Inferno - Max Hastings [414]
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 on 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 northwest 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 indulged 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 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