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War has been a constant of the human experience for millennia. The question that continues to trouble historians is: why? Richard Overy considers the major factors that have fuelled conflict since before the emergence of the state, and what that might mean for us in the 21st century
Why war? Albert Einstein posed this question to the psychologist Sigmund Freud in a series of letters sent in 1932, at the prompting of the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. He was disappointed with the answer. Freud told him that all animals – humans included – possessed a destructive “death drive” that could explain why they fought and why they would continue to do so. Since that exchange, many of the world’s brightest minds have sought an answer that explains our propensity for collective violence – both over the millennia of recorded history and in all parts of the globe. This line of thought prompts two more questions. What is warfare? And for how long have we been fighting wars? These points have, unsurprisingly, sparked major disagreements. What is the definition of ‘war’? Historians and social scientists have tended to define war as something that is a product of the state as an entity. They have been fought in periods when, and in places where, they could be planned, armies raised and resources paid for – in other words, over the past 4,000–5,000 years in areas where states emerged. Any violence below the level of the state is not warfare but, rather, feuding or raiding or ritual contests. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists, on the other hand, see the emergence of warfare as having occurred much deeper in the human past, when small groups of hunter-gatherers or fishers competed for food or resources and fought to protect their kin. Warfare in this early environment was almost certainly sporadic and brief, albeit potentially deadly, and has influenced behaviours into the modern era. Cultural anthropologists have also suggested that warfare evolved before the state, both in the remote past and among tribal communities more recently. It was waged by pre-state peoples in a variety of ways – from ritual stand-offs to full-scale massacres – and was, in many cases, reinforced by a prevailing culture that endorsed violence when necessary and prompted the evolution of a warrior class and militaristic values that glorified war. There are many examples of warfare among peoples who lacked state structures but fought from a variety of motives – over resources, land, booty and vengeance. The Māori fought with extreme violence among themselves to protect food supplies stored in special silos known as pa. Tribal chiefdoms in Neolithic Europe fought regular engagements against encroaching tribes or to safeguard trade. In North America, too, tribal conflict often led to extreme violence. Take the massacre perpetrated in the first millennium AD in southern Utah. The skeletons of 92 victims, mostly male, were found at Wetherill’s Cave, displaying evidence that they had been bludgeoned to death, scalped and decapitated. What evidence is there for ‘emergent warfare’? Such bloodletting was not the same as modern organised war, but it is difficult to see the pre-state past as peaceable, given everything we now know about collective, war-like conflict. Evidence for this stage of ‘emergent warfare’ has been found in the archaeological record in the form of weapons, fortifications, iconography and skeletal remains scarred by bone damage indicating violence. At Talheim in Germany’s Neckar Valley, marks on the excavated remains of 32 men, women and children who lived around 7,000 years ago suggest that they fell victim to attack by axes, clubs and arrowheads. The examination of Paleoamerican skeletons from between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago has revealed that more than half met a violent death. Why have there always been wars? Clearly, humans have been fighting each other since long before the emergence of the state. But this fact reveals little about why. We are far more belligerent than any other species, and have evidently evolved that belligerence as one means of survival in the face of factors such as competition from other humans and ecological shocks. In short, warfare has become completely embedded in the human past. But wars are not all the same, even if they are rooted in common causes. To make sense of the bewildering number of conflicts in the recorded past, certain recurring motives can be found: the need for resources; the imperatives of belief or ideology; the pursuit of power; and last, but by no means least, the search for security. Motive for war #1: fighting over resources The quest for, or protection of, resources has a long pedigree. Whether the aim was to preserve a hunting ground from trespassers, or to claim additional land, or to capture slaves, or to leverage payment of tribute, resource wars are identifiable. In many cases, ecological shifts caused by climatic change, overhunting or population growth have prompted the violent pursuit of resources. The pressure of nomadic tribes on the northern Chinese frontier 2,000 years ago was driven in part by sudden climate shocks that reduced pasture land. And a prolonged drought in central North America in the late-13th century triggered waves of bloodshed as tribes struggled to find food in an arid land. In the modern age, the drive to secure resources has been less obviously the primary motive behind acts of war. However, there is one notable exception to this rule: the Second World War. German aggression against the Soviet Union in summer 1941, and Japanese attacks on the US and on the British and Dutch empires later the same year, were unquestionably propelled by a thirst for material resources and land. Read more | Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War “What one does not have, but needs, one must conquer,” announced Adolf Hitler shortly before his troops invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. That summer and autumn, he sparred with his generals, insisting – against their instincts – that German forces should first seize the coalfields and other rich assets of the Donbas rather than focusing on the capture of Moscow; their 1942 campaign was also intended to claim the oil and other resources of the southern Soviet Union. These would be needed if Germany were to become an economic superpower capable of holding off or defeating the British empire and the US. Japan’s leaders also saw resources as vital to their war effort in China and their ambitions to be a major power. It was this imperative that drove their decision to launch the Pacific War. This, they hoped, would provide them with the material resources – the oil and minerals of south-east Asia – necessary to prevail over the western powers. Motive for war #2: belief and ideology Religion has also proven a powerful driver of conflict over the centuries. But should it be taken seriously as a cause in its own right? Or does it often, in fact, mask social and economic motives? Historians have debated these questions for centuries – and when they have, the medieval crusades launched by Christian powers against the so-called ‘infidel’ have rarely been far from their minds. Though some historians have contended that economic gain and local power were the crusading knights’ true goals, it could be argued that this conclusion is a product of the outcome of these campaigns, rather than their cause. Read more | Crusaders: did they fight for God or gold? Pope Urban II’s 1095 call for Christians to capture the Holy Land – and, in doing so, to win redemption from sins – was answered by thousands of people, both rich and poor. They overcame unimaginably harsh conditions and succeeded in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, where they slaughtered the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Only belief made sense of the campaign and the contest to hold onto the new crusader kingdoms in the east. Belief also prompted Islamic leaders to unite in order to drive out the crusaders, with the promise of paradise for those who died fighting for the cause; by the end of the 13th century that campaign was complete. The call to jihād – war in defence of Islam – has been revived in recent years, with strong echoes of a much earlier rhetoric. Longstanding Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s recent claim that Jerusalem will again be in Muslim hands echoes the 12th-century campaign to recapture the city from Christian control. Belief, then, is not so easy to dismiss as a cause of war. Motive for war #3: pursuit of power On the face of it, the link between war and the pursuit of power appears far less controversial. Few would argue with the contention that the quest for authority and control over others has always been a prime driver of conflict. Yet even this conclusion runs into problems, because people seldom fight for power for its own sake. Rather, conflict aims to gain power for something: seizing land, demanding tribute, controlling resources, enhancing security and satisfying honour. Military power may be the means to achieve these aims, but it is the instrument rather than the cause. However, there can be little doubt that the desire for power was the motor that propelled some of history’s most famous (or infamous) figures – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler – along the road to conflict and conquest. Whatever else drove these individuals to wage war, an insatiable appetite for personal power was clearly central. Napoleon was a classic case. Relentlessly driven to rise above the ordinary, he embarked on a military career at a young age. “The only thing to do in this world,” he told his brother Joseph in 1794, at the age of about 25, “is to keep acquiring… power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.” Read more | The many faces of Napoleon Power for him was bound up with military success, which meant dominating as much of Europe as he could. And power brought with it a popular cult of Napoleon as saviour and ruler. ‘Saint Napoleon’ or ‘Napoleon the Great’ were epithets wielded to enhance his status. Napoleon could brook no opposition to his power, which explains the constant conflicts in central Europe, Spain and, eventually, Russia, where his ambition reached its limit. The pursuit of power made possible other achievements, but it was also the sign of a man who didn’t know where to stop. That thirst for power warped Napoleon’s thinking even while he was incarcerated on an Atlantic island. Here, during his final exile on St Helena, the vanquished French emperor claimed that, if he had succeeded in Russia, he would have been “the greatest man that ever lived”. Motive for war #4: security Power and religious faith may have sparked numerous conflicts down the centuries, but the quest for security is surely the most common motive in all of recorded history for waging war. Modern security studies were born in the aftermath of the Second World War, and security of all kinds has become something of a modern obsession. But security as an ambition has a much longer pedigree. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, saw the defence of frontiers by a permanent “posture of Warre” as essential for security in the absence of a power to enforce peace and the lack of sufficient trust in others. The anarchic nature of the international order is a major argument for why modern states must stay armed and prepared, even when there are institutional or legal constraints on resort to war, or a strong desire for peace. Linked to this, frontiers or borders have long been flashpoints. Indeed, most wars in the modern age have been fought between neighbours, and very often over issues of security around a frontier. This is true today of the current conflict in Gaza and also of the Russia-Ukraine war, which was launched – or so Russian leaders claim – in order to create a secure frontier against what Moscow sees as the menace to security posed by Nato. But it was also true of the Roman empire, whose long frontier, though seldom fixed in the way most of today’s borders are, had to be defended against a host of potential enemies to preserve the security of imperial territory. Rome’s frontier was a constant source of friction and war. It stretched over 5,000 miles around western Europe, the Middle East and north Africa, extending from Britain in the north to the Sahara in the south, and from Spain in the west to areas beyond Palestine in the east. Read more | The Pax Romana: how the Romans maintained peace at the point of a sword This border was porous, though great efforts were made to install watchtowers or outposts along its length in order to monitor entry and to safeguard against violent incursions. Hadrian’s Wall – the Vallum Aelium – is arguably the best-known example, constructed in an effort to keep the tribes of the Caledonians and Maeatae at arm’s length from the Roman province of Britannia. The wall was connected by roadways to garrisons farther south, so that reinforcements could be rapidly marched in, and forts and watchtowers were set along its 73-mile length. At least 11 major raids by Celtic tribes were recorded between AD 160 and 400, but the wall served its purpose – preserving the security of the provincial territory. By the fourth century AD, most Roman soldiers were stationed along the frontiers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and the primary endeavour of the empire was frontier security – until it was overwhelmed by the tribal federations driven from Eurasia into the Roman heartland. War in the 20th and 21st centuries Some historians assert that, over the 16 centuries since the fall of Rome, the global order has become more peaceable. However, that argument has been thoroughly undermined by the fact that the 20th century witnessed the two largest and deadliest wars in human history. Indeed, there has not been a single year in the 20th or 21st centuries when a war of some kind – state-on-state war, insurgency and counter-insurgency, civil war or resource war – was not being fought. Warfare is embedded in the way modern states think about their security, and that security seems once again at serious risk in the 2020s, as it was in the 1930s. Today, war is not just history, and much academic effort has been devoted to assessing what kind of conflicts will emerge over the course of the current century. The concept of Power Transition Theory, developed by international relations experts during the Cold War, suggests that a challenge to a hegemonic power by a rising power creates the danger of war, either to defend a waning hegemony or to elevate the challenger. It’s proposed that a potential war between China and the US would fit this pattern, though it remains a speculation impossible to predict with certainty. Read more | Historians debate: how do intractable conflicts come to an end? More likely sources of conflict are the shrinking availability of resources – oil being a key example – and competition for their control. This is being exacerbated by the effects of climatic change, as climate shocks undermine resource availability – notably of water – or precipitate mass migrations in affected regions. Cyberwar or war in space have also become potential arenas of conflict as militaries have come to rely on sophisticated electronic communication. Over the past 15 years, America has activated US Cyber Command and US Space Force to beef up its defences against new threats – and to enable it to launch counterattacks. These initiatives, and the long history of human belligerence that preceded them, suggests that we shouldn’t anticipate a warless world in anything but the remotest future. War first emerged in the archaic past, evolving through the stages of village, tribe, tribal federation, state and empire into a universal phenomenon. As to why it did so? Well, there’s no single answer to that – much as Einstein might have wished for one. Richard Overy is honorary research professor at the University of Exeter, and author of Why War? (Pelican, 2024) This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
“They changed the way war is run”: Ben Macintyre on the early SAS
Ben Macintyre has written the first authorised history of the SAS in the Second World War. He tells Rob Attar how a group of bearded ruffians mastered covert warfare in the north African desert
The SAS (Special Air Service) was founded in north Africa in July 1941 with the aim of attacking airfields and other targets deep behind enemy lines. At a time when the north African campaign was going badly for the Allies, the British were prepared to attempt a new form of warfare, which, despite a number of reverses, proved highly successful. The unit rapidly grew from a few dozen men to several thousand. In Europe, the SAS was active in both the Italy campaign and the attacks on France, the Netherlands and Germany. At the end of the war the SAS was disbanded, but was later reformed in 1947 and continues to operate today. We have an image today of the SAS as a ruthless, efficient unit. Does your research into its wartime inception tally with this idea? It may be hard to believe now, but in the early days the SAS was amateur. Things went very right for the unit at times, but also spectacularly wrong at others. And these were not over-muscled exemplars of butch masculinity in all cases. The man who founded the SAS, David Stirling, was about as far as you could get from that image: he was 6ft 6ins and not very robust at all. Yet he was a brilliant leader of men who had a fantastically good idea that changed the way war is run. I hope my research will also cast a new light on the qualities that went into this kind of military action. There was a kind of mental toughness to the people who founded the SAS that is pretty unique. They are an interesting combination of qualities and not all of them expected. Indeed, as one character says, they were the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons. They were people who would not fit into normal military shape, but they were extraordinarily courageous. Read more | The real 'Rogue Heroes' of the early SAS The SAS’s origins are quite unusual. Could it only really have been created in that particular circumstance at that particular time? That’s right and luck played a huge part. The idea for the SAS came to Stirling while he was lying in a hospital bed in Cairo having carried out a hopeless parachute jump. He had snagged his parachute on the back of a plane and it didn’t so much float to Earth as plummet, injuring his back very badly. He came up with this idea of parachuting behind the lines in the north African campaign with the intention of sneaking up onto airfields, blowing up aeroplanes and then running away back into the desert. This was the kind of warfare that a lot of people in the top brass of the military thought was not only unconventional but not really cricket. He faced a lot of opposition from within. The SAS’s earliest operation ended in disaster. Was the unit lucky to survive this? In Operation Squatter, the first parachute jump, 55 men jumped into the desert and only 21 came back. It was an absolute calamity that should never have been allowed to happen. The weather was so bad that this was almost a suicide jump. And, yes, it is remarkable that the unit wasn’t disbanded. It came down really to chance and the fact that Stirling rather carefully hid the full scale of what had gone on. In contrast, many of the later desert raids were hugely successful. How was the SAS able to achieve such amazing results? It was partly tactical, it was partly extraordinarily good training. Jock Lewes, one of the forgotten heroes of the SAS, was their first sort of training officer. He put the SAS through their paces and achieved a level of physical resilience that would otherwise have been impossible. On the tactical level, the SAS teamed up with the Long Range Desert Group, a reconnaissance unit who became, in Stirling’s words, a sort of “Libyan taxi service”. The LRDG would ferry units of attackers close to the airfields and they would then slip on to these airfields under cover of darkness, and were indeed extraordinary effective. They destroyed hundreds of planes. On the podcast | John Lewes, nephew and biographer of Jock Lewes, to talk about how his uncle helped found one of the world’s most famous special forces during World War Two. How important was it that Churchill got on board with the SAS quite early on? It’s pretty clear that the SAS would not have survived if Winston Churchill had not learned of it from his son Randolph, who was actually in the unit briefly, and then adopted it almost as a sort of mascot. Randolph Churchill was a very unlikely soldier, being overweight and a heavy drinker, but he had been taken by Stirling on a hopelessly failed raid into Benghazi and been so excited that he wrote to his father describing in detail what had happened. Stirling had calculated that this might happen and that Churchill would absolutely love this sort of derring-do. Later, on his way to see Stalin, Winston stopped off in Cairo and invited Stirling to dinner. They got on incredibly well and after dinner Churchill’s secretary sent a note to Stirling asking him to expand on what he’d spoken to the prime minister about. Stirling wrote a memo that more or less asked for all special forces to be put under his command and that’s what duly happened. How did the SAS cope with the desert conditions? The Libyan desert is one of the most hostile places on Earth and they had to work out techniques of survival. It was really tough. They would spend months at a time holed up in caves and in tents in the desert under camouflage. It took a psychological as well as a physical toll – a kind of desert madness began to kick in after a while. But the SAS developed a very particular esprit de corps and their own songs, rituals and language for talking about desert life. It was all done with a strange British sense of humour. One thing some in the SAS never recovered from was having to leave wounded people behind in the desert to die of thirst. It’s something we don’t really associate with the Second World War but it was the brutal reality of what had to happen. They simply could not carry those people across hundreds of miles of desert. There are amazing stories of survival where individuals trudged 150 miles over weeks across the desert, but there are other tales of tragedy. Some just disappeared into the desert and all we know is that they never came out. How different were the SAS’s campaigns in Europe from those in the desert? The SAS transformed over time just as the war itself evolved. The north African campaign began as a very exciting adventure: Rommel described it as a sort of gentleman’s war. The rules of war applied, prisoners were taken and civilians were not involved. In Europe it became a much darker sort of war. By the time the SAS was in occupied France they were dealing with civilians, collaborators, partisans and people they could and couldn’t trust. Hitler issued his famous commando order, which said that any ‘parachutist’ – actually any military person found behind the lines – was to be treated as a spy and executed without trial. This was really a death sentence for the SAS. It didn’t appear to prevent anyone from taking part in operations but it meant that scores, if not hundreds, of SAS people were executed over the course of the campaign. Meanwhile, there were incidents where the SAS, perhaps unsurprisingly, were not entirely tied-down by the rules of war. There were occasional examples where individuals were shot out of hand and when revenge was taken. One of the darkest moments of the story was when SAS members discovered Bergen-Belsen. What impact did that have on those involved? A group of SAS were motoring north through Germany in 1945 when they came upon Bergen-Belsen, purely by accident. It was actually the smell of the camp that first alerted them that there was something in the forest. When they drove through the open gates of the camp they came upon a scene of unbelievable horror. Now, given what the SAS had been through in the war, with so many of their men murdered because of Adolf Hitler’s commando order, you might have expected them to stride in and begin executing the SS guards. And there was clearly a moment where some of the troopers were ready to open fire, but the leader of the group, a man called John Tonkin, stopped them. He incarcerated the camp commandant and the SS, but they weren’t murdered, and I think of that as a moment of rare civilisation in an uncivilised war. It was perhaps a defining moment in the contrast between the two elite forces of the war: the SS and SAS. What kind of impact did the SAS have on the war as a whole? It’s impossible to put a figure on this kind of thing but what I think has been underestimated is the extent to which the SAS, at a pivotal moment in the war, provided hope. Their mystique, their legend and even their appearance – bearded, swashbuckling ruffians in their own made-up uniforms – all had a huge impact on allied morale. They had a psychological impact on the other side, too. In the desert, stories of their exploits spread through German and Italian ranks, keeping the soldiers behind the lines in a sense of permanent fear because they never knew when the next attack was going to come. Hundreds and thousands of soldiers were kept back from the front line to defend against attacks. How much of the wartime SAS can be seen in special forces nowadays? It’s no exaggeration to say that the SAS invented a new sort of warfare. Up until this time, military thinking pretty much ran along traditional lines: two large armies colliding on a battlefield and that’s the end of the story. Stirling rewrote the rules. All special forces around the world owe their being to that inheritance, and some such as Delta Force in the US are specifically modelled on it. In many ways this is in fact the face of modern warfare. In Syria, Iraq and Libya (back where it all began) all these sorts of methods are currently being used. The US defense secretary recently described how their special forces meant their enemies “don’t know at night who’s going to be coming in through the window”. That is a precise echo of the philosophy David Stirling used to such dramatic effect 75 years ago. Ben Macintyre is an author, journalist and broadcaster who has written several books on the Second World War, including Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross and Agent Zigzag, and the author of SAS: Rogue Heroes – The Authorized Wartime History (Viking, 2016) This interview first appeared in the December 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Second World War
When it comes to the Second World War, most people will be able to tell you the important dates and historical facts. But did you know that Britain actually had the least rationing in Europe? Or that Germany had a unique way of treating its flying ‘aces’? Here, historian James Holland reveals several lesser-known details about the conflict
France had more tanks, guns and men than Germany in 1940 It is always assumed that during the Second World War the Germans bludgeoned their way to victory with a highly modern and mechanised army and Air Force that was superior to anything the Allies could muster in May 1940. The reality of WW2 was very different. On 10 May 1940, when the Germans attacked, only 16 of their 135 divisions were mechanised – that is, equipped with motorised transport. The rest depended on horses and cart or feet. France alone had 117 divisions. France also had more guns: Germany had 7,378 artillery pieces and France 10,700. It didn't stop there: the Germans could muster 2,439 tanks while the French had 3,254, most of which were bigger, better armed and armoured than the German panzers. 10 of the most important Second World War dates Why did the Second World War happen? The priority for manpower in the UK is surprising Britain had decided before the war began that it would make air and naval power the focus of its fighting capability, and it was only after the fall of France that British powers realised that the Army would have to grow substantially too. However, right up until the spring of 1944, the priority for manpower in the UK was not the navy, RAF, army, or even the merchant navy, but the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In the war, Britain alone built 132,500 aircraft, a staggering achievement – especially when considering that Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain never had more than 750 fighters. View Riddle on the source website Allied merchant shipping losses were just 1 per cent Allied shipping losses in the Second World War in the North Atlantic, Arctic and Home Waters were just 1.48 per cent. Overall, there were 323,090 individual sailings, of which 4,786 were sunk. Of these, 2,562 were British, but on average, there were around 2,000 British ships sailing somewhere around the world on any given day. Convoys, for the most part, were pretty safe, even though a few suffered terribly. Independent sailings and stragglers from convoys suffered the worst, but faster independent sailings were needed to cut down on unloading time and congestion, which was the drawback of the convoy system. The great misconceptions of the Second World War The reluctant kamikaze of the Second World War The Japanese had Kamikaze rockets It was not only the Germans who put rocket-power aircraft into the air in the Second World War. After their initial victories, the Japanese struggled to pace with US and British technology, but they did develop the Ohka – or ‘Cherry Blossom’, a rocket-power human-guided anti-shipping missile, which was used at the end of the war as a kamikaze weapon. It had to be carried by a ‘mother’ plane to get within range, then once released would glide towards the target – usually a ship – before the pilot would fire the rockets and hurtle in at up to 600 mph. Ohka pilots were called Jinrai Butai – ‘thunder gods’ – but only managed to sink three Allied ships. It was a lot of effort and sacrifice for not very much. Listen | Mariko Oi discusses her experiences of interviewing some of the last survivors of the notorious Japanese raids in World War Two Britain had the least rationing in Europe France and Britain began the war without rationing and, while it was modestly introduced in Britain in January 1940, France had still resisted by the time they were defeated in June 1940. Germany, on the other hand, introduced rationing before the war and struggled to feed its armed forces and the wider population from start to finish. The country’s demand for food from occupied territories led to a lot of hunger for a lot of people, including the urban French. British people never had to go hungry and, although a number of foods were rationed, there were lots that were not. Certainly, by 1945, Britain had it very easy compared with the rest of Europe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/06/GettyImages-79667574_master_cmyk-48e7db8.jpg" width="1821" height="1345" alt="Women and children line up to register with the rationing service in WW2" title="Women and children line up to register with the rationing service in 1939. “Studies suggest that the average Briton was better fed during the Second World War than ever before,” says Margaret MacMillan. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)" /> Field Marshal Alexander was the most experienced battlefield commander of the war Field Marshal Alexander was known to every Britain in the country by the war's end, but he is less well known today. He had an extraordinary career, and was the only officer of the war to lead front-line troops at every rank. After rising to acting Brigadier in the First World War, he led the Nowshera Brigade on the Northwest Frontier in the 1930s, the First Division in France in 1940, and British forces in Burma in 1942. He commanded Middle East Forces and two army groups before finally becoming Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean. He was also unique in the British Army for having commanded German troops in Latvia in 1919-20 during the war against Russia. There was a difference between Allied & German fighter aces The Luftwaffe had an entirely different approach to their 'aces.' Not only were pilots expected to fly on operations longer without breaks, they also actively helped their leading shots get big scores with lesser mortals protecting them while the 'experten' did the shooting. On the Eastern Front they came up against badly armed and trained Soviet aircraft and soon the leading pilots began amassing huge scores. Bibi Hartmann was the leading ace of all time with 352 'kills'. The leading Allied ace of the entire war was RAF ace, James 'Johnnie' Johnson with 38 kills. 6 Battle of Britain myths 7 must-see Second World War films The missing Luftwaffe fighter plane At the same time as Messerschmitt was developing the Bf109, rival firm Heinkel were also putting forward a new all-metal monoplane fighter, the He112. Early prototypes of each were pretty evenly matched in terms of speed and rate of climb and both the Me109E, as Messerschmitt’s fighter became, and the He112E had speeds of more than 350mph. The latter could climb to 20,000 feet in 10 minutes. More importantly, it had a very sturdy inwardly-retracting undercarriage that made it easy to land for newly trained pilots, and a phenomenal range of some 715 miles, which was better even than the twin-engine Messerschmitt 110. The He112 would have been the ideal partner to the Me109 – and its range was an advantage in the battle of Britain and elsewhere. However, while Willy Messerchmitt was a good party man and Göring had a special (and irrational) fondness for the Me110, Heinkel had a whiff of Jewish blood – so the Heinkel fighter was dropped. The American Parsons Jacket was designed with comfort in mind The standard and most widely worn US Army field tunic of the war was the M41, better known as the Parsons Jacket. This was introduced in 1941 following trials by the US 5th Division in exercises in the Midwest and Alaska in the summer and autumn of 1940, and was given its name after Major-General Parsons, the divisional commander. The design, however, was based on a pre-war civilian windcheater: the rapidly expanding US Army recognised that most of its recruits were conscripts and that comfort, durability and practicality were more important than slick military bearing. With a zip and button front, it was a simple, lightweight and warm short jacket that required little tailoring and wasted no material, and which was designed in consultation with Esquire magazine’s fashion desk. 9 things you (probably) didn't know about Dunkirk D-Day: the successes and failures in focus Germany’s motor transport was minimal German wartime propaganda that the Third Reich had a highly mechanised and modern army is still widely believed, but actually, in 1939, Germany was one of the least automotive societies in the western world, despite the autobahns and Grand Prix victories of Mercedes. On the outbreak of war, there were 47 people for every motor vehicle in Germany. In Britain, that figure was 14, in France it was eight, and in the USA it was four. This meant the German army was largely dependent on railways, horses and carts and the feet of its soldiers to get around; there were only 16 mechanised divisions in the army in May 1940. More importantly, however, such comparatively low numbers of motor vehicles meant there were fewer factories, fewer workshops, fewer petrol pumps and fewer people who knew how to drive. In other words, it was a shortage that could not be easily rectified. James Holland is an award-winning historian, writer and broadcaster and author of Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Battle for France (Bantam Press, May 2019). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a research fellow at Swansea University, and he hosts a weekly podcast with Comedian Al Murray about the Second World War, ‘We Have Ways of Making You Talk’. You can follow James on Twitter @James1940. This article was originally published by History Extra in September 2014
The lion and the rising sun: Britain and Japan's 400-year relationship
Antony Best picks out eight key moments in the relationship between Britain and Japan that has veered from violent hostility to cultural and economic partnerships
1613: Will Adams leads England’s first foray onto Japanese soil In 1613 the East India Company opened the era of formal Anglo-Japanese relations when, emulating its European rivals, it established a trading ‘factory’ at Hirado. Its efforts were aided by the presence of a sailor called Will Adams, who had arrived on a Dutch ship 13 years previously. With his knowledge of nautical science and his political tact, Adams had carved out an influential position for himself at the court of the military leader (or Shogun) Ieyasu Tokugawa, who ruled Japan on behalf of the emperor. Adams had even been made an honorary samurai. With Adams as its leading figure, the factory operated for 10 years, but in 1623 a lack of profits forced it to close. By this time, storm clouds were, in any case, gathering, for the shogunate was growing increasingly anxious about the foreign presence in Japan. In 1635 Ieyasu’s grandson, Iemitsu, banned Christianity and announced that foreign trade would be restricted to one Dutch and one Chinese trading post at the port of Nagasaki. And thus, for 200 years Japan was largely cut off from the world. Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? You debate The big question: Why did the west dominate history for so long? A brief history of samurai warfare 1858: Japan opens for business again The 1850s saw Japan’s long policy of seclusion come to an end. The United States took the lead in ‘reopening’ the country but the British were not far behind: in 1858 Lord Elgin took time out from waging war on China to sign a commercial treaty with the shogunate The British were highly satisfied with the visit, one of Elgin’s staff declaring: “I must beg to state that the impression which Japan and the Japanese have left on the minds of all, is of the most pleasing description”. The British enthusiasm may be explained by the fact that the treaty placed Japan in a subordinate position, forcing it to open ports, and forbidding it from setting its own tariff rates. Britain soon sent its first diplomatic representative, Sir Rutherford Alcock, to Japan, while merchants flocked to the ports of Yokohama, Nagasaki and, in time, Kobe. 1869: A British royal picks the perfect moment In 1869 Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, travelled to Japan on an official visit. His arrival coincided with a crucial moment in Japanese history, for the Tokugawa shogunate had just been overthrown by a new government under the nominal leadership of the Meiji emperor. The new regime was torn between those who wished to expel the west and those who realised that Japan had to adapt itself to the modern world. The prince’s visit couldn’t, therefore, have been better timed for it showed that Britain was prepared to treat Japan with respect. It also drew the country towards the European orbit. Britons would soon be playing a role in the modernising of many aspects of Japanese life, not least the creation of its navy. Listen | Dr Christopher Harding explores Japan’s dramatic history over the past 150 years 1885: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado causes a stir Seeking a new means of satirising Victorian society, which had been gripped by a fascination with Japanese culture, WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan hit upon the idea in 1885 of setting their next opera, The Mikado, in Japan. The production was an immediate success, and cemented the public perception of Japan as a quaint, fairy-tale paradise. Initially, the Japanese did not take kindly to this caricature and what was seen as mockery of the emperor, and they staged protests when it was performed in Yokohama. Britain’s attitude to the opera changed when Japan rose as a great power in the early 20th century. In 1907, when a Japanese prince visited Britain, the D’Oyly Carte Company was forbidden from staging a new production and military bands were told not to play the songs. 1902: Two nations strike a momentous deal In February 1902 Japanese students staged a torch-lit parade around the British legation in Tokyo to celebrate the fact that their country had just signed an alliance with Britain. Japan – a nation that had only brought its policy of seclusion to an end 50 years earlier – was now the ally of the world’s greatest power The alliance came about because both countries were concerned about Russian expansion in the far east, but for Japan it was much more than this: it was also a symbol that it had been accepted by the west. The alliance was an important strategic pillar for both nations. It proved vital in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 – which was fought over Korea and Manchuria and led to victory for Japan – and the First World War. It also led to a blossoming of relations between the two states’ royal families, culminating in visits by Crown Prince Hirohito and Edward, Prince of Wales in 1921 and 1922 respectively. 1941: Japan mauls the British empire On 8 December 1941 Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong and Malaya, sounding the death knell for the British empire in Asia. The Anglo-Japanese alliance had disguised the fact that the two countries had different wishes for China’s future, with Britain supporting an ‘open door’ for trade and Japan attempting to carve out a sphere of influence for itself in the region. In the interwar period these tensions descended into outright enmity. Britain was unable to spare sufficient forces to defend its eastern possessions in 1941, and so Japanese aggression met little resistance. On 10 December Japan sunk one of Britain’s most modern battleships, HMS Prince of Wales, and Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day. On 15 February, Singapore, a supposedly impregnable fortress, was forced to surrender, and by April much of Burma had been conquered. The erstwhile pupil had taught its teacher a lesson. 1945: PoWs’ treatment casts a long shadow In September 1945 the first British journalists reached Singapore following the end of the Pacific War. What they found there, in the form of half-starved and maltreated Allied prisoners of war, was to sour Anglo-Japanese relations for decades. The PoWs’ ordeal became a key element in British culture, with films, plays, books and works of art representing their suffering, while the prisoners themselves formed a vocal lobbying group. As a result, despite the fact that Japan was an important member of the Cold War alliance system against the Soviet bloc, the British government had to be cautious about the speed at which it restored relations. Even as late as 1971, the visit to Britain by Emperor Hirohito proved to be a distinctly fraught affair. 12 things you (probably) didn’t know about Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s devastating conclusions: why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War 1986: Nissan sets up shop in Sunderland In 1986 the Japanese car manufacturer Nissan opened a state-of-the-art factory in Sunderland to produce its latest design, the Bluebird, for the British and European markets. This was the culmination of years of negotiations by the British government to get more foreign direct investment from Japan, which was by then the second largest capitalist economy in the world. The fact that Nissan was willing to invest in Britain was a sign that some of the internal problems that had bedevilled the British economy in the postwar era were passing, but it also showed that Anglo-Japanese relations themselves had turned a corner and that the bitter legacy of the war was now passing into history. This was also evident in 1981 when the Royal Academy staged the highly successful Great Japan Exhibition, with art and artefacts from the Tokugawa era (1600–1868). Antony Best is a senior lecturer in international history at LSE, who specialises in the Anglo-Japanese relationship. This article was first published in the Christmas 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
Benn Steil explains the background to the 1947 US aid initiative to Europe and considers how it helped shape relations between the USA and USSR
Economist and author Benn Steil explains the background to the 1947 US aid initiative to Europe and describes how it helped shape relations between the USA and USSR. He also considers what impact it had on European recovery after the Second World War What was the Marshall Plan? Why do we call it the 'Cold War'? Plus 8 other key questions
Mariko Oi discusses her experiences of interviewing some of the last survivors of the notorious Japanese raids in World War Two
BBC journalist Mariko Oi discusses her experiences of interviewing some of the last survivors of the notorious Japanese raids in World War Two, in advance of her new documentary on BBC World Service.
No more reverses. That was the message that the British Eighth Army carried into the second battle of El Alamein in October 1942. What happened next transformed British fortunes in the desert war. But, asks James Holland, did victory come at too high a price?
At around 9.40pm on Friday 23 October 1942, Flight Lieutenant Tommy Thompson, a Battle of Britain and Malta veteran, was flying over the Alamein line on his return from a strafing mission. Suddenly, the guns below opened up and it seemed to Thompson that one massive flash of fire had erupted in a long line. Mesmerised, he circled around at just 3,000 feet and watched. Further away he spotted a wave of bombers pounding enemy positions too. “A magnificent sight,” he recalled. “What an artillery battle.” On the ground, 22-year-old Corporal Albert Martin of 2nd Battalion, Rifle Brigade had never heard anything like it in the two long years he’d been in the desert. He’d been feeling on edge and nervy all day, knowing they would be going into battle that night and that it would be a tough fight. One hundred and sixteen thousand Germans and Italians were dug in behind millions of mines, thick entanglements of wire, and supported by guns, tanks, machine-guns and mortars. Nor was Martin pleased about his role. The Rifle Brigade had been used to independence and mobility, beetling about the desert in trucks. That night, as the battle began, their job was to protect the engineers as they cleared six paths through the minefields. It was through these lanes, each the width of a tennis court, that the mass of armour was due to pour, get in behind the enemy and then exploit their advantage. As Martin listened to the deafening blast of 900 guns, and felt the shockwaves pulsing through the ground, he knew the wait was over. As the gunners’ loading rhythm changed, so the sky became a kaleidoscope of flickering colour. The second battle of Alamein had begun, and if successful, as the British Eighth Army commander General Montgomery had assured them it would be, then the Germans and Italians could be driven from all of Africa for good. Bickering and bellyaching Eighth Army had undergone quite some transformation since ignominious defeats at Gazala and Tobruk back in June. However, it was not poor equipment or training – as some claimed at the time, and have done ever since – that caused these reverses, but rather poor generalship. Neil Ritchie, the Eighth Army commander, had been over-promoted, and had no control or authority over his subordinates, who were all bickering. Indecision and lack of clear thinking led to an entirely unnecessary disaster. In contrast, the RAF in the Middle East was ably led by Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, while his subordinate, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, had shown the dynamic leadership that had been so lacking in his army colleagues. The British finally halted German general Erwin Rommel’s dramatic advance at the Alamein position, but a clear-out of senior commanders was now urgently required. Out went General Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief Middle East, and so too did a host of other commanders, Ritchie included. In their stead came General Sir Harold Alexander as C-in-C and General Bernard Montgomery as the new Eighth Army Commander. In August 1942, they were the right team and both utterly committed to ensuring there were no more reverses. Both also recognised that the biggest problem for Eighth Army was one of morale, and one that needed righting quickly. Alexander was the most experienced battlefield commander of any side in the war, having commanded in action at every rank. He’d even led German troops in the Baltic Landwehr against Russia in 1920. Utterly imperturbable, charming, and full of good judgment, he understood all facets of war and both protected his army commander from interference from London and oversaw the swift build-up of supplies in Egypt. Montgomery, meanwhile, was highly capable, no-nonsense and a fine trainer of men. He did not tolerate ‘bellyaching’, as he called it, which was what was needed at that time. A dash for Tunis At the end of August, when Rommel made his last attempt to break the Alamein position, Montgomery fought a good defensive battle and sensibly resisted the urge to counterattack in turn. Unlike Ritchie and Auchinleck, he also worked closely and well with Coningham and the RAF; the defensive victory at Alan Halfa, as the battle became known, belonged as much to the RAF as it did Eighth Army. Monty also recognised, as Alexander had realised, that nothing less than a decisive victory would do in their next engagement. For that to happen, he argued, more tanks, guns and men were needed – and his troops required more training. Immense pressure was being put on Alexander to launch the battle as soon as possible; at the same time, preparations were under way for a joint Anglo-US invasion force to land in north-west Africa, overrun the Vichy French in Algeria and Morocco and then make a dash for Tunis. The aim was for the Axis forces in Africa to be crushed by a two-pronged attack from west and east. But the destruction of Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika now at Alamein was to happen first. Montgomery insisted his attack could not be launched before October. Eventually, it was agreed that Eighth Army’s assault would begin on the night of 23 October, when there was a full moon. His plan was to punch two holes through the Axis defences, one in the north of the 40-mile line and another further south. The northern breach was to be the main one and was also where the enemy defences were strongest, but Monty wanted to hit Rommel head-on. His XXX Corps was to punch this hole to a depth of 3–5 miles through two channels each of three lanes. Through these narrow lanes, X Corps was to pass and burst out into the open desert beyond. British tanks would hold the inferior numbers of Axis tanks at bay while the infantry destroyed the enemy infantry through a process Monty called ‘crumbling’. Meanwhile, XIII Corps would break through in the south and split the Axis forces in half. Armoured break-out Every man rehearsed the process over and over. Deception plans were also brought into play and Montgomery placed a huge reliance, as ever, on the increasingly dependable RAF and his artillery. Overwhelming firepower was the name of the game. Monty reckoned this would take about 10 days. The first part was the ‘break-in’. Then came the ‘dogfight’ – the slogging grind of enemy forces. Last would come the ‘break-out’ by the armour to secure victory. Broadly, this was what happened, although inevitably there were twists and turns and setbacks, not least on the opening night. Pouring masses of armour through six lanes, each only 8 yards wide, was ambitious, especially in the north where the desert soil was fine sand. The tracks of hundreds of tanks, tow-to-tail, quickly ground the sand as fine as talcum powder, which combined with immense amounts of smoke to cloak the battlefield. Corporal Albert Martin had little idea of what was going on and was soon caked in choking dust and could see little. Nor could the tanks, which began crashing into one another and over-heating. Supercharged advance Then the enemy guns, apparently not remotely destroyed, opened up. By dawn, much of the British armour was exposed in the open. “It was quite one of the worst moments of my life,” noted Major Stanley Christopherson, commander of A Squadron, the Sherwood Rangers. “I couldn’t go forward, but all the heavy tanks were behind me so I couldn’t go back… we just had to sit there.” He survived, although many of his crews were not so fortunate. The battle ground on over the ensuing days. Despite the success of the Australians in the very north, Monty paused on 26 October. Meanwhile, Albert Martin and his comrades in the Rifle Brigade had become temporary anti-tank gunners and, having edged forward overnight on 28 October, woke to find themselves confronting the main Axis panzer counterattack. It was to prove a decisive day as they stubbornly held their ground and knocked out 70 enemy tanks and self-propelled guns. How he’d managed to survive that ordeal, he had no idea. Early on 2 November, Montgomery relaunched his attack, codenamed Supercharge. In essence, it was more of the same, but it did what the opening phase had failed to do: break the back of the Panzerarmee’s defence. The end was now in sight. “The battle is going heavily against us,” Rommel wrote to his wife on 3 November. “We’re simply being crushed by the enemy weight.” That summed it up neatly. Superior numbers, superior firepower and the relentless air assault by the RAF had bludgeoned Rommel’s forces into a terminal defeat. By 4 November, the Panzerarmee was on the run, streaming back west across the desert. The battle of Alamein was the first decisive land victory by the British against German forces and came less than two-and-a-half years after the catastrophic defeat of France and the retreat of the BEF from Dunkirk. Back then, Britain’s army had been tiny. Its growth since had been impressive. Alexander and Montgomery’s victory had also showed that, despite the defeat at Gazala four months earlier, there was much already in place that Britain was getting right: decent equipment, determined troops, an increasingly effective tactical air force and a greater dependence on technology and firepower, all of which played to British strengths. The biggest beef But, for all that the British Army was a transformed force, the second battle of El Alamein was a flawed victory. There’s little doubt that, though it made a hero of Monty, it was a tactically turgid campaign – one that wasted lives and materiel. General Francis Tuker had commanded the 4th Indian Division at Alamein and was one of the brightest, yet most under-used, commanders the British had. Earlier in the year, with Rommel on the charge, he suggested to Auchinleck and Ritchie that, rather than falling back to the Alamein line, it made far more sense for Eighth Army to establish their defensive position at Tobruk , which had an open supply line to the sea and which had withstood all the enemy had thrown at it during a siege that had lasted half the previous year. As he pointed out, Rommel could not simply bypass such a bastion. Tuker was right, but his good advice was ignored, and the Eighth Army almost annihilated. Montgomery never asked his advice before the second battle of Alamein, but Tuker was firmly of the view that it made sense to strike a heavy blow with infantry, supported by artillery on a narrow front in the north, around a feature or ridge that meant the Panzerarmee simply had to counterattack. The key, he reckoned, was to draw in the bulk of the Axis armour in the north. While most of the Panzerarmee’s armour and artillery was caught up with this attack, Tuker would have made a second thrust simultaneously in the centre of the line with the bulk of the armour, where the defences were not as strong. This plan made good sense. Tuker’s biggest beef with Monty’s ideas, however, was over his fire plan at the start of the battle. Of the 900 field guns available, Monty only employed 400 in support of the main thrust in the north – that is, less than half. That meant that 500 guns were not being used in the main thrust, while more than 300 were available to support the feint thrust of XIII Corps to the south. Perhaps more inexplicable, though, was the way in which the guns were used. A central tenet of war is the concentration of force. For all his new stamp and fighting talk, Montgomery dispersed his firepower not only in terms of its spread along the length of their line, but also in the way the guns were fired. Those 400 in the north were spread over 10 miles, with just 100 guns supporting each of the four attacking divisions. That wasn’t very many, especially since they were mostly firing straight ahead. A far better plan would have been to have attacked over, say, 5 miles, with 750 guns firing in concentration. So the second battle of El Alamein wasn’t the masterpiece that has often been portrayed, and it could be argued that the Eighth Army paid far too high a price for victory. This won’t, of course, prevent it from being remembered as a turning point in the war in north Africa – and nor should it, for El Alamein set the British on the path to the capture of Tunis six months later. Here, in a triumph that would secure victory in north Africa, Allied troops captured or killed 250,000 Axis troops and seized a vast amount of enemy materiel. In doing so, they inflicted a bigger material defeat on the Germans than the one at Stalingrad three months earlier. James Holland is an author, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History (Corgi, 2011). The war in the sun 10 milestones on the road to El Alamein 1) Mussolini goes on the attack The Italian leader declared war on Britain in June 1940 and began desultory attacks on the British island of Malta lying at the heart of the Mediterranean. On 4 July the British destroyed the French fleet at Oran on the coast of French Algeria – to prevent it from falling into German hands – and on the 9th the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet fought the Italians at the battle of Calabria. 2) The Italians are put to flight In September 1940, the Italian Tenth Army advanced into Egypt. In October, the Italians also invaded Greece, but were swiftly repulsed. On 9 December, the 36,000-strong Western Desert Force under General Richard O’Connor counterattacked in Egypt and over the next three months routed Tenth Army and much of the Italian Fifth Army, capturing 131,000 men out of 160,000 Italian troops in north Africa. British forces also attacked Italian forces in Abyssinia, east Africa. Cut off from all but air supply, the Italians were soon in retreat. 3) The Germans enter the fray In February 1941, Hitler sent General Erwin Rommel with two divisions of the newly formed Afrikakorps to Tripoli to stiffen the Italian forces there. In April, German forces invaded Yugoslavia, quickly overran the country and then advanced into Greece. 4) Rommel sweeps all before him Having forced the Italians back to El Agheila halfway to Tripoli, British troops were withdrawn from the Western Desert Force and sent to Greece. It was too little too late and, lacking strong enough air support, Greece soon befell the same fate as Yugoslavia. In north Africa, Rommel advanced well beyond his orders, recapturing Cyrenaica, pushing the British back into Egypt, and besieging the port of Tobruk. 5) The Germans capture Crete The majority of British troops were safely evacuated from Greece but, in the third week of May, German airborne troops attacked Crete. Fatal errors of judgment by the commander of Creforce, New Zealander General Bernard Freyberg, and the local commanders at Maleme airfield, ensured the Germans got a toehold they were then able to exploit, albeit at considerable cost and just a few weeks before their invasion of the Soviet Union. Crete fell to the Germans and, though most British troops were evacuated, the Royal Navy suffered considerable losses. 6) Auchinleck is thrown into the fray In June 1941, the British counterattacked the German-Italian forces in Egypt but made little headway and General Wavell, C-in-C Middle East, was sacked and replaced by General Claude Auchinleck. In June, British and Free French troops attacked Vichy-French Syria and, by July, had obtained its surrender. Pro-German revolts in Iraq and Iran were also quelled. 7) The Eighth Army pummels Rommel In November, the newly formed Eighth Army counterattacked Rommel’s forces in north Africa. Weakened after three-quarters of his supplies had been destroyed by mostly Malta-based aircraft, ships and submarines, Rommel’s army was pushed back and Tobruk relieved. 8) Bombs rain down on Malta At the end of 1941, Field Marshal Kesselring had been made C-in-C of Axis forces in the south and, recognising that Malta needed to be neutralised, began an aerial blitz of the island. By April, Malta had become the most-bombed place on Earth. But a planned invasion was postponed. 9) The British face annihilation Rommel’s German-Italian Panzerarmee counterattacked again on 26 May, smashing the Gazala Line and capturing Tobruk on 21 June 1942 in what was unquestionably one of the worst-conducted battles the British fought in the entire war. Eighth Army, now in full retreat to the Alamein Line just 60 miles from Alexandria, was only saved from annihilation by the round-the-clock effort of the RAF’s Desert Air Force. Eighth Army commander General Neil Ritchie was sacked and Auchinleck took over direct command. 10) Standstill in the sand The Alamein Line, unlike elsewhere in north Africa, could not be easily outflanked because of the deep Qattara Depression escarpment 40 miles to the south. In the first battle of El Alamein Rommel tried to force his way through but in a series of clashes that raged through the month of July, neither side was able to force a decisive outcome. Stalemate ensued – until the second battle of El Alamein This article was first published in the November 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
Hans van de Ven and Rana Mitter discuss China’s role in the Second World War and the connections to the country’s communist revolution
Expert historians Hans van de Ven and Rana Mitter discuss China’s lengthy war against Japan and consider its impact on the country’s civil war and Chinese participation in the later conflict in Korea.
The incredible tale of the WW2 Poles who fought back
In 1940, thousands of Poles were deported to Siberia and left to rot in Stalin's gulags. Four years later, they were taking the fight to the Nazis in Italy. Monica Whitlock has spoken to some of the survivors of a wartime odyssey...
This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine Behind the Jala photography shop in Isfahan, Iran stands an old outbuilding. It is filled with boxes of glass negatives taken by Abdolqasem Jala, a brilliant photographer in the middle of the 20th century. The plates, surprisingly intact, include portraits of Polish people who found refuge here during the Second World War. Most of the negatives show women and children, including some of the 13,000 Polish orphans who lived in Isfahan. A few of these orphans are still alive. “To us, Iran was a paradise,” remembers Henrika Levchenko, who married and settled in the Middle East. “People were so kind. Iran was a wonderful place, after everything we had been through.” Henrika is one of around 1 million men, women and children deported from Poland by the Soviet authorities in 1941. They were sent to labour camps in the USSR and later dispersed around the world, founding the Polish communities that we know today, from Tel Aviv to London to Melbourne. For decades, the story of their odyssey was hardly known. In Poland, it did not fit the wartime narrative generated under communism. Abroad, immigrants finding their feet had neither time nor appetite to look back. Many deportees concealed their stories even from their own children. This missing history is now emerging, through the testimony of survivors and evidence scattered around the world. A pile of gramophone records, a cinema poster, a suitcase of letters – all are clues being assembled by scholars and by a new generation of Poles eager to make sense of their past. Poland pulverised On 17 September 1939, Soviet troops invaded Poland – 16 days after Nazi Germany launched its deadly strike, devastating the populations of western Poland and pulverising Warsaw. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the latter laid claim to the eastern borderlands. This region comprised prosperous cities like Vilnius, Białostok and Lviv, surrounded by forests and farmland. The diverse population included a high proportion of Jewish people, swelling by the day as Jewish families from across Nazi-occupied Europe fled east. Rounded up Within weeks of occupying eastern Poland, the Soviets started arresting local people by the tens of thousands to prevent potential resistance. Danuta Gradosielska, now of Forest Gate, London, was then a farmer’s daughter in Rivne. She was 14 when the NKVD, the Soviet political police, knocked at the door at 6am on 10 February 1940. Danuta remembers raised voices as the Soviets ordered her parents to be ready in half an hour. The family took what they could – food, warm clothes and blankets – and bundled on to a sledge. Hundreds of families were gathered around Lyubomyrka station. “We were put on a cargo train,” recalls Danuta. “Seventy-two people in each wagon. There was a hole in the floor for a toilet. There were planks to sleep on, like shelves. I climbed up to the top plank and lay looking out through a grating. When we crossed the border out of Poland we all sang the national anthem, Poland Is Not Yet Lost. I watched Russia going by: just empty spaces and snow.” The journey was brutal. “The guard would throw the dead babies into the snow,” recalls Danuta. “When an adult died, they’d put the body on a platform by the engine. When the train slowed, they’d push them off. But the children they just threw away.” Elizabeth Piekarski from Vilnius remembers a mother with two boys stirring grain over a camping stove. “The children drew closer and closer. The train jolted and the little one fell into the stove. He burnt to death. The guard grabbed his heel and swung him out of the door.” Unknowable numbers of the elderly, the ill and young children were dead by the time the trains reached Siberia two weeks later. The Memorial Society of Krasnoyarsk records four deportations arriving in Siberia from February 1940 to June 1941. First came the officers of the Polish army, forestry workers and farmers with their families. Then followed fugitives, including Polish, Czech and Austrian Jews. Families of prisoners came next and then Ukrainians. The Polish deportees spent the next 18 months in labour camps mainly in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Elizabeth cannot bear to think of all the bitter labour she endured as a teenager. Once she was detailed to cut reeds in a marsh. “They left us with no food for two weeks. Nothing. So one of the boys climbed a tree and pulled some baby birds out of their nest. We tried to warm them in marsh water before we ate them.” Elizabeth’s younger sister was sent down the coal mines in Karaganda, where only small children could squeeze into the tunnels. She survived an underground explosion that left shards of coal in her body for the rest of her life. But the corrosive dust that coated her lungs would eventually kill her. Danuta and her family were sent into silent forests where they were put to logging, living in huts that had been part of the old gulag. There was no perimeter wire as there was nowhere to run. Many simply died of hunger. Danuta remembers one nearby family with seven children, all but one of whom starved to death. Beaten and burned The stories of Elizabeth and Danuta represent hundreds of thousands of others. Deportees young and old carried notebooks and sketch pads in which they described and drew their experiences. One bundle of drawings and writings comes from Edward Herzbaum, discovered in a suitcase by his astonished family only after his death. Edward, aged 19, was alone. He was Jewish and his mother had sent him east for his protection. When the NKVD picked him up in Lviv they burnt him with cigarettes, beat him and sent him to a gulag camp near Yaroslavl. Edward cheated death time and time again. “I cannot surrender to these pigs,” he wrote. “I will not die among those thugs who would then laugh. When we go to hell, nobody will ever know how we died.” But then everything changed. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, smashing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Polish deportees, at a stroke, became Soviet allies. “Suddenly a rumour spread through the crowd about some kind of agreement with the Polish government, concerning the creation of a Polish army and the releasing of all war prisoners and inmates,” wrote Edward Herzbaum. “How wildly happy I would be to go to the front, to die there, but not here.” The Polish prime minister in exile, General Sikorsky, chose General Władysław Anders to lead this implausible army out of the USSR. Anders was in prison in Moscow. Released, he headed for central Asia on the southern Soviet border. The Poles in their hundreds of thousands crammed into trains for a journey of up to 4,000 miles south. Many died of typhoid on the way. Uzbek villagers recall opening the train doors and the corpses toppling out like logs. Danuta, now aged 16, made it to Tashkent. She added two years to her age and joined up. She embroidered a white Polish eagle on her uniform and stuffed her huge boots with straw so they would stay on. The army that mustered near Tashkent was like no other in modern times: soldiers, many in their teens, with all their dependants and more than 10,000 orphans. All these people were famished, typhoid-ridden and disorientated. The blazing beauty of central Asia intensified Edward Herzbaum’s unhappiness. “We will regret the fine days, the sunshine and our young years. We should somehow keep it in our memory, but we can’t… one day maybe we will want to recreate it and we won’t be able to.” Surviving superstars Other Poles stranded in the USSR joined in. Among them was the fabulously talented musician Henryk Wars. Henryk had scored 50 or more of the biggest films in prewar Warsaw. The Nazis had rounded up many of his circle, including the brilliant dance-music composer Arthur Gold. Arthur would be murdered at Treblinka. His brother (also Henryk) escaped and joined Anders, along with Henryk and other surviving superstars. General Anders led the Poles across the Soviet frontier in the spring of 1942. Approximately 115,000 people boarded creaking barges at Krasnovodsk and chugged across the Caspian Sea to the Iranian port of Anzali. For 639 Poles this was the end of the journey. They were brought ashore dead, or they died on the beach. The British Army was ready to meet the Poles with mass disinfection tents and lorries for the journey to Tehran. From there the non-combatants were sent mainly to Isfahan. Some of the orphans would later move on to India and east Africa. Military and medical staff trained in Tehran before travelling to Iraq and then Palestine to join the Allied north African campaign. Finest hour Danuta became one of 600 or so Polish women and girls in the all-female 316 Transport Company. “I drove a three-tonne Dodge. I was very small so I folded a blanket and sat on it so I could see over the wheel. The men were amazed to see us girls driving the lorries.” Danuta delivered ammunition, petrol, food and troops all over Egypt. Several hundred Jewish Polish soldiers left the corps in Palestine, including the future prime minister of Israel, Menachim Begin. These people joined the community of Poles who had left for Palestine before the war. “All the cafes and bars were Polish and they all wanted to treat us,” remembers Elizabeth. “It was like home, like being in Poland.” Edward Herzbaum wrote: “We have become a little closer to the world in which we used to live before the war and therefore we are now more like our old selves in the time before Russia, but it doesn’t mean that I’m closer to my past. The opposite is true… The way I am now, I don’t fit into this old world any more and I fit into the new one even less.” The Poles served in Egypt, from where they sailed to Sorrento to take part in the Italian campaign, under the title of the Polish II Corps. For many of these men and women, what happened next become the defining moment of their wartime lives. They were dispatched to Monte Cassino, where the armies of many Allied nations had fought three battles to break German positions around a Benedictine monastery perched on a rocky hill. Monte Cassino anchored the defensive Gustav line and so guarded the road to Rome. The fourth battle, General Sir Harold Alexander’s Operation Diadem, was intended to encircle the hilltop, prising out the Germans from the valley beneath. The role of the Poles was to isolate the monastery and push around it until they connected with a British force. General Anders led his men into battle with a shattering artillery bombardment on the night of 11 May 1944. The week-long battle that ensued has been described as a Verdun in miniature, with ferocious fighting, some of it hand-to-hand, at Snakeshead Ridge above the monastery. Despite ferocious German resistance, the Polish and British armies con­n­ected on 18 May, the Poles scrambling to the summit and raising their flag over the rubble. But their victory had come at a huge cost – the II Corps had lost more than a thousand men. Elizabeth, a Red Cross nurse, served throughout Monte Cassino, doing what she could for the injured and dying. Casualties came in so fast that the ratio to nurses was 100 to one. Monte Cassino went down as General Anders’ finest hour. Poland was occupied, broken, in ruins. But in Monte Cassino the battered Polish flag still flew. Few of the II Corps returned to Poland to live after the German surrender in 1945. The Yalta conference had severed eastern Poland and absorbed it into Soviet Ukraine and Lithuania. All plans, all futures were derailed. Few families emerged unscathed. Danuta’s sister Zosia had died of pneumonia in Siberia in 1940. Edward Herzbaum’s mother perished in the Łodz ghetto in 1943. The Soviet NKVD murdered Elizabeth’s father at Katyn, although this was not acknowledged until 1990. In some families no one was left at all. Life after war The Poles set out to make new lives. Some sailed to the United States, others to Australia, Canada or South Africa. The composer Henryk Wars went to the US, resuming his career, with the support of Ira Gershwin, scoring films for Colombia, Universal and Twentieth Century Fox. Danuta married a Polish officer in Italy. They set off to Britain where she brought up six children and where she still lives. Elizabeth was demobbed in Scotland. “They gave the men a suit and the women got a length of material,” she said. “And that was it! Goodbye, all the very best.” Edward Herzbaum also headed for Britain, where he became an architect. “And now I am close to the end,” he wrote. “It seems strange that this letter will one day go out into the fog – a long, long way – and one day you, so far away, will read it.” Monica Whitlock is a radio journalist specialising in the former USSR. She worked for the BBC for 20 years as a correspondent and producer.
Postwar occupations and Raleigh bicycles
Susan L Carruthers tells the story of American forces in Germany and Japan after World War Two, while Steve Humphries previews his new BBC Four documentary Pedalling Dreams
Professor Susan L Carruthers tells the story of American forces who occupied Germany, Japan and other defeated powers after World War Two. Meanwhile, we are joined by TV producer Steve Humphries to chat about his upcoming BBC Four documentary Pedalling Dreams, which charts the history of the iconic Raleigh bicycle.