Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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exposed to an onslaught of propaganda. It told them that they were engaged in a
life and death struggle against the evils of fascism and militarism. In the initial phase
of the German invasion Soviet propaganda emphasized traditional Russian patriotism.
In an effort to highlight continuities between this campaign and earlier, successful
efforts to expel invaders from Russian soil, Soviet propagandists initially labeled the
conflict as the Great Patriotic War. Stalin was even prepared to compromise with the
Orthodox church in order to unite all Soviet citizens against the invader. It was only
after the tide had turned that the Soviet propaganda machine shifted some of its
emphasis from the need to fight to defend traditional Russian values to emphasize
the goal of supporting Soviet patriotism. But throughout the war the Soviet regime
continued to harp on one common theme: the need to kill the invader.
Official propaganda in the western democracies also emphasized that they were
fighting a war of good against evil. The western democracies insisted that they stood
for what one historian has called “progressive, post-Enlightenment values,” whereas
their enemies were mired in barbarism.
12
However, overt political indoctrination in
the British and US armies, compared to the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, was half-
hearted. In both the British and American armies there was probably a widespread
belief in the righteousness of their cause, but many soldiers would have been hard-
put to express it. In 1940, when the British military authorities discovered that many
recruits did not understand why Britain was at war and had little interest in the issues
at stake, the war office established the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) in
an effort to enthuse and teach them.
13
It met with only limited success. After attend-
ing an ABCA session one paratrooper still opined that the average British soldier was
concerned with only three things, “football, beer and crumpet.”
14
One authority has
asserted that patriotic appeals to American GIs on the eve of battle usually left them
feeling disgusted and embarrassed. Growing up during the Depression had left them
deeply suspicious of the Wilsonian idealism espoused by their father’s generation at
the end of World War I. They believed that they were fighting for a just cause, but
they were deeply suspicious of anyone who talked about the war in terms of grand
platitudes. Nearly all British and American soldiers hated Hitler and Nazism, but they
also had a grudging respect for the ordinary Wehrmacht soldier – although not for
members of the SS. Few British or US soldiers expressed any particular desire to kill
Germans. The available evidence points squarely towards the fact that the war aims
of most British and American soldiers focused not on exterminating their enemies,
but on surviving, ending the war as quickly as possible, and returning to their family,
a decent home, and a steady job after the war.
15
Discipline, Psychiatry, and Punishments
Soldiers who performed up to or beyond the expectation of their superiors in combat
were rewarded with medals and promotions. But soldiers who ran away presented
armies with a stark problem which they tackled in widely different ways. During
World War I the British army had maintained what was by contemporary standards
a ferocious disciplinary system. It imposed over 3,000 death sentences, of which 346
were actually carried out, 266 of them for desertion. The suspicion that many men
who were executed had been suffering from “shell shock” caused so much public
and political disquiet that in 1930 parliament abolished the death penalty for deser-
the real war 449
tion in the face of the enemy. During World War II the British army executed 40
soldiers, but none for desertion.
British soldiers who broke down when confronted by the horrors of the battlefield
could expect to be disposed of in one of two ways. If they were known to their
superior officers, and if the latter believed that they had made a genuine effort to
overcome their fears, it was likely that they would be dealt with as a medical casualty
and labeled as suffering from “battle exhaustion.” In mid-1942 psychiatric casualties
accounted for 7–10 percent of the total casualties suffered by the 8th Army in north
Africa. In periods of intense fighting the proportion of exhaustion cases could rise
even higher. Between late June and late July 1944 exhaustion cases accounted for
nearly 24 percent of British casualties. They were treated at a forward psychiatric
center, and either returned to their unit or posted to a job behind the line. However,
if the soldier who broke down was a recent replacement whose record of previous
service was unknown to his company or battalion commander, or if he was a known
malcontent, he might be classified as a deserter and convicted by a court martial.
Approximately 100,000 men deserted from the British army during World War II.
On the battlefield infantrymen were far more likely to break down or desert than
any other kind of soldier. When he was apprehended the typical deserter was awarded
a prison sentence of 3–5 years. To avoid men deliberately committing offenses to
exchange the dangers and discomforts of the front line for the relative comforts of
a military prison, sentences for desertion were frequently suspended, and the guilty
party was quickly returned to the front line where, if he behaved well, his sentence
might in time be quashed. Some commanders – Gort in 1940, Auchinleck in 1942,
and Alexander in 1944 – wanted the death penalty reinstated, but their political
masters never thought the time was propitious.
16
The US army did retain the death penalty for desertion, but it made little use of
it. Of the 21,000 US soldiers court-martialed for desertion, only 162 were sentenced
to death, and only one was executed. Like the British, the US army also suffered a
high proportion of psychological casualties. In the first instance, nearly a million
potential soldiers were rejected by the army on neuropsychiatric grounds and not
even permitted to enlist, and about the same number who were enlisted were subse-
quently treated for psychiatric disorders. Even so nearly a quarter of US casualties in
north Africa in 1942–3, and in northwest Europe in 1944–5, were caused by psy-
chiatric breakdowns. Some senior US officers shared General Patton’s low regard for
such men, but others accepted that every soldier had his own personal breaking point,
and that “combat exhaustion” was a medical, not a disciplinary problem. By 1944–5
both the British and US armies had developed similar methods for treating such men.
Experience had taught them that if they were evacuated far to the rear, they were
unlikely ever to return to front line duty. Exhaustion cases were therefore sent to rest
stations only a short way behind the line, where mild cases recovered after being
briefly sedated and then interviewed by a doctor who tried to assure them that their
breakdown was only temporary and that they would soon be fit to return to front
line duty. Between June and December 1944 over half of all combat exhaustion cases
in the US 1st Army were returned to duty after only a brief respite, although it is
likely that a considerable number of them suffered a relapse. More serious cases were
evacuated further behind the line and if possible, eventually found a job on the lines
of communication.
17
450 david french
The German and Soviet armies responded to this problem very differently. Soldiers
in these armies knew that failure to endure the hardships and terrors of the battlefield
would probably lead to a firing squad. During World War I the German military
penal code was remarkably lax. Only 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death
and only 48 were executed. The lesson that the German military authorities drew
from the collapse of morale in their army in 1918 was that this had been a disastrous
mistake. Only a draconian disciplinary system coupled with intensive political indoc-
trination could sustain their soldiers’ will to fight. Following Hitler’s accession to
power, the military authorities took the opportunity to devise a new wartime military
code that would ensure that the apparent mistakes of World War I would never be
repeated. German soldiers knew that they could be executed not only for treason,
mutiny, desertion, or striking a superior, but also for doing or saying something that
undermined fighting power. German army doctors insisted that soldiers suffering
from psychological disorders were the victims of lax discipline and poor morale, not
of unbearable conditions at the front. Unlike their British or American counterparts
they barely recognized the possibility that soldiers might be psychologically predis-
posed to breakdown in combat. Effectively forbidden to escape from the firing line
by means of a psychological breakdown, German soldiers found other ways to quit.
Some developed physical symptoms that might earn them a spell in hospital. Perhaps
as many as 23,000 committed suicide. And others deserted, even though they knew
that they risked being executed. By the end of the war German military courts had
sentenced about 50,000 soldiers to death and executed about 33,000 of them.
Between 16,000 and 18,000 of the soldiers who were executed had been found guilty
of desertion.
18
But it was the Soviet army that treated its own men most brutally. In August 1941
Stalin prescribed ruthless punishments for anyone guilty of desertion, surrender, or
spreading panic. Behind the line the NKVD established “holding detachments” ready
to shoot any Soviet soldier, be he private or general, who ran away. In August 1942
the Soviet Army introduced special punishment battalions. Life expectancy for the
nearly 423,000 men who were drafted into them was normally very short, as they
were frequently given near-suicidal missions to perform. Deserters could also face
summary execution. As many as 13,500 Soviet soldiers are reported to have been
executed by their own side during the battle of Stalingrad.
19
The consequences of these differing disciplinary regimes were striking. Whereas
in the German army an average of 7.9 soldiers per thousand deserted or went
AWOL annually, by 1944, in the US army, the figure had reached 45.2 in the
European theater. Some Soviet units did give way to panic and fled. But many others
showed that they were determined to continue fighting even after the situation facing
them was obviously hopeless. The unpalatable conclusion may be that draconian
discipline worked, at least to the extent that it discouraged men from abandoning
the front line.
Killing, Brutality, and Atrocities
The extent to which armies succeeded in persuading front line soldiers to kill their
enemies with their own hand-held weapons is debatable. By developing doctrines
that emphasized that battles were won by mobility and mechanically generated fire-
the real war 451
power, both the British and US armies minimized the need for their troops to do
so. But no army could do without infantrymen who were willing to kill their enemies.
Montgomery admitted privately shortly after El Alamein: “The trouble with our
British lads is that they are not killers by nature.” The attitudes and reactions of
individual soldiers confronted by the apparent need to kill an enemy soldier defy easy
generalization. During the war the US army deployed analysts in the front line to
observe the behavior of men under fire. Their conclusions purported to show that
only 15–25 percent of infantry soldiers ever fired their personal weapons at the enemy.
More recently it has become clear that the apparent precision of their findings was
based on what was at best only highly impressionistic evidence.
20
One major study
of the attitude of British and American troops has recently tried to demonstrate that
many actually enjoyed the act of killing. However, the author’s use of sources has
been criticized so roundly that the book’s conclusions remain questionable. Soldiers
penning letters at the front might be apt to exaggerate their propensity to kill in
order to meet the expectations of their readers. The latter were not just the intended
recipient, be they friends or relations at home, but also their military superiors, their
platoon or company commander, who had the duty to censor their letters before
they were posted. In either case the writer might have felt a compulsion to live up
to an expected public image of the soldier as a loyal, patriotic, and willing killer.
Furthermore, it is apparent that for every soldier who claimed at the time, or later,
that he enjoyed killing, another claimed that he found the experience intensely
painful, and that he acted under the pressing need of self-preservation, or revenge
for a friend who had just been killed.
21
British and American soldiers were usually quite content to spare the lives of any
German who wanted to surrender, provided he was not so foolish as to have been
firing on his would-be captors only moments earlier. Once captured, German prison-
ers in the hands of the British or Americans might be deprived of their watches and
wallets, but they could otherwise expect to be treated broadly in accordance to the
dictates of customary international law and the Geneva Convention. By contrast,
prisoners taken on the eastern front, be they Germans who fell into Russian hands
or Russians who had the misfortune to be captured by the Germans, could expect a
much bleaker and more brutal future. All wars involve brutality, but the behavior of
German forces on the eastern front after 1941 went beyond the limits of “normal
brutality.” The German political and military leadership were fighting a war to exter-
minate Bolshevism. Recent research has demonstrated that the defense offered by
many German soldiers after 1945 that it was the SS, not the ordinary Wehrmacht
soldiers, who were responsible for the atrocities committed by the Germans against
Soviet prisoners and civilians is no longer tenable.
22
Of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers
who fell into German hands, between 2.2 million and 3.3 million died before the
end of the war. The precise number of German POWs captured by Soviet forces
remains debatable and figures between 2.4 million and 3.2 million have been sug-
gested. Early Soviet figures suggested that 352,000 of them died, but this is probably
much too low and a figure closer to 1.2 million is more accurate.
23
The barbarization of the war in the east began in Poland in 1939. Most members
of the Wehrmacht regarded the indigenous Polish population with a mixture of dis-
trust and racial arrogance. They were content to turn a blind eye to the murderous
atrocities of the SS and Einsatzgruppen. Even officers and men who were not
452 david french
members of the Nazi Party accepted many of the key elements of its ideology, its
antisemitism, anti-Slavism, and militant anti-Bolshevism. This helped to ensure the
widespread acceptance of orders issued by Hitler on the eve of Operation Barbarossa
that Soviet POWs would not be treated according to the Geneva Convention or
customary international law, that Jews, Soviet commissars, and partisans were to be
murdered, and that German soldiers would be exonerated from crimes they might
commit against the Soviet people. After June 1941 senior army commanders endorsed
these orders, insisting that as Jews might be both Bolsheviks and partisans, their mass
murder was permissible as an essential measure to protect the lives of German soldiers.
Other Soviet civilians were treated with equal brutality by the German occupying
forces. From the outset the German army had expected to live off the land in Russia
and the collapse of German logistical support in the first winter of the war made
doing so an urgent necessity. It became common practice for German soldiers to
steal whatever they wanted from each Soviet village through which they passed, be
it food and livestock or warm winter clothing and fur-lined boots. Not all German
soldiers on the eastern front took part in atrocities against civilians, Jews, and
members of the Communist Party, but some did, and only a small minority of soldiers
openly expressed their disquiet about the activities of the SS and Einsatzgruppen.
24
It was hardly surprising that when the Soviet army entered Germany, Soviet troops
were bent on revenge and embarked upon an orgy of looting, raping, and murder.
The Soviet authorities did not wage a deliberate policy of extermination against
occupied enemy peoples, but they only acted to stop their troops from misbehaving
when their behavior threatened military discipline.
Conclusion
There was no single reason why soldiers endured the awful experiences of war on
the front line. For some, comradeship was the main reason. For others, it was ideo-
logical commitment to the cause for which they were fighting. For others, it was fear
of the consequences if they deserted. For most men it was probably a combination
of all three factors. But for all of them the war left poignant and often painful memo-
ries that they carried with them into the postwar world. Reflecting on his experiences
in October 2002, one British 8th Army veteran concluded: “I’m 86 and have spent
my whole life looking on the bright side. . . . For a lot of us the war was the biggest
adventure of our entire lives. We’re still talking about it, for heaven’s sake. I can still
remember the oranges we’d eat in Palestine . . . but what never leaves you are the
memories of all the smashing blokes we lost.”
25
NOTES
1 See Alan R. Millet, “The US Armed Forces in the Second World War,” in
Military
Effectiveness, vol. 3: The Second World War, A. R. Millet and Williamson Murray, eds
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), p. 60; Jürgen E. Förster, “The Dynamics of
Volksgemeinschaft: The Effectiveness of the German Military Establishment in the Second
World War,” in Millet and Murray, Second World War, p. 190.
2 See John Erickson, “Soviet War Losses: Calculations and Controversies,” in
Barbarossa:
The Axis and the Allies, J. Erickson and David Dilks, eds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
the real war 453
Press, 1994), pp. 259–61; J. Erickson, “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941–45:
The System and the Soldier,” in Time to Kill: The Soldiers’ Experience of War in the West,
1939–1945, Paul Addison and Angus Calder, eds (London: Pimlico, 1997), pp. 236, 241;
John Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War Two (London: David
and Charles, 1982), p. 177; Reid Mitchell, “The GI in Europe and the American Military
Tradition,” in Addison and Calder, Time to Kill, pp. 306–7; Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s
Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), p. 370.
3 Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. Accession No. 12239. Gerry Barnett, Reel 6.
4 See Martin Van Creveld,
Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945
(London: Arms and Armour Press, 1983), pp. 65–7; Albert Seaton, The German Army,
1933–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 95–7; J. E. Förster, “Evolution
and Development of German Doctrine 1914–45,” in The Origins of Contemporary
Doctrine, J. Gooch, ed. (London: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, 1997), pp.
18–31; Earl F. Ziemke, “The Soviet Armed Forces in the Interwar Period,” in Military
Effectiveness, vol. 2: The Interwar Period, A. Millet and W. Murray, eds (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1988), pp. 1–38.
5 See David French, “Doctrine and Organization in the British Army, 1919–1932,”
Historical Journal 43 (2001): 497–515; Michael D. Doubler, Closing With the Enemy:
How GI’s Fought the War in Europe, 1944–45 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1994).
6 See Jeremy A. Crang,
The British Army and the People’s War 1939–1945 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 5–20; John C. McManus, The Deadly Brotherhood:
The American Combat Soldier in World War II (Novato CA: Presidio, 1998), pp. 8–11.
7 See David French,
Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against
Germany, 1919–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 65–6; Millet, “The
US Armed Forces in the Second World War,” pp. 60–1, 82; Trevor A. Wilson, “Who
Fought and Why? The Assignment of American Soldiers to Combat,” in Addison and
Calder, Time to Kill, pp. 284–303.
8 See Erickson, “Red Army Battlefield Performance,” p. 239.
9 See Doubler,
Closing with the Enemy, p. 235.
10 See, for example, Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in
the Wehrmacht,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 280–315.
11 See Omer Bartov,
Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991); Omer Bartov, “Daily life and Motivation in War: The
Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Strategic Studies 12 (1989): 200–14; Stephen
G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War Two (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1995); Stephen G. Fritz, “‘We are trying to change the face of the
world’ – Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View
from Below,” Journal of Military History 60 (1996): 683–710; Gerd R. Ueberschär, “The
Ideologically Motivated War of Annihilation in the East,” in Hitler’s War in the East: A
Critical Assessment, Rolf-Dieter Müller and G. R. Ueberschär (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. 209–82 (provides a useful critical survey of the literature).
12 Richard Overy,
Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 285.
13 See S. P. Mackenzie,
Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship
Education in the British Army 1914–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
14 David French, “‘You can’t hate the bastard who is trying to kill you . . .’ Combat and
Ideology in the British Army in the War Against Germany, 1939–1945,” Twentieth
Century British History 11 (2000): 6.
15 See Jeremy Crang, “The British Soldier on the Home Front: Army Morale Reports,
1940–45,” in Addison and Calder, Time to Kill, pp. 60–74; R. Mitchell, “The GI in
454 david french
Europe and the American Military Tradition,” in Addison and Calder, Time to Kill, pp.
312–13; McManus, Deadly Brotherhood, pp. 182–3, 228–38.
16 See Robert H. Ahrenfeldt,
Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957); David French, “Discipline and the Death
Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War,”
Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 531–46; David French, “‘Tommy is no
soldier’: The Morale of the Second British Army in Normandy, June–August 1944,”
Journal of Strategic Studies 19 (1996): 154–78; Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew, Battle
Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939–1945 (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Ben Shepherd, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and
Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), pp. 205–27.
17 See Van Creveld,
Fighting Power, pp. 95–6; Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 293–4; Steven
R. Welch, “‘Harsh but just’? German Military Justice in the Second World War: A
Comparative Study of the Court-Martialling of German and US Deserters,” German
History 17 (1999): 369–99.
18 See Bartov,
Hitler’s Army, pp. 22–4; Welch, “‘Harsh but just’?” pp. 369–99; Omer
Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare
(London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 27–35; Shepherd, A War of Nerves, pp. 299–312; Jürgen
E. Förster, “Luddendorff and Hitler in Perspective: The Battle for the German Soldier’s
Mind, 1917–1944,” War in History 10 (2003): 321–34.
19 See Antony Beevor,
Stalingrad (London: Viking, 1998), pp. 166–72.
20 See S. L. A. Marshal,
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War
(New York: William Morrow, 1947); Roger J. Spiller, “S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio
of Fire,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 133 (1988): 63–71.
21 See Joanna Bourke,
An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-
Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999); French, “You can’t hate the bastard who is
trying to kill you,” pp. 10–12.
22 This may be something that some older Germans still have some difficulty in accepting.
See Hannes Heer, “The Difficulty of Ending a War: Reactions to the Exhibition ‘War of
Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’,” History Workshop 46 (1998):
187–203.
23 See Overy,
Why the Allies Won, pp. 281–3, 287–8, 291–2; Richard Overy, Russia’s War
(London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 260–2, 297–8; Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 26–8, 125;
Bartov, Eastern Front, p. 153.
24 See J. E. Förster, “Motivation and Indoctrination in the Wehrmacht, 1933–1945,” in
Addison and Calder, Time to Kill, pp. 263–73; T. J. Shute, “The German Soldier in
Occupied Russia,” in Addison and Calder, Time to Kill, pp. 275–83; A. Steim,
“International Law and Soviet Prisoners of War,” in From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet
Russia and the World, 1939–1941, Bernd Wegner, ed. (Providence RI: Berg, 1997), pp.
293–308; Klaus-Jürgen Müller, “The Brutalisation of Warfare, Nazi Crimes and the
Wehrmacht,” in Erickson and Dilks, Barbarossa, pp. 229–37; H. Heer and Klaus Naumann,
eds, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War Two 1941–1944 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
25 Helena Smith, “Last Post for Alamein and the Desert Rats,”
Observer, October 20,
2002.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Paul Addison and Angus Calder, eds, Time to Kill: The Soldiers’ Experience of War in the West,
1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 1997). An important collection of essays that examine the
experience of ordinary soldiers in the Axis and Allied armies.
the real war 455
Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991); The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization
of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 2001). Bartov’s books are the essential starting point for
understanding the conduct of German soldiers in Russia between 1941 and 1945.
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-Century
Warfare (London: Granta, 1999). Tackles a difficult and important subject, but the author’s
use of sources means that the book’s conclusions should be treated with some
reservations.
Jeremy A. Crang, The British Army and the People’s War 1939–1945 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000). A good social history of the British army.
Michael D. Doubler, Closing With the Enemy: How GI’s Fought the War in Europe, 1944–45
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). Goes far towards rehabilitating the reputation
of the US army in northwest Europe.
John Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War Two (London: David and
Charles, 1982). An early and still important study of the experience of frontline soldiers in
the British and US armies.
David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany,
1919–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Attempts to analyze the combat capa-
bility of the British army.
Steven G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War Two (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1995). Examines the experience of German soldiers on the eastern
front.
John C. McManus, The Deadly Brotherhood: The American Combat Soldier in World War II
(Novato CA: Presidio, 1998). Makes use of oral history material to explore the behavior of
GIs in battle.
S. L. A. Marshal, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (New
York: William Morrow, 1947). Although Marshall’s methodology has been criticized, his
book is still a landmark in the analysis of how soldiers behave on the battlefield.
Alan R. Millet and Williamson Murray, eds, Military Effectiveness, vol. 3: The Second World
War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988). A selection of essays that analyze the combat
capabilities of the armed services of all of the major belligerents.
Ben Shepherd, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2000). An excellent account of how the British and US armies employed
psychiatrists.
Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht,” Public
Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 280–315. A seminal article that suggested ideology was not
important in motivating German soldiers on the battlefield. Much criticized by Bartov and
Fritz.
Martin Van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (London:
Arms and Armour Press, 1983). A comparative analysis of the combat capability of the US
and German armies.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Home Fronts: Europe at War,
1939–1945
Nicholas Atkin
World War II, it is commonly said, was a war like no other. In the number of coun-
tries involved, in the diversity of fighting fronts, in the mobilization of populations
and economies, in the extent of material devastation, in the numbers of lives lost, in
the intensity of the struggle, and in the atrocities of slave labor and genocide, this
conflict dwarfed all others. While historians dispute whether it constituted a “total
war,” there is consensus that the home fronts were so closely interconnected with
the fighting fronts that the two became inseparable, a marked distinction with the
past.
1
As Eric Hobsbawm notes, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era
(1792–1815), states could still keep war and domestic affairs in “watertight compart-
ments, as the ladies and gentlemen in Jane Austen’s novels were just then doing in
Britain.”
2
During World War I such compartmentalization was no longer possible,
but it would be a mistake to believe that war intruded into every walk of life. In his
memoirs, Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves recalls how 20 miles beyond the
trenches lay the tranquility of the French countryside, apparently oblivious to the
horrors being perpetrated nearby. In 1939–45 such escape was not possible. In
August 1940 Churchill declared: “The whole of the warring nations are engaged,
not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts
are everywhere.”
3
The nature of World War II has ensured that historians focus as much on propa-
ganda, rationing, and the movement of populations as they do on weaponry, military
campaigns, and logistics. There have, however, been remarkably few European-wide
surveys of the home fronts, and most of them dwell on the sensationalist aspects of
resistance and collaboration.
4
Although this situation is changing, the reasons for
neglect are understandable.
5
Cross-national comparisons are difficult at the best of
times, and especially so for Nazi Europe. As John Campbell observes, “For no two
countries was the experience of German occupation identical, and in each country
German rule was in a state of flux throughout.”
6
Because of the importance of events,
the literature on individual countries is also so vast that it would take several lifetimes
to read, not to mention a command of several languages. Nevertheless, in the case
of Hitler’s Europe at least, historians possess a series of shared concerns: occupation,
the home fronts 457
collaboration, and resistance. Several studies thus pursue a familiar path, focusing
on what Germans call Alltagsgeschichte (“everyday life”). This usually involves analysis
of defeat, the arrival of the occupier, the erection of a New Order, the material
circumstances of wartime, and the impact shortages had on communities.
7
From a
study of occupation, it is but a short step to look at collaboration and resistance.
Here, historians have stressed the issue of choice: whether to collude with the occu-
pier or to resist, or whether to wait on events (a phenomenon known as attentisme).
Such choices were rarely straightforward, either for individuals or institutions or
governments. It is in recognition of this ambiguity that historians have often preferred
to investigate not a single country but a particular region, a trend noticeable in the
cases of Italy and France, where there exists a tradition of local history.
8
Today, every
Italian city of any size has its Istituto nazionale per la storia del movimento di libera-
zione in Italia.
European Geopolitics, 1939–1945
Any appreciation of the home fronts must begin with an awareness of the geopolitics
of Hitler’s Europe, which echoed Napoleon I’s First Empire in its jumble of satellite
states.
9
At the core, writes Henri Michel, was the greater Reich. This comprised
Germany, as configured by the 1919 settlement, to which was added Austria, the
Sudetenland, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxemburg, Eupen and Malmédy, Poznam, Upper
Silesia, the Polish corridor, and Danzig. Here, continues Michel, German administra-
tion prevailed, and a process of Germanification introduced, to the cost of those
peoples, notably Poles and Lorrainers, damned as racially inferior. Because of their
strategic importance, military governors were imposed on Belgium, so-called “occu-
pied France” (essentially the northern and western territories, significantly the wealth-
iest parts of the country), and those parts of the Soviet Union quickly surrendered
by Moscow. In the course of 1940–1 puppet states were established in Serbia under
Milan Nedi´c, in Croatia under Ante Paveli´c, in Greece (under George Tsolakoglou,
Constantine Lotothetopoulos, and Ioannis Rallis in turn), and in Slovakia under Josef
Tiso. Because of their “Aryan” descent, explains Michael Burleigh, some autonomy
was permitted in the following, although they were ultimately destined for absorption
into the greater Germany: Holland (governed by the Dutch civil service, overseen
by a civilian Reich commissioner); Norway (again governed by a civilian commis-
sioner, periodically assisted by Vidkun Quisling); and Denmark (where national
institutions, such as parliament, were uniquely allowed to survive, albeit under the
watchful eye of the occupying forces).
10
Not wishing to inflame the country’s revo-
lutionary heritage and seeking a breathing space to prepare his invasion of Britain,
Hitler left a third of France unoccupied under the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain,
although in the longer term he envisaged the disappearance of France altogether.
Severest were the arrangements reached in Slav areas: a Protectorate was established
over Bohemia-Moravia, while a “Government General” was imposed on what was
left of Poland, where Hitler intended to offload what he called the “rubbish” – “Jews,
the sick, slackers, etc.” Among its allies, continues Michel, Germany counted Finland,
Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria (all minor but carefully watched by Berlin) and
Fascist Italy, although Italian military shortcomings meant that Rome was soon
Berlin’s lackey. Switzerland, Sweden, Eire, Turkey, Spain, and Portugal proclaimed