A sympathetic reaction: C.P. Snow’s The Light and the Dark.

In a subplot of Kingsley Amis’s 1978 novel Jake’s Thing, an Oxford college debates whether to surrender to the Zeitgeist and admit female students. It’s mentioned that a strange alliance is forming between the more reactionary of the men’s colleges – attached to the status quo for the reasons you’d expect – and the women’s colleges, who fear losing their student base to the more prestigious, traditionally all-male institutions.

“It’s like something out of C.P. Snow,” someone observes.

For C.P. Snow’s novels are famously About Politics. I capitalize the words to emphasize that this is not the same as being Political, as the word is usually meant: when we attend an evening of Political comedy, we don’t expect a bunch of gags about coalition building, or how to swing a recalcitrant committee member to your side; we expect to be lectured about how awful the Republicans are, with (if we’re lucky) a few jokes thrown in.

I would be hard-pressed to name a book more About Politics than 1951’s The Masters, which concerns the manoeuvres leading up to a vote by the dozen or so fellows of a Cambridge college to elect a new Master from among themselves. It’s a topic that would lend itself to black humour; but however low-stakes their dissensions appear, however petty their motives, Snow never treats his characters cynically. As he wrote elsewhere, in what could serve as a thesis statement for all his fiction:

Put your ear to those meetings and you heard the intricate labyrinthine and unassuageable rapacity, even in the best of men, of the love of power. If you have heard it once – say, in electing the chairman of a tiny dramatic society, it does not matter where – you have heard it in colleges, in bishoprics, in ministries, in cabinets: men do not alter because the issues they decide are bigger scale.

That passage comes from 1954’s The New Men, which is about British physicists working to develop the atom bomb during World War II, and subsequent efforts by the idealists among them to prevent the bomb from actually being used. It belongs, along with the better-known The Masters, to the Strangers and Brothers series: eleven novels written over a span of thirty years, collectively depicting a life and career arc roughly paralleling the author’s own. I’ve read three others:

The Affair (1960), set twenty years after The Masters and at the same Cambridge college, concerns an apparent case of academic fraud by a stridently left-wing scientist that divides the administration.

The Sleep of Reason (1968), set in a grimy corner of England during the 1960s sexual revolution, examines both sides of a sexually sadistic murder trial where the sanity of the defendants is in doubt. (It was Peter Hitchens’s review of The Sleep of Reason a few years back that inspired me to start collecting Snow’s books.)

The Light and the Dark (1947) I’ll be discussing below.

Our narrator and authorial stand-in Lewis Elliott takes an active part in the conflicts animating these stories. He’s usually aligned with the “radical” side, meaning he supports the modern progressive agenda, more or less, albeit with more central economic planning and less freaky sex stuff. But Elliott, like his creator, is a level-headed, good-humoured chap who keeps up friendships even with political foes.

But it’s not only the author’s fair-mindedness that keeps the novels from feeling propagandistic – Political in the typical sense. It’s that Snow isn’t much interested in rehashing topics that at the time would have seemed wearisomely familiar from op-eds and dinner party debates. Perhaps because he sees political beliefs as being formed by personality and social pressures rather than by reasoned-out arguments, or perhaps simply because he finds political debate dull as a subject for fiction, the content of those debates is usually skimmed over. His characters let fall acid remarks at parties, unburden their souls while strolling by the Cam, reveal too much under the influence of alcohol, but their words are always slightly askew of the main point. On occasion a key revelation will be so artfully, annoyingly lacking in specifics that you wonder if you’ve skipped a page.

The Light and the Dark, though less About Politics than the other books mentioned above, is somewhat more Political. It’s about Lewis Elliott’s friendship with a dashing, brilliant, emotionally troubled linguist named Roy Calvert, whose specialty is the early writings of Manichaeism, the extinct faith whose name has become shorthand for black-white thinking.

The setting is Cambridge and London in the 1930s. Calvert’s researches take him frequently to Berlin, where in his naturally gregarious way he makes friends in both low and high society: among the Bohemian fringe as well as in the ruling Nazi elite.

Back home he is reproached by some of his fellow academics for his apparent Nazi sympathies, but such sentiments are not uncommon at a time when many moderate Englishmen are still eager to believe that war can be avoided. Calvert is protected by his reputation for frivolity. At the faculty dining table he amuses himself by teasing the more hawkish fellows; with a straight face he suggests that the college’s Jewish scholars be reclassified as “Welsh by statute” to remove a potential source of friction with the Germans. And yet he’s personally unprejudiced, twits his Nazi friends openly about their “mad” Jewish policy, and at some personal risk and expense helps a family of German Jews resettle in England.

Inviting the narrator to visit him in Berlin, Calvert opens up about his hopes for the regime:

The future [said Calvert] would be in German hands. There would be great suffering on the way, they might end in a society as dreadful as the worst of this present one: but there was a chance – perhaps a better chance than any other – that in time, perhaps in our life time, they would create a brilliant civilisation.

“If they succeed,” said Roy, “everyone will forget the black spots. In history success is the only virtue.”

To us this sounds callous and nuts, but Calvert knows that it will be difficult for Elliott to refute without being hypocritical; it so closely parallels the arguments of their pro-Soviet friends. [1]

(As a real-life example, here’s Snow’s contemporary, the poet Stephen Spender, remembering in The God That Failed what he believed as a young Communist in 1930s England:

One ceases to be inhibited by pity for the victims of revolution. … These lives have become abstractions in an argument in which the present is the struggle, and the future is Communism – a world where everyone will, eventually, be free. … It is “humanitarian” weakness to think too much about the victims. The point is to fix one’s eyes on the goal, and then one is freed from the horror and anxiety – quite useless in any case – which inhibit the energies of the liberal mind.)

Calvert, though himself intellectually subtle and temperamentally moderate, is attracted to simple and radical solutions. He is fond of a paradox (apparently a paraphrase of a famous line of the Cambridge clergyman Charles Simeon) that “the truth lies at both extremes. But never in the middle.” We see that his attraction to Nazism is connected to his religious yearnings – an atheist despite himself, he is terrified by the implications of free will, and suspects that he and others would be happier with their choices constrained. He perceives a germ of good sense at the core of the Nazi’s authoritarian philosophy which allows him to forgive their excesses.

It’s fascinating to hear such a likable character propound a tolerant view of Nazism, a view which must have been widespread in pre-war England but which now is so utterly abominated that it’s given voice only by cranks. As I’ve written before, despite its current reputation as a cesspool of drooling halfwits, had Nazism lasted longer as a governing philosophy it would inevitably, like Soviet Communism, have accumulated a vast library of subtle encomiums by anti-bourgeois intellectuals. People are capable of believing any implausible thing, and clever people are both better than the rest of us at coming up with good arguments for implausible beliefs, and more likely to be attracted to beliefs that give them the scope to demonstrate their cleverness. (The question, in this as in any other age, is whether our prevailing belief system is likely to stand up to the judgement of history, or whether we too will be revealed to have been taken in by a lot of fine-sounding razzmatazz.)

Calvert never exactly renounces his sympathies; when war breaks out he falls patriotically back into line. He tries retrospectively to explain to his friend his mixed feelings:

Roy said that he had never quite been able to accept the Reich. It was a feeble simulacrum of his search for God. Yet he knew what it was like to believe in such a cause. “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last hope.” I said that was unrealistic: by the nature of things, they could not have been different. But he turned on me:

“It’s as realistic as what you hope for. Even if [the Germans] lose, the future isn’t going the way you think. Lewis, this is where your imagination doesn’t seem to work. But you’ll live to see it. It will be dreadful.”

As usual, Snow doesn’t spell out what Calvert means. I’d guess that in his disdain for the comfortable middle way Calvert dreads the triumph of Nietzsche’s Last Man, that stunted mediocrity incapable of higher aspirations than securing the safety of his own supple and well-moisturized hide:

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,” – say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled – otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

“We have discovered happiness,” – say the Last Men, and they blink.

–from Thus Spake Zarathustra

Nearly eighty years later we’re much further along the road to Last Manhood, and it’s a good bet that if Calvert had lived to see it he would have despised our culture of trigger warnings, social media mobs, and corporate thought policing. Whether the progressive Lewis Elliott would have adapted better to present-day pieties is unclear. In his broad-minded way he would no doubt have found much to praise about them; but I suspect he would have felt a twinge of compunction when he saw some so-called Nazi being harried from his career for threatening the highly-evolved sensibilities of the modern Left.

M.

1. Update, Feb. 20, 2019. In Corridors of Power, a later entry in the Strangers and Brothers series set at the height of the Cold War, the narrator unconsciously echoes his old friend’s words. By this time, Lewis Elliott is a high-ranking civil servant in the defense bureaucracy whose anti-nuclear leanings attract suspicion from his own side’s spooks. Grilled about his youthful friendship with avowed Communists, he replies:

“I’m not emotional about the operations of politics. But about the hopes behind them, I’m deeply so. I thought it was obvious that the Revolution in Russia was going to run into some major horrors of power. I wasn’t popular with [my Communist friends] for telling them so. But that isn’t all. I always believed that the power was working two ways. They were doing good things with it, as well as bad. When once they got some insight into the horrors, then they might create a wonderful society. I now believe that, more confidently than I ever did. How it will compare with the American society, I don’t know. But as long as they both survive, I should have thought that many of the best human hopes stand an excellent chance.”

—

Update, July 28, 2020: Added cover image and linked to Bibliography page.

—

Last year I voiced my revulsion at all the trendy talk about Nazi-punching, and more recently I expressed some sympathy for racist idiots. Nietzsche’s Last Man has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few years; witness this 2016 post about time travel, immigration, and the End of History which, I’ve come to realize, pretty much sums up everything I currently believe, making all my subsequent commentary redundant.

I take a stand!

(An early draft of this essay bore the cheeky title, “Come to think of it, I guess I am a Nazi sympathizer”. But why invite needless trouble?)

The other day I removed, from a telephone pole by my building, a sticker advertising the white nationalist website Stormfront.org. The first time I passed by I thought, “Meh, none of my business”; but on second thought I decided I ought to do what I could to forestall the inevitable media meltdown when someone else noticed it – “Community Rallies To Oppose Wave Of Racism” – so on my way home I stopped by the pole and, after checking to make sure no-one was watching, scraped off the sticker. I assume it was left by one of the little jackasses from the nearby high school who pass under my window hooting and swearing every day at three o’clock.

I felt a little conflicted about what I’d done, because I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist; I think even the most imbecilic speech ought to be tolerated, even in sticker form. It never crossed my mind to tear down the many posters I saw around town this winter, put up by local socialists, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution; but then, I’m pretty sure the local media won’t be reporting worriedly on the Wave of Communism that all decent people must stand against. My removal of the Stormfront sticker was purely self-serving; as someone who harbours mildly subversive thoughts, I was trying to prevent the more dimwitted of my fellow subversives from making the rest of us look bad. So it seems I’m not all that committed to free speech after all.

While I have no sympathy for Nazism, an idiotic creed, I do sympathize with Nazis; or rather, I sympathize with people who believe all manner of idiotic things, having believed various idiotic things at various times in my life; and being unable to declare with certainty that I don’t believe one or more idiotic things right now.

I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual Nazi. There was an older kid – eighteen, but no bigger than a fourth grader, with leather jacket, long hair, and a wispy moustache – who when we were introduced by a mutual friend greeted me with, “Are you a Jew?”

“N-no,” I replied. Only then did he extend his tiny hand to shake mine, in the “clasped-thumbs” style favoured at that time and place by stoners, longhairs, and cool kids. (Sometimes the clasped-thumbs shake would be combined with a finger snap, a trick I never mastered.)

How sincere was his anti-Semitism? We lived in a part of Canada where you could greet a hundred people a day with “Are you a Jew?” without much danger of encountering an actual Jew. It was a low-risk, low-effort way for that physically unprepossessing kid to stake out the most outrageously antisocial position in a subcaste where antisocial attitudes were celebrated and rewarded.

I fantasized afterward about standing up to the shrimp: “Sure, I’m a Jew. You wanna make something of it?” (I’m not a Jew.) But what would that have accomplished? Despite his weirdly high status among the longhair crowd, it’s obvious in retrospect that the kid was mildly mentally retarded. I think his friends played along partly because he was known to be unstable and maybe dangerous, but also out of something akin to pity. To defy him would’ve meant risking a shanking; but even if he’d backed down, it would’ve meant humiliating him in front of the only group of weirdos who’d tolerate him.

That’s the only incident of overt anti-Semitism I can recall from my youth in small-town Saskatchewan in the 1980s and ’90s; though for a time it was a fad with some of my high school friends to use “jew” as a verb meaning “to rip off” – “that vending machine jewed me out of a loonie” – which got on my nerves, but I was too cowardly to say anything. I’m quite conflict-averse, and I was as uncomfortable defending an unpopular position at sixteen, when I was the most bleeding-heart among my redneck friends, as I am at forty-one, when I’m the most redneck among my bleeding-heart friends.

I used to feel ashamed of my cowardice, but looking back I’m glad I never took an off-puttingly self-righteous stand over what I now realize was harmless posing. It only took a couple years of university for most of my redneck friends to turn into censorious progressives of the modern type; and if the pendulum ever swings back, and mild homophobia and racial slurs again become signals of coolness, my friends who’ve conveniently forgotten the then-fashionable things they claimed to believe in high school will forget the fashionable things they claim to believe now. My beliefs, too, have mutated over time, in response to the changing political climate, and it’s probably some quirk in my character that makes me feel like I always wind up wearing a fur coat on a sunny day.

But to return to my small Saskatchewan town: the one time I recall speaking up was in junior high when I learned that a few of my friends, in my absence, had spent the evening drinking Slurpees and vandalizing the playground equipment at a local elementary school with symbols of rebellion: heavy metal band logos, anarchy signs, and KKKs. “Mmm,” I responded mildly, when my friend told me what he’d been up to the night before. “I dunno. I mean, what if people think you’re serious about all that KKK stuff?”

“Yeah,” my friend agreed – a little abashed, I believe – and we never spoke of it again. Back then people kept incidents like this in perspective. The newspapers weren’t notified, the graffiti was painted over a few days later, and probably only one or two little native kids, as opposed to every native person in the city, decided based on my friends’ asinine prank that white society was irredeemably prejudiced against them.

My preference is to refrain from throwing gasoline on fires. Groups scrape along best when there’s a consensus that we should ignore, rather than amplify, each other’s idiocies; and the idiots themselves, I feel, are likelier to respond to quiet reason than angry howling. But then, I’m pretty sheltered. I recall chatting with a Scottish visitor who told me and my friends about the low-level conflict between Catholics and Protestants in her country, and how brawling among sectarian gangs was an ordinary rite of passage for working-class males. “Gosh, I’m glad we don’t have anything like that in Canada,” I said; and a fellow Canadian piped up that, well, actually, his older brother and his cronies had regularly gotten into rumbles with native gangs back in the day. I’ve never heard directly from anyone who participated in such rumbles. Maybe, as I rather supect, my friend was exaggerating; or my friend’s older brother was exaggerating; maybe even our Scottish visitor was exaggerating. But such violence does happen, whether or not I find it believable; and having gone through it would probably make one snigger at the impotent finger-wagging of armchair geezers like me.

Why am I sharing any of this? I guess I’m hoping that, since I did my small part to Oppose a Wave of Racism, the Commies will cut me a bit of slack when they take over.

M.

—

Last year, inspired by a poster left on another nearby piece of urban infrastructure, I worried about progressives’ ever more flexible definition of Nazism; and the year before that, I wondered whether pre-war German Nazi Party members were really as dumb as their opponents claimed.

The old, illogical morality: The Kindly Ones and Darkness at Noon.

Note: This is the third in a cache of old abandoned blog posts I recently recovered from a rarely-used laptop. The “project” I allude to below is the novel I’m currently wrapping up, about which more soon.

—

In preparation for a project I’m thinking of attempting, I’ve been doing some research on life behind the Iron Curtain. To this end I was recently reading Anne McElvoy’s The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life and Legacy, in which she interviews Wolfgang Leonhard, a “former comrade” of longtime East German ruler Erich Honecker. Leonhard recalls of the leader-to-be:

He had the main characteristic I would consider essential for success as a young functionary: absolutely average intelligence. In a communist party on the Stalinist model, you have to have a good memory and an ability to absorb reams of resolutions and turn them into directives, so you need a certain basic intelligence. You can’t be plain dumb, as was required under the Nazis, because the ideology is much more complicated. But you can’t be too intelligent, because people of above-average intellect have a tendency to challenge the arcana, to spot its flaws, which makes them disobedient.

Did the Nazis require their members to be “plain dumb”? To some degree we must defer to the old comrade’s experience. As a youth in the Third Reich, Leonhard must have met many Nazis, and maybe they were on the whole dumber than his Communist acquaintances – although one doubts his impartiality. Certainly Nazism and its Fascist sister-governments had their share of intelligent sympathizers, from Martin Heidegger to Robert Brasillach to Ezra Pound; and I suspect if those governments had remained on the scene longer, they would eventually have accumulated a body of Western intellectual fellow-travellers like those that forgave and justified all Communism’s “mistakes” and “excesses”. But it’s hard to say.

Leonhard’s comment brought to mind a scene in The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell’s disturbing novel of World War II. Our narrator and “hero”, the intelligent and cultured SS officer Dr. Maximilian Aue, as punishment for having displeased his superior, is transferred to Stalingrad just as the Germans are losing control of that city to the Soviet counterattack. There, amid the rubble and sickness and squalor, he interviews a captured enemy politruk – a Communist Party member assigned to a Soviet army unit to build morale and ensure obedience to the party line. Their conversation runs for several pages and makes a useful crib sheet on the differences and similarities between the two totalitarianisms. Here’s how the politruk sums it up:

“[O]ur ideologies have this basic thing in common, which is that they are both essentially deterministic; racial determinism for you, economic determinism for us, but determinism all the same. We both believe that man doesn’t freely choose his fate, but that it is imposed on him by nature or history. And we both draw the conclusion that objective enemies exist, that certain categories of human beings can and must legitimately be eliminated not for what they’ve done or even thought, but for what they are. In that, we differ only in the definition of the categories: for you, the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, and even, I believe, the mentally ill; for us, the Kulaks, the bourgeois, the Party deviationists. At bottom, it’s the same thing; we both reject the homo economicus of the capitalists, the egotistical, individualistic man trapped in his illusion of freedom, in favor of a homo faber: Not a self-made man but a made man, you might say in English, or a man yet to be made, since communist man must still be constructed, educated, just like your perfect National Socialist. And this man-to-be-made justifies the pitiless liquidation of everything that is uneducable, and thus justifies the NKVD and the Gestapo, gardeners of the social body, who tear out the weeds and force the good plants to follow their stakes.”

This politruk, like Aue, has been sent to the front after falling out of favour with his superiors. He bears a passing resemblance to Rubashov, the main character in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a high-ranking commissar and veteran of the Revolution who is imprisoned on trumped-up charges and tried as a “Party deviationist”.

In his diary Rubashov writes:

We [Communists] have learnt history more thoroughly than the others. We differ from all others in our logical consistency. We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation. Therefore we concentrated all our efforts on preventing error and destroying the very seeds of it. Never in history has so much power over the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands as in our case. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death.
…
History put me where I stood; I have exhausted the credit which she accorded me; if I was right I have nothing to repent of, if wrong, I will pay.

Following this logic, Rubashov convinces himself of the historical necessity of his own annihilation. He willingly confesses to the absurd charges against him and abases himself at his show trial.

Just as Darkness at Noon illustrates the thought processes by which an intelligent man can arrive at the conclusion that his own life must be sacrificed to the vaunted triumph of the Classless Society, The Kindly Ones shows how an intelligent man can convince himself of the necessity of exterminating whole ethnicities deemed inconvenient to the security of the state. At one point Dr. Aue accepts an invitation to dinner at Adolf Eichmann’s apartment and finds himself instructing his host on the finer points of their shared ideology – specifically, how it can be reconciled with Kant’s categorical imperative. (At his 1961 trial in Israel, Eichmann would arouse indignation by proclaiming, as Hannah Arendt recounts in Eichmann in Jerusalem,

that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.

Arendt expresses surprise that Eichmann, questioned by a judge on this point, is able to supply “an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative”.)

At his dinner party, Eichmann listens eagerly as his educated guest explains how Kant’s philosophy of individual will can be reconciled with the Führerprinzip, the principle that in the Third Reich “the Führer’s words have the force of law”:

“You have to live out your National Socialism by living your own will as if it were the Führer’s … Whoever only obeys orders like an automaton, without examining them critically to penetrate their inner necessity, does not work closer to the Führer; most of the time, he distances himself from him. … All law must rest on a foundation. Historically, this has always been a fiction or an abstraction – God, the King, or the People. Our great advance has been to base the legal concept of the Nation on something concrete and inalienable: the Volk, whose collective will is expressed by the Führer who represents it. When you say Frei sein ist Knecht sein [To be free is to be a vassal], you have to understand that the foremost vassal of all is precisely the Führer, since he is nothing but pure service. We are not serving the Führer as such, but as the representative of the Volk, we serve the Volk and must serve it as the Führer serves it, with total abnegation. That’s why, confronted with painful tasks, we have to bow down, master our feelings, and carry them out with firmness.”

It’s possible that the mental convolutions necessary to overcoming the evident contradictions of Communism and National Socialism make those ideologies more appealing to intelligent people; it is precisely their affront to common sense that makes them attractive to those, like Rubashov and Dr. Aue, who justly perceive themselves as uncommon. No particular genius is necessary to observe that mass murder is wrong. It takes a nimble mind to argue that the grand march of history dictates the necessity of submitting to this distasteful duty.

Rubashov, on the eve of his execution, begins to doubt the result to which his reasoning has led him:

For forty years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. … And where had it landed him? Premises of unimpeachable truth had led to a result which was completely absurd … Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.

Perhaps not, but how are we to know when to abandon logic except by logically analyzing the problem? Some like to imagine there’s an invisible thread wound around our hearts that will, if we let it, guide us back to the light when logic leads us astray. Call this thread God, or conscience, or common humanity. But the history of the last century demonstrates that the thread, if it exists, is easy to sever, and that far from feeling lost without it, we gloat over our freedom.

M.

—

Update, July 27, 2020: Added cover images and linked to Bibliography page.

So did the Red Army really singlehandedly defeat the Third Reich?

This bugs me. It’s Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing in The National Interest:

The idea that the United States was the savior of Europe in World Wars I and II is popular in some circles on both sides of the Atlantic, but is demonstrably false. Between the formal entry of the United States into the Great War in April 1917 and the last German offensive in March 1918, hundreds of thousands of Entente soldiers were killed, mainly British in the summer and autumn of 1917 after the frightful slaughter of the French army in the spring; and in that period of nearly a year, fewer than two hundred Americans died. In the course of that war, the Frenchmen killed defending their country were twice as numerous as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war taken together from 1776 until today. As a matter of historical fact, the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies. Even though over one hundred thirty-five thousand American GIs died – a startling figure today – between D day and V-E day, more than half a million Russians were killed.

If Wheatcroft had expressed his point less categorically – if he’d written that the Third Reich was defeated primarily by the Red Army – I wouldn’t have blinked. I’ve read this before; I thought it was the conventional wisdom. But seeing it described as “a matter of historical fact” made me pause. How do we measure the “historical fact” of the Allies’ relative contributions to the victory over Nazism? [1]

According to Wheatcroft, it’s measured by counting the number of casualties each country suffered. The Soviets lost more soldiers than the Americans; therefore the Soviets deserve the larger share of the victory.

Strange, I would’ve thought the measure of military success was the number of enemy soldiers you killed.

It’s true that the Soviet Union sacrificed more to defeat Hitler than any other country. But much of that sacrifice was wasted. Millions of Soviets died through the incompetence and brutality of their own political masters. It was Stalin’s blindness to Hitler’s pre-invasion manoeuvres that allowed the Germans to occupy Russia’s industrial heartland at a stroke. Only then, with reluctance, did Stalin shift his attention from killing his own citizens to killing Germans. His tactics, if they can be dignified with that name, involved throwing masses of underequipped men virtually under the treads of invading panzers. To retreat was a crime against the motherland: in 1941 and ’42, according to the historian Dmitri Volkogonov, 157,593 men were executed for “cowardice”. [2]

(How many Americans were executed for desertion in World War II? One: Eddie Slovik. Were the Americans that much braver than their Soviet allies? Of course not – thousands in fact deserted – but the US Army was more prudent in its valuation of a soldier’s life.)

This doesn’t diminish the Soviets’ contribution to the war effort, which was vast and decisive. In fact it’s even more marvelous what they accomplished, given the handicaps imposed by their leaders. Without the Soviet contribution, the western democracies probably couldn’t have defeated Hitler’s armies on their own. But could the Soviets, fighting on their own, have defeated Hitler – say, if the democracies had capitulated after the fall of France?

***

Perhaps a better way to compare the effectiveness of the western and eastern armies is not to compare Allied deaths but to compare German deaths. Estimates vary widely, but since I’m looking for a ratio rather than a total, one source will do as well as another. For military deaths only:

Killed by Soviet Union	Killed by other Allies [3]
2,742,909	534,683

This limited comparison (which excludes casualties among Italian and other Axis forces, as well as Germans killed in the Balkans, Scandinavia, and Germany itself [4]) suggests that the Red Army was roughly 5.5 times as lethal as the other Allied forces combined. This is a somewhat more convincing argument for Wheatcroft’s claim that “the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies”.

However. At the end of the war, the Allied democracies held over twice as many German prisoners of war as the Soviets – 7.7 millions versus 3.1 million, according to this chart.  This makes sense, because the war in the east was far more brutal. Soviet soldiers were likelier to execute prisoners, and German soldiers were likelier to fight to the bitter end, knowing their chance of surviving Soviet captivity was slim. At the close of the war, as defeat became inevitable, German strategy was based partly on the recognition that their countrymen would be better off surrendering to the Americans or Brits.

Still, conceding that a POW has been removed from combat just as effectively as a KIA, let’s reevaluate those figures:

Killed or captured by Soviet Union	Killed or captured by other Allies
5,870,289	8,201,683

By this calculation, the Allied democracies were almost one and a half times as effective at neutralizing German soldiers as their Red Army counterparts.

But those POW figures are distorted by the fact that at the end of the war, most German military units surrendered to whichever occupying power they happened to find themselves facing. Maybe a still better way to compare Soviet and Anglo-American military effectiveness would be to add up casualties and POWs taken in action.

This page offers some insight. I’ve combined the data from Tables 5 and 6:

	Killed in action	Missing	KIA + missing
Eastern front:	1,105,987	1,018,365	2,124,352
West + southwest:	157,523	603,695	761,488

(These data omit the final months of the war, and also exclude Navy and Air Force deaths.) Note that on Germany’s eastern front the number of confirmed deaths slightly exceeds the number of missing, while in the west and southwest (i.e. western Europe, Italy, and Africa) the number of missing is almost four times the number of confirmed deaths. I interpret this to mean that the bulk of the missing in the west and southwest were taken prisoner. [5]

If that’s true, then about 26% of German ground troops were removed from action, one way or another, by the democratic Allies. Throw in naval and air casualties, most of which were sustained in western Europe and the Mediterranean, and you’ve got the western democracies responsible for perhaps 30% of German manpower losses through the end of January, 1945 – which doesn’t include the final push into Germany.

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Of course, this is only one way to compare the wartime contributions of the Soviet Union and western Europe, and I recognize that it’s incomplete. Another way of looking at it would be to say, “Regardless of how many German soldiers the Soviets killed or captured, they tied up the bulk of the Third Reich’s military capacity.” It’s no great achievement to take a German bullet, but that’s one less bullet the Germans have to fire elsewhere. The Red Army held off the Germans at the critical point in the war, allowing the Americans and Brits to get organized and open up a second front.

To admit that the Nazis were defeated by the efforts of all the Allies doesn’t take anything away from the sacrifices of the Soviet Union in its Great Patriotic War. Millions of Russians died so that millions of Americans didn’t have to. But the suggestion that the United States was somehow an idle bystander in the conflict is nonsensical and offensive. [6]

Am I being too hard on Geoffrey Wheatcroft? He’s only trying to debunk the myth that American GIs dealt Nazism its greatest blow on the cliffs of Omaha Beach. The specific comment that he’s responding to comes from Pascal Bruckner in his book The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Bruckner writes (as quoted by Wheatcroft) that

without American help in 1917, and especially in 1944, [Europe] would have been purely and simply wiped off the map […]

Obviously Bruckner is being hyperbolical here – even a Nazi-dominated Europe would still have been Europe, “purely and simply” in the geographical sense. But Bruckner doesn’t attribute the entire victory to the Americans, he only says their help staved off certain defeat. I think this is a less disputable position than the one Wheatcroft is advancing as “a matter of historical fact”.

What’s more, a peek at the original text (courtesy of Google Books) reveals that Wheatcroft is leaving a crucial clause out of Bruckner’s argument. Here’s the sentence in full (emphasis is mine):

Europe suffers, with respect to its American cousin, from the debtor’s complex. It is clearly understood, at least in Western Europe, that without American help in 1917, and especially in 1944, it would have been purely and simply wiped off the map or permanently colonized by Soviet troops.

Bruckner’s untruncated point is that a western Europe left to shift for itself in the 1940s would have been screwed either way – if not screwed by Hitler, then screwed by Stalin, like Poland and Czechoslovakia and all the other countries “liberated” by the Red Army. The presence of three and a half million American servicemen and women (and billions of dollars of aid) helped assure the survival of European freedom, in its western half at least.

It bugs me that this truth bugs Geoffrey Wheatcroft so much.

M.

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1. I’m not going to analyze Wheatcroft’s comments about World War I, because I know less about that conflict, but I suspect he’s on firmer ground there.

2 This and other details of Stalin’s ghastly war leadership can be found in Martin Amis’ Koba The Dread (pp. 195-212). See also Part I, Chapter 6 of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

3. “Killed by other Allies” includes all German deaths in France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Africa, plus those killed in the Battle of the Atlantic. “Killed by Soviets” includes figures from the eastern front only. I’ve excluded deaths in the Balkans and Scandinavia as they don’t fall neatly into either column, and anyway the numbers aren’t big enough to significantly skew the totals.

4. This is a big caveat. According to the same chart, 1,230,045 German soldiers died in the defense of their homeland in 1945. Assuming they died in the same ratio as those killed in the wider war – about 5.5 killed by Soviets for every 1 killed by the other Allies – then the totals look something like this:

Killed by Soviet Union	Killed by other Allies
3,772,297	735,340

Killed or captured by Soviet Union	Killed or captured by other Allies
6,899,677	8,402,340

5. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting these figures. If you can think of another explanation for the far higher rate of “missing” troops in the western and southwestern theatres, please let me know.

6. I’ve left out of this discussion the armaments, food, and other assistance supplied to the Allies by the United States under the lend-lease program. I can’t find a webpage that discusses in any but the vaguest terms what percentage of Soviet, British, and other Allied war materiel was provided by the USA. This page – the third chapter of a pamphlet called How Shall Lend-Lease Accounts Be Settled? published by the US Army in 1945 – provides an overview of lend-lease, then adds:

This does not mean that our major allies – except for the revived French army which was almost completely equipped under lend-lease – were mainly dependent on American supplies. It has been estimated that lend-lease provided only 10 percent of British war equipment, and certainly a lesser proportion of Soviet materiel.

But in 1945, for domestic political reasons, the US government had reason to downplay how much the Soviet Union’s military capabilities had been augmented by its support. According to this page, the United States provided $11 billion worth of supplies to the Soviet war effort, in the form of locomotives, tanks, aircraft, trucks, and artillery, amounting to “almost 10% of all Russian war materiel.”

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Update, July 27, 2020: Reconnected a number of dead links, but some of my sources seem to have disappeared from the internet since 2010.