Inferno - Max Hastings [253]
The Atlantic “air gap” was significantly widened, and many lives and much tonnage lost, in consequence of the fanatical loathing of Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera for his British neighbours. Almost every warship and merchantman that sailed past the Irish coastline in the war years felt a surge of bitterness towards the country which relied on Britain for most of its vital commodities and all its fuel, but would not lift a finger to help in its hour of need. “The cost in men and ships … ran up a score which Irish eyes a-smiling on the day of Allied victory were not going to cancel,” wrote corvette officer Nicholas Monsarrat. “In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.” Yet because of Ireland’s divided sovereignty and loyalties, even Northern Ireland, still a part of the United Kingdom, never dared to introduce conscription for military service. The perverse outcome was that more Catholic southern Irishmen than Protestant northerners—who loudly asserted their commitment to the crown—served in Britain’s wartime armed forces, though the services of most southerners were purchased by economic necessity rather than seduced by ideological enthusiasm for the Allied cause.
The Swedes asserted their status with a rigour promoted by proximity to Germany and thus vulnerability to its ill-will: they arrested and imprisoned scores of Allied intelligence agents and informants. Only in 1944–45, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, did the Stockholm government become more responsive to diplomatic pressure from London and Washington, and less zealous in locking up Allied sympathisers.
Switzerland was a hub of Allied intelligence operations, though the Swiss authorities foreclosed all covert activities they discovered. They also denied sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Nazis, and profited enormously from pocketing funds deposited in Swiss banks by both prominent Nazis and their Jewish victims, which later went unclaimed because the owners perished. The daughter of a rich French Holocaust victim, Estelle Sapir, said later: “My father was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss.” Switzerland provided important technological and industrial support to the Axis war effort, in 1941 increasing its exports to Germany of chemicals by 250 percent, metals by 500 percent. The country became a major receiver of stolen goods from the Nazi pillage of Europe, and banked what the OSS, Washington’s covert operations organisation, categorised as “gigantic sums” of fugitive funds. The Swiss unblinkingly paid to the Nazis the proceeds of life insurance policies held by German Jews, and the Bern government dismissed postwar recriminations about such action as “irrelevant under Swiss law.” Only a fraction of Switzerland’s enormous profits from wartime misappropriations were ever acknowledged, and an even smaller portion paid out to Jewish victims and their families. The war proved good for business in the ice-hearted cantons.
Among the belligerents, unsurprisingly, the more distant was a given Allied country from the consequences of Axis aggression, the less ill-will its people displayed towards the enemy. For instance, an Office of War Information poll in mid-1942 found that one-third of Americans expressed willingness to make a separate peace with Germany. A January 1944 opinion survey showed that while 45 percent of British people professed to “hate” the Germans, only 27 percent of Canadians did so.
For most people in Europe and Asia, the conflict was a pervasive reality. Families in the Asian republics of the Soviet Union, among the remotest places on earth, found their menfolk conscripted for the Red Army, prison camps established within sight of their villages and food chronically short. A Japanese air raid on the northern Australian