Good and Evil in Wartime

Moral Combat: A History of World War II, by Michael Burleigh; HarperCollins, 2010, 576 pages, $69.99.

War is a cruel business and so a degree of moral ambivalence is always going to be a part of the whole picture. All the same, in Moral Combat Michael Burleigh argues that the attempt by some historians to re-apportion criminality and victimhood in the Second World War has gone too far. Burleigh finds his own moral bearings by beginning with the obvious: responsibility for the Second World War and its attendant horror lies with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.

All three regimes were predatory, but none more so than the Third Reich. The chapter “The Rape of Poland” illustrates all too clearly the diabolical consequences of Nazi ideology on humanity. The German Labour Front, for instance, took German soldiers on leave through the Warsaw Ghetto to satisfy their ghoulish inquisitiveness: “As time passed, these visitors inevitably saw corpses lying in the streets, waiting to be taken by cart to the cemetery, which was the high point of each trip.” So defiled were they by Nazism, the perpetrators of some of the most notorious murders in history could see their killing as “a form of racial altruism”.

The inhabitants of Soviet-occupied Poland fared only marginally better. For example, 1,250,000 Polish citizens were deported to the frozen interior of the Soviet Union, half of them dying on the journey. In many ways the brutal interrogation techniques of the NKVD and the SS were alike, and Burleigh notes that during the time of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the Soviets handed over German communist exiles and thousands of Polish POWs to the Nazis. Nevertheless, after Operation Barbarossa, Britain and the USA formed an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not an ideal arrangement, and involved all manner of compromises on the part of the West, including the establishment of the Eastern bloc at the conclusion of the war, but it was the price that had to be paid to destroy the evil of Nazism.

The defence of such compromises is at the heart of Burleigh’s book. In the fight against Nazism the choices offered were not between right and wrong so much as between the lesser of two evils. The only other alternative—not to fight—was no alternative at all. Burleigh characterises Chamberlain’s response to Hitler in the wake of the 1938 Anschluss as “the sort of rebuke one might have delivered to a schoolboy who had stolen, rather than asked for, an apple from an orchard”. On some level at least, appeasement enabled the subsequent Nazi (and Soviet) occupation of Poland.

The fight had to be taken up to Hitler. Churchill, for all his faults, was the man to lead it. His decision in 1940 not to seek an armistice with Nazi Germany saved the world from a catastrophic fate, but the struggle that ensued involved every kind of hard moral choice. Burleigh insists that any judgments of Churchill’s actions, not to mention Allied Bomber Command’s, have to be made in the context of the narrow options open to him at each turn of events and his desperation not to lose against Nazism. Moral Combat handles the wartime bombing of Germany adroitly and authoritatively. Burleigh acknowledges that miscalculations and even indifference sometimes accompanied German civilian casualties, and yet he is persuasive in arguing the outrageousness of placing Dresden in the same category as the Holocaust.

Moral Combat brilliantly tracks down one moral conundrum after another thrown up by the Second World War. In the struggle to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan few scenarios did not involve risking innocent lives. Burleigh is invariably judicious and knowledgeable in his evaluation of a given event. The 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Anthropoid is a case in point. On the one hand, Heydrich’s death resulted in the slaughter of approximately 5000 innocent people and the destruction of Czechoslovakia’s underground resistance. On the other, it took out an important player in the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution.

The killing of Heydrich had other consequences. German retribution, including the destruction of the village of Lidice, was savage and infamous enough to enlarge “the Allies’ moral capital”. Moreover, the assassination and Nazi response resulted in Britain formally renouncing the Munich Agreement and guaranteeing that the Sudetenland would be returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, and most probably without its ethnic German population. If all this was an unexpected bonus for Czechoslovakia, it still came at the price of 5000 innocent Czechoslovakians—the kind of casualties, Burleigh reminds us, those responsible for the operation “cannot have failed to anticipate”. This was the kind of onerous moral calculation that fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan endlessly demanded. 

Michael Burleigh is sometimes disparaged as a right-wing historian, and yet the analysis in Moral Combat is not ideologically driven—quite the opposite. Nowhere does he impose an ideological position and then try to make the facts fit his case. A genuinely gifted scholar, he is able to bring us an authentic insight into not only how leaders thought and behaved but also how those at “the combat coalface” reacted. Different armies had their own ways of going about the business of war and yet common to every combatant was the dark reality that “killing became a job of work”. What they did not have in common was their response to the experience: “While some people, in later years, regretted having killed, others never gave it another thought, and merged effortlessly back into civilian existence.”

If there were any criticism of Moral Combat it would be that the subtitle, “A History of World War II”, seems more than a little misleading, the focus of the book being far more limited in scope than the subtitle suggests. Burleigh has elsewhere written that this was the publisher’s decision. Certainly his own suggestion, “Good and Evil in World War II”, represents a more accurate description of this eminently readable and valuable book. Michael Burleigh is a voice of informed common sense.  

Daryl McCann reviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Nomad in the September issue.