The Economist magazine publishes book reviews every week, once in a while they cover the WW2 period. Every time one shows up I'll put it here.

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

France during the second world war - Not a good time to be hungry - Apr 12th 2006

TALES of heroic resistance fighters, such as Jean Moulin who was tortured to death by the Nazis in 1943, are emblematic of wartime France. But so too are the stories of un-heroic compromise and collaboration, which for some were the only real options. In an absorbing new book, Richard Vinen, a historian at King's College, London, who has made a speciality of Vichy France, focuses on the harsh times endured by ordinary French people, whether refugees on the road, captured soldiers, the huge numbers of men drafted to work in Germany or the women left behind scrabbling to feed their families.

By early 1942 most of France was hungry. What the German occupiers did not send home, they ate and drank on the spot, at one point taking 80% of the meat brought into Paris. Ernst Jünger, a German writer and officer who dined on the top floor of the sumptuous Tour d'Argent restaurant overlooking the Seine, wrote of the "diabolical satisfaction" of seeing the "grey ocean of roof tops under which the starving tried to keep body and soul together".

Food — or lack of it — became a national obsession. Mr Vinen describes the experience of 2,000 Parisians lining up to buy just 300 portions of rabbit. In the provinces, women started queuing at 3am for food, only to discover that there was none left in the shops. One daughter of a judge married a peasant farmer from the Loire, lured by his pork chops and rillettes. Parisian criminals masqueraded as German policemen to extort food, fuel and money from their fellow-citizens.

Most people resorted to black-market transactions with German soldiers, French collaborators or farmers — the countryside profiting at the expense of the city. The French population during the occupation was predominantly female. Close to 1.4m young Frenchmen had died in the first world war, 2m were taken back to Germany as prisoners of war in 1940 and a further 600,000 were forced to work there from 1942. Recent research suggests that German soldiers in France fathered as many as 200,000 children, mostly with waitresses, chambermaids and shop assistants — all of whom were likely to have come across Germans during the course of their daily work. These women suffered brutal punishment during l'épuration —the savage purges after the liberation, described by Mr Vinen in a chapter entitled "Sunset of Blood". Their heads shaved, the women were spat at and marched down the streets by jeering crowds.

Mr Vinen examines in turn the fate of France's Jews. The most shameful act of collaboration —exceeding the demands of even the Germans themselves — was the deportation to Auschwitz of 4,000 Jewish children aged 12 or under, most of them rounded up by gendarmes under brutal conditions that must have proclaimed even to the dullest of bureaucratic minds what kind of a fate lay at the end of their journey.

The deportations ripped Jewish families apart. Seven-year-old Serge Klarsfeld, for example, hid in a cupboard with his mother while his father was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. An Austrian Jew entrusted his daughter to a French family only to discover on his return from a concentration camp that the child spoke only French — a language he did not understand.

Many Jews were also shown courageous support. Gentile students in Paris wore the yellow star; teachers forged papers for Jewish families, while Father Jacques, a Carmelite headmaster, hid three Jewish boys in his school, a story that later inspired a fellow pupil, Louis Malle, to make into a film. Sometimes whole French villages in remote areas protected Jews.

In her recent biography of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the one-time Vichy commissioner for Jewish affairs, Carmen Callil describes in close detail how France's most notorious anti-Semite helped round up and deport thousands of his own countrymen. What is remarkable, though, as Mr Vinen points out in this eminently balanced book, is that nearly 80% of the Jews in France survived the war. Hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers, postmen, priests and petty bureaucrats preferred turning a blind eye when there was a new face in town rather than alerting German authorities. Faint praise, perhaps, but this passive resistance helped save over a quarter of a million lives.

__________________
Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

That was interesting, thanx Za!

But defintely not interesting according to the French at the time I bet.

I do recall that in 1940 before occupation in the Netherlands there were some 40 million (?) chickens, and once the occupation started only some 3 million left. The rest were mostly killed and sent to Germany.

So I´d suppose the Nazis had all this nicely plannned for all the occupied countries...

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Stupid of me! Everything was there except the most vital data!

"The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation"
Richard Vinen
Penguin / Allen Lane
478 pages; £25

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

China's Long March

The long and winding road
Apr 27th 2006
From The Economist print edition

"The Long March: The True Story Behind the Legendary Journey That Made Mao's China"
By Andrew McEwen and Ed Jocelyn

Constable & Robinson; 350 pages; £8.99


SEPARATING myth from reality in China is a challenge at the best of times. This is particularly true of the Long March, the famous journey that China's beleaguered communists made in the 1930s to a new base several thousand miles in the north of the country. Only a few of those who participated are still alive today. The Communist Party tolerates only one view: that it was utterly heroic. Debate about what really happened is suppressed. Parts of the route through some of the country's most inhospitable terrain are difficult for researchers to follow.

With the approach of this October's 70th anniversary of the official end of the march, two new books attempt to explore the truth of what both describe as communist China's “founding myth”. Their efforts follow the publication last year of an iconoclastic biography of Mao Zedong by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that dismisses the Long March as “one of the biggest myths of the 20th century”. Ms Chang and Mr Halliday say Mao was borne on a litter and that China's then ruler, Chiang Kai-shek, made no more than a token effort to stop them.

Historians of the Long March are challenged by the passage of time and a dearth of first-hand accounts other than by party leaders. It was not until 1984 that Harrison Salisbury, an American journalist, became the first foreigner to be given permission to retrace the Long March. Few other independent writers have done it since. The accounts of ordinary marchers interviewed in the two latest works, one by a Chinese-born film producer, Sun Shuyun, and the other by two British journalists, Andrew McEwen and Ed Jocelyn, provide no more than isolated glimpses subject to the distortions of fading memories.

In party propaganda, the most iconic episode of the march was the crossing of a narrow suspension bridge over the turbulent Dadu River in Sichuan Province. Red Army soldiers are said to have crawled over its chains and burning planks under enemy fire. With remarkably few casualties they supposedly defeated two battalions on the other side. Edgar Snow, who with Mao's help wrote the first foreign account of the Long March, which was published in 1937, called this “the most critical single incident”.

The bridge is now one of the fiercest battlegrounds between myth and reality. Ms Chang and Mr Halliday say there simply was no battle at all. The enemy had withdrawn before the communists arrived in May 1935. A 93-year-old woman interviewed by the authors in 1997 said she could not remember any shots directed at the Red Army. Messrs McEwen and Jocelyn and find a woman in her early 80s who remembers differently. She recalls that local people led the way across the bridge and were all shot and killed. Ms Sun's book bases its account on the recollection of yet another ageing local. This witness says there was a small enemy force on the other side armed with guns that could “only fire a few metres”. They panicked and fled.

What about the planks, half of which Snow says were removed by the enemy with the others set on fire with paraffin? Smoke and flames feature heavily in Mao-era propaganda art. According to Ms Chang and Mr Halliday, there may have been some missing planks but they were not burned. Messrs McEwen and Jocelyn believe that at least half the planks had been removed, though their witness says there were only chains left. Ms Sun insists that planks had been removed only at one end; she sidesteps the question of fire.

The new accounts are enjoyable to read. They help convey the ordeals suffered by the marchers, and as Ms Sun describes particularly vividly, by some of those they encountered. Messrs McEwen and Jocelyn find the Long March was only half the length Mao made it out to be, though still a punishing 3,750 miles. China can rest assured that its cherished myths will long endure.

__________________
Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

By Antony Beevor

Penguin Press; 560 pages; $17.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £25

Jun 22nd 2006
From The Economist print edition

A quarter-century after he first wrote it, a British military historian reworks his epic study of the Spanish civil war—and challenges many of its enduring myths

ANTONY BEEVOR, a military historian and former soldier, has made a speciality over the past decade of sifting through recently opened Russian archives in search of new material about old events. This search has yielded considerable treasures, allowing him to produce a fresh account, from the inside, of the siege of Stalingrad and a narrative of the final battle for Berlin. Both became bestsellers, translated into more than 20 languages and with 2m copies in print.

Mr Beevor's latest trawl through these same archives, far from resulting in a new book, has led him instead to rewrite an earlier work, his 1982 account of the Spanish civil war. Mr Beevor seeks to dispel many of the myths that arose from the conflict, in particular the mystique surrounding the republican cause.


If the history of wars tends to be written by the victors, Spain's civil war is the great exception. Few believed General Francisco Franco's version of the divinely backed “crusade” against communists, freemasons, separatists, atheists and other assorted enemies. As a result, an air of heady romance surrounds those who lost. The heroic figures of the war are the poet-volunteers of the International Brigades, the anarchist militia fighters of the republic and the woman known as la Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri. “No pasarán!” (“They shall not pass”) she famously said of Franco's right-wing rebels. She was wrong. The 1936 rightist uprising ended in absolute victory in 1939. Spain lived under dictatorship for nearly four more decades.

Spain's short-lived republic, argues Mr Beevor, was badly destabilised by those on the left who later claimed to be its protectors. An attempted 1934 revolution, led by Asturian miners against a conservative republican government, inflicted a terrible blow. The left-wing Popular Front that won the elections then failed to control its extreme supporters. Had the left not won at the polls, Mr Beevor suspects, it would have risen up against the right. However well-informed, that is only speculation.

Twentieth-century right-wing dictators routinely claimed to be saving their countries from communist “evil”. Franco was no exception. Was he right, though? Some Spaniards think he was, as recent sales of revisionist polemics show. Mr Beevor does not go that far. The rightist uprising was, after all, against an elected government. The counter-factual question of what might have happened may be fascinating—but it remains just that, a question.

The ultimate success of the generals' rebellion came down to many things. Top of Mr Beevor's list is republican incompetence. Advance warnings were ignored. Then, when it happened, the republic was crippled by hesitation. Indecision, ill-discipline and poor officers threw away what early on was a winning position.

Spain was a curtain-raiser for the second world war—pitting the great totalitarian blocks against one another. Missing from the equation, however, were the democratic powers of Europe and America. Mr Beevor nails the hypocrisy of their non-intervention. Britain's ambassador in Spain, Sir Henry Chilton, was “a blatant admirer” of the nationalists. Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, supposedly told his French counterpart that he preferred a quick rebel victory. The behaviour of the Royal Navy was “astonishing for a non-interventionist power”. Quiet conversations by pro-nationalist Spanish aristocrats in White's, a London gentlemen's club, were “infinitely more influential on government policy than mass rallies or demonstrations”. So much, then, for the efforts of the intellectuals—from W.H. Auden to George Orwell—who made the republic their cause célèbre.

Texaco, meanwhile, fuelled Franco's army. “Without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit we could never have won the civil war,” one official said later. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin ignored non-intervention. Spain became their military sandpit. They sent troops, tanks, aircraft, advisers and pilots.

Mr Beevor lists the military milestones that they helped Franco to attain. The first major troop airlift in history, for example, brought his Army of Africa to mainland Spain. The intense aerial bombardment of Madrid was the first of a major capital, the precursor to the London Blitz. The destruction of the Basque town of Guernica, which inspired Picasso's famous painting, fitted Germany's treatment of Spain as a test laboratory for military hardware. Heinkel bombers were the first to attack the town. Careful follow-up work was done elsewhere to assess the bombing accuracy of the new German aircraft,especially the Junkers 87 or “Stuka”.

Hitler's insistence that German arms go to Franco, rather than rival generals, helped the future caudillo win absolute control of the nationalist side. The republic walked willingly into Stalin's embrace. Communists, and their Soviet advisers, brought discipline and organisation to the army. Mr Beevor shows how they also brought Trotskyist paranoia, witch hunts, strategic errors and a tendency to blame disasters on imagined enemies within. The republic's final chance of survival lay in the hope that the democracies would wake up to Hitler. Neville Chamberlain chose appeasement. Mr Beevor reckons Franco's ensuing “white terror” claimed 200,000 lives. The “red terror” had already killed 38,000. The real loser of the battle for Spain was Spain itself.

The current debate focuses on how the republic and, indeed, the civil war should be remembered. Spain's Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is due to present proposals for what to do with the underground basilica that Franco built for himself at the Valle de los Caídos, the “valley of the fallen”. He should read Mr Beevor's book first.

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers.

By Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney.
University of Chicago Press; 246 pages; $25

Jul 6th 2006
From The Economist print edition


“HOW unbearable to die in the sky,” wrote Tadao Hayashi, a student pilot, in his diary on July 27th 1945, the night before his plane was shot down. Hayashi's writings, like those of the other Japanese student soldiers compiled in this book, contradict the caricature of the fanatical kamikaze pilot imagined by Americans and Britons during the war, and challenge the myth of the nationalist hero spun by conservative institutions in Japan.

The student soldiers, argues the author, were wantonly sacrificed in the military government's final gambit of the war. She reveals that the tokkotai (“special attack force”, which is how the kamikaze are referred to in Japan) had no volunteers when it was formed in October 1944. Instead, new recruits were either assigned by their superiors or forced to sign up using pressure tactics. No senior officer offered his life for this mission; instead the “volunteer” corps comprised newly enlisted boy-soldiers barely of age and student conscripts from the nation's top universities.

The poems, letters and diaries featured in this book give the lie to the notion that Japan was unified behind the war. The voices of the student soldiers speak thoughtfully and eloquently about their dilemma between duty to the nation and wanting to stay alive. Most of them had been drafted late in the war and represented the country's intellectual elite. Well-read, many of them turned to European literature and philosophy to rationalise their deaths. “Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in mein Herz!” (“Ah, two souls reside in my heart!”) cries Hachiro Sasaki, as he seeks to reconcile his patriotism with his desire to live. Another pilot carries Soren Kierkegaard's “The Sickness Unto Death”, together with the Bible, on his final flight. Just like any young adolescents far from home, the student soldiers were intensely lonely. At Tsuchiura naval air base, home for many of the tokkotai, the song they sung most often was nothing patriotic, but a lullaby in the Kumamoto dialect that went: “I am here far away from home. Even when I die, no one will cry for me; how lonely it is only to hear cicadas cry.” Death for these young intellectuals came not in a burst of fire and glory, but at the end of a long struggle they fought alone.

The word “kamikaze” entered the English language during the second world war and has endured as a symbol of Japan's zealous militarism. After the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York, they were reborn as the 20th century's suicide-bombers. The author argues that both characterisations are deeply flawed. The tokkotai, as she prefers to call them, did not commit suicide but were handed down death sentences in the military missions they were assigned. The al-Qaeda terrorists, on the other hand, sought death in their attempt to exert maximum civilian damage. “Kamikaze Diaries” is a timely and necessary correction of a popular myth, and an important contribution to the understanding of Japan at war.

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

Hijacked by history

Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953
By Geoffrey Roberts
Yale University Press; 468 pages; $35 and £25

From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War
By Wilson D. Miscamble
Cambridge University Press; 393 pages; $39 and £30

Jan 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition

WHAT happens when the leaders of a powerful nation arrive at the end of a long and bloody war and try to give shape to the world beyond it? This question ultimately lies at the heart of two new historical studies, one by Geoffrey Roberts, an associate professor at University College Cork, and the other by Wilson Miscamble, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Both look backward and forward from the bloody fulcrum of 1945 to see how wartime experiences shaped the cold-war world.

Mr Roberts provides the more colourful account. His telling of the basic narratives of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Nazi betrayal of it and the long gruelling combat on the eastern front is, if familiar, nonetheless highly readable. Where Mr Roberts deviates from the standard is in his assessment of Stalin as a military leader. While admitting that he was a mass murderer, Mr Roberts nonetheless finds a surprising (and not entirely convincing) amount to admire in Stalin's wartime leadership and its consequences for the post-war world.

Mr Roberts sees Stalin as a “very effective and highly successful war leader” who was “indispensable” to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. He presents Stalin as a man essentially trying to avoid war. For that reason, he argues, Stalin did not mobilise Russian forces in the summer of 1941, even as his spies relayed worrying portents of the coming German invasion. According to Stalin's logic, the mobilisation would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it would have provoked the Germans into attacking.

However, once the invasion came, Mr Roberts finds that Stalin learned from his generals and met challenges with skill and flexibility. This new flexibility, forged by near-defeat in war, endured into the peace afterwards, which Mr Roberts sees as a period of “de-Stalinisation”, even though Stalin was still alive. Mr Roberts finds that the West, in failing to take advantage of this to produce some kind of mutually agreed post-war settlement, missed an enormous opportunity.

In its attempt to suggest that wisdom gained in war made compromise with the West possible, “Stalin's Wars” enjoys only limited success. Mr Roberts is indeed right to remind the reader of “the paradoxical truth that Stalin was the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy.” But saying that Stalin and his nation survived the Nazi invasion neither excuses his failure to prepare for it, nor proves that his wartime leadership had become both successful and flexible as a result of it.

Mr Roberts tries to explain Stalin's shortcomings by saying that “the concept of strategic defence had no place in the doctrinal universe of the Soviet High Command at the time.” True, perhaps; but this was largely a result of Stalin's 1937 decision to execute most of his military brainpower, among them the real Russian strategic genius of the age, Mikhail Tukhachevskii. Leaders who expel knowledgeable subordinates from their circle of advisers should not be surprised when they find themselves ignorant of their country's real needs.

For his part, Mr Miscamble could hardly disagree more with this assessment of Stalin, whom he views as the primary author of the cold war. In his study, Mr Miscamble provides an answer to the riddle of whether or not Harry Truman carried out Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wartime plans for peace after the latter's untimely death on April 12th 1945. Truman's foes have long argued that the younger man reversed a predominantly co-operative course—that, had Roosevelt lived, he would have compromised with the Soviet Union and prevented the cold war.

Mr Miscamble dismisses this notion, saying that Truman never self-consciously tried to transform American foreign policy in opposition to Roosevelt's wishes. Rather, international developments after the war—which Roosevelt would have faced with the same result—propelled America on to a haphazard but increasingly hardline course. In reaction to Soviet aggression in eastern Europe, Truman “put to rest Rooseveltian notions that Europe's significance could be reduced and worked instead with a proper understanding of the old continent's true importance.”

Although they are looking at different leaders and arguing from opposite ends of the political spectrum, these two authors end up in the same place. They both tell stories of leaders at the mercy of external events. After the seemingly most dangerous phase of hot war passed, the realities of international tension continued to confound the expectations of even the most powerful. Envisioning a post-war world must be done with humility; if for no other reason than because there is only so much that even a superpower can control.

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

Stalin

The makings of a monster

May 17th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Young Stalin.
By Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 432 pages; £25.
To be published in America by Knopf in October

IT TAKES a lively ambition to write yet another biography of Stalin, and Simon Sebag Montefiore, having written one already, does not quite have that. This book is restricted to the early years of the man who became the architect of the Great Terror in the late 1930s. Many of the big questions about Stalin and his regime are therefore set aside, but there is plenty to make up for this absence.

Mr Montefiore has a thesis. For him—and he is surely correct in this—the Gulag and the mass deaths in 1937-38 were a pivotal point in the history of the 20th century. His intuition is that the politics of Stalin did not appear on the stage unheralded. To prove his point, he has delved into the boyhood and early manhood of the Great Terrorist, hoping to show that he was dangerously unhinged and deeply misanthropic throughout his life.

The author cannot be faulted for industry. With help from Russians and Georgians, he has dug up a pile of fresh information. Stalin did not say much about his life before the October 1917 revolution. Occasionally, he told stories to his dinner guests, and usually he lied or dissembled in the telling. With good reason. At school he was notorious for his nasty little tricks in fights with his friends. At the Orthodox seminary where he trained to become a priest, he was often fighting again, usually unprovoked. In his Marxist faction he annoyed everyone with his endless intrigues. In prison he organised the killing of another inmate. In Siberian exile he seduced an under-age girl and had to promise the police he would marry her when she came of age (he did not, of course).

Stalin was especially averse to publicising one of his greatest escapades, even though it had been carried out on behalf of the communists. In 1907 he organised an armed robbery on two coaches carrying treasure to the state bank in central Tbilisi. It was one of the most audacious thefts in Europe at the time, widely reported in newspapers around the world, and Stalin proudly delivered his ill-gotten gains to Lenin. But Marxists in general disapproved of such robberies, as they brought their cause into disrepute. Stalin lay low.

Mr Montefiore argues persuasively that Stalin was already identifiable as a monstrous personality before the fall of the Romanov monarchy. At the same time he seeks to prove the entire communist movement guilty by association. He comes close to saying it was no accident—one of Uncle Joe's favourite phrases—that Stalin should assume supreme power after Lenin's death in 1924.

The account would have been the better for more nuances. It seems harsh to imply that most communists were psychological misfits long before they seized power. On the other hand, it is undeniable that several communist leaders in the Soviet Union and elsewhere feasted on their chances to butcher their enemies. Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Mengistu Haile Mariam trod a path marked out by Lenin and Stalin.

This is an attractive book, despite the themes of dictatorship and terror. Mr Montefiore recognises that even so terrible a man as Stalin had a side to his personality that was not to his discredit. He appreciated literature. He liked to crack jokes, albeit at someone else's expense. He was a good singer. And he had a laudable wish to improve himself educationally. What a complex monster.

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Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

Excellent reading, keep them coming and thanks!

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American by birth, TEXAN by the grace of GOD!

The cruellest years

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The Fall of Mussolini
By Philip Morgan.
Oxford University Press; 263 pages; $29.95 and £16.99

ERNEST RENAN, a 19th-century French philosopher, once famously observed that national identity requires a collective work of amnesia. In “The Fall of Mussolini”, Philip Morgan suggests that the Italians have more reasons than most to want to forget their modern history, especially the dog days of fascism. He provides a panoramic account of social and emotional life in 1940s Italy, with a stress on trauma, dislocation and brutishness.
Roger ViolletIl Duce rescued by the Führer in 1943

By the end of the war mass political support for fascism had haemorrhaged. Diehards remained and some “ultras” longed for the apocalypse, or at least for taking the fight against the Allies to a redoubt in the Alps, there to die in a final courageous shoot-out. Many more experienced exhaustion, rage and despair. The once bombastic orator had himself lapsed into silence; in fact Benito Mussolini made only four public speeches during the entire course of the war.

Gaffes are rare in Mr Morgan's sober and balanced account, although a few slip through, such as the claim that myths (flat earth included, presumably) always have some basis in reality. In fact, much of the book is devoted to debunking Italian legend. Most of the people never became out-and-out partisans, but in large areas of the country there was ferocious strife, even tantamount to civil war. After Italy's armistice with the Allies in 1943, the invading German army was widely hated and sometimes severely undermined by opponents, communist or otherwise, although a number of fascist sympathisers bitterly complained about their country's disgraceful “betrayal” of the Führer.

Mr Morgan describes the Nazis' appalling crimes during their occupation of the peninsula and retreat north, but he is careful to present his history of Italian collusion, resistance and negotiation in a dozen shades of grey. Whether in the cities or the countryside, opinions and circumstances varied wildly. Desperate citizens, hunting food or patronage as the regime crumbled, often had to walk a dangerous path.

For many post-war families retrospection meant, at best, raw feeling and rancorous dispute, at worst, intolerable exposure to guilt. The author speculates as to whether there could have been an Italian version of the Nuremberg trials, and what difference it might have made. Instead, ad hoc settling of scores and summary executions of fascists were the order of the day after hostilities officially ended; the precise number who died in this way is disputed, but ran into thousands.

Many things set Mussolini apart from Hitler, not least the fact that he enjoyed a second coming. His first exit was in July 1943: a palace coup saw him arrested with surprisingly little fuss and spirited away in an ambulance. Even his closest associates believed that was the end of him. In fact, thanks to Hitler, he was brought back, but this time as a puppet.
The final curtain came in April 1945. He tried to slip the country but was hauled back by a partisan band. He, his mistress, Clara Petacci, and a couple of associates were executed before being left to swing together, upside down, in a Milan square for the edification of the crowd. With commendable attention to detail, Mr Morgan points out how Petacci's skirt had been carefully secured to her body to avoid any semblance of impropriety.

__________________
Everly Brothers - What I Have To Do Is Dream
"Never wrestle with pigs, you both end up getting dirty and the pig likes it."

Yes Miguel, excellent updates!!

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Thanks Za, pinned.

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"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." Socrates

Not quite WW2, but on it's immediate aftermath.

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The unruly end of empire

Jul 19th 2007 From The Economist print edition

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan.
By Yasmin Khan.
Yale University Press; 288 pages; £19.99. To be published in America by Yale in September


An epic tragedy brought about by hubris, confused thinking and lack of planning


SIXTY years ago this August one of the greatest and most violent upheavals of the 20th century took place on the Indian subcontinent. It was an event whose consequences were entirely unexpected and whose meaning was never fully spelled out or understood either by the politicians who took the decision or the millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs who were to become its victims. In 1947, faced with irreconcilable differences over the demand for a separate state for India's Muslims, Britain decided, with the consent of a majority of India's political leaders, to partition the country and give each bit its independence. Tragedy followed.

The break-up of Britain's Indian empire involved the movement of some 12m people, uprooted, ordered out, or fleeing their homes and seeking safety. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, thousands of children disappeared, thousands of women were raped or abducted, forced conversions were commonplace. The violence polarised communities on the subcontinent as never before. The pogroms and killings were organised by gangs, vigilantes and militias across northern, western and eastern India. They were often backed by local leaders, politicians from Congress and the Muslim League, maharajahs and princes, and helped by willing or frightened civil servants.


Yasmin Khan, a British historian, has written a riveting book on this terrible story. It is unusual for two reasons. It is composed with flair, quite unlike the dense, academic plodding that modern Indian history usually delivers. Second, it turns the spotlight away from the self-posturing in the British viceroy's palace and the well-documented political wrangling between Congress and the Muslim League leaders. Instead, it focuses on a broader canvas that leads the reader through the confusion, the uncertainties, the fear and eventually the horror faced by those who were soon to become citizens of the two new states, India and Pakistan.

Today the upheaval on both sides of the partition line would be described as ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. It left two traumatised, injured nations—suspicious and fearful of one another even to this day—where once there had been one country of loosely interwoven peoples. Pakistan's present military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, himself a child of partition, calls India “the arch-enemy”. Such thinking has become instilled on both sides—an outcome unthinkable to all those involved in the independence movement.

The decision to divide India on religious lines was taken with regret but little foreboding and carried out with outrageous haste and unconcern by the British government and its viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten. Asked by a journalist if he foresaw any mass transfer of population, Mountbatten said, “Personally I don't see it...Some measure of transfer will come about in a natural way...perhaps governments will transfer populations.”

No preparation or consideration was given to the central issues of citizenship, security and property rights in the division of the country. On the other hand, India's civil servants, the babus of empire, were busy itemising every fixture in their offices down to ink pots and paperweights that were to be divided between Pakistan and the new India. Lack of planning, hubris, confused thinking and a complete void as to the consequences were the fatal flaws in the partition plan, writes Ms Khan.