better way to start than with this scholarly yet immensely readable history of the last great war.
Here are only a few of its virtues:
1. Maps. Roberts provides a large number of maps and sketches of the most important battles and campaigns, in order of time, in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific, at the beginning of the book. This makes it easy for the reader to follow the action without the typical frustrating searches in the book’s interior when maps are interspersed with text–and there are not enough of them.
2. Eye for telling detail. A book of this scope has to husband its quotes and anecdotes very carefully so as to illuminate what is important without bogging the reader down. Roberts is at his best here. For example, that Patton was a colorful general with a high opinion of his own talents is well known. Roberts conveys this with a quote from Patton’s diary during the war: “When I think of the greatness of my job and realize that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.” And Roberts skillfully conveys the mindless horror of the war. He quotes, on the German side, a Lieutenant Schutte whose company commander saw the face of what he thought was an enemy sniper, and fired a full clip of his pistol into what turned out to be “a bodiless head, which had been blown off by an artillery blast and tossed up into the tree, where it had lodged.”
3. Wit and humor. Roberts has a dry wit that enlivens a book which inevitably has more horror than humor. Of Charles de Gaulle, he writes that examples of his ingratitude towards his British wartime hosts are legion. “De Gaulle’s staple diet between 1940 and 1944 was the hand that fed him.” And on the “special relationship” between England and America: “The British and American generals in the west between 1943 to 1945 did indeed have a special relationship: it was especially dreadful.” And he reports on the moments of unintended humor from Hitler himself. At one of the military conferences during the war (Hitler had them meticulously documented for posterity by six–eventually eight–parliamentary stenographers) Hitler declared: “One always counts on the decency of others. We are so decent.”
4. The human side. Roberts gives us an insight into the foibles of the war’s great (and not so great) generals, including their vanity and efforts to outdo the others, in public relations if not on the battlefield. General Mark Clark emerges as the biggest self-promoter of the lot. Roberts quotes from one book on the war that noted Clark had fifty men working on public relations, which included a “three to one” rule. “Every press release was to mention Clark three times on the front page and at least once on all other pages–and the General also demanded that photographs be only taken of him from his left side. His public relations team even came up with a Fifth Army song: ‘Stand up, stand up for General Clark, let’s sing the praises of General Clark…He was very fond of that song.'” On the other hand, Roberts lets us see a softer side of General Patton, revealed after the war by General John Hull, who worked with Patton closely on three campaigns. “At heart he was very gentle, he was modest, very friendly, not at all superior in his attitude toward you…when he left a formation where he bawled somebody out, he might sit down and write a prayer…So, all in all he was quite a character, interesting and very likeable if you knew him.”
5. Asks interesting questions. Roberts asks questions that were not raised during the war or in its immediate aftermath but have become a focus of concern decades later. Should the Allies have bombed the railroad lines to Auschwitz? Was the Pope culpable in not speaking out against the Holocaust while it was in progress? Could the battle of El Alamein, with its heavy casualties for the Allies, have been avoided? Was it justifiable–or indeed of strategic value–to bomb the civilian population in occupied Europe, Germany and Japan? And, of course, what has become the most asked question, Should the U.S. have dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Roberts also raises the question, throughout the book, Could a different decision by Hitler, at various pivotal moments, have produced a Nazi victory?
Roberts delivers thoughtful and sometimes surprising answers to these and many other questions he raises in this chronicle of what fellow historian Max Hastings calls “the largest event in human history.” To learn what his answers are, read the book.
It is a privilege to meet and interview the author.
Questions for Andrew Roberts
Rael Jean Isaac: There are a number of histories of World War II. What made you want to write this one?
Andrew Roberts: In a sense this is a compilation of all the thinking, working and writing I’ve done about World War II in the last twenty years. And so I very much wanted to bring that all together. And the fact is there’s always new information coming out about World War II. In a previous book I wrote on World War II called Masters and Commanders I came across the verbatim accounts of Winston Churchill’s war cabinet which no one had seen before. In this book, The Storm of War, I was very fortunate that an English collector who has the largest collection of Second World War memorabilia in the United Kingdom, indeed in the world, over 100,000 letters and papers, photographs, diaries and so on made his collection available to me and I was the first historian into the archive. And so it isn’t just an imposition on the public, to write another book.
RJI: Were there also misperceptions of the war you wanted to correct? Or do you feel we ask different questions now?
Andrew Roberts: I think here in the West, since our victory in the Cold War, we probably should look again at the immense contribution made by the U.S.S.R. in the war against the Nazis. It doesn’t fit in very nicely with our white vs. black conception of democracy triumphing over totalitarianism– because of course Stalin’s Russia was just as totalitarian– but the fact is that 27 million Russians died in that conflict and for every five Germans killed in combat (and I don’t mean bombed from the air but dying on a battlefield) four were killed on the eastern front. And so what the Americans, British, Canadians and other allies did was to kill the fifth German and the war wasn’t decided by us. And I think that’s something that requires restating now that the evils of Communism are behind the Russians at least.
RJI: You write at considerable length about the ghastly behavior of both Germans and Japanese. You talk at length about the Trent Park recordings showing the extent to which high Germany army officers, not just the SS, knew what was going on and were implicated in it. Do you feel this is something insufficiently emphasized in histories of World War II?
Andrew Roberts: I think it is possible to read histories of World War II– especially the ones that were written soon after the war, and especially those that were written with the help of German officers– to assume there was a really clear cut difference between the Nazis and the Germans. And the fact was that in the Wehrmacht that was not necessarily the case at all. An awful lot of ordinary German soldiers and officers agreed with Hitler and supported him and it isn’t good enough to assume otherwise simply because some German generals attempted to blow him up on the 20th of July, 1944– very brave men indeed, but nonetheless they were utterly unrepresentative of the Wehrmacht at the time. So, yes, I think it is dangerous to assume that German generals didn’t know what was happening behind the lines, what the Einzatsgruppen were doing, because we see again and again they probably did.
RJI: A major thesis of the book is that what made Hitler fight the war made him lose the war–being a Nazi. Could you amplify on the ways this was the case in terms of his losing the war?
Andrew Roberts: Yes, it struck me again and again in the course of researching and writing this book that whenever the best interests of the German Wehrmacht diverged from those of the Nazi Party, Hitler would always go down the latter route. The invasion of Russia didn’t need to take place at the time that it did in the way that it did. In fact if he had pursued a different strategy, he might have pulled it off. But he desperately needed to invade Russia, not for strategic reasons–Russia was actually an ally of Germany since August 1939–but because of three great imperatives, none of which had anything to do with grand strategy. They were all political.
The first was to create lebensraum in the east so the German ubermensch, the superman, could lord it over the untermensch, the Slavic subhumans, a completely Nazi concept. The second was to have a final reckoning against the Bolsheviks whom they’d been fighting on the street corners of Munich since the 1920s. The third was the attempt to wipe out the Jewish race in Europe and over half of Europe’s Jews lived in the U.S.S.R. in 1941. These were all Nazi rather than German ideas and ideals.
You have the complete inability to coordinate with the Japanese. You were in effect fighting two completely separate wars. It would have been tremendously helpful to the Germans had the Japanese fought in close cooperation but Hitler despised the Japanese racially and didn’t think of them as a superior people. You also see it in the decision to go to war, totally unnecessarily, against the U.S.–he didn’t have a treaty obligation to go to war against the United States on the 11th of December 1941. He could have let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and just stay out of it. It would have been very difficult for the Roosevelt administration to go to war against Germany when it had a full scale war on its hands in the Pacific. However, Hitler believed the Americans were ruled by Jews and blacks and therefore they wouldn’t make good fighting men, a completely absurd set of assumptions which even went against his own personal knowledge because he’d fought in the First World War across from American regiments and should have known how excellent they were. His own Iron Cross First Class was given to him by his adjutant, who was Jewish. It was a complete absurdity but they genuinely thought the Americans would not be able to land any troops in the European theater until the year 1970.
RJI: You focus on the mistakes Hitler made. Do you think there were mistakes the Allies came close to making that would have cost them the war?
Andrew Roberts: There are several mistakes the Allies made but none that I think could have cost them the war. The Market Garden operation at Arnheim, the Bridge Too Far, was a mistake. It was dangerous to have not spotted the Ardennes buildup of the Germans in December 1944, very difficult indeed because there was no radio traffic so there was no way of knowing where it was going to come, but nonetheless to miss 39 divisions was quite a mistake. The Allies made a number of tactical mistakes but in terms of the big issues, the decision to invade North Africa, the decision to cross the Channel when they did, the decision to cross the Rhine when they did, these I think have been vindicated by history. One major decision that might be questioned is the entire Italian campaign. To try to fight up the middle of a long thin mountainous country is a pretty serious undertaking and when one looks at Anzio and some other serious and ghastly battles on the Italian peninsular one might argue–although I don’t think so personally–that that was a serious mistake.
RJI: Do you think there are lessons from World War II for the way we conduct our wars today?
Andrew Roberts: I think there are. We had a much greater sense of national unity in the Second World War, of people all being on the same side, of pulling together, of appreciating that it was very important for the democratic powers to win this conflict. So people were much more forgiving of errors, they were much more willing to give leaders the benefit of the doubt, they were much more patriotic, frankly. And they weren’t constantly making trouble about the detaining of enemy POWs for example. They weren’t constantly tempted to undercut the war effort and peace efforts with media and so it strikes me that when first Pres. Bush and now Pres. Obama come under sustained attack over issues like Guantanamo Bay, this is a real luxury that we in democratic countries have but not one that we ought to overindulge –which I think is what is happening at the moment.
RJI: Would the BBC then and the BBC now be an example?
Andrew Roberts: Yes, the BBC in the Second World War were stalwarts. They would rather have chopped off their own fingers than make life more difficult for Winston Churchill. I think today most people, I think it is fair to say, see reporters and commentators as thinking it is part of their duty to make life as difficult as possible for the people who are attempting to fight the war against terror.
RJI: You offer a rosy view of the outcome of World War II in terms of the transformation of Germany and Japan into peaceable democracies. But what about the current trend of Islamization, the pervasive hostility to Israel which certainly slides into anti-Semitism where it is not explained by anti-Semitism, the moral collapse of European countries as they line up against Israel in the votes in various UN agencies? What do you think of the moral state of Europe today and its prospects for the future?
Roberts: I’m very worried about the moral state of Europe today. It’s at its worst moral state, it seems to me, than at any time since the 1950s. I was hoping that the collapse of Communism would usher forth what Winston Churchill called the sunlit uplands for civilization but it hasn’t happened like that at all. I’m particularly worried about the recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks that have been taking place in France, where they have gone up three times. We in Britain have not only got our skin heads who attack Jews and desecrate synagogues but also now with a large Muslim population, we have a lot of mostly young, mostly male Muslims who see themselves in direct cultural hostility toward our Jewish population and it’s a very, very dangerous situation and it only seems to be getting worse. Of course the economics don’t help but I think this is a much more cultural thing than it is economic. You need much more historical education , you need everybody to understand the kind of road that anti-Semitism leads to. But you also need to have leadership, from the communities, from the churches, especially the Catholic church–it would be nice to see more condemnation of anti-Semitism from the Roman Catholic Church–and from political leaders, both local and national.
I am a founding member of the Friends of Israel initiative that Jose Maria Aznar set up and what we are trying to do is fight the delegitimization of Israel which is a huge thing on the left nowadays– not just on the left I am sad to say. It’s also promoted a lot by trade unions and by academics–the academic boycott of Israel, the sporting boycott. You see the danger of treating Israel as a completely different entity which it is not. In effect you legitimize the treatment of Jews and Israel as being different. Especially when academics do it, what is being picked up by ordinary people, especially less intelligent people, is that if it’s O.K. for academics, if it’s O.K. for the most intelligent people in society, if it’s O.K. for the intelligentsia to diss Israel, then of course it’s O.K. for me too. And that’s a very difficult and dangerous path which all too many Europeans, and I’m afraid Britons, are treading.
RJI: Not many public intellectuals speak out–Bernard Harrison, Robin Shepherd, but not many.
Roberts: No, we’re a small group. But also William Shawcross, David Trimble. I’d like to think the people who are speaking out are people who don’t mind putting their heads above the parapet and believe passionately in what they are saying. It seems to me that it does communicate itself. Things are getting worse but we don’t know how much worse they would be if no one was speaking up at all. I think it’s also very important just retaining the moral high ground–Ron Prosser, the Israeli ambassador to the UN made a fabulous speech in the UN yesterday which basically told the delegates of so many countries that are anti-Israel that they should be ashamed of themselves.
RJI: You take on huge subjects that would terrify most people, for example, World War II, the history of the English speaking peoples since 1900. Is there any technique you have that makes you feel you can take on such huge topics?
Roberts: The way I see it is I am 48 years old, I should be in my intellectual prime. If I’m ever going to deal with big topics it should be now. I also enjoy it. You can’t really write a book–I’ve written ten or twelve now–unless you are intellectually stimulated by it, because halfway through, if you’re bored by a book, it must be the most terrible thing in the world. It’s never happened to me since I only work on books I want to read as well as to write. Yes, I don’t go for small topics. What I’m working on now is a single volume history of Napoleon. That’s been done 3,000 times before. One has to be psychologically disturbed or appallingly hubristic or just quietly self-confident to take on a task like that. I’ve written a book on the Battle of Waterloo and a book on Napoleon and Wellington so it is an area I feel comfortable in but it is a big subject and frankly my feeling is in this period of my life I ought to be tackling the big subjects. I started off writing relatively small subjects and I might wind up later on in my life going back to small subjects but big subjects are what fascinate me at the moment. They also fascinate other people. People do buy books, especially Americans I’m pleased to say, on big subjects like the Second World War– and hopefully on Napoleon.
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The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts (Hardcover – May 17, 2011)
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