Inferno - Max Hastings [255]
At the outbreak of war even many white Americans, immigrants or children of immigrants, defined themselves in terms of the old-world national group to which they belonged, notably including almost 5 million Italian-Americans: until December 1941, their community newspapers hailed Mussolini as a giant. One published letter writer applauded the German invasion of Poland, and predicted that, “as the Roman legions did under Caesar, the New Italy will go forth and conquer.” Even when their country declared war on Mussolini, many Italian-Americans hoped for a U.S. victory that somehow avoided imposing an Italian defeat.
By 1945, however, an immense change had taken place. The shared experience of conflict, and especially of military service, accelerated a remarkable integration of America’s national groupings. Anthony Carullo, for instance, had emigrated to the United States from southern Italy with his family in 1938. When he joined the army and served in Europe, he had to address letters home to his sisters, because his mother understood no English. But when he was asked, “If we send you to Italy, are you willing to fight Italians?” the twenty-one-year-old replied doughtily, “I’m an American citizen. I’ll fight anybody.” The German-born sergeant Henry Kissinger afterwards asserted that it was the war that made him a real American. Between 1942 and 1945, millions of his compatriots of recent immigrant stock discovered for the first time a shared nationalism.
Much more complex and brutal issues of loyalty confronted societies occupied by the Axis, or subject to colonial rule by the European powers. In some countries, to this day it remains a matter of dispute whether those who chose to serve the Germans or Japanese, or to resist the Allies, were guilty of betrayal or merely adopted a different view of patriotism. Many Europeans served in national security forces which opposed Allied interests and promoted those of the Germans: French gendarmes consigned Jews to death camps. Despite the legend of Dutch sympathy promoted by Anne Frank’s diary, Holland’s policemen proved more ruthless than their French counterparts, dispatching a higher proportion of their country’s Jews to deportation and death.
France was riven by internal dissensions. Especially in the early years of occupation, there was widespread support for the Vichy government, and thus for collaboration with Germany. A German officer working with the Armistice Commission in 1940–41, Tassilo von Bogenhardt, asserted that he found his French counterparts “very interesting to talk to … I suspected that the fortitude of the British in the face of our bombing rather annoyed them … [They] admired and respected Marshal Pétain as much as they detested the communists and Front Populaire.” Some 25,000 Frenchmen served as volunteers in the SS Westland Division. Though the colonial authorities in a handful of France’s African possessions “rallied” to de Gaulle in London, most did not. Even after the United States entered the war, French soldiers, sailors and airmen continued to resist the Allies. In May 1942, when the British invaded Vichy Madagascar to preempt a possible Japanese descent on the strategic island, there was protracted fighting. Madagascar is larger than France—1,000 miles long. Its governor-general signalled to Vichy: “Our available troops are preparing to resist every enemy advance with the same spirit which inspired our soldiers at Diego Suarez, at Jajunga, at Tananarive [the sites of earlier encounters between Vichy forces and the Allies] … where each time the defence became a page of heroism written by ‘La France.’ ”
Clashes at sea made it necessary for the Royal Navy to sink a French frigate and three submarines; in the Madagascar shore campaign, 171 of the defenders were killed and 343 wounded, while the British lost 105 killed and