All Hell Let Loose (109 page)

Many other nations suffered large numbers of fatalities, though all statistics should be considered suggestive rather than exact, because they remain disputed: 769,000 Romanians, many of them Jews; up to 400,000 Koreans; 97,000 Finns out of a population of less than four million; 415,000 Greeks from a population of seven million; at least 1.2 million Yugoslavs from a population of 15.4 million; more than 343,000 Czechs, 277,000 of them Jews; 45,300 Canadians; 41,200 Australians; 11,900 New Zealanders from a population of 1.6 million – the highest proportionate toll of any Western ally. The most noteworthy aspect of these statistics is that the heaviest burden fell upon nations which suffered enemy occupation, or whose territories became battlefields. One in four of the world’s twenty million military dead perished in German or Japanese captivity, most of them Russians or Poles.

Combatants fared better than civilians: around three-quarters of all those who perished were unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle. The peoples of western Europe escaped more lightly than those of eastern Europe. The best recent research suggests that 5.7 million Jews of all nationalities – out of a pre-war Jewish population of 7.3 million in lands occupied by Hitler – were killed by the Nazis in their attempt to achieve a ‘Final Solution’. Hitler’s agents also murdered or allowed to die some three million Soviet PoWs, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, five million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 150,000 mentally handicapped people, and 10,000 homosexual men.

Most Germans considered that their shattered cities, wrecked industries and millions of dead paid their dues for the crimes of Nazism. The young felt mingled bewilderment and rage that their elders whom they trusted had brought them to such a pass. ‘I wasn’t quite sure what I ought to feel,’ said Helmut Lott, a teenager in 1945. ‘A certain world – a world I’d grown up in and believed in – was destroyed.’ Many Germans colluded in allowing former Nazis to meld unpunished into their post-war society. ‘No one believes a decent German nowadays,’ said former SS officer’s wife Hildegard Trutz bitterly in 1947, ‘but anything those dirty Jews say goes for gospel.’ South America became a popular destination for irreconcilables and the most heinous war criminals, some of whom were given sanctuary by the Catholic Church during their passage from Europe.

Only a tiny fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the victors had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundreds of thousands, that would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis murderer. Less than a thousand retributive executions took place in the Western zones of occupation. Some 920 Japanese were executed, more than three hundred of them by the Dutch for crimes committed in the East Indies. The Allies chose to treat Austria as a victim society rather than a partner in German war guilt, so that no serious denazification process took place there. Former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim was one of many Austrians who had been complicit in war crimes – in his case, the murder of British prisoners in the Balkans. In full knowledge of this, his countrymen eventually elected him as their Chancellor.

Many German convicted mass killers served jail sentences of only a few years, or even escaped by paying a fine of fifty almost worthless Reichsmarks. The Germans and Japanese were not entirely mistaken in regarding the international war crimes trials of 1945–46 as ‘victors’ justice.’ Some British and Americans, and many Russians, were guilty of offences under international law, the killing of prisoners notable among them, yet very few faced even courts-martial. To have been on the winning side sufficed to secure amnesty; Allied war crimes were seldom even acknowledged. British submarine commander ‘Skip’ Miers, for instance, who in 1941 distressed even some of his own crew by insisting that German soldiers struggling in the Mediterranean after the sinking of their caïques should be machine-gunned, was awarded a Victoria Cross and eventually became an admiral. American, Canadian and British troops who routinely shot snipers and Waffen SS prisoners on the battlefield, usually in supposed retaliation for similar actions, went unindicted. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and sentences represented not injustice, but partial justice.

In both Europe and Asia from 1945 onwards, the confrontation with the Soviet Union created new strategic imperatives which were perceived to demand the enlistment of thousands of German and Japanese war criminals in US, British and Russian intelligence organisations and scientific research establishments. With notable cynicism, the Americans amnestied the Japanese biological warfare Unit 731’s commander, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, in return for his secrets. After investigation, US scientists at Camp Detrick declared Ishii’s data worthless. But as a result of a personal decision by Supreme Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur, most of the 20,000 scientists and physicians engaged in Japan’s wartime biological warfare programme were able to resume comfortable civilian careers, despite having been responsible for unspeakable murders in China. The only retribution for their atrocities was extracted by the Russians, who convicted twelve leading members of Unit 731 at a trial at Khabarovsk in 1949. The guilty received long terms of imprisonment; Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo denounced as propaganda both the trials and well-founded Soviet allegations of an American cover-up of Japan’s biological warfare crimes.

Who was to blame for the catastrophe that had befallen Japan? Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa shrugged: ‘The brass – the people in charge.’ But then he added: ‘Really, though, one must include the whole nation, because its mood had been dragging us towards war for so long. There was a horrible inevitability about the way we just plunged deeper and deeper into the mire.’ After 1945 the Japanese people renounced their militarists, and indeed the soldiers who had fought in the war, with a fervour that distressed the nation’s veterans, many of whom remained impenitent. Colonel Hattori Takushiro, former military secretary to Japan’s war minister, wrote proudly in 1956: ‘The Japanese army had no peer in its terrific fighting capacity, which is a separate issue from the fact that Japan lost the war.’ The Japanese people embraced the post-war United States with an enthusiasm that won the hearts of most Americans who served in the occupation army. Japan’s campaigns of conquest, and its treatment of its subject peoples, notably including the Chinese, became forbidden subjects of political or social exchange, and indeed of school learning. Hiroshima and Nagasaki dominated post-war Japanese perceptions; Emperor Hirohito kept his throne despite having led his country to war, which made it less plausible that his subjects should acknowledge collective guilt.

Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, who survived the Tokyo firestorm, said in 2007: ‘In the aftermath of the war, blame was placed solely on the Japanese army and navy. This seemed just, because the civilian population had always been deceived by the armed forces about what was done. Civilian Japan felt no sense of collective guilt – and that was the way the American victors and occupiers wanted it. In the same fashion, it was the Americans who urged that no modern Japanese history should be taught in schools. The consequence is that very few people under fifty have any knowledge of Japan’s invasion of China or colonisation of Manchuria.’ In the early twenty-first century, Hando lectured at a women’s college about the Sh
wa era: ‘I asked fifty students to list countries which have
not
fought Japan in modern times: eleven included America.’

‘It is important frankly to discuss what happened in the Second World War,’ he added, ‘because today relations between China and Japan are so poor. But there is a problem in starting such a discussion, because so few younger Japanese know any facts. There are many people who do not support our militant nationalists, but still find it offensive to endure endless criticism from China and Korea. They dislike those countries poking their noses into what they see as matters for the Japanese people. Most of us think that we have apologised for the war: one of our former Prime Ministers has made the most fulsome apology. I myself think that we have done enough apologising.’ This remains a matter of debate, and some British and American people strongly disagree with Hando. As recently as 2007, the head of the Japanese air force was obliged to resign his post after publishing a paper in which he asserted the philanthropic nature of Japan’s activities in China between 1937 and 1945.

Palestine was among the lands most conspicuously influenced by the outcome of the conflict. For more than two decades of British mandatory rule, its future had been keenly debated. Captain David Hopkinson was one among hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who passed through the ‘Holy Land’ in the course of his war service, and pondered its rightful destiny. Hopkinson had a special interest, because his wife was half-Jewish. He wrote to her from Haifa in 1942, expressing a hostility to Zionism founded in his belief that ‘Jews are of greatest value within the countries where they have been long established. I am as impressed as everyone must be by the technical and cultural accomplishments of Jews in Palestine, but for an intensely nationalistic minority to seek to carve out for itself an independent state from territories to which others also have a claim seems to be inconsistent with the high ideals of peace and humanity in which civilized Europeans believe.’

Yet in 1945, such temperate views were swamped by the ghastly revelations of the Holocaust. It is important to emphasise that, even after newsreels from liberated Belsen and Buchenwald had stunned the civilised world, the full extent of the Jewish genocide became understood only slowly, even by Western governments. But it became manifest that the Jews of Europe had fallen victim to a uniquely satanic programme of mass murder, which left many survivors homeless and dispossessed. The US commissioner of immigration Earl Harrison visited the Displaced Persons camps of Europe and was shocked by what he found there. He reported to President Truman in August 1945: ‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.’ By a vast historic irony, Hitler’s persecution transformed the fortunes of the Jewish people around the world. It provided an impetus to Zionism which seemed to many Westerners morally irresistible. Never again would anti-Semitism be socially acceptable in Western democratic societies; and the slaughter of Europe’s Jews precipitated the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. Yet, if the Holocaust made a devastating and lasting impact upon Western culture, many other societies around the world have never identified themselves with its significance, and in some cases even deny its reality. Widespread bitterness persists that the Western Powers assuaged their own guilt about the wartime fate of the Jews by making a great historic gesture in lands identified by Muslims as rightfully Arab.

There is a wider issue: some modern historians who are citizens of nations that were once European possessions regard their peoples as victims of wartime exploitation. They suggest that Britain, especially, engaged them in a struggle in which they had no stake, for a cause that was not properly theirs. Such arguments represent points of view rather than evidential conclusions, but it seems important for Westerners to recognise these sentiments, as a counterpoint to our instinctive assumption that our grandparents fought ‘the Good War’.

Within Western culture, of course, the conflict continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that this was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Practically all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises. It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, nor rationally to celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many. Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who had taken part. All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.