Were we any better than the Nazis?

Sam Leith

HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 566, ISBN 9781847372741 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In July 1940, Hitler issued what Nicholson Baker calls ‘a final appeal to reason’. ‘The continuation of this war,’ he said in a speech, ‘will only end with the complete destruction of one of the two warring parties . . . I see no reason that should compel us to continue this war.’ ‘It’s too tantalising, since there’s no shadow of a doubt we will reject any such suggestion,’ Frances Partridge wrote in her diary afterwards, adding the savagely deflating rider: ‘Now I suppose Churchill will again tell the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and then we shall proceed to do so.’ If this fascinating and upsetting book is the story of anything, it is above all the story of Winston Churchill telling the world that we are going to die on the hills and on the seas, and of people then doing so — and dying, too, in the forests and in the valleys, the ghettos and in the cities, in the air and in tunnels under the ground.

Human Smoke is not a conventional history. Rather, it is, as Simon Winchester describes it, ‘a meticulously curated catalogue of text’. Relying principally on primary sources — diaries, public speeches and documents, and newspaper reports — Baker has assembled a series of prose snapshots in chronological order. The first is from 1892, but the bulk deal with the beginning of the second world war, up to the end of 1941.

‘Was it a “good war”? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?’ Baker asks in his afterword. ‘Those were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.’ Many of this book’s readers will suspect that its author had a pretty good idea what answer he expected when first he sat down.

Baker ostentatiously smothers his usual sharp and puckish style in favour of neutralsounding reportage: ‘Winston Churchill published a newspaper article. It was 8 February, 1920.’ But this book could scarcely be an angrier or more polemical argument for pacifism. It achieves its effects pointillistically. The editorialising is there in the selection and juxtaposition of facts, quotes and stories rather than in the author’s voice.

Since Winston Churchill is still widely regarded as the man without whose doughty stand against Nazi Evil we would all be speaking German, he is Baker’s biggest target. And, boy, does he go to town. The Churchill presented here is infantile, capricious, egomaniacal and sybaritic — a ruthless militarist excited by war, careless of the lives of his own and enemy civilians alike, and intoxicated by his own rhetoric. ‘His real tyrant is the glittering phrase,’ the Australian Prime Minister noted, ‘so attractive to his mind that awkward facts may have to give way.’ After the declaration of war in 1939, Churchill enthused disgustingly: ‘The glory of Old England . . . instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being.’ Baker quotes Gandhi’s view that Churchillism and Hitlerism differ in degree more than they differ in kind.

The standard squawk of protest will be that Baker is indulging the unforgivable sin of ‘moral equivalence’. I don’t think he is — though he wades in exceptionally deep waters. He is indulging, we can say, in ‘moral comparison’. He is interested above all in trying to find a way to step to one side of the endless rhetorical circles by which ends justify means, and the means of the other side justify making your means your ends. He is interested in the self-affirming pathology of violence, and in the ways that a war, waged by all means deemed necessary by its leaders, became on both sides a racist war of extermination. Beyond any doubt, there were crazed symmetries, because both sides believed that the answer to violence was more violence. Canting references to ‘peace-loving’ nations driven to take up arms by intolerable aggression were belied by the bloodthirsty reality. ‘Peace offensive’ is a term used with great pungency here; as is talk of the ‘moral effect’ on civilians of indiscriminate bombing. The one common enemy Churchill and Hitler had were people who didn’t want to kill at all. Pacifists and humanitarians were regarded on both sides as a pernicious threat — to be suppressed in print and interned in person.

The two chief evils Human Smoke addresses in most detail are both things that the Allies took the lead on: bombardment and blockade. Both were methods of war aimed at civilians. Both caused incredible suffering. Both were sold on a series of lies. Both did not work. The response in both cases was to step them up.

As refugees and civilian populations in Belgium, Poland, Norway and Holland faced starvation, Churchill refused to let food relief through the blockade. He told Parliament that fats would be used by the enemy to make bombs, potatoes used to make fuel, and that — less plausibly — ‘the plastic materials now so largely used in the construction of aircraft are made of milk’.

In October 1941, Herbert Hoover asked:

Is the Allied cause any further advanced today because of this starvation of children? Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if those children had been saved? Are Britain’s children better fed today because these millions of former allied children have been hungry or died? Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?

The record of the bombing was similar. In 1941 it was estimated that only one in five British bombers placed its payload ‘within 75 square miles of its assigned target’. ‘Not more than one per cent’ of bombs hit their military targets — so targets were selected in order that the bombs that missed would hit civilians rather than be ‘wasted’. And what were the results? By May 1941, there had been ‘no collapse of civilian morale, no revolutionary unrest, no industrial taproot cut’. What was needed? Why, more and bigger bombs, more dead civilians.

Was it a war fought to prevent the persecution of Jews? It was not. Jewish refugees were not welcomed in any great numbers anywhere, and when war started, the vast majority of those summarily interned were just those refugees. British propagandists, where they were to show images of suffering, were instructed to concentrate on ‘indisputably innocent people . . . not with violent political opponents. And not with the Jews.’ As things got worse for Germany, they got exponentially worse for its Jewish population. Rations in the ghettos plummeted, furs were expropriated in the dead of winter and Jewish families evicted from their homes to make way for Aryans dispossessed by the bombing.

This book asks huge questions, and hints at answers. Did Roosevelt actively court the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring America into the war? Did Churchill have a hand in the fact that nobody in Coventry was warned about the devastating imminent bombardment? The one it moves tentatively towards is: did the second world war accelerate or even bring about the Final Solution?

These are serious questions — but by not engaging with secondary sources, and not offering a narrative line or a direct argument about causation or motive, Baker sidesteps a degree of responsibility. He meticulously cites his sources, but does rather less by way of testing them. And by arranging the dots so that the reader irresistibly joins them up — there are many deft touches of tendentious colour — the author is able to have his cake and eat it. It makes this reader, at least, uneasy.

Narrative history, arguably, imposes an artificial order on a sequence of chaotic and irrational events. Baker’s method, therefore, can be seen enshrining in its formal structure a deliberate challenge to the idea that the history of the second world war made any sense. But it also runs the risk of inviting the reader to impose an occult order: it is, to follow the analogy of painting, a form of historical impressionism. Narrative history makes its judgments explicit, and thereby leaves them open to challenge.

Baker offers unanswerable evidence, though, that the prosecution of the war by the Allies was in many details as bestial as that by the Nazis, and sometimes a good deal worse. We are invited to shake our heads at the idiotic rhetoric, the exterminatory hatred, the savage and callous titfor-tat, the determination at every turn to escalate on the logic that if violence wasn’t working you simply needed more of it and nastier.

But by stopping in 1941, Baker avoids arguing about what did bring the war to an end. And what would have happened if the war had not been fought at all? Could it have been any worse? Would an even greater holocaust have taken place — albeit at a more leisurely pace? Or would nonviolence, widely and determinedly practised, have prevailed?

Baker does not pretend to know. Nor can we. But his book makes a strong case, and makes it originally and with astonishing attack and verve, that history having given the fight-fire-with-fire mob their chance, we should just for once try fighting fire with water.

‘Our way of passive resistance has never yet been tried out,’ said the Labour MP George Lansbury in 1939, ‘but war has been tried through all the centuries and has absolutely