[ALBSA-Info] Book Review by N. Malcolm

[Agron Alibali]

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) 
October 21, 2001, Sunday 
Ordinary people in the front line The Second World War - its causes, history and participants - is just too big a subject to fit into a short book, says Noel Malcolm 

 By NOEL MALCOLM 

The Second World War: A People's History by Joanna Bourke 

Oxford, pounds 14.99, 270 pp pounds 12.99 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222 

JOANNA BOURKE 's last book, An Intimate History of Killing, tried to answer a fascinating and apparently simple question: how is it that ordinary people, when taken from their peace-time jobs and turned into soldiers, can be induced to break the most basic taboo of civilised life, and kill other people? 

The question may sound so elementary that it hardly needs to be put. Yet the range of possible answers is bewilderingly large: discipline, fear, patriotism, group-loyalty, ideology, the de-humanisng of the enemy, and so on. And so long as we lack an overall answer to this question, there will surely be something missing at the centre of our understanding of modern warfare. So, in a bold and sudden move, this social historian (now Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London) had sent in her arguments to capture the heartlands of modern military history. The Old Guard of military historians closed ranks, and laid down a withering fire of scorn and contempt. Not being a member of any military-historical formation myself (apart from occasional forays as a Balkan irregular), I found the passion with which they dismissed her book rather perplexing. Perhaps her feminist concern with topics such as "masculinity" had something to do with it. But the book itself was, I thought, lucid, penetrating, and impressively well-researched. Nor was I the only person to think so: it went on to win both the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. 

And now here comes the follow-up book. The task Prof Bourke has set herself here is less original, but in many ways more difficult: to distil the entire history of the Second World War into one short account (the text fills only 225 pages, and the war itself ends on page 184), and to present it in a way that puts the experiences of ordinary people in the foreground. Hence the subtitle: "A People's History". 

Some historians, faced with the task of summarising six years of world-wide conflict in such a short space, might have picked out one theme as the key to final victory: mastery in the intelligence war, for example, or superiority in the basic economics of arms-production. Joanna Bourke touches from time to time on both of these topics, but never really judges their importance to the eventual outcome. 

She does in fact seem quite uninterested in the economics of the war, despite all the modern research on this topic. And the interaction of economic concerns and strategic ones is also underplayed: 

Hitler's geostrategic interest in the Middle East is passed over, and the whole war in North Africa is therefore dismissed by her as a "sideshow". 

What about her special concern, the experience of "ordinary people"? This is a recurrent theme in the book, but hardly a unifying one - the nature of the experience involved is just too various for that. Quotations from letters, diaries and memoirs are scattered here and there: infantry soldiers, concentration camp inmates, a child in Tokyo, the mother of a bomber pilot in Massachusetts. All are well-chosen, and some - such as the letters written by an anonymous woman in the ghetto of Tarnopol, in Galicia - are utterly heart-breaking. But in the end they serve only as illustrations, little human-interest interludes in a larger narrative that can carry on without them. 

For the most part, therefore, the ordinary people in this story are on the receiving end, either the victims or the instruments of policies imposed from above. Just occasionally does this "people's history" become the history of a "people's war", in the traditional (mainly Left-wing) sense of a military effort being driven by a political agenda from below. Some so-called "national liberation struggles" qualify: thus both Tito and the Greek Communist partisans are given rather starry-eyed treatment here. 

Readers may also baulk at the respectful treatment given to those Asians who collaborated with the Japanese against British or Dutch colonial rule. And there is a whiff of moral equivalentism in the discussion of European and Japanese "imperialism" in south-east Asia, which the statistics that Prof Bourke herself furnishes (for example, the 3.7 million Indonesians killed in four years of Japanese rule) surely belie. 

Overall, however, this book is not in the grip of a political agenda; nor is it trying to push through any radical new "take" on the war. If anything, it suffers from too much non-committal detachment, not too little: there are just too many issues on which Prof Bourke is content to declare that "some historians say this, while others say that". 

So, on the most painful issue of all, she writes: "Some historians argue that Hitler and other senior Nazis made a deliberate decision to kill the Jews and then carried out the plan. Other historians believe that the Holocaust was the result of an unintentional radicalisation process within the chaotic Nazi state." And her own opinion? "In practice, these views are not mutually incompatible." This is not very helpful. Yes, it is possible to imagine both a deliberate plan and an unintentional process going on at the same time, at different levels; but one would like a historian to say which, in the end, was the more decisive in producing the final outcome. 

Perhaps the task Joanna Bourke set herself here was just too great. She has brought to it talents which many other historians might envy: an impressive geographical range, a fine eye for human detail and a real clarity of expression. The result is not a bad book, but, coming in the wake of that truly original Intimate History of Killing, it is a disappointing one. 

Noel Malcolm's books include 'Kosovo: A Short History' and 'Bosnia: A Short History'. 



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