As the B52s go in, history takes another pounding

FRANK JOHNSON

Iwish people would not keep saying, at times like this, that truth is the first casualty in war. History is.

As soon as war looms, both the war's supporters and opponents ransack history to justify their support or opposition. As a result, the historical record sustains collateral damage. As this present war begins, several claims about the past are doing the rounds which are wrong, or unconvincing, or damaging to our understanding of the past. Does it matter? I think it does. If the past is misunderstood, so can the present and future be.

On Newsnight, a few days after the New York and Washington atrocities, Mr Tony Benn mocked the Tory prime minister. Eden, for comparing one of the West's earlier Islamic enemies, Nasser, to Hitler. But it was not Eden who compared Nasser to Hitler. It was the then leader of Mr Benn's own party, Gaitskell. 'It is all very familiar,' Gaitskell told the Commons when Nasser seized the Suez Canal. 'It is exactly the same as that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war.'

Another example. When, just after 11 September, some people believed, or claimed, that President Bush was about to do something rash or mad, British left-wingers drew on what they took to be a precedent from 1950. President Truman, they said, threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea, where British forces were fighting alongside those of the United States, against first the North Koreans and later the Chinese. On learning of Truman's alleged threat, the then British Labour prime minister, Attlee, immediately flew to Washington and stopped him, they claimed. Mr Benn has kept on saying it since 11 September. So has Mr George Galloway. Mr Galloway, it may be remembered, is a left-wing Labour MP who commands broad, all-party unpopularity. Nonetheless, anyone with any sense of fairness must admit something about his Commons interventions warning against America's policy towards bin Laden: they have been impressive and so far not easy to refute, though I hope they will be proved wrong.

Robert J. Donovan, in the second volume (1982) of what is the most detailed account of the Truman presidency, concedes that at a press conference Truman answered questions 'in a way that allowed frightened people fed by excited news stories to believe that the atomic bomb might be used in Korea and at MacArthur's discretion' (MacArthur being the American commander in Korea). Donovan adds that, such was American forces' precarious position in Korea in the face of the Chinese, 'the press conference was held at a time of enormous stress'. The Chinese had recently entered the war. American forces were in great danger.

Truman, pressed by reporters from rival news agencies, refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Or at least his replies were so loose as to give the impression that he was not ruling it out. But he said nothing to rule it in either. In reality, as we now know, Washington's higher soldiery had already rejected the idea, and were not urging it on the president. But, as Donovan puts it, 'given the mindless competition for headline news then prevailing among the three wire services at the White House, the consequences were inevitable'. They reported that Truman was considering using the bomb in Korea.

The reports arrived while the Attlee government confronted a Labour backbench revolt. The Left purported to believe that the Americans would drag us into a wider war in Asia with China and eventually the Soviet Union. (The government had a tiny majority, the 1945 landslide having been much reduced at the 1950 election.) Attlee sent a message to Truman asking to fly to the White House at once. Truman agreed. Donovan finds no evidence, in either the American or the British records of this meeting, of the tale that Truman considered using the bomb and Attlee dissuaded him. The British Left, at the time, especially associated MacArthur with the desire to use the bomb. Truman famously sacked MacArthur the following year.

Five years later, Richard Crossman reviewed Truman's memoirs. Crossman's view of the White House meeting is particularly interesting because he was then a left-winger, a Bevanite:

Mr Attlee, it will be remembered, suddenly decided to go to Washington owing to a rumour that General MacArthur was going to be permitted to use atomic weapons in Korea. According to Mr Truman, they got on fine.. .. Characteristically, Mr Attlee seems to have been content to assure himself that the president was in control. Apparently he never mentioned General MacArthur and his only reference to the A bomb was made in an aside when the conference was over and the communiqué actually being drafted. If this picture is correct, British socialists should undertake some rethinking. We have all made speeches about the Labour govern

ment's moral influence in Washington and the restraint it exerted on America's wild men. In fact, these claims fail to do credit to the courage and will-power of Harry Truman. The president, on his own initiative, exercised both the moral influence and the restraint.

The two examples I have mentioned are examples of the Left misusing history. But the Right does it too. Mr Blair has been doing so. (I think it fair to describe Mr Blair, in the present situation, as being on the Right. Much of the Labour party thinks he is in all situations.)

Mr Blair continually says that we are standing by the United States just as the United States stood by us. He seems to mean in 1940 and during the Blitz. Even Mr Blair, who whatever his many qualities has never seemed to be a great reader of history, must know that the United States was neutral at that time.

The historical record of America's true attitude towards us in 1940 is exceptionally opaque because of the impenetrable President Roosevelt. More, I think, than any important 20th-century figure, he kept his cards close to his chest. It is impossible to discern what he really thought, or thought he was doing. Anglo-American 'special relationship' orthodoxy now insists that he was trying to get the United States into the war against Germany all along. There is some evidence of that. A decade or so ago, an American scholar published a fascinating article alleging that Roosevelt, in 1940, constantly tried to provoke Germany into some outrage against American shipping in the Atlantic that he could use as a casus belli.

But how helpful was he to us at the darkest moment? The British historian Llewellyn Woodward, in Whitehall's own British Foreign Policy in the Second World War — published in one volume in 1962, later expanded into six — reports a request Roosevelt made to our Washington ambassador, Lothian, at the time of Dunkirk. If the King and His Majesty's government had to move out of Britain, 'it might be better [said Roosevelt] to establish a temporary capital at Bermuda, and not in Canada'. Americans 'might be restless at monarchy being based on the American continent'. That seems an odd priority at this crisis of Western civilisation.

One consolation for all this: it is to be assumed that politicians and commentators in years to come will be equally free with the facts about the war which began this week.