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Рубрики WWII; Память; Версия для печати

[2Chestnut] Рецензия Ричарда Овери на новую книгу Нормана Дэйвиса

Если коротко, то "товарищ Дэйвис упрощает"

THE MORAL LOW GROUND
EUROPE AT WAR,1 939-1945:
No SIMPLE VICTORY
*
By Norman Davies
(Macmillan 4871121 L25)

I REALISED ALMOST as soon as I began reading Norman Davies's new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing aside, that when he is invited to talk about the war he often asks his audience whether they know its five largest battles, or the different ideologies involved, or the state that suffered the most dead. He tells us that his audience is usually reduced to a shy silence, followed by spontaneous, but usually wrong, guesses as to the responses he is seeking. This book is intended to be salvation for these many lost souls. But for those, like this unfortunate reviewer, who know the answers, the book must be at best a happy reiteration, at
worst a redundant catalogue of established fact.
To be fair, Davies has in his sights not just the average audience whose understanding of the war has been coloured by years of myth-making and distortion. He also wishes to correct the historical profession, which has clung for too long to an outmoded view of the Second World War: first as a largely 'Western' narrative, and second (in Studs Terkel's phrase) as a 'Good War'. The aim of this book is to explain that the Soviet war effort was the real core of Allied victory (a view surely now so long established that in turn it threatens to distort reality by becoming merely cliche), but also to make clear that
having fought alongside the Soviets means the West has no right to see the war as having been an unalloyed triumph of good over evil. The 'Good War' image has worked, he claims, only by decades of deliberate silence on the nefariousness of the Soviet regime, whose crass totalitarian character and ruthless acts of repression were nevertheless what made it possible to resist Hitler at all.
Since there are evidently people out there who have not understood this, it is a point worth making. Crimes were indeed committed by all sides; plenty of Germans did not want to be fighting Hitler's war and most of them never committed an atrocity. Yet fixed in the Western mind is the image of the black-uniformed SS man (plague of Europe and typical Nazi), whose activities in some sense represented, and still seem to represent, the German capacity for evil. The recent extraordinary fuss about the German novelist Günther Grass – who finally admitted, late in a life devoted to exposing the
bleaker aspects of modernity, to having been a member of the Waffen-SS − ignored the fact that the so-called 'Armed SS' was not part of Himmler's praetorian guard but a hotch-potch of volunteers, from Germany and its allied and occupied states, fighting in the line just like the regular soldiers. Grass was not an SS man, whatever the more hysterical sections of the press might claim.
If the relative nature of morality and immorality is the central message in Davies's history, he does not go on to argue that it would have been better if the West had not helped the Soviet war effort. At the time, morality aside, the Western states judged that it was more in their interest to let Stalin defeat a predatory Germany than to allow the opposite to happen. Moreover, the West was forced to think globally, not just in terms of the conflict in European Russia. Since Davies has chosen to talk only of Europe's War, it is difficult to make sense from his account of the global character of Western
concerns: to protect the world's trade routes and trading system; to preserve Anglo-American naval mastery; to protect
the overseas empires (a part of the strategy that American statesmen could not entirely buy); to secure the defeat of Japan in the Far East, and of Italy in Africa. When all is sad and done, Hitler's decision to turn to the Soviet Union - rather than sweep Britain from the Mediterranean and Middle East, gobble up the vast oil supplies of the region, cut Britain's sea lanes and link up with the Japanese in Asia - turned this not into the 'Good War' but, from the West's point of view, 'the Best War' they could hope for.
They were not blind to the nature of the Soviet system or the threat it posed, but postponed that crisis until later. So far, so good. What will make this book a frustrating read for the audience at which it is presumably aimed is its shapeless, even incoherent structure and the absence of serious analysis or explanation. The book is divided Into large chapters that survey warfare, politics, the civilian, and so on. The chronology is loose, to put it mildly: lengthy discussion of the Versailles system and the politics of the 1920s comes long after the rather slumpy account of the wartime fields of conflict. The decision to turn much of the book into what amounts to a number of encyclopaedia entries produces a deliberately fractured
text. In a peculiar section headed simply 'Miscellaneous Wartime Groups', Davies unabashedly opts for an alphabetical
series of brief sketches from 'aristocrats' to 'women': a reminder, he tells us, that the war affected lots of different people in lots of different places. The staccato nature of this approach is scarcely compensated by the rich range of the anecdotes, memoirs and odd facts that inhabit each entry. No explanation is given that fits with a wider social, political or cultural history of the war. Readers are left to savour each mouthful, but have no real idea of what the whole dish looks like.
Among those for whom Davies is writing are presumably a great many military buffs who may not know much about the Gulag but who know a lot about the combat history of the war. They will learn very little from this account. The description of the major events is so lightly and carelessly drawn that it is hard to understand why it was put in at all. Take, for example, the discussion of the Western bombing campaigns. They get one-and-a half pages in total. Harris is seen as the architect of area bombing, though the directives that permitted it predated his appointment by many months. The first Thousand Bomber Raid on Cologne did not 'level' the city. The American campaign needs to be integrated with the British, since both were directed at a range of detailed industrial and military 'target systems' and not just at whole cities indiscriminately. The P-51 escort fighters became available in 1944, so that for more than a year daylight bombing took a very heavy toll of American
crews. The construction of a complex German defensive network is ignored. The bombing of civilians was, of course, one of the major blots on the West's claim to be fighting a just war, but on the one question that might fit with Davies's attempt to rewrite the moral story of the war he hedges his bets. 'War', he tells us, in one of many platitudinous asides, 'is a dirty business.'
The best part of the book is the last chapter, on portrayals of war. Though it is presented again merely as a list of key media and artistic approaches, Davies reminds us that there have been many different ways of representing the war, both at the time and since. These acts of representation depend on many variables, some underpin established myths, others demolish them. Historians are constantly catching up with these shifts in representation or the revelation of new sources, and it is
this huge game of intellectual tag that has prevented a stable narrative of the war years from solidifying. Perhaps the unstructured character of Europe's War is its strength.
For all its knowingness, this is a book that ends by reminding us of what we still do not know.

"Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов"