All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [411]
Each of the three principal victorious nations emerged from the Second World War confident in the belief that its own role had been decisive in procuring victory. Not for many years did a more nuanced perspective emerge, in Western societies at least. Hitler was correct in anticipating that his enemies’ ‘unnatural coalition’ must collapse and give way to mutual antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West, although this occurred too late to save the Third Reich. The Grand Alliance, the phrase with which Churchill ennobled the wartime relationship of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, was always a grand charade; it was a necessary fiction to pretend that the three powers fought the war as a shared enterprise directed towards common purposes.
Some modern historians have sought to argue that the entire conflict might have been avoided if in the early years of Nazism Britain and France had forged a united front with Russia against Hitler. This view seems untenable, as well as supremely cynical: how could the Western democracies have agreed common political objectives with a Soviet regime as brutal and imperialistic as that of the Nazis? Stalin’s tariff for any deal with the French and British would have been identical with that he presented in exchange for the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact: a free hand for his own expansionist ambitions. This was unacceptable to the Western democracies until the tumult of war enforced unforeseen obligations and realities. Powerful elements of British, French and American conservative opinion deplored communism even more than fascism, and would have resisted appeasement of Stalin with more vigour than they displayed towards appeasement of Hitler.
France, Britain and its dominions were the only major Allied nations to enter World War II as an act of principle, rather than because they sought territorial gains or were themselves attacked. Their claims upon the moral high ground were injured, however, by the fact that they declared support for embattled Poland without any intention of giving this meaningful military effect. There was little French popular appetite for a battlefield showdown with Germany in September 1939, and less in June 1940, while the British Expeditionary Force could play only a marginal role. Following France’s defeat, informed British and American soldiers and politicians asserted, with truth, that many Frenchmen disliked Churchill’s nation more than Germany. Even allowing for the significant role of French troops in the final campaigns in north-west Europe, the statistical fact remains that Vichy’s armies and domestic security forces made a more numerous contribution to Axis interests than those Frenchmen who later joined the Gaullists, other Resistance groups or Eisenhower’s armies provided to the Allied cause.
Most French people persuaded themselves in 1940 that the Pétain regime constituted a lawful government; however uncomfortably, they accepted its rule until the eve of liberation. Once defeat in 1940 had denied the French a heroic role in the struggle against Nazism, many remained confused for the remainder of the war about the least ignoble part their nation might play. After the liberation in 1944, France indulged in an orgy of domestic recrimination, reflecting rancour about the 1940 defeat, together with a settling of national and local accounts between former collaborationists and resisters which prompted several thousand killings during l’épuration – the purification, as it was ironically known. Forrest Pogue wrote after a visit to Paris, ‘I soon found that the old bitterness against Jews and labor remained.’ Communist factions emerged from the war