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By Root 1242 0

strengthened in France, as also in Italy and Greece, and for some years there were fears for the survival of democracy in all three countries. Bourgeois capitalism eventually prevailed, but political stability proved slow to achieve. To this day, France has not produced an official history of its war experience, and probably will never do so, because consensual support for any version of events would be unattainable. It is striking that the most persuasive modern studies of the French wartime era have been written by American and British authors: relatively few indigenous scholars wish to address it.

It is hard to imagine that Britain would have continued to defy Hitler after June 1940 in the absence of Winston Churchill, who constructed a brilliant and narrowly plausible narrative for the British people, first about what they might do, and later to persuade them of what they had done. The Nazi leaders, land creatures, lacked understanding of the difficulty of achieving hemispheric hegemony against a formidable sea power while themselves lacking an effective navy. Churchill owed a large debt to Hitler for a succession of unforced errors. First, by launching the Luftwaffe against the RAF’s Fighter Command, Germany’s leader offered Britain its only conceivable opportunity to salvage a victory from the ashes of strategic defeat in the summer of 1940. He then failed to reach agreements with Mussolini and Franco that should have enabled him to evict British forces from the Mediterranean and Middle East in 1941. After fumbling confrontation with Britain, Hitler’s invasion of Russia transformed the struggle, and ensured that Stalin’s nation would bear the principal burden of combating Nazism. Seventy-nine million Germans challenged 193 million Soviet citizens from an economic base much weaker than the Allies recognised.

Churchill displayed the highest wisdom by embracing the Soviet Union as a co-belligerent in 1941, but both he – briefly – and later Roosevelt – persistently – were foolish to suppose that a real partnership was possible. Stalin, with his usual icy clarity of vision, recognised that the common commitment of Britain, Russia and the US to defeat Hitler did nothing to bridge the yawning divide between their respective national objectives. He intended to sustain a tyranny which denied any vestige of freedom to his own people, and to secure territorial gains for the Soviet Union which the Western Allies would never willingly approve. Russia’s vast blood sacrifice spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of British and American soldiers, but in consequence the Red Army secured physical possession of an East European empire. The Americans and British had no choice save to acquiesce in this, since they lacked both military means and domestic support for a new war to expel the Soviet Union from its conquests. The Russians reaped the rewards for doing most of the fighting necessary to defeat Nazism. Western material aid contributed importantly to the Soviets’ 1943–45 war effort, but seems trifling alongside the destruction and slaughter they experienced.

Stalin committed many blunders in the first year after Barbarossa was launched, but thereafter learnt quickly, as Hitler did not. The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler’s war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruple or compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which ruthlessness was even more institutionalised than in Germany, could have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant, as Hitler was not. The Western Allies’ manner of fighting, hampered by bourgeois sensitivity about casualties, was a chronic impediment to overcoming the Wehrmacht. In 1944, when Italian officer Eugenio Corti first met British troops socially, he enjoyed their company, but observed in some puzzlement that ‘They are more like civilians than