A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  The morals drawn from this conflict, which killed perhaps around seventy million people (twice as many of them civilians as soldiers), were varied. For the Russians, who lost more both in total and as a percentage of the population of the Soviet Union, it is the Great Patriotic War. At the time it seemed a vindication of Stalin (despite his wobbles early in the war) and of the Red Army, whose victory over the ultimate evil, Nazism, involved few others. For the Americans, it was the war to save democracy, which established the moral and physical hegemony of their nation. For Jews (and many Gentiles) it was the Shoah, or Holocaust, the ultimate ethical failure of European civilization, whose consequence was modern Israel. For many Arabs it was the war that persuaded Europeans to steal their land for the Jews, making the Arabs pay for European guilt. For Germans it was the consequence of their time of madness and for the British their ‘stand alone’ moment, which outshines any of the more dubious episodes of empire, or military reverses.

  And so on. Most people have drawn simple lessons, as we mostly need to. Yet as we gain distance and perspective, many of the first lessons are being revised. The huge ‘Russian’ death-toll also involved the deaths of massive numbers of Ukrainians, Poles and others who were not ethnically Russian; and indeed many of them were killed by Russians. The postwar Stalinist determination to play down the special horror of what happened to European Jewry – ‘Do not divide the dead’ – reduced a dreadful truth to patriotic self-congratulation. Furthermore, the deliberately inflicted famines and mass deportations inside the USSR before 1939 had ravaged vast territories, which were then more vulnerable to German depredation.

  Hitler intended simply to empty vast areas between the Black Sea and the Baltic for German settlers, but Stalin’s treatment of the same area – a ‘breadbasket’ emptied to feed Soviet cities – paved the way. One superb recent study, Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, begins simply: ‘In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.’ They died between 1933 and 1945, and though about half of all the soldiers who died in the Second World War died in this same area, ‘not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty. Most were women, children and the aged; none were bearing weapons; many had been stripped of their possessions, including their clothes.’ Of the fourteen million, roughly two-thirds were killed by the Nazis, and one-third by the Stalinists.

  Add to the account the long period when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany worked together, slicing up Poland and fuelling war, and the huge material help given to the Red Army by the British and Americans once Hitler had invaded, and the story of the Great Patriotic War starts to look rather more complicated. The greatest moral failing of pre-war Nazi Germany was not the collapse of democracy but the campaign to dehumanize Jews, to warp and shrivel empathy so drastically in the minds of the German people that Jewish people became very easy to kill. But if one looks at the campaign run by Lenin and then Stalin to reduce the better-off farmers, the kulaks, to the status of loathsome enemies of the people, was this not similar?

  Kulaks, like Jews, were depicted as coarse, bloated, ridiculous beings. Like the German soldiers, Bolshevik commissars found it very easy to kill kulaks, and incite others to join them. This had started with Bolshevik hatred of the ignorant peasantry. In its emphasis on a ‘merciless war’ to ‘crush’ the enemy and on the celebration of terror, the language of Lenin and his cronies was not dissimilar in tone to Hitler’s at the same time. By the early 1930s under Stalin, hatred of kulaks had been disseminated through posters and campaigns. The behaviour of the Red Brigades ravaging the countryside looking for grain and those who stored it, is strongly reminiscent of German soldiers’ later behaviour: ‘They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray.’24 Mass rape and then starvation followed. Cannibalism was rife. The same ritual humiliations and dehumanizing of Jews and peasants would be practised by the Germans when they arrived a decade later.

  Germany’s own Jews were comparatively few by 1939, and the vast majority of them died not in Germany but in the violated territories to the east. Though six million would die, Hitler’s ‘hunger plan’ for the region meant another thirty to forty million non-Jews were expected to die from starvation, to free their soil for the invaders. Before the Shoah, the Russians had killed much of the intelligentsia and professional leadership of Poland and many of the brighter and more ambitious Ukrainian peasants.

  Once the war started, both the Russian and German armies conducted themselves with astonishing ferocity, mass-raping and murdering civilians in enemy territory and killing prisoners of war. During the first phase of Barbarossa, as many Soviet PoWs were dying as British and US PoWs died during the whole war.25 The Russians would repay the Germans in kind, with mass rapes and shootings as they headed back towards Berlin. Nor was the violence limited to nation against nation. It is thought that more Russian soldiers were killed by their own officers for cowardice or desertion – some three hundred thousand of them – than all the British troops killed during the Second World War.26

  The Great Patriotic War was also a triumph of human willpower, notable for the heroic sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the determined suffering of millions of soldiers. In the end Stalin’s Russia had more military factories, situated far to the east, beyond the German advance and able to churn out far more fighting equipment; and more men; and more land. The Red Army vastly outnumbered the Germans, and overwhelmed them with tanks and aircraft. But the ‘Great Patriotic War’ also left its victor a grey, fearful, stunted and fundamentally pessimistic society. The Soviets would end the war ruling their own enslaved European empire and threaten worldwide nuclear annihilation; but unable to build a decent society.

  The American experience of the war was much easier. It produced the huge industrial boom at home, which raised living standards and set the United States on a firm route to global market domination, which is only now ending. Far fewer Americans died, proportionally and absolutely: around 417,000 in total, against 5.7 million Soviet casualties, or 2.5 per cent of the US’s population in 1939 as compared to around 25 per cent in the case of the USSR (or Japan). Hastings points out that 17,000 Americans lost limbs while fighting – but 100,000 became amputees as a result of industrial accidents at home.27 The US fought the war with growing skill, tenacity and awesome technical advances, but fought it in other people’s countries. This war that never seriously reached US civilians has been remembered for its moral simplicity as ‘the good war’. Yet America could not have won the good war without its ally, Soviet Russia, nor without the survival of another bête noire of US politicians, the British Empire.

  America’s war was dominated by three events. The first was the remorseless destruction of the Japanese in the Pacific, most crucially at the battle of Midway in June 1942, as the US fleets and airpower began to destroy at sea the advances won by Japanese bayonets and infantry on land. This ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb and the occupation of Japan itself. The second, with the British, was the slow and bloody victory of convoys and long-range aircraft against the U-boats in the Atlantic, which allowed the reinforcement of Britain herself and the supplying of the USSR. This in turn led to the third great event, the 1944 invasion of France by US, British and Canadian forces. By then the Americans had turned much of southern England into a vast encampment for US firepower, whence British and American bombers were annihilating German cities. America would end the war unstained by war crimes, optimistic about the future of democracy, and stronger than ever before.

  Inside the US, Japanese citizens were interned, but for many life continued almost normally. There was a huge military-driven industrial boom, which set the seal on Roosevelt’s New Deal e
xpansion of federal government, and a vast expansion of Washington bureaucracy. American women were recruited to work in the factories, giving them opportunities and self-confidence they might not have had in peacetime.

  The British experience of the war was deeply ambiguous. No thoughtful Briton could have missed the message contained in a series of early defeats. Britain and France had gone to war on the basis of the fantasy that they could somehow – nobody knew how – come to Poland’s aid. After an initial quiet spell, the British were humiliated in Norway and then comprehensively defeated by the German blitzkrieg through France. The Battle of Britain saved the islands from the threat of invasion, and the Luftwaffe blitz on British cities produced a remarkable outpouring of solidarity and defiance. But these events could not dispel the poor performance of the British army in Greece and initially in North Africa, nor the humiliation of the Japanese advance almost to the borders of India, after the surrender of Singapore. The defeat of German armies at El Alamein and the increasingly savage bombardment of Germany by RAF Bomber Command, who lost a huge proportion of their aircrew, began to restore national self-confidence, as did the successful invasion of Sicily, then Italy.

  But it was obvious even after D-Day that British power was shrivelling. In the Far Eastern empire, the defeat of white European armies by the Japanese would never be forgotten, while India would go almost as soon as the war was over. By then Britain was virtually bankrupt, deeply in hock to the United States for its war-fighting equipment and even for food. As with defeated France and Holland, the British grip on other parts of the world was fatally weakened. France would lose her empire in Indo-China and North Africa; but for France, the humiliation of that surrender did have a silver lining. Ever since the revolution, France had been struggling between her monarchical history and her more recent secular and republican personality. After the fall of conservative France’s client Nazi state, headquartered at Vichy, this argument effectively ended.

  The Melting of Nations

  Europe had given the world modern nationhood. It had been an ambiguous gift. We have seen how Europeans advanced from living in territories ruled by families to developing a stronger sense of themselves as rival and thoroughly coherent language groups. Monarchies had slowly and painfully given way to representative democracies; mythic pasts had been concocted for the new nations, along with striped flags, wedding-cake parliament buildings and unified legal systems. This way of doing things had been exported first to North America. Then Latin America had taken it up, and Japan too. In Africa, colonial frontier lines from the nineteenth century became national boundaries in the twentieth, as tribal societies reorganized themselves into liberated nations. In the Middle East, Europeans carved nationstates out of the rotting corpse of the Ottoman Empire. Though there were many people around the world who did not think of themselves as members of nations, the European system was so far advanced that it became impossible to imagine it reversed. A world of national identities and passports came together, apparently quite logically, in the United Nations, founded in San Francisco in 1945.

  But just at this moment, when Europeans might have celebrated the global domination of their local political invention, this next world of flags, boundaries, constitutions and presidents, they instead began to try to melt the nation-state away again. The reason was obvious: nationalism had just torn Europe apart.

  In particular, after four modern wars between Frenchmen and Germans – the Napoleonic, the Franco-Prussian, and the two world wars – these countries had to come to a new understanding. In a now divided Germany, nationalism had virtually collapsed. Under Charles de Gaulle, France was rebuilt politically: French presidents would achieve more personal power than politicians anywhere else in modern Europe. France soon cast aside the autocratic and self-intoxicated de Gaulle, but France’s always formidable political class would find in the embryonic European Union a new national purpose. West Germany became the key French ally.

  Committed to very tough financial policies so as to ensure no return to the inflation of the Weimar years, lacking substantive military of their own, and doggedly determined to work their way up from the ashes of 1945, the West Germans, now with their capital in the small town of Bonn, created a success story for which ‘economic miracle’ was a fair description. Other smaller European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg formed a customs union, as did France and Italy. All were beneficiaries of the huge postwar American aid package, the Marshall Plan, which poured food and industrial essentials into the ravaged continent – or rather, into that part of it on the western side of the ‘Iron Curtain’. US motives included the need to stave off Communism and keep the loyalty of Western Europe, but it was a programme of great generosity and wisdom that allowed Europe to recover from the war remarkably quickly.

  The first crucial anti-national step was the formation of the European Iron and Steel Community in 1952 which, though it included Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands too, was essentially a way of integrating French and West German heavy industry so closely that they simply could not go to war again. It was followed by the same six members joining together as a trading union, the European Economic Community, in 1958. Driven by a commission of civil servants from the member states, regular summits of national leaders and later including a parliament, the EEC evolved by stages into today’s European Union of twenty-seven nations. Always the drive was towards supranationalism, a persistent, gentle downward pressure on national independence. It was touted as bringing greater trading efficiency and therefore prosperity, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, Eastern European states rushed to join it as a guarantor of market freedom and enrichment. But the EU’s real aim was to melt the nations down, abolishing national customs posts, using not an army but harmonized laws, common standards and eventually a single currency too, the euro – aimed for since 1969 but not fully launched until 2002.

  This was highly political, but not politics as Europeans had ever known it before. It was the deliberately bland alternative to Europe’s vivid interwar years with their short-lived socialist governments, the Soviet-funded Communist fronts, and the strange glamour of Fascism. ‘Europe’, with its own flag, anthem, aid and foreign policies and central bank, is neither country nor empire. Counted as a single economy, it is the world’s largest, a little ahead of the US, but has no military forces nor any real leader – no visible president in world affairs. Rich, nervous, herbivorous, feared by nobody except nationalists, it is also admired enough to be copied, in a more dilute form, by South Americans and Africans. Yet it has not managed to convince its own people it is really democratic, either. Nor is it. A democracy has always depended on a common sense of belonging, mostly based on a language and shared history; Europe’s nation-states still enjoy too much local support for their citizens to think of themselves as European first, and French – or Greek – or British – second. The economic crisis which hit members of the Euro currency in 2010–12 exposed the tensions dramatically.

  Politics continued, of course, inside the European states. Left-wing Germans in the West abandoned Marxism for a soft social democracy, which also became popular in Scandinavia. In some countries, notably France and Italy, Moscow-backed Communists struggled seriously to gain power, but were pushed back by capitalist parties, generally social democratic or Catholic. In Italy, the Communists later broke with Moscow and developed their own form of ‘Euro-communism’, but never defeated the American-backed centrist parties, who delivered growth and good times, despite being corrupt. Franco’s Spain, and Portugal after the dictatorships of Salazar and Caetano, managed to shed their quasi-Fascist identities and embrace mainstream politics. In Britain, a socialist government ousted Churchill’s Conservatives and went further in the creation of a welfare state than ever before; but it had gone by 1951, after which Britain too experienced a long period of centre-right government. France, Britain, Belgium and Portugal all expended much political energy struggling with the problems of dec
olonization – often a barely dignified scuttle.

  The war, which had opened in a Europe dominated by dictators and had become a war of empires, produced a Europe of committees, self-consciously managing to get by without political heroes; and shorn of empire. British critics of the European project, referring to its political capital in Brussels, spoke of the ‘Belgian empire’, but this was at least partly a joke. If it was an empire, it was one whose colonies had come voluntarily, even eagerly, under its embrace, and whose impact on the rest of the world was minimal. World influence was anyway something that postwar Europeans mostly shrank from. Culturally, and in her business attitudes, Europe became a follower of America. In other circumstances the US would surely have also risen to dominate Europe. But the war hastened this dramatically. America, which had grown a mighty state apparatus first in response to the Depression, and then in war, was handed a global role that many Americans would have regarded with incredulity and alarm just seven years earlier. But this was the inevitable consequence of America’s new weapon.

  The Missing City

  In the auditorium of a small hastily built town for some six thousand people in the desert high country of New Mexico, a tall, gangling man in his early forties pushed his way through the crowd. It was the afternoon of 6 August 1945. The man climbed onto the stage, then turned and looked down. He paused. Then he put his hands together over his head in the traditional boxer’s fist-pump of triumph. A ragged cheer went up. He told the crowd he was proud of what they’d achieved together. Later on, people would disperse for parties; but some did not feel like partying. Some just hung around and talked about what they had done.

  The man was Robert Oppenheimer. The town was Los Alamos. The crowd were the people, scientists, soldiers and helpers who had made the world’s first atom bomb. And what they had achieved a few hours previously was the death by burning, radiation and debris of seventy thousand Japanese civilians in the city of Hiroshima. The total death-toll would rise fast through cancers and other effects to as many as two hundred thousand.