Daft Dominion

Here are the facts. The year is 1952. In the east the German war with Russia, now eleven years old, shows no sign of ending. On a line roughly extending from Lake Ladoga in the north-west to the Caspian Sea in the south-east, the struggle is in stalemate, a contest punctuated by blows and counter blows which settle nothing.


In the west Britain, having made peace with Germany after the brief war of 1939-40, is governed by a crypto-fascist regime headed by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party made substantial gains in the rigged parliamentary election of 1950, is Home Secretary, in charge of the normal police and black-shirt recruited auxiliaries. Enoch Powell is Secretary of State for India, where Britain is still fighting a rearguard action to retain the Jewel in the tawdry Crown. Under the Treaty of Berlin, which ended the western war, the Isle of Wight has been turned over to Germany as a base.

In Berlin, Hitler, suffering from increasingly acute Parkinson’s disease, is nearing the end. The future is uncertain, with no clear succession. There are those who want to end the hopeless war in the east; there are those, chiefly in the SS, who want to carry on the struggle against the Slav ‘sub-humans’ until that elusive final victory.

We are, of course, in past futures, a foreign country which did things differently; we are in the country of C. J. Sansom’s Dominion, a ‘what if’ novel along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, Len Deighton’s SS GB and Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

The premise is a plausible one. The novel opens with a real historical scene, the meeting in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street on 9 May, 1940. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, has announced his intention to resign, discredited by Britain’s disastrous campaign against the Germans in Norway. The contenders are Halifax and Churchill. Halifax, the Foreign Minister and a noted appeaser, is favoured by Chamberlain, the King and most of the Tory Party. In real history he demurs. In this history he does not. After the German invasion of the West, and the disaster of Dunkirk, Halifax makes peace, entering into a treaty of friendship with Britain’s former enemy. Churchill withdraws, eventually to lead a Resistance movement against the new Vichy-style regime, headed in succession by Halifax, David Lloyd George and finally Beaverbrook.

Dominion is the first book that I’ve read by C. J. Sansom, though I’m told that he is well-respected for his Shardlake series, historical novels set in Tudor England. He has a doctorate in history; so, if that’s any measure, he is qualified enough to treat the subject with imaginative insight and a high degree of verisimilitude and empathy. Does he? Well, now, that’s the key question. At the risk of trying your patience I’m going to begin this review by looking at the justification for the premises contained in the novel, set out in a Historical Note at the very end.

Actually, if you are at all interested in the context, I would suggest that you begin at the end. It’s the key to all that goes before. It shows the author as a man with a mission. He has, in other words, a political intent; his novel is not merely for shallow entertainment. Rather it has a didactic purpose, namely to warn you against the dangers of nationalism and fascism in the real historical present by showing you nationalism and fascism in a fictitious historical past.

I suppose that this book might be compared, at least superficially, with It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel warning of the dangers of fascism in America. It could have happened here, that’s Sansom’s point. But could it have happened in the way he describes in Dominion?

You see, what he gives us is an Anglo-Saxon version of Petain and Laval’s Vichy state. It’s really all based on a shallow idiocy of perspective, if I can put it like that. George Orwell, who also feared a form of fascism in England, was altogether more subtle than the inept Mister Sansom, at pains to advance his left-wing credentials. “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially left wing intellectuals”, Orwell wrote, “is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

My own doubts were raised early. Beaverbrook, in real history, was a close friend of Churchill and an effective minister in his wartime cabinet. In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. In justifying his portrayal, Samson quotes Clement Atlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, who said that the press baron was the most evil person he had ever met. Really? Is this the same Beaverbrook that Michael Foot, a former Labour leader and respected leftwing journalist, describes with such warmth and affection in his essay collection Debts of Honour?

Then there is Enoch Powell, the bête noir of Samson and his kind. His real credentials were impeccably anti-fascist, an opponent of appeasement and a man who returned to England from a comfortable academic position in Australia specifically to fight against the Nazis. The idea of him collaborating with Oswald Mosley is laughably absurd. Samson has simply advanced beyond his fictitious present to a real future, to Powell’s 1960s warning over the possible effects of mass immigration. He has then projected back again; for, as we all know, concerns about immigration equals fascism.

Powell, who only entered Parliament in 1950, was an admirer of British rule in India, that much is true, but by the early 1950s his imperial convictions were weakening. The depiction of him in Dominion is, quite frankly, childishly inexact. By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India.

So, what is there to say about Samson’s imagined Britain? It’s a drab place, economically depressed, a country in debt, a country that is no more than a satellite of a Continental superpower, a country where independence is all but a fiction, a country with an uncertain future. This is Vichy Britain, the only model the author seems to understand, a country whose cowardly leaders are prepared to hand over some of its citizens to an uncertain fate.

But Vichy was not the only model to hand. In real history there was Finland, an ally of Germany in the war against Russia, but one that preserved its democratic polity and refused to play any part in the Holocaust. Then there is Denmark, the ‘model’ protectorate, a country occupied by the Germans but one that still managed to undermine Nazi policy towards the Jews.

It’s perfectly true, in a world of limitless possibilities, that Samson’s alternate is just as valid as any other alternate, but does it stand up to scrutiny? My alternate is that if Britain had exited the war in 1940, instead of 1945, it would not have accumulated the massive debts, particularly to America, that so crippled its post-war economic performance.

Even in Sansom’s world the country would surely have done much better. There is no objective reason why it should have been so poor. Although allied to Germany, it was not involved in the war with Russia. Why on earth would the Germans have erected tariff barriers against British produce when such produce, particularly in armaments, would have been vital for the continuing campaign in the east? Sansom’s model makes no logical sense.

The truth is that Sansom’s depiction of a sad, indebted, economically and politically dependant nation is far closer to our contemporary political realities; a grubby Britain, a country increasingly uncertain of itself, a country falling to bits, a country tied to the European Union, an organisation the author clearly approves of.

The Historical Note, incidentally, which starts off objectively enough, ends up as a carpet-chewing rant against nationalism in general and – would you believe it? – Scottish nationalism in particular! Nationalism and patriotism, in Sansom’s view, are close kin to fascism. We are back in the mental world of those 1930s intellectuals who, when it came to understanding fascism, understood exactly nothing

I’ve tried your patience too far. The historical stuff may be of no interest at all to you. You have one question only: what of the novel, what of the story; is it any good? Yes, well, it is in part, now and again a bit of a page turner. Ignore the political manipulation – unfortunately I can’t - and you might actually enjoy it. The problem is that it is overlong and repetitive. More than that, the whole superstructure rests on an astonishingly weak base. The core plot device, the heart of the story, is as weak as marshmallow.

It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. I’m not going to tell you what the ‘dreadful secret’ is, simply that the Germans are anxious to find out, though what earthly good it could have done them is anybody’s guess. Muncaster learns his ‘dreadful secret’ from his physicist brother, who happens to be working with the Americans. In the contretemps that follows, the said brother is pushed out of the window of Muncaster’s flat, while he proceeds to wreck the place (why?), all the time shouting about the end of the world.

It turns out that Muncaster is the sort of fellow that a goose would say boo to, so his actions, to say the least, are just a tad out of character. But on his hissy fit all else follows; the Gestapo follow, the British fascist police follow, the British resistance follow; Churchill himself follows. Quick, let’s find Frank; our war in Russia depends on his ‘dreadful secret.’ Quick, let’s find Frank; let’s discover the ‘dreadful secret’ or get him away safely to America.

I’m really trying not to laugh as I write this, but there is so much in Dominion that is laughable; the lost and found chase through a thick London fog, Keystone Cops-style, is particularly funny. Poor Muncaster, freed from a loony bin, is aided by an assortment of individuals – David Fitzgerald, a civil servant and member of the resistance who befriended the forlorn chap (oh, just how many times do we heed to be reminded of his rictus smile?!) while they were at Oxford together. He is aided by Ben, a nurse at a lunatic asylum and a homosexual Scottish communist, also a member of the resistance, ye ken. He is aided by, of all organisations, the Fire Brigade, an organisation with impeccable left-wing credentials, which rides to the rescue through the fog!

And so it goes on, from high tension to low comedy, a series of increasingly implausible encounters. The scene on the beach below Rottingdean on the Suffolk coast takes verisimilitude to the Senate House, the SS headquarters in London, and tortures it out of existence. In the end Frank takes himself and the ‘dreadful secret’ into oblivion, an action, if taken earlier, that would have saved several hundred wearisome pages.

As a novel Dominion is real boys’ own stuff, difficult even for boys to swallow. In almost 570 pages of text the only believable character, the only character with any real human depth, is the world-weary Gunther Hoth, the Gestapo agent on Muncaster’s tail. There would seem to me to be a spot of plagiarism here, for he is simply a more ideologically committed dimension of Xavier March, the detective from Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

Dominion is based on a bogus historical premise; it’s based on the character assassination of real people. As a novel it’s too long, it’s repetitive, the characterisations are weak, the encounters unbelievable, the narrative plodding, as thick at point as the London fog and the fog in the author’s mind.

Samson does not write badly; he just doesn’t write very well. If he were not already Mister Shardlake I am convinced that this book would have gathered rejection slips rather than accolades from the likes of the Guardian and the Independent. Quite frankly, it’s a shallow and immature book, no more than a vehicle for the writer’s political prejudices. If you like alternate history and political thrillers go to Fatherland instead. It’s infinitely superior.

Go tell the Spartans

This time of year, more than any other, is a time to reflect on heroism and self-sacrifice. I imagine most people through their family histories will have some recollection or remembrance of bravery, even if only of duty done in intolerable circumstances.

I mentioned recently my own great-grandfather, who won the Military Cross at the Battle of Passchendaele. I should also like to recall the memory of my grandfather, who served in the British Indian Army, both before and during the Second World War. Advancing towards Mandalay in 1945, his battalion was ambushed by the Japanese rearguard. In immediate danger of his life, he was saved by Sergeant Khan, one of the Muslim soldiers in his company, but for whose prompt actions you would not be reading these words today.

But I would like to bring to your attention another man altogether, a sailor, a man whose selfless courage saved many lives, losing his own in the process. His name was Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegen, born in England of Irish parentage, captain of the HMS Jervis Bay.

The Jervis Bay was not a powerful man of war. No, she was a liner, a commercial ship, converted at the outbreak of the Second World War into an armed merchantman, assigned to convoy duty. Her most powerful weapon was a set of vintage 150mm calibre guns, no match even for a light cruiser. She was also unarmoured.

On November 5 1940 Jervis Bay was the sole escort for a convoy of thirty-seven ships sailing from Canada to Britain. In the afternoon of that day they had the misfortune to be intercepted by the Admiral Scheer, a German pocket battleship. The Scheer, launched in 1933, was part of a class of warship built under the restrictions on weight and size imposed on the German Navy by the Treaty of Versailles. Although inferior to the battleships and battle cruisers of the day, she was far better armed than any other cruiser, carrying as her principal weapon six guns with a calibre of 280mm, as well as another eight of 150mm and a torpedo battery. The Canadian convoy, spotted to the south of Iceland, was an ideal prize, given the poor level of protection. It would have been an easy prize but for Captain Fegen and the crew of Jervis Bay.

Realising the danger, Fegen ordered the convoy to scatter, himself immediately sailing towards the jaws of the Scheer to buy essential time. From this point the Jervis Bay only had twenty-four minutes of life left, but those twenty-four minutes were enough.

Of the convoy thirty-two ships managed to get away into the falling darkness. Outgunned and outranged, the Jervis Bay fought on, drawing the fire and using up the heavy ammunition of Admiral Scheer. One shot landed on the bridge, taking off the captain’s left arm. Jervis Bay kept up its own fire, drawing ever closer to the enemy, but always falling short. The outcome of this unequal battle was inevitable: the Jervis Bay, pounded relentlessly, went down ablaze, Captain Fegen and another one hundred and ninety-seven of the crew going down with her. The surviving fifty-nine were later picked up a neutral Swedish ship.

For his actions that day Captain Fegen was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for bravery, for his “valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect.” He was a brave and noble Irishman, one who deserves to be placed in the same company as Drake and Nelson. I offer this in his memory.

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

Carved with pride

Eileen Nearne died aged eighty-nine of a heart attack in her home in Torquay on the south-west coast of England at the beginning of this month. She died alone, without family or friends, just another sad story, just another Eleanor Rigby. But she wasn’t; she was something quite special.

I read in The Times yesterday that she was destined for a council grave but officials, sifting through her papers in the hope of finding the names of relatives or friends, discovered something quite unexpected; she was a decorated war hero, awarded an MBE, found among her citations for bravery.

Eileen Nearne, you see, was one of a select band of who served in the Special Operations Executive, set up during the Second World War to carry out highly dangerous missions in German Occupied Europe. She was one of only thirty-nine women to do so, a company that included the likes of Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan. Her story is not completely unknown (she has a page on Wikipedia) but local people seemed to have known virtually nothing, beyond that she had something to do with the ‘resistance.’

She certainly had. Under the code name ‘Rose’, she was flown to in secret in a light Lysander aircraft in March 1944 to Les Lagnys in central France, where she joined the Wizard network as a radio operator. The average life expectancy for such people was only six weeks, though ‘Rose’ managed to evade capture until July 1944, some four months after her arrival, when her radio signal was finally detected.

After torture by the Gestapo, she was eventually sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. It was here where Violette Szabo, along with Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort and Lillian Rolfe, also SOE operatives, were murdered. Nearne was more fortunate, surviving Ravensbrück, where an estimated 92,000 women died, and a labour camp in Silesia. In April 1945 she managed to escape with two French girls from a work gang, finding refuge with a priest near Leipzig prior to the arrival of American troops.

Eileen Nearne MBE may not have talked with her immediate neighbours about her past, but it is something that she herself never forgot. In 1993 she went back to Ravensbrück to unveil a plaque to her fellow agents who were murdered there.

I admire these women so much, the operatives of SOE, who were chosen not because of extraordinary qualities but, as in the case of Nearne and Szabo, because they could speak French well enough to pass as a native. They able to learn certain skills, operation of the radio being the most important, but courage is something one does not learn; courage is innate, found even in the most unexpected places.

I would like to think that in similar circumstances I would have behaved in the same composed manner of the women of SOE, though I’m not at all sure that I would be able to withstand the constant paranoia, the fear of discovery or betrayal or capture, the endless strain on one’s nerves.

Nearne, along with Szabo, Khan and the others, deserves to have her name carved with pride. I’m glad to mark her passage on this day, the Battle of Britain Day.

A story about a lie

Katyn is a movie not so much about the infamous wartime massacre of Polish officers by the NKVD, the Russian security service, as about a lie. It's about the 'little lie' that it was the Nazis and not the Soviets who were responsible for the crime, and it's about the 'big lie' that forced Poland and the Poles to deny the truth -or face the consequences - behind the event for decades after the war in the name of 'communist solidarity.'

Directed by Andrzej Wajda, one of the great figures of post-war Polish cinema, Katyn was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. So far as I am aware it has never been screened in this country. I only found out about it recently from an advert in the press, immediately sending away for the DVD on Amazon.

Now I've seen it and I'm so glad I've seen it. It's not an easy movie to watch for various reasons. There are too many themes, too much ambition of scope, which makes it somewhat plodding and incoherent at points. But it is no less powerful for this criticism. It's uncompromisingly Polish, in that the message it carries is clearly intended for a domestic rather than an international audience, no bad thing in my estimation.

Take but one small example. It's 1939; Poland is conquered, savaged from the west by the Germans and betrayed from the east by the Soviets; refugees flee from the west only to be turned back by refugees fleeing from the east. In their zone of occupation, one of the bones allotted to the Soviet dog by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russians have rounded up thousands of officers, taking them away to an uncertain fate. A large group are shown held temporarily in a ruined monastery. Their commander addresses them in solemn terms. It is their duty to survive, he says - "Gentlemen, you must endure. Without you, there will be no free Poland."

Just consider the significance of this, the dual significance. These men did not survive; there was no free Poland, not for fifty years after the end of the war, which across the whole of Eastern Europe simply substituted one tyranny for another. No Pole would fail to recognise the symbolism here.

I thought the depiction of the actual crime, carried out in the spring of 1940 on the orders of Stalin, would be the central event of the movie. Wajda's far too clever for that: it comes right at the end for good reason. For, as I said at the outset, the movie is really about a lie and the truth only appears when falsehood is finally swept away.

Instead the action, both during and after the war, focuses in large part on those left behind; on the mothers, wives, children, sisters of those who have disappeared, people who, firstly, want to know where their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers are, and secondly, want to know the facts behind an unravelling tragedy, a truth partially told, more deeply obscured by a lie, one perpetuating the pain.

There continues to be a lot of anger in Poland, possibly less now over the massacre itself as the subsequent official line given out by the Soviet and Polish governments in the days of communist control. But Wajda, whose own father was among the victims, has resisted any temptation to make an anti-Russian diatribe.

The site of the massacre in Katyn Wood near Smolensk was discovered by the Germans in 1943, who immediately tried to use it for the ends of their own propaganda. Their 'sympathy' with these victims of communism stands in sickening contrast to their own conduct in Poland, which the director alludes to in his depiction of the 1939 Sonderaktion in Krakow, when the teaching staff of Jagellonian University were shipped off to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, there to be murdered. This was the Nazi Katyn, part of a wider attempt to exterminate the Polish elite.

The wife of one of the senior officers killed at Katyn has his medal returned to her by the Germans, with official expressions of sympathy from Hitler. She is then asked to take part in a propaganda broadcast, refusing to do so, recognising the ugly cynicism at work.

No sooner did the facts of the tragedy emerge than the Soviet denials began: they were not responsible; it was the Germans. This was the position they continued to maintain even so far as the Nuremberg Trials - where it was shamefully supported by the British government - and for decades after, until the full truth was finally admitted in the 1990s.

Part of the movie is concerned with the Poles who were forced to live in the shadow of a lie, including Agnieszka, played by Magdalena Cielecka, who, in the manner of Antigone, is obsessed with paying proper rites to her dead brother, with her attempts to erect a marble headstone in his memory bearing the true date of his death - April, 1940. A time, in other words, when only Poland's 'fraternal' ally could be blamed.

Katyn was the Calvary of modern Poland. Salvation was only found, as ever, in resurrection, in the resurrection of truth. This is a bold, uncompromising movie, an excellent depiction of a great tragedy. It's a victory over the lies, little and big, a great tribute to the director's father and all the other ghosts of Katyn, hopefully now at peace.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła,
Kiedy my żyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wzięła,
Szablą odbierzemy.

Cruel Necessity

This is a piece I wrote on the anniversary of VJ Day- Victory over Japan Day – posted on another site. I’m adding it here for Quiet_Man.

It’s VJ Day today, the sixty-fifth anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender on 15 August 1945, more generally the final end of the Second World War. It was a sudden stop to a conflict that may have gone on well into 1946, perhaps even longer, at an incalculable human cost. This was prevented, thankfully, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which brought and fanatics in the Japanese government rapidly to some sense of reality.

Thankfully, did I really write that; am I truly thankful for such a terrible event, the curtain raiser to the atomic age? Yes, I am, and I offer no apology whatsoever for my frankness. What I will say is that the atomic bombings were the last act in a dreadful tragedy, one that I personally wish had never happened. But it did. Even God can’t change the past.

The great and terrible paradox is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives than were lost. I do hate this kind of calculus, this calculus of mortality, balancing the dead against the probable dead. But it still has to be done. My grandfather served in the East during the war in the Fourteenth Army under Bill Slim. He was one of the first to enter Singapore after the Japanese surrender; one of the first to see the liberation of Changi Prisoner of War Camp, the liberation of men who would not have survived if the war had gone on many weeks longer.

There were so many other men, so many other camps right across the lands still held by the Japanese, so many other men who would have died. But it wasn’t just men. There were women and children, too, held in internment camps where conditions were not much better.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the atomic bombings saved the Japanese themselves, saved them from the last ditch lunatics who were willing to contemplate the extermination of a whole nation. After the war Kido Koichi, a high Japanese official, estimated that the surrender may have saved as many as twenty million Japanese lives. I would urge those who think this an exaggeration to look at the details of the Battle of Saipan, where the wretched Emperor Hirohito, the one major war criminal to escape retribution, sent out a message to the civilian population ordering them to commit suicide, afraid that people may be favourably impressed by their treatment at the hands of the Americans.

The above thoughts were really brought on by the fact that this year, for the very first time, the United States sent a representative to the annual commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing. On Obama’s initiative John Roos, the ambassador to Japan, laid a commemorative wreath, the closest the country has ever offered to a formal apology for the attack. This is just another empty gesture by PPP, the Peace Prize President, a gesture rightfully condemned by Gene Tibbets, the son of Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped ‘Little Boy’ from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. It was an attempt, Mr Tibbets put it, to rewrite history.

There is one other thing I have to say about rewriting history, or perhaps forgetting history might be better. The Japanese are very good when it comes to remembering their own suffering, remembering events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are not so good when it comes to remembering the suffering they inflicted on others, the suffering their militaristic regime inflicted right across Asia and the Pacific. Earlier this year I saw City of Life and Death and John Rabe, two movies which drew my attention to the Rape of Nanking, the greatest war crime of the twentieth century prior to the Holocaust.

Nanking, now Nanjing, was capital of China when it was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. Thereafter they began the wholesale massacre and rape of tens of thousands of civilians, a crime still denied today in Japan. John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party then living in the city, was so horrified by events that he was instrumental in building his own Schindler’s Arc. It comes as something of a shock in John Rabe to see Chinese civilians sheltering under a huge Swastika flag in the grounds of his factory, a banner of salvation, not something one normally associates with that symbol. So, yes, when I look over the whole history, the hypocrisy, dissimulation and self-pity of the Japanese disgusts me.

I want my soul back

In Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg and the heart of old Prussia, there is a shrine, sacred to the memory of all those who fell for the fatherland. It’s the final refuge for their spirits, their souls. It’s also a celebration of militarism, a celebration of German martial achievements, without qualification. Among the millions of names you will even find those of Hitler, Goring and all those hanged at Nuremberg. Outside, in the main grounds, the guard marches up and down, dressed in Second World War uniform, including the old-fashioned coal scuttle helmet. Yes, they are there, goose-stepping up and down, a comfort to Germany’s nationalist right.

This is outrageous, don’t you agree, how could such a thing be allowed in the heart of the new Europe? It’s simply not possible. Forgive me; I’ve been misleading you; there is no such shrine, which would indeed be an outrage to the memory of all those who suffered and died last century at the hands of the Nazis. But the thing is there truly is such a place or something very like, though it’s not in Germany – it’s in Japan.

On August 6 every year the Japanese gather at Hiroshima to bewail their fate as ‘victims’. On every other day they can go to the Yasukuni Shrine, situated in the Chiyoda district of the capital, to celebrate the spirit of men who carried aggressive warfare across Asia, including former Prime Minister Tojo and all those hanged after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. And the guard does march up and down under the flag of the Rising Sun.

Though never particularly generous in life to those who served with them – by force – the Japanese are generous in death; for the souls who have been ‘annexed’ include those of 21,000 Taiwanese and 28,000 Koreans, once colonial subjects of the Japanese Empire. They are there in this militarist Shinto paradise whether they like it or not.

Kim Hee Jong does not like it. Kim Hee Jong hates it so much that he has begun a court action in Tokyo to reclaim his soul. What? But how can the dead possibly do such a thing? The thing is he’s not dead, though he was mistakenly reported missing in action during the war. In 2006 he found out to his shame that his name was enrolled at Yasukuni;

I was so angry that I wanted to set fire to the shrine. The war deprived me of a chance to receive an education. That shrine means nothing to me.

As The Times reported on Saturday, Mr Kim is now involved in one of most unusual legal battles in history, a battle over the ownership of his own soul, not claimed by the Devil, though it may as well have been. He is one of eleven plaintiffs, though unique in that the others are the children of the dead. The Yasukuni authorities are resisting the action, claiming that once a soul has been enshrined it cannot be extracted, anymore than a drop of water can be removed from a pool.

This includes Mr Kim, who clearly enjoys the singular distinction of a man whose soul has effectively been stolen and placed in a kind of hell. The court case opens in November.

A Soldier's Song

It’s December 1862, the last day of the year. The American Civil War has been underway for more than a year and a half with no decisive breakthrough. In Tennessee, in the western theatre, the Union and Confederate armies gather late in the evening, ready to do battle the following day in the Stones River Valley around the small town of Murfreesboro.

Camped only a few hundred yards apart, the soldiers shout defiance at each other, urged on by their bands, the Northerners playing such songs as Yankee Doodle and Hail, Columbia, the Southerners responding with a barrage of Dixie and The Bonnie Blue Flag. But then one of the bands strikes up Home, Sweet Home, a popular and melancholic tune of the day. At once both sides, North and South, start to sing, overwhelmed by the occasion, all enmity set aside in mutual longing.

There are universal sentiments, longings for home, and peace and love that can unite enemies, even, with the example I have in mind, across a language barrier, even across national boundaries. In 1939 a German singer by the name of Lale Anderson recorded one such song, a tune based on a poem called Das Lied eines jungen Soldaten auf der Wacht (The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch), written during the First World War This song is better known to the world as Lili Marleen.

Initially it enjoyed only limited success, I suppose because the time was not yet right for its sweet and gentle melancholy, the thoughts of a soldier recalling his love back home. But in 1941 the German radio station in Belgrade started to play it regularly, broadcast across the whole of the Western Desert, where the Africa Korps was locked in duel with the British Eighth Army. The lovely opening words had an immediate impact on the German soldiers;

Vor der Kaserne,
Vor dem grossen Tor,
Stand eine Laterne
Und steht sie noch davor,
So woll’n wir uns da wiederseh’n,
Wenn wir bei der Laterne steh’n,
Wie einst, Lilli Marleen,
Wie einst, Lilli Marleen.

Even Hitler, not noted for his taste in popular music, was said to be impressed, saying that “this song will not only inspire German soldiers, it might even outlast us all.” The even greater surprise is that the tune quickly became just as popular on the Allied side as the Axis, a universal anthem of love and homesickness. Although the British authorities, alarmed by its reception, fearful that it would undermine morale, initially tried to dismiss it as a song about a prostitute it’s lasting popularity resulted in an English version, which opens with the same sentiments as the German;

Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate,
Darling I remember the way you used to wait;
'Twas there that you whispered tenderly,
That you lov'd me, you'd always be,
My Lilli of the lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene.

The one person that it did not impress was Doctor Goebbels, head of German propaganda, who found it ‘morbid’ and ‘unheroic’. Radio Belgrade was ordered to stop playing it, the original master was destroyed and Andersen arrested. But then came the letters to the radio station, not just from Africa but across the whole of occupied Europe, from German soldiers, unaware that it had been banned, requesting that Lili Marleen be played again. Such was the demand that the Propaganda Minister’s interdict had to be overturned.

It continues to stand as the song of the universal soldier, a lasting tribute to simple human values. For once Hitler was right.

The French Goebbels

In the summer of 1944 Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was the setting for a state funeral in what was to be the last symbolic act of the regime of Marshall Petain that had governed France with ever diminishing authority since 1940. There was something bizarrely unreal about the whole occasion. To the north-west of the capital the Allies were fighting to break out of Normandy; within six weeks they would arrive in Paris itself. To all but the most deluded it was clear that the Germans were losing the war.

But still the funeral was conducted with due solemnity. The man being honoured was Philippe Henriot, appointed Vichy’s head of propaganda in January 1944, who had been assassinated by the Resistance on 28 June. Why was this considered necessary? Quite simply because, in the twilight of collaboration, it was Henriot who had become the voice of Vichy, not Petain or Pierre Laval, his prime minister. And a highly effective voice he was too, so effective that the Free French, broadcasting from London, had taken to calling him the French Goebbels.

Henriot, besides being a skilled radio broadcaster, possessed one key advantage: the French may have been tired of the war, even more tired of the German occupiers, but they were still immensely fearful of the destructive consequences of liberation. For weeks prior to the Normandy landings Allied bombing raids on France had increased in intensity, providing Henriot with plenty of material for his twice-daily broadcasts. He contrasted the suffering of his fellow countrymen with those who had taken refuge with de Gaulle in England. And the native Resistance, the Maquis, he told his listeners, was made up of communists, terrorists, criminals and gangsters. The true heroes of France, he said, were the men of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary police force, who would restore order to a chaotic world.

Henriot had an interesting background, emerging from the Catholic and Anti-Semitic right that had felt itself increasingly beleaguered ever since the days of the affaire Dreyfus earlier in the century, which had introduced one of the great fault lines into French political life. At the beginning of the war he had also been strongly anti-German, a patriot like most patriots of the day who rallied to Marshall Petain after the fall of France and not to the band of émigrés who followed Charles de Gaulle to London. He was a French patriot, yes, a believer in the nation’s Catholic civilization and a hater not just of Jews, whom he did not consider to be French, but of communists.

This fear and hatred of communism is the key to understanding the most crucial metamorphosis in Henriot’s career. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 he saw Germany as the great cleansing force, one that that would deliver Christian civilization from the contagion of communism.

In the early months of 1944, such was Henriot’s effectiveness, the French were fighting a civil war ‘on air.’ Resistance agents had reported that his broadcasts were having a strong influence on a fearful and uncertain population. From London a counter-attack was launched, with a number of people, headed by Maurice Schumann, warning people against Henriot’s seductive words. He continually referred to the exiles as the “the Jewish shirkers in London”, who responded by calling him a “Judas”, seemingly quite unaware of the irony here.

Counter-broadcasts were not enough. In the end the only way to stop Henriot was to kill him. That same evening Schumann proclaimed that “We will not hide our joy at this event. France will do very well without the voice of Philippe Henriot.” The rest was silence.

French Marquis; Soviet Hero

I don’t generally read obituaries. To be more exact, I don’t think I’ve ever read one right through. I did on Saturday, though, for two reasons: the obituary was about a pilot and I have a slight obsession with all matters relating to flying and aircraft at the present. But it wasn’t about just any pilot, no; it was about a French marquis who flew a Yak fighter alongside the Red Air Force during the Second World War. Reading these outline facts I was drawn like a moth to a flame!

Jacques, marquis de Saint Phalle, who died on 15 June aged ninety-two, belonged to a family that can trace its roots as far back as the sixth century. His ancestral home was the Burgundian Chateau de Mountgoublin. During the war he managed to escape from occupied France, coming to London, where he hoped to fly Spitfires with the RAF.

Instead he eventually found serving with the Normandie-Neman squadron of the Free French Air Force, which was sent, on the suggestion of Charles de Gaulle, to the Eastern Front in 1943 to aid the Soviet forces. The unit had the name Neman appended to its title by Stalin himself after the part it played the Battle of the Neman River in 1944.

Although Saint Phalle himself only ever had one confirmed kill in a hundred missions, shooting down a Focke-Wulf 190, the squadron destroyed 273 enemy aircraft in all between March 1943 and May 1945, flying Russian Yakovlev ‘Yak’ fighters, as effective in the east as the Spitfire was in the west. Such was the prowess of the unit, emphasised in Soviet propaganda, that Field Marshal William Keitel ordered the immediate execution of any captured French pilots.

Saint Phalle, clearly a remarkable man, had begun his pilot training before the war, obtaining his licence in the summer of 1939. Even so when he came to London he had not enough flying hours to qualify as a skilled pilot. He simply overcame this obstacle by lying to Jean Tulasne, the commander of the Normandie squadron. For his part in the war in the east he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the Medal for the Victory over Germany and the Order of the Patriotic War.

I have no idea what his politics were; so while I’m tempted to call him the ‘Red Marquis’ this may be a disservice to his memory. Instead, by one of the little ironies that history rather favours, a French aristocrat found himself fighting for the "workers' state". I wonder what Robespierre and Marat would have made of that!

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightning, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.

De Gaulle and the Myth of Resistance

Tomorrow is one of the most famous days in French history. It marks the anniversary in 1940 when Charles de Gaulle appealed on BBC radio in London to his countrymen urging them to continue to resist the Germans, even though the government of the day had formally surrendered to the invading army. Famous, yes, an event being marked by commemorations across the land. President Sarkozy himself will attend a ceremony at Mont Valereien near Paris, where a memorial to the French Resistance is situated, before flying to London to visit studio B2, from where de Gaulle made his broadcast, saying, in noble words, that "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not and will not be extinguished."

There is only one small problem: it’s a myth. Oh, not the broadcast; that's real enough, something that happened because Winston Churchill, the prime minister, allowed it to happen in the face of opposition from the rest of the war cabinet. It's a myth because de Gaulle was probably heard by enough people to fill a village hall. The chances are, moreover, few of those who did listen on that bleak day in French history, when a great part of the nation was on the road fleeing from the German advance, had ever heard of this figure, a senior soldier but a minor politician. It's a myth - and here is the uncomfortable truth -because the vast bulk of the French population were relieved by the call for the armistice. The vast bulk of the French population rallied behind another soldier altogether and were to remain behind him for years to come. He was Philippe Petain, the new Prime Minister and subsequently head of the French state established at Vichy.

But history is often made retrospectively. De Gaulle, in the end, was on the side of the winners and Petain, Petain, whose side was he on? The losers, the answer has to come because he was tried and condemned as a traitor in 1945. But Petain was not Pierre Laval, who did more or less take the side of losers he believed were to be winners; Petain, rather like de Gaulle, took the side of France, though there are few now who would admit to this, preferring to sweep Vichy into a shameful oblivion. There is much about the Vichy regime that is shameful but the shame is not Petain's it is not even Laval's: the shame is France’s

No matter; in the end the obscure figure in London, stiff, totally lacking in humour, unimaginative and uncompromising came like a new Joan of Arc to save the conscience of the nation. He came in time to create the myth of resistance passing into shameful memory the realities of collaboration. Thus is history born; thus are nations made.

Killing Hitler

Last month at a conference in Moscow General Anatoly Kulikov, formerly Russian Interior Minister under Boris Yeltsin, said that Stalin called off two assassination attempts against Hitler, one in 1943 and another in a more advanced state of preparation in 1944, for fear that his successors would conclude a separate peace with the Western Allies. He continued by saying that in pursuing the war to the very end Stalin intended to destroy Germany as a future threat as well as gaining more influence in Eastern Europe.

It’s an intriguing claim but as yet no documentary evidence has been produced, though the general has said that the details will be forthcoming in a new book about Russia and the Second World War. Kulikov says that in preparation for the second plan the intended assassin had even infiltrated Hitler’s immediate entourage, before the mission was aborted.

We now seem to be entering the realms of the fantastic. Security around Hitler was severe. For a stranger to get anywhere within striking distance does not seem at all likely. The evidence, once produced, will have to be very strong indeed. Writing in The Telegraph Guy Walters has already dismissed Kulikov’s claim, in the continuing absence of proof, as ‘junk history.’ I suppose the general might just be trying to talk up the book to be published by the Club of Military Leaders, which he heads, but he is going to look rather foolish if this grand claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Of course there is another possibility, that the general is reminding a Russian audience of the suspicions and fears once entertained towards the West, the Casablanca declaration that the Germans had to surrender unconditionally notwithstanding. It’s certainly true that if the attempt by sections of the German military to assassinate Hitler in July of 1944 had been successful any new government would have made an early approach to Britain and America. There were already tensions within the Alliance which might conceivably have resulted in a separate peace. The truth is that Germany had to be defeated and seen to have been defeated. Against this background cloak-and-dagger assassination schemes were quite irrelevant. Stalin would have understood that.

Least We Forget

It’s now seventy years since the successful conclusion of Operation Dynamo, during which thousands of Allied troops, trapped in and around the French port of Dunkirk by the advancing German army, were rescued and brought back to England. The effort of the ‘little ships’, the pleasure boats and private vessels which played such a vital part in saving so many, has entered into folk memory. A story about some of these boats returning to France was shown on the BBC News recently.

It’s as well to remember, though, that there was another dimension to the success of Operation Dynamo that is not perhaps mentioned quite as often as it should be – namely the selfless courage of the men who were left behind, the rearguard that slowed the German advance on Dunkirk.

Last month The Daily Telegraph told the story of Private Bert Evans, the only living survivor of the Wormhoudt Massacre. On 26 May Private Evans, serving with what was left of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, took up position in the village of Wormhoudt. His company was joined by units of the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery. Their orders were simple: they were there to buy time.

This was no idle sacrifice; for every hour the German advance was delayed the more men could be lifted from the beaches. Under assault from advance units of SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division, they managed to hold out for two crucial days, only surrendering after they ran out of ammunition.

No sooner had they been taken prisoner than a number were machine-gunned in the village square. The rest were crowded into a tiny nearby barn, a hundred men in all, and killed by a combination of stick grenades and machine-gun fire. The few badly-wounded survivors, Private Evans included, were later picked up and cared for by units of the regular German army.

At the south-west end of the Dunkirk perimeter the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolks, along with the 8th Lancashire Fusiliers, had been ordered to hold the line at the villages of Le Cornet Malo, Riez du Vinage and Le Paradis for as long as possible. Leading the attack the SS Totenkopf Division suffered serious casualties. The Norfolks, cut off in and around a farmhouse at Le Paradise, were reduced to ninety-nine men. On 27 May, now running out of ammunition, they were ordered to surrender by their commanding officer. The captives, the majority of whom were wounded, were marched down a road off the Rue du Paradis to a prepared position where they were machine-gunned. The survivors were bayoneted. Two men survived the carnage, rescued by French civilians.

When Private Evans was interviewed by The Telegraph he said of himself and his comrades that he thanked God that they did their duty. They all did their duty, the Warwicks, the Cheshires, the Norfolks, the Royal Artillery and all of the others, all played a part in ensuring that their comrades would live to fight again. They, too, are worth remembering.

A Certain Brutality

In view of the current, ahem, tensions between Greece and Germany in the benighted euro zone I thought I might just mention the war, with particular reference to the career of Alexander Löhr, commander-in-chief of Army Group E in Greece and Yugoslavia from 1943 until the end of the war.

Löhr was in many ways quite a tragic figure. A soldier of the old school, and Russian Orthodox by birth, he was far from being a committed Nazi. He had, in fact, served in the army of the Habsburg Empire during the First World War, as did many of his senior officers, and thus brought to his command many of the imperial prejudices many older Austrians felt towards the Balkan peoples.

Though tied by the stupid and ultimately self-defeating counter-terrorism guidelines issued to the German Army, he implemented them without a great deal of latitude or imagination. His task in Greece was to eliminate the andartes, and that is what he attempted to do with all thoroughness.

I suppose it did not help matters much that most of his troops, Wehrmacht and SS, had been brutalised by service on the Eastern Front. Indeed, one formation, the 117 Jaeger Division, was specifically told that eine gewisse Brutalität (a certain brutality) was absolutely necessary. The usual measures were adopted against the insurgents, including hostage-taking, wholesale executions and casual atrocities. The consequences of this were exactly the same as elsewhere in Europe; the resistance movement grew steadily in both strength and confidence.

The guerrilla war changed the preconceptions with which the Germans had first arrived in Greece. Philhellenism gave way to notions of the wild 'Balkan fanatic', with the Greeks being seen as little different from the Serbs. As a consequence the Greeks slipped steadily down the racial ladder in the Nazi scheme of things, with the connection between the ancient peoples and 'this land of neo-Greeks' being openly doubted.

Queen of the Naga

I came across an extraordinary story recently, the story of an extraordinary woman. Her name was Ursula Graham Bower, an old Roedean girl, a debutant, who led the Naga, a tribe of head-hunters who live on the border between India and Burma, against the Japanese in the Second World War.

Aged thirty years old, she had been living among the Naga since her mid-twenties conducting an anthropological study. But by 1942, with the Japanese advancing through Burma, the war had come to the Naga, living in hilltop communities straddled across India’s north-eastern frontier.

With fears that the Japanese would push on into India, good intelligence on enemy movements was imperative. A special guerrilla group known as V Force was therefore set up to explore the Naga Hills on both sides of the border. This is where Ursula came in because of her understanding of the Naga peoples and because of the unique bond she had formed with them. In August 1942 the head of V Force asked her to form her local Nagas into a band of scouts, combing the jungle looking for signs of Japanese troop movements.

She thus became the only female guerrilla commander in the history of the British Army, detailed to lead some one-hundred and fifty men in a wide sweep across some eight hundred square miles of difficult mountainous jungle terrain. Her appointment was only supposed to be temporary and she received no military training at all. But she remained in post, performing a vital role in 1944, when the Japanese finally mounted their offensive against British India.

It was one of her patrols which spotted the enemy moving in strength through the Naga Hills, some three divisions in all. The message was sent back to General Sir William Slim, commander of the Fourteenth Army, who had almost been taken by surprise, expecting the Japanese to take an easier route, not push through such difficult jungle terrain.

As the Japanese moved on Kohima Ridge, Ursula, some eighty miles away watching the jungle passes, was given a consignment of rifles and permission to move forward and engage the enemy directly. Her troops advanced through the jungle, rescuing stranded Allied airmen on the way. Soon her fame spread, with American pilots referring to her as the Jungle Queen. To the British she was Queen of the Naga, a person to whom men were sent to be trained in jungle warfare. The Japanese offered a reward for her capture, dead or alive.

Ursula’s unit was disbanded in November 1944, after the Japanese had been decisively defeated in the battles of Kohima and Imphal. For her bravery she was awarded an MBE and the Lawrence of Arabia medal. She died in 1989. A remarkable life; a remarkable woman.

The Ghosts of Katyn Wood

Documents have finally been published that prove, once and for all, that Stalin personally authorised the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers at Katyn Wood and other places in 1940. I never had any doubt about this; I've read biographies of the man and know that nothing of importance in the old Soviet state ever happened without his authorisation. I also know that he personally signed many death lists during the Great Purge.

Still, this is an important development, not for a select band of scholars, who have long had access to the Russian archives, but for the public at large, for Poles in particular. For many years after the massacres the Soviet state was in denial about what happened, blaming the Germans, though they gave the lie to this assertion by refusing to allow the matter to be raised at the Nuremberg Trials of the major Nazi war criminals. Although a new openness began after the collapse of communism it has taken time for the full truth to come out, bound up as the question has been with issues of national pride. It proves once and for all that the assertion of people like Vevgeny Dzhugashvili, the tyrant's grandson, that he was somehow not personally responsible, is disingenuous in the extreme.

It comes at just the right moment, not long after the death of the Polish president, killed on his way to a commemorative ceremony. It's a welcome gesture by Dimitry Medvedev, the Russian president. One can only hope this is the beginning of a better understanding between the two nations, nations that have a long history of mutual animosity despite a common racial identity.

By any definition Katyn was a terrible crime, the massacre of close on 22,000 unarmed prisoners by the agents of the NKVD, the Soviet state security apparatus, the predecessor of the present MGB. One of the documents made public is a note by Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD and one of Stalin's vilest henchmen, whom he once referred to in a joking mood as 'our Himmler.' In this he proposes that the Poles, who included priests, writers, professors and aristocrats as well as military officers, should all be shot. This particular document, which carries Stalin’s signature and a red 'top secret' stamp, is dated March 1940. There are other documents, coming after the Stalin era, showing that the Soviets were determined to keep the matter secret.

Responsibility was finally admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev only in 1990, when he expressed his 'profound regret', a bold gesture by the one decent man the communist state ever produced. But for history, for future generations, tangible proof is in every way better than expressions of regret, no matter how sincere. The ghosts of Kaytn can finally rest.

The Arithmetic of Death

Stalin is reputed to have said that one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. I suppose it's possible for one to relate to the sentiments behind this statement. After all, it's about the limits of human imagination, the limits of empathy. I can understand a single death; a million deaths is beyond me.

On a recent blog on the question of the Armenian massacres of 1915 I wrote "I think it wrong to reduce the debate to numbers; it’s just as terrible if a ‘mere’ 300,000 Armenians died rather than 1.5 million, a figure favoured by those who define the event as genocide." On reflection, and thinking beyond that particular historical example, there are issues to be considered; that numbers, precision in numbers, are important if one is to avoid sinking into a bog of relativism, or into a haze were one figure is no more meaningful than another.

Recently Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, was asked why the arithmetic of mass murder was so important he replied-"There is if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely the matter of a record. Does the record matter? In my judgement it does." Now a German historical commission has established, after a five year investigation, that the number who died in the bombing of Dresden in the air raid of February 1945 was around 25,000, as precise a figure as we are ever likely to get.

Yes, it's still shocking, as Peter Beaumont said in recent a press report, but it's still a long way short of the 135,000 given by David Irving in his 1963 historical pot-boiler The Destruction of Dresden. This figure has long been under challenge by historians a lot more credible than Irving, who, as has become increasingly clear over time, writes with a specific political agenda in mind.

The sad thing is Irving has considerable skills both as a writer and as a researcher, almost seductively so, but these have now taken second place to his politics. He's a Holocaust-denier and an apologist for the Nazi regime. His invention of the death toll at Dresden, and it is pure invention, a figure he may very well have conjured out of the air, was to serve those who have attempted to establish a kind of moral equivalence between Allied and German crimes.

Accurate accounting is, indeed, part of the process of historical understanding.

Remembrance of things past

I'm about to enter into something of a political minefield. I shall have to be careful, to move on tiptoes, to stand in carefully prepared positions. Do try to bear with me as I make my way towards the end and-please-no sudden movements!

For Eastern Europe the Second World War did not end in 1945, something we are increasingly coming to terms with in the West. No, one form of occupation was simply substituted for another. It was an occupation that was to last for almost fifty years, bringing all sort of personal and national traumas. It was an occupation in the case of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the three Baltic States, that entailed the long term prospect of cultural extinction. So there are demons that have to be exorcised in these places, places where the brief Nazi occupation was replaced by a lengthy Soviet one; places where the Russians are hated even more than the Germans.

David Cameron came in for some criticism from the likes of Edward McMillan-Scott, a former Tory MEP, now a Liberal Democrat, for aligning the Conservative Party in the European Parliament with such organisations as Latvia's Fatherland and Freedom Party. I should pause and say I have no idea what a euro wet like McMillan-Scott was doing in the Conservative party in the first place, but that only makes my passage all the more difficult. Cameron has also been criticised by David Miliband, Banana Man himself, our benighted and incompetent Foreign Secretary, describing his association with Fatherland and Freedom as "sickening". Why? Because Fatherland and Freedom in Riga today commemorated the men who fought and died in the Latvian SS Legion.

This is the part of the field where the mines are packed most closely together; so I have to be highly cautious, highly careful, watching each step as I go. The commemoration was for those Latvians, teenagers mostly, who fought, not for the Germans, but to prevent the return of the Soviets, who in a brief occupation of 1940-41 deported thousands of people to Siberia. Still, those who know the history of the Legion will also know it was not only made up of selfless patriots and fighters. No, some of its recruits came from the police, men who were more involved in killing Jews than in fighting Russians. But those who were not, those who served in the fighting battalions, continue to be honoured by many Latvians as defenders of their freedom in some of the darkest days in the nation's history.

It's almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to be forced into this kind of choice; of serving alongside one opponent in countering another. I'm working my way through Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown quartet of novels about the final years of the British Raj. In A Division of the Spoils, the last of the four, he touches on the officers and men, serving in the British Indian Army and captured by the Japanese in the Malaya and Burma campaigns, men who subsequently went on to enrol in the so-called Indian National Army. This collaborationist force was set up under the guidance of Subhas Chandra Bose, an extreme member of the Indian National Congress. The aim was supposedly to serve alongside the Japanese in the 'liberation' of India, though a deeper aim was to prevent the substitution of one Raj for another. These men, the memory of these men, is not without honour in modern India.

And so it was, it might very well be argued, with the men of the Latvian SS, who served only as soldiers and died only as soldiers. But the very acronym 'SS' carries such a burden of horror that it's almost impossible to be objective, almost impossible to see things in dispassionate terms. Perhaps it is wrong for the Latvian Freedom Party to make this a political focus for an emergent nation; perhaps there are some things best forgotten. But for a long time Latvians had no choice but to forget. This recovery of memory, even an unhappy memory, is part of a process of coming to terms with a sublimated past.

There, I'm through. :-)

Mendacious Mitterrand

Following on from my recent piece on Sarkozy’s visit to Rwanda I though I would add a separate article on Francois Mitterrand, the man who was president of France at the time of the genocide, the man who bears a singular responsibility for what happened, the man whose ignorance and turpitude made him conceivably the worst head of state the French have ever known, not excluding Marshal Petain, his hero and avatar.

What an odd thing, is it not, for a socialist to have an old reactionary like Petain as a hero. Ah, but you see, this is where we begin, with confusion, inconsistency and the worst forms of opportunism imaginable. In political terms the French are quite capable of switching from the camp of Caesar to the camp of Brutus, without any major qualms of conscience. But try to imagine being in the camp of Caesar and Brutus at one and the same time. Can you picture such a thing; can you understand such a thing? If you can you are already on the way to understanding the kind of man Mitterrand was.

I don’t really want to dig too deeply into old ground; there is plenty of material already on this man’s shady past and I suspect that there will be more to come in time. Let me just say that when it came to reconstructing the record Mitterrand had a tendency to be not just economical with the truth but parsimonious in the extreme, at least until the full story came out when Pierre Péan, an investigative journalist, published Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, a study of the man’s life and actions between 1934 and 1947. By one of those small ironies that fate enjoys it was published in 1994, the year Mitterrand acted as godfather to the Rwandan Holocaust.

Before this book appeared Mitterrand had either lied about his past or suffered from a highly convenient amnesia. In his youth he had supported the Popular Front, the socialist-communist alliance presided over by Leon Blum. In the war, after he escaped from a German POW camp, he became “a resister after no great agonising”, to use his own words. The truth is quite different. His associations were not with the Popular Front but with Action Française, the Croix de Feu, Le Camelots du Roi and the Cagoulards, monarchist, racist, anti-Semitic and terrorist organisations, some of whom specialised in political assassination, including the planned assassination of Leon Blum.

Mitterrand’s motto really should have been ‘don’t mention the war’, or at least don’t mention all of it. Once back in France he became a minor Vichy functionary. This was not just a job; he wasn’t just another bureaucrat, dedicated to serving authority, regardless of its political complexion. No; this was born of conviction, of support for what the Petainists called the ‘National Revolution.’ His sympathies are revealed in two articles he published in 1942, once criticising France for “150 years of mistakes”; criticising it, in other words, for the Revolution of 1789 and all that came thereafter. In the other article he approves the formation of the Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL), though lamenting its lack of “fanaticism”. He need not have worried about that, for the following year the SOL became the Milice, notorious for torturing and murdering members of the Resistance and collaborating in the Holocaust.

After Péan’s book appeared Mitterrand made all sorts of implausible excuses, more lies and dissimulation. But there was one particularly revealing admission in a television interview. In a response to a question about Vichy’s Jewish Statute he said that it was a piece of legislation against foreign Jews about which he had known nothing.

All I can say is that he must have been both blind and deaf not to know of this Statute. But that’s not the crucial point, no; the Statute was directed against all Jews, but even if it had not been this hardly makes it more defensible, as one author wrote. There he is, still the residual Vichyist, still holding the prejudices of that benighted age, still distinguishing between French and ‘foreign’ Jews. He could not condemn the past because he was the past.

Yes, he was the past and by his friends the French should have known him; friends like the notorious René Bousquet, the former secretary-general of the Vichy police, the man responsible for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris in 1942, in which some 13,000 Jews were sent to their deaths. In 1992 when a committee dedicated to remembering this outrage tried to get an official apology for the actions of Vichy against the Jews Mitterrand refused. The apology came in due course, but it was made by Jacques Chirac, his Gaullist successor, in yet another peculiar irony.

So, there we have it, there we have a taste of the career of France’s first socialist president. De Gaulle was right; Mitterrand was a ghost who came from the deepest depths of the collaboration. His career should have ended in 1945 but for the forgetfulness that descended on France, encouraged by de Gaulle himself. To have a man like Mitterrand as president says a lot about French socialism; says a lot about France.

Remembering Stalin

I saw from a brief report in the British press that Stalin is set to return to Moscow. His portrait is to appear on public buildings prior to 9 May, the day the Russians celebrate the end of the Second World War. This is clearly part of the present drive to create a more ‘positive’ image of Russia’s past, embracing a repackaging of its bloodiest tyrant, a programme fully supported by Premier Putin, moving forwards on some fronts, backwards on others.

In responding to criticism that it is wrong to glorify a man who caused so many deaths, Vladimir Makarov, a city official, said “We need to remember the man who led our country in war.” Yes, that may be true, but there are other things worth remembering, not least of which that this is a man who nearly destroyed Russia in war.

In the original victory parade of May 1945 it was Marshall Zhukov who took the salute, because Stalin was too scared to sit on a horse. Zhukov was later to find himself a victim of the Great Leader’s paranoia and petty jealousy, although his demotion was nothing when compared with the almost total destruction of the senior command of the army, navy and air force in 1937 during the Purge.

Russia was robbed at a crucial time of the services of the likes of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, possibly the most talented soldier of the day, certainly the equal of any senior German officer in imaginative strategic thinking. In his place came Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, whose servility was only equalled by their stupidity. These, along with Stalin, were the masters of the ‘don’t give an inch’ strategy which almost brought total defeat after the German invasion in 1941.

It’s often said that Stalin trusted nobody, not even his closest acquaintances. That’s not true; there was one man he trusted- he trusted Adolf Hitler. In the early months of 1941 the Kremlin received report after report that German forces were massing on their western frontier. Stalin ignored communiqués from Churchill; he ignored communist agents in the west; he ignored the reports of Richard Sorge, his best agent by far. He even ignored German deserters who crossed the border with a warning. They were simply tortured and then shot as provocateurs. His trust was deep, naïve and child-like in the extreme, so much so that he lapsed into a kind of mental seizure after the German onslaught began in June 1941, refusing to believe what was happening, even blaming the invasion on ‘renegade’ generals.

It was Stalin’s errors that caused the catastrophic early defeats, costing Russia millions of men, killed or captured. It was wasteful, it was stupid and but for even greater stupidity on the part of Hitler it would almost certainly have ended in defeat. As it was Stalin continued to waste men and materials in needless and pointless offensives. So, if Stalin is to be remembered it should be for these things; for this was the style of the leadership that he brought to Russia.

A Tale of Collaboration

This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of the Fall of France in May 1940. It’s time, I think, to reflect on what followed; time to reflect on how the French conducted themselves during the ‘dark years.’ It’s not a comfortable picture.

France, of all the countries attacked and invaded by the Nazis, is almost in a unique position in that it retained its own government, a distinction shared only with the Danes. It’s salutary to compare the two examples. There was collaboration in Denmark, yes, though only to a limited degree. The spirit of national independence and self-respect was kept alive and symbolised in the person of King Christian X. Throughout the occupation the Danes consistently resisted German pressure to introduce discriminatory laws against the country’s Jewish minority. Danish Jews never had to wear the yellow star. When discussing the possibility that they might, Christian remarked to his chief minister “perhaps then we should all wear it.”

Now look at France. It’s still wrongly assumed by some that the government of Philippe Pétain was imposed by the Germans, that it was a puppet administration. It was not. Pétain’s government was legally constituted after the Chamber of Deputies granted him plenipotentiary powers, effectively voting the Third Republic out of existence.

It’s also wrongly assumed that his authority only applied in the unoccupied zone whereas in fact he had control over government agencies in the whole country, including the civil service and the police. In 1941 the Germans had a mere 30,000 troops in the occupied zone, most concentrated in the costal areas opposite England. At this stage control would have been all but impossible without active and widespread collaboration.

Ah, but there is collaboration and there is collaboration; the Danes at a minimum, the French at a maximum. Nowhere is the contrast greater than in French treatment of the Jews. There was, of course, a strong pre-war tradition of anti-Semitism in France, a tradition that found full expression in the policy of the Pétain government.

The French police were active in rounding up the Jews on the authority of Vichy, even exceeding German expectations. Drancy Concentration Camp in the suburbs of Paris was set up by the French and run by them until 1943. In the notorious Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942 some 13,000 people, including children, were taken, eventually being sent to Auschwitz. In the south Jews took refuge in those areas occupied by Italy, where in the acutest of ironies the fascists offered them greater protection than their own government.

It seems to me that France of these years is not best depicted in the face of the semi-senile Pétain or even in that of Pierre Laval, his sleazy-looking premier, but in the likes of Joseph Darnand, the head of the notorious Milice, and most particularly in that of the altogether loathsome Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.

Yes, there were resisters and there is eternal and honourable example of Jean Moulin. But the resisters were a tiny minority in a nation of active and passive collaborators. Many of those who did resist were killed not by the Germans but by other French people. A nation of resisters was a post-war myth created by a country anxious to bury so many aspects of its recent past.

The truth is that French conduct under the occupation if not cowardly was supine in the extreme. Not a good example by any standards; not a good example when contrasted with other nations who had not the same historical reputation to defend. It’s a sorry and wretched tale.