The benefits of hindsight
Noble Frankland
POISONED PEACE, 1945: THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDED by Gregor Dallas John Murray, £25, pp. 739, ISBN 0719554780 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 There are so many ways in which the second world war may be viewed and therefore of how it can, or should, be understood. It may be approached from the angle of the battles and campaigns that composed it, in which case decisive moments such as the Battle of Britain or of Stalingrad then emerge as the salient determinants of history. It may be seen through the eyes of those who conducted it, such as the memorialists Churchill, Eisenhower or Montgomery, who invite judgments as to who was right and who was wrong, or at least who was righter and who wronger. Then there is the view that the second world war was not an identifiable entity but part of a continuous world war of 1914-45. After all, the second world war, by and large, was conducted by those who had fought in the first, Hitler and Churchill, for example.
The list of such angles could be extended almost indefinitely in proportion to the endless number of volumes that continue to pour from the presses of the world. But in his Poisoned Peace, 1945: The War that Never Ended, Gregor Dallas has chosen to focus his study not upon the course but upon the consequences of the war and he has done so to an extent I have not seen elsewhere. The work therefore has, to my eye, a great attraction. It opens new vistas of consideration, it arranges facts, often well-known ones, in new relationships and it offers opportunities to revise previously entrenched ideas.
Stalin, with a ready supply of displaced Jews at his disposal, was the effective creator of the state of Israel, Dallas tells us, because his other attempts to penetrate the Middle East had failed. Churchill’s vision for the post-war world was far ahead and much more humanitarian than anything foreseen by Roosevelt. (It is unnecessary to mention Stalin.) Montgomery could have reached Berlin in 1944 and probably concluded the war by Christmas if Eisenhower had decided in favour of military opportunity rather than political expedience. (But remember, the Americans had one and a half million soldiers in the field; the British about 400,000.) And so on and so on.
It is not necessary to accept chapter and verse of all such premises. For example, I do not accept Dallas’s view that Churchill abandoned Mihailovic and backed Tito as a result of communist penetration of the British staff in Cairo. The reason, I believe, was the report brought out of Yugoslavia by Bill Deakin who, having vis ited Tito’s HQ and got wounded for his pains, demonstrated that Tito was a far greater thorn in Hitler’s side than Mihailovic. (Deakin’s name does not appear in the index, nor do any of his writings find a place in the bibliography.) But if one does not accept all Dallas’s conclusions, or if one finds some of them well worn, they are nonetheless, because of the contexts in which they are set, interesting, challenging and usually well argued. And what is perhaps most interesting about them is that they emerge from a view from the other end of the telescope, a view in other words primed by hindsight, that faculty historians are too often told they must not employ, but which, of course, is the very essence of history.
Poisoned Peace is the product of a large, industrious and well-ordered mind. Dallas writes great sweeps of history, synthesising complex details, to reach meaningful interpretations, some of which are no less valid for being obvious. For example, he shows how all the cards fell into Stalin’s hands because it was his armies, far more than any others, that smashed Hitler’s and it was his armies that stood on the disputed territories, such as Poland, Romania and Hungary and, apparently, Berlin. Yet by 1947, when the Americans had 6,500 troops in Berlin and 60,000 in all Europe and Stalin had 400,000 within striking distance of Berlin, it was the Americans, the British and even the French that won the battle of the blockade and halted any further Soviet advance in Europe.
The synthesising of broad historical sweeps does of course require the presentation of detail to prove the case and nourish the atmosphere. But the problem for the historian of broad sweeps is that he has to depend on published material as his source of detail and example. If he were to turn to the original documents, he would be lucky to complete a tenth of his book within a lifetime. And so the rub comes. The difficulty about published material is not only that it is often wrong, but that it is also inevitably of uneven quality. Yet it all has to be grist for the broad-sweep historian’s mill. Specialist historians, who have worked from original documents on smaller scales, then enjoy picking up factual errors and, as Arnold Toynbee found out years ago, the broad-sweep historian is then accused of misleading inaccuracies that invalidate his conclusions.
I make no such sweeping charge in this case, but Dallas does sometimes lay his neck on the block. He loves to put in detail that is not always essential. For example, on 11 November 1944, he tells us, Churchill and de Gaulle ‘boarded a black Citroën and drove down to the Rondpoint des Champs Elysées’. That seems all right, but before that we were told that General Sikorski crashed on take-off from Gibraltar in a Lancaster bomber. He did not; it was a Liberator. Sir Arthur Harris never lent Lancasters for that sort of thing. And yet before that we were told that by 1940 tanks moving at 40 mph (did they?) and artillery drawn by horses had been replaced by twin-engined dive bombers. Alas, there was no such thing as a twinengined dive bomber nor, as we are told elsewhere, were Mosquitoes dive bombers. A black Citroën? The seeds of doubt are sown. But never mind; this is a not-to-beforgotten read by an author of outstanding quality, even if his claim that the war never ended is a bit odd. I thought it ended when I was permitted to stop fighting it.
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