Ode to War

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •
Jacques Pauwels

The Great War: The first truly industrial war. Observe this image closely.

 
Around the turn of the [20th] century, it had become apparent that the aristocratic-bourgeois elite had achieved considerable success with its anti-democratic strategy. The symptoms of this success were visible everywhere: plenty of “little” people, particularly peasants and members of the lower-middle class, had embraced nationalism, anti-Semitism, militarism, and imperialism, and voted not for the socialists, but for conservative parties, such as Germany’s Catholic Zentrum. In any event, in most countries, the franchise was still a privilege of the “better” classes, and an enormous amount of state power remained concentrated in unelected institutions such as the parliaments’ upper chambers, the bureaucracy, and the army, institutions in which the elite had solidly retrenched itself. The church still enjoyed a lot of influence, mostly among the peasants in the countryside, and worked hard to regain lost loyalty in the camp of the working class, which, under socialist influence, had abandoned Christianity en masse during the 19th century.
 
The Catholic counter-offensive in this respect culminated in the 1891 proclamation of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism as a “plague” and ordered the creation of Christian political parties and trade unions. During the “severe pontificate” of Leo XIII, the elite could also increasingly count on the church to “glorify the throne, the sword, the flag, and the established social order” and, conversely, to condemn socialism and (non-Christian) trade union activism. Nevertheless, the spectre of revolution – not only social, but also national revolution – continued to haunt Europe. Agitation and tension also affected distant parts of the world such as South America and China. The elite feared not only the possibility of a sudden and violent revolution, but also the prospect of a gradual and pacific evolution towards democracy, loathed as the rule of the presumably ignorant and vicious populace.
 
During the “severe pontificate” of Leo XIII, the elite could also increasingly count on the church to “glorify the throne, the sword, the flag, and the established social order” and, conversely, to condemn socialism and (non-Christian) trade union activism. Nevertheless, the spectre of revolution – not only social, but also national revolution – continued to haunt Europe.
Democracy was indeed something for which both the haute bourgeoisie and the nobility, from the most powerful monarch to the lowliest village squire, had nothing but contempt. The reason for this should be obvious: democracy, power exercised by and for the people, spelled the end of a system in which power was exercised by, and indeed for, a small part of the people, namely the tiny demographic minority that the combination of nobility and upper-middle class happened to be. Genuine democracy, that is, not only the political but also the social-economic emancipation of the lower orders, was not in the interest of the elite. Emperor William II publicly denounced democracy, equating it with anarchy. But at the time democracy was also a dirty word in Great Britain, because it stood for the power of the popular masses and not the supposedly normal, natural, or “God-given” power of the “better” classes, that is the propertied classes - or as they used to say in French, the power of the gens de rien, the “people of nothing,” instead of the gens de bien, the “people of substance.”

British tank in a ditch. Their entry into the battlefront was less than spectacular.

Early tanks were feared by the troops, but countermeasures were soon fielded.


 
If the masses came to power via elections, that too would constitute a catastrophe from the perspective of the elite. It was firmly believed that in this case, the scenario of the Paris Commune would repeat itself, but on a much larger scale, with enormous effusions of blood and, as outcome, nothing less than the end of civilization, or at least of aristocratic-bourgeois civilization, and the birth of a monster: a socialist or, as they already said at the time, a “communist” society.
 
The fear of the disagreeable consequences of the process of democratisation and of the apparently irresistible rise of the masses that was linked to it loomed even worse when one considered the problem within a worldwide instead of merely national or even European context. Did democratisation not similarly threaten to produce an equally irresistible rise of the masses of coloured folks in the colonies, to bloody “Communes” over there, and ultimately to the hegemony of the white man giving way, not only in the colonies but all over the world, to the rule of the inferior brown, black, and yellow masses?
 
"The ancient French race and a new social group, formed by a heterogeneous, motley crew, including outcasts of the old race as well as recent newcomers, not yet assimilated and…inassimilable, the extraordinary coalition of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, socialists, and aliens [métèques]."
 
 
One can easily understand that this vulgar way of thinking managed to become “the dominant world-view of Europe’s ruling and governing.”  Concepts such as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” fit marvelously into the liberal theory that preached that competition separates the wheat from the chaff, so that the victors in the social and economic competition, that is, the prosperous businessmen and the elite in general, are manifestly the best and the fittest and thus merit being the “victors.” And was it not evident that, in a race with countless competitors, there could only be a few winners? Consequently, the wealth and the power of a small number (the elite), as well as the poverty and powerlessness of the great number (the masses) were deserved and justified. The former did not have to be ashamed, and the latter did not have the right to complain, but had to shut up. The inequality of individuals and groups of people, such as classes, was the natural state of things (or, for the believers, the God-given and therefore immutable order of things). Any attempt to change that order, as the socialists and the nationalist champions of ethnic minorities proposed to do, was not only doomed to fail, but was in fact a senseless and even criminal undertaking.
 
Social Darwinism was equally useful for the purpose of affirming and justifying the power of the white man in the colonies. All-too-easy conquests in Africa, the American “Wild West,” and elsewhere convinced the Europeans and Americans that their own white “race,” then still generally known as “Aryan,” though numerically insignificant in number, was qualitatively far superior to the huge masses of brown, black, and yellow folks. But a hierarchy likewise prevailed within the “Aryan” family, even if it was not entirely clear who occupied its summit. The “Anglo-Saxons” was the answer given to that question in London, but in Berlin they were convinced that on top were the Teutons, a “race” to which belonged not only the Germans, but also other “Germanic” tribes such as the “Anglo-Saxons,” the Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the Flemish denizens of Belgium. In Paris and Rome, it was firmly believed that superiority had been bestowed on the French, Italians, and other “Latin” nations by virtue of their imperial Roman pedigree. In the United States, finally, the palm was handed not just to the presumably superior “Anglo-Saxons,” but to “Nordic” people in general, preferably those embracing a Protestant version of Christianity. The anthropological nec plus ultra there would long remain the “WASP,” that is, the American who was not only white, but also Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Italians and other folks with slightly darker skin, people of the so-called “Mediterranean” type, generally shorter of stature, dark-haired, and Catholic, and of course the “Celtic” Irish, also Catholics, were perceived to inhabit a no-man’s-land that separated the “Nordic” wheat from the chaff of blacks and Indians or “redskins.” For the latter, a special term – with a Nietzschean ring to it – would be coined, namely “under-men,” by the American “scientic racist” Lothrop Stoddard. He first used this term in a book published in 1920 entitled The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. This opus was immediately translated into German and impressed and inspired Hitler, who co-opted the term in its infamous German version, Untermensch.
 
From a Social Darwinist perspective, all the members of the superior “Aryan” family had ample reason to be satisfied and happy. In their community, social or economic problems could not exist, and if somehow they did appear, it was the fault of members of inferior “races” who, like a kind of dangerous germ, had penetrated the healthy body of the “Aryan” community to contaminate it and make it sick. Revolutionary socialism was such a disease, a potentially deadly disease, and the germs that had engendered it were the Jews who had infiltrated the “Aryan” community. It was taken as given that the Jews, like all other “inferiors”, were envious of the superior “Aryans” and dreamed of bringing them down from their lofty pedestal, using socialism as an instrument to achieve that evil objective. Thus we can understand why anti-Semitism was widespread at the time in conservative, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and counter-revolutionary circles.

 

Henry Ford being decorated by the Nazis, an honor he proudly accepted. (Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday, 30 July 1938.)


Explaining social problems by pointing the finger at foreigners, not necessarily but preferably the Jews – in other words, making the Jew a scapegoat – already had a long tradition. Luther had blamed the Jews for the peasant revolts, and according to theorists of counter-revolutionary conservatism such as de Maistre, de Bonald, and Burke, it was the Jews – and the Freemasons – who had unleashed the French Revolution. Later, the Jews would similarly be accused of planning the Russian Revolution by people like Oswald Spengler, a German historian and philosopher who today no longer enjoys a good reputation, but also by personalities that many continue to admire, for example, the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and the most famous of all British statesmen, Winston Churchill.
 

 

Indian troops (Sikhs), in the service of the British crown, marching in Paris' grand boulevards. Many people thought they looked awfully smart, and their battlefield deeds proved their military mettle.


The Social Darwinists believed that outside of Europe too, inferior peoples, green with jealousy, would try in one way or another to put an end to the legitimate worldwide hegemony of the “Aryans.” For example, in Africa and the United States, or at least in the Southern states, blacks – who were only recently slaves – were presumed to always be looking for opportunities to rape white women, in the hope that they would thus pollute and ultimately destroy the “Aryan race.” (In contemporary Europe, still extremely repressed on the sexual level, it was the Jews who were suspected of lusting after “Aryan” females.) Yet another menace lurked in the shape of the immense human masses of Chinese, simultaneously loathed and feared by whites as the “yellow peril.”  (The less numerous Japanese did not yet inspire such fear.) And the Chinese nationalists’ Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 in Beijing was ruthlessly crushed by the combined armed forces of no less than eight imperialist powers, fraternally united for the occasion. In 1914, when these same powers rather unfraternally went to war against one another, the Germans, who had looked forward to a military contest among fellow “Aryans,” were shocked that the French mobilized Senegalese and Moroccan troops against them and that the British called up Indians to fight on their side. Noblesse oblige and, confronted with the menace of inferior peoples, the “Aryans,” no matter how divided they may have been among themselves, should maintain a common front, so the Germans believed. On the other hand, in the African theatre of operations, for example in East Africa, the Germans themselves did not hesitate to use black soldiers against the British and Belgian forces, which also consisted mostly of black recruits.



Victims of a gas attack.


What had gone wrong, and what could be done about it? To find answers to these questions, the European and American elites sat down at the feet of the great German philosopher of the end of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche has been described by Arno Mayer as "the chief minstrel of this battle [of the elite against all forms of equality],…[a man whose] thought was coherently and consistently antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antisocialist…He reviled his own age for permitting the masses to shackle the will to power of the ‘highest specimens’…[so that] herd animals made themselves masters."

With the Enlightenment and liberalism, Europeans had gone astray, explained Nietzsche. Liberty, equality, and progress for all had been an impossible and dangerous ideal in a healthy society. An elite of superior beings must dominate and the masses must be dominated. To allow the inferior masses to come to power was not merely a mistake, but a crime. And, according to Nietzsche, the criminals who incited the people and fomented revolutions were the Jews, whom he called the “spiteful people par excellence.”
 

Nietsche: Preaching a form of uber individualism and social darwinism, his philosophy fit perfectly the visions of exclusivity entertained by the aristocrats in the capitalist and ancien regime precincts.


The elite can and must exercise power, said Nietzsche, and could find inspiration for that in the brilliant example of Ancient Greece, where a superior social layer of capable, wise, and courageous people ruled with an iron fist over a crowd of hilotes, aliens, and slaves, the inferior oi polloi, “the multitude.”
 

But Great Britain also boasted a tradition of glorification of war. In The Crown of Wild Olive, published in 1866, the great Victorian author John Ruskin, who remained very popular and influential until 1914, lauded war as follows:

In the British monthly The Nineteenth Century and After, there appeared in 1911 an article entitled “God’s Test by War,” written by a certain H. F. Wyatt. “The biological law of competition,” one could read there, “still rules the biological destiny of nations as of individual men.” And to the question whether a country like Britain could still play a role in the competition, the answer was: “How shall we know? By the test. What test? That which God has given for the trial of peoples – the test of war.”
An almost identical tribute to war was featured in the catalogue of the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900, more specifically in a comment about the military section:

"War [is] ‘natural to humanity…a school of the highest qualities of man…Peace fructifies the arts, trade, and industry, [but] also develops those states of mind called selfishness, pessimism, nihilism, egoism’…[war can] restore the lofty virtues that seem to be fading, raise their spirit, and give them new heart."

“Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men,” complained the Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad in 1905, “and reigned with less disputed sway in their minds.” It was not the “little” people, however, but the elite who excitedly guzzled the soup of Nietzschean ideology and pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism. “The cult of war was an elite, not a plebeian, affair,” insists Arno Mayer, “[because] there was no spontaneous clamor for war among the presumably aggressive and bloodthirsty masses.” And he added:

 
Darwinian and Nietzschean thought…became immensely meaningful and valuable to the elites engaged in reaffirming their dominance…Indeed, they became a central component not only of the Weltanschauung but also of the persuasive belief system of the ruling and governing classes.
 
The Belgian historian Sophie de Schaepdrijver also recognizes that Nietzschean belligerence “had not only infected Germany, [but] the Belle Époque elites of all of Europe.” The young Winston Churchill was typical of the British elite. He was “really fascinated by war” which he considered “the normal occupation of man…war – with gardening”! In 1914, when the Great War broke out, Churchill would be ecstatic and declared that war was “glorious and delicious.” In any event, it was not the working class and the rest of the lower orders, supposedly the classes dangereuses, but the openly belligerent ruling elite that revealed itself to be “Europe’s most formidable classe dangereuse,” as Arno Mayer has put it.
 

 

"Over the top"—Perhaps the most dangerous moment in trench warfare.

According to the German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, militarism and war were necessary as antidotes to “the propagation of Marxism and political radicalism among the popular masses.” He viewed Mars as the perfect ally against Marx! The European (and American) elite, which felt increasingly threatened by the rise of the labour movement and of socialism, believed that it could use war as a kind of life vest that would allow it to survive the democratic deluge. In this sense, it is true that war was “a profoundly conservative activity,” directed “against the Idea of Progress,” as the American historian (and World War II veteran) Paul Fussell has written.

 
As far as the elite was concerned, war could and would be a cure for the great ailment that affected not only the socialists, but the workers and the lower orders in general. With their demands for higher wages and other benefits, the labouring masses had presumably revealed themselves overly materialistic, egoistic, even hedonistic. War, inevitably accompanied by privations and hardship, would purge them of this materialism and infuse them with asceticism. War would teach the socialists and workers in general to be satisfied with less and to accept their lot in life instead of making all sorts of extravagant demands. Military service and war were also considered – for example by the many French army commanders who had perused the book by Le Bon – as a means to transform the popular crowd (foule), supposedly undisciplined and therefore untrustworthy and dangerous, into disciplined, malleable, and servile “troops” (troupe).
 
“had caused many to long for a more heroic existence…The elites of the Belle Époque in all of Europe experienced an urge for ruthless action of any kind, for a merciless battle that would put an end to this boring bourgeois existence full of conventions and compromises.”
 
This viewpoint was shared by the great German general and field marshal (as well as count) Helmuth von Moltke, for thirty years the chief of staff of the Prussian army, known as “Moltke the Elder” to avoid confusion with his nephew Helmuth von Moltke, “Moltke the Younger,” who was to be commander in chief of the German Army in 1914. In 1880, Moltke senior wrote the following in a letter:
 
Perpetual peace is a dream – and not even a beautiful dream – and war is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe. In war, man’s noblest virtues come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop at giving up life itself. Without war, the world would be swamped in materialism.
 
War, it was said, not only amounted to an edifying spiritual experience but was also a kind of sport and therefore quite enjoyable. In a book published in 1903, based on his experiences during colonial wars, entitled Modern Warfare, or How Our Soldiers Fight, Brigade General Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg wrote the following:
 
"An army…tries to work together in a battle…in much the same way as a football team plays together in a match…The army fights for the good of its country as the team plays for the honour of the school…Exceptionally gallant charges and heroic defences correspond to brilliant runs and fine tackling."
 
Perhaps it was these lines that inspired a British officer, Wilfred Nevill, of the Eight East Surrey Regiment, on July 1, 1916, to give the signal for attack by kicking a football towards the German lines. The Daily Mail would celebrate this exploit with this poem:
 
On through the hail of slaughter,
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them,
True to the the land that bore them,
The Surreys played the game .
 
War, then, was supposedly good for everyone, and therefore desirable. War was expected to function as a catharsis: it would cause a wind of fresh air to blow through the musty old dwelling that Europe had become. Of war, one expected “deliverance from vulgarity, constraint, and convention.” War was associated with “liberation and freedom.” It could not come too soon. “How I long for the Great War,” wrote the English conservative Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, “it will sweep Europe like a broom.” The German writers known as pre-Expressionists similarly imagined that war would bring deliverance from the prison of a sick society and a sad and boring era. One of them, Georg Heym, openly longed for the occurrence of some thrilling event that would put an end to “this idle, greasy, and sticky peace.” The year 1914 would finally bring the hoped-for relief from this taedium vitae, associated with all sorts of illusions about war.
 
The association of war with liberation also appeared in the work of an Italian intellectual, Giovanni Gentile, who would later describe himself as “the philosopher of [Italian] fascism.” He glorified war as “the suffering through which the human soul is purified and responds to the call of its destiny.” Other transalpine admirers of war and violence were the painters and other members of a cultural movement that became known as Futurism. This movement was supposedly “avant-garde,” but it was definitely not progressive in the political or social sense of the term. Arno Mayer has described the Futurists as “allied with conservative forces,” who distanced themselves from socialists and workers, the political vanguard of political progress. Instead, they trusted in extreme Italian nationalism, imperialism, and war to clear the ground for the machine age and culture, regardless of the human, social, and political cost. Inspired by Nietzsche…the Futurists denied equality, opposed the leveling of society, and believed in an aristocracy of the spirit and the arts.”

WWI: French machine gun nest.


One might think that Mayer exaggerates somewhat, but in the Manifesto of the Futurists, published in 1909, the author, the famous writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, shouted from the rooftops that,

we [the Futurists] want to glorify war, the world’s only hygiene, as well as militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.
 
In 1914, the wishes of the Nietzscheans were to be granted. Countless young men would go to war voluntarily, convinced that by “undergoing [their] baptism [of war]” they would achieve “manhood,” as a German soldier, a member of the Danish minority in the region of Schleswig-Holstein, put it in 1914. One of his comrades, another German of Danish origin, confided to his journal in typically Nietzschean terms that he went to war “to strengthen [his] character, to strengthen it in power and will, in habits, custom and earnestness.”

A major advantage that war was expected to bring was undoubtedly the fact that in wartime the rules of the game of democracy – and of the allegedly inefficient parliamentary system that was associated with it – were deemed to be useless, and would therefore have to be abandoned in favour of the authoritarian power relations and strict discipline featured in armies. Was it not evident that in wartime, commanders had to give orders and subordinates had to obey unconditionally? Of discussion and of input from below, of criticism, in other words, of democracy of any kind, there could no longer be any question. And it went without saying that the commanders would be the traditional, natural or God-appointed leaders of society, in other words, the existing elite – the aristoi, to use Nietzschean terminology – held to have emerged “organically”.
 
For the elite, war would also be an occasion to realize its own supposedly innate potential for leadership, to demonstrate excellence as political and military leaders, and to display heroism. It was hoped that the authoritarianism and discipline associated with war would similary transform the undisciplined, restless, and dangerous masses of workers and other proletarians into a multitude of servile and agreeable underlings. War would function as the “school of the nation” in general, but above all it would restore tranquillity and discipline among the lower orders. The proletarians needed to be cured of their democratic and revolutionary illness, caused by “judeo-socialist” propaganda and intrigue according to elitist types such as the infamous German nationalist Heinrich Class, and for this illness war happened to be the ultimate remedy. War was to function as a “wake-up call” for “all the good elements of the people” and would thus inaugurate a national renaissance.
The elite, then, viewed war as an instrument for the control of the popular masses. This is precisely what was implied in Churchill’s aforementioned remarks comparing war to gardening. In both cases, the aim was to control, to tame. Gardening was about the control of luxuriant plants, the taming of nature. War was about the control of society, about the taming of people in general and of the undisciplined, unruly – and dangerous – working class in particular.
 
In the case of gardening, one must sometimes be prepared to prune, and to prune deeply, thus improving quality at the expense of quantity. The Nietzschean elite, which also worshipped older, but still influential intellectual idols such as Malthus, was convinced that waging war would involve an analogous kind of pruning. The inevitably high losses war causes among the rank and file constituted not only an inevitable and even necessary Malthusian “positive check” on the population, but could also be justified as a quantitative cut that improved the quality. The popular masses were simply too plentiful. It was a crowd that, for the good of society as a whole, needed to be culled from time to time. Was it not a fact that culling made it possible to improve the quality of a breed of cows, deer, etc.? It was not a coincidence that during the Great War, hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers, consisting overwhelmingly of peasants and workers, would be sent headlong into certain death by their own generals. Virtually without exception, the latter were members of the Nietzschean and Social Darwinist pre-war elite, steeped in bellicism and contempt of death.

Contempt of death means not fearing death, and indeed, the elite did not fear the death of proletarians they loathed, over whom they exercised total power, and whose lives they would waste so lightheartedly during the Great War, as the German historian Hermann Glaser has observed. With respect to this culling of their ranks, certain proletarians were in fact convinced that these seemingly senseless massacres reflected a desire on the part of their generals to reduce the ranks of the workers and thus to make the fearsome masses less “massive” and less frightful. During one of the many strikes Paris witnessed in June 1919, a striker, reflecting on the Great War, declared that,

This war was wanted by the bourgeoisie, the industrial capitalists, and the leaders of all the countries [involved in the war]. They observed the swelling of the ranks of the proletarian organisations and they feared for their coffers. And so they found a solution: eliminating workers by means of war.
 
The elite expected the war not only to function as a cure for the distemper of the masses, associated with socialism, but also to give birth to a new form of solidarity, a non-socialist and even anti-socialist solidarity. War was supposed to spawn a “war socialism,” that is, a spiritual instead of materialist socialism, a national instead of an international socialism, a German, French, or British socialism instead of a Marxist and therefore “Jewish” socialism. Mars, the god of war, was expected to become the patron saint of a new kind of society, a society without class antagonisms. It was in this sense that – even if it ended in defeat –war would be “great and wonderful,” as the renowned German sociologist Max Weber believed. His conviction was shared by the writer Thomas Mann who, in a famous book, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, published in 1918, would sing the praises of what he called the “warrior ideology.” This was the conservative concept of a new community, a product of the war, different as day and night from socialist and liberal societal notions. War was expected to be the instrument that would make it possible to integrate the masses into the existing society, and thus to put an end to the social problems and the class struggle.
 
War was supposed to unite the entire people and integrate all classes into the established order, to the advantage of the elite. Conversely, war would divide the “proletarians of all countries”, who had been uniting under the auspices of socialism to the disadvantage of the elite. In the struggle against socialist internationalism, war was considered to be the ultimate weapon, the most effective instrument in the strategy of “divide and conquer.”

WW I, The Great Class War 1914-1918, published by James Lorimer in Toronto in 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Jacques R. Pauwels is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti,  Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Pauwels has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Waterloo. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War.

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THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD 1942-1943: HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND IMPORTANCE

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jacques Pauwels

1942: After aerial bombardment has almost totally cleared their path into the city of Stalingrad, German troops make their way through the ruined suburbs. Almost every standing building in Stalingrad served as a firing point for Germans or Soviets, forcing house-to-house combat. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

A war against the Soviet Union was wanted by the industrialists, bankers, large landowners and other members of Germany’s upper class, the “elite” of the land. That was one of the reasons, and arguably the paramount reason, why they had enabled the coming to power of Hitler, a politician of whom it was widely known that he considered the destruction of the Soviet Union as the great task entrusted to him by providence. Hitler’s so-called “seizure of power”(Machtergreifung) was in reality a “transfer of power,” and this transfer was orchestrated, logically enough, by those who, behind the democratic façade of Weimer Germany, ensconced in the army, judiciary, state bureaucracy, diplomacy, and so forth, wielded power, namely the upper-class.

However, to win the great war planned by Hitler, Germany, a highly industrialized country but lacking colonies and therefore woefully short of strategic raw materials, had to win it fast, before the depletion of the stockpiles of imported rubber and above all petroleum that Germany could establish before the start of the conflict. These reserves, much of which consisted of imports from the US, could not be adequately replenished by synthetic fuel and rubber produced at home (on the basis of coal) and/or oil supplied by friendly or neutral countries such as Romania and – after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 – the Soviet Union. It is in this context that the Nazis developed the strategy of Blitzkrieg, “lightning warfare”: synchronized attacks by massive numbers of tanks, airplanes, and trucks (for transporting infantry), piercing the defensive lines behind which the bulk of the enemy’s forces were typically ensconced in the style of World War I, then encircling these forces, leaving them to face either annihilation or capitulation.

 
In 1939 and 1940, this strategy worked perfectly: Blitzkrieg produced Blitzsieg, “lightning victory,” against Poland, Holland, Belgium, and – spectacularly so – against France, supposedly a great military power. When, in the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany was poised to attack the Soviet Union, everyone–not only Hitler and his generals but also the army commanders in London and Washington – expected a similar scenario to unfold: the Red Army would be finished off by the Wehrmacht within a maximum of two months. Hitler and his1 generals despised the Soviet Union as a ‘giant with feet of clay”, whose army, presumably “decapitated” by Stalin’s purges during the thirties, was nothing more than “a joke,” as the Führer himself put it on one occasion. On the eve of the attack, Hitler felt supremely confident: he reportedly “fancied himself to be on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life.”

Soviet sharpshooter. Stalingrad, September 1942. (Photo by: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

 

Soviet morale boost: German prisoners parade in Moscow, 1944. Stalingrad and other great defeats ended up entrusting the Soviet Union with more than three million German prisoners, a colossal figure to care for in a nation practically destroyed, and lacking essentials even for its own population.

 

In the meantime, the Red Army had recuperated from the blows it had received initially, and on December 5, 1941, it launched a devastating counter-offensive in front of Moscow. The the Nazi forces were thrown back and had to adopt defensive positions. With great difficulty, they would manage to arrest the Red Army’s offensive and survive the winter of 1941-1942. In any event, on the evening of that fateful fifth of December, 1941, the generals of the Wehrmacht’s high command reported to Hitler that, on account of the failure of the Blitzkrieg strategy, Germany could no longer hope to win the war. The Battle of Moscow heralded the failure of the lightning-war strategy against the Soviet Union. From a Blitzsieg, a “lightning-like victory,” on the eastern front, in 1941, Nazi Germany’s political and military authorities had expected that it would have made a German defeat in the entire war impossible, and that would almost certainly have been the case. It is probably fair to say that if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany would today still be the hegemon of Europe, and possibly of the Middle East and North Africa as well. However, in front of Moscow, in December 1941, Nazi Germany suffered the defeat that made an overall German victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general. In other words, December 5, 1941, was the real turning point of the Second World War. It ought to be noted that at that point –a few days before Pearl Harbor – the United States was not yet involved in the war against Germany. In fact, the US only became involved in that war because of the Battle of Moscow.3

 
 
 
 
The forces available for a push toward the oil fields of the Caucasus were therefore extremely limited and, as it turned out, insufficient to achieve the offensive’s objective. Under those circumstances, it is quite remarkable that in 1942 the Germans managed to make it as far as they did. But when their offensive inevitably petered out, in September of that year, their weakly held lines were stretched along many hundreds of kilometres, presenting a perfect target for a Soviet counterattack. This is the context in which an entire German army was bottled up, and ultimately destroyed, in Stalingrad, in a titanic battle that started in the fall of 1942 and ended in early February 1943, precisely eighty years ago. After this sensational victory of the Red Army, the ineluctability of German defeat in World War II was obvious for all to see. It is for this reason– but also because of the long duration of the battle, the huge numbers of troops involved, and the unprecedented losses suffered by both sides – that most historians consider this battle, rather than the Battle of Moscow, as the turning point of the worldwide conflict of 1939-1945. It must be recognized that, from a strictly military point of view, the Battle of Moscow of September 1941 had already ensured that the bulk of the German armed forces would be tied down on the eastern front, with a length of approximately 4,000 kilometers, and that it was there that the Germans would have to use the bulk of what remained of their meager resources in petroleum and rubber.
 
This situation had eliminated the possibility of any new German military initiatives against the British and made it impossible to supply Rommel in North Africa with sufficient men, equipment, and fuel to prevent his defeat at El Alamein in the fall of 1942. However, it is obvious that the fiasco at Stalingrad made the lamentable military situation of the Reich infinitely worse and made it impossible to station a sufficient number of troops on the Atlantic coast of Europe to deal with an Anglo-American invasion that was certain to materialize sooner or later. In June 1944, at the time of the landings in Normandy, the Western Allies experienced considerable difficulties, even though they only confronted a small fraction of the Wehrmacht, while the once fearsome Luftwaffe was virtually absent from the skies over the beaches because of a debilitating shortage of fuel. Without the successes of the Red Army, first in front of Moscow and then around Stalingrad, the entire Wehrmacht would have been available to fight on the western front, and the Luftwaffe would have disposed of inexhaustible quantities of Caucasian petroleum. An Anglo-American landing in Normandy would have been “mission impossible.”5

 

Claus von Stauffenberg. Wanted to get rid of Hitler and sue for an "honorable peace" with the allies, but the plot failed.


In any event, the impact of the Battle of Stalingrad was enormous. In Germany, the public was henceforth painfully aware that their country was heading towards an ignominious defeat, and countless people who had previously supported the Nazi regime now turned against it, Many if not most of the military and civilian leaders who were involved in the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, for example, lionized today as heroes and martyrs of the German “anti-Nazi resistance,” such as Stauffenberg and Goerdeler, may have been brave individuals, but they had enthusiastically supported Hitler at the time of his triumphs, that is, before the defeat at Stalingrad.

If, after the Battle of Stalingrad, they wanted to get rid of Hitler, it was because they feared that he would drag them with him into ruin. Awareness of the significance of the German defeat on the banks of the Volga similarly demoralized the allies of Nazi Germany and caused them to start looking for ways to exit the war. As for the neutral countries, many of which had hitherto sympathized with Nazi Germany, mostly because their rulers shared Hitler’s anti-Sovietism, they became considerably more benevolent towards the members of the “anti-Hitler coalition,” and above all towards the “Anglo-Americans.” Franco, for example, pretended not to notice the allied airmen whose planes had been shot down over occupied countries and who, assisted by resistance fighters, crossed the Pyrenees from France into Spain to return that way to England.

In France and in other occupied countries, the leading political, military, but also economic collaborators, that is, bankers and industrialists, started to discreetly distance themselves from the Germans. Relying on the benevolent services of the Vatican and the Franco regime, they sought contact with the Americans and the British, from whom they received sympathy and assistance as both sides were eager to preserve the established capitalist social-economic order. (The French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz has focused on this little-known aspect of the war in a couple of her thoroughly researched and documented books.) Conversely, the news from Stalingrad boosted the morale of Germany’s enemies everywhere. After many long years of darkness, when it had seemed that Nazi Germany would dominate all of Europe forever, resistance fighters in France and elsewhere finally perceived the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. And their ranks were now increasingly reinforced by many who had been too lethargic before they received the happy tidings from Stalingrad. In France, in particular, the name of Stalingrad became a battle cry of the resistance. After the great victory of the Red Army on the banks of the Volga, the specter of an inevitable defeat haunted 6 Germany, while in the occupied countries everybody knew that the hour of liberation approached– slowly, perhaps, but surely.

Let us know consider the post-Stalingrad situation from the viewpoint of Uncle Sam and his British (junior) partner. There is no doubt about it: the prospect of Germany being defeated and of France and the rest of Europe being liberated by the Red Army caused alarm bells to ring in the halls of power in London and Washington. The Western Allies had been happy to remain on the sidelines, minimizing their losses and maximizing their military strength, while the Nazis and Soviets were locked in mortal combat on the Eastern Front. While the Red Army provided the cannon fodder needed to vanquish Germany, they would be able to intervene decisively, like a deus ex machina, whenever the Nazi enemy as well as the unloved Soviet ally would be exhausted. With Britain on its side as a junior partner, the USA would then be able to play the leading role in the camp of the victors and dictate the terms of the peace to the Soviets as well as the Germans. It is for this reason that, in 1942, Washington and London had refused to open a “second front” by landing troops in France. Instead, they had implemented a “southern” strategy by sending an army to North Africa in November 1942 to occupy the French colonies located there. Because of the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad, the situation had changed dramatically.

 

Despite the Hollywood hoopla, the D-Day landings had a far less noble purpose than what Anglo-American media, politicians, and historians would admit.



However, when the news of the Soviet triumph at Stalingrad became known and its implications started to sink in, which was in early 1943, it was too late to plan a landing in France for that same year, so things had to wait until the spring of 1944.

 
The landings in Normandy in June 1944 did not constitute the turning point of World War II. Militarily, Nazi Germany had already received fatal blows at the Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, and again, in the summer of 1943, at the Battle of Kursk. And while the landings officially purported to liberate France and the rest of Europe, their “latent,” that is, unspoken but real function was to prevent the Soviet Union from singlehandedly liberating Europe, possibly including Western Europe all the way to the English Channel– a prospect that was first raised by the Red Army’s victory on the banks of the Volga. Liberating France – or occupying it, much as the Germans had occupied the country, as General de Gaulle described the outcome of the Normandy landings on one occasion! – also purported to prevent the French resistance leaders, of whom the majority had great sympathy and admiration for the Soviets, as did the rank-and-file, from playing a major role in the reconstruction of their country.
 
Washington and London detested this “philosovietism,” which was actually shared at the time by the majority of the French population. But it was feared, above all, that these patriots might come to power and proceed to implement radical social-economic reforms, including the nationalization of corporations and banks that had collaborated with the Nazis. (Dire warnings to that effect were emanating regularly from the leading American spy based in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA.) To sabotage the radical projects of the Resistance, which were incompatible with the American plans for France and all of Europe, namely the introduction of a capitalism as unbridled as possible, Washington and London decided, after much hesitation, to rely on General Charles de Gaulle, a rare bird in the sense that he was a popular resistance leader who was conservative. The Americans considered him to be an annoying megalomanic, but eventually realized his usefulness and made it possible for him to come to power in liberated France. That strategy involved orchestrating a kind of triumphant entry into Paris for de Gaulle, featuring a rather theatrical stroll down the Champs Elysées, during which other, arguably equally or even more important resistance leaders were forced to follow behind him. Even so, working with de Gaulle 8 would prove to be far from easy for the Americans. It proved impossible, for example, to prevent him, once he had been anointed as head of the government, from adopting some radical reforms wanted by the resistance and by a majority of the French people. Without him, however, the Left might have come to power and many more far-reaching, quasi-revolutionary changes might have been introduced. And in that case, the Americans would not have been able to integrate France into the anti-Soviet alliance they were to set up in Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany and in the context of the Cold War. In fact, membership in this so-called alliance equated vassalage to Uncle Sam, and the alliance’s objective proved to be the same as that of operation Barbarossa, namely, the destruction of the Soviet Union.

As the Second World War came to an end, and for quite a few years afterward, most denizens of Western European countries victimized by Nazi Germany, but France in particular, were keenly aware that the libération of their homeland was above all due to the efforts and sacrifices of the Soviet Union, a fact that had become evident a the time of the Red Army’sglorious victory in the Battle of Stalingrad. It was a period of time when these same people, in stark contrast to the present situation, harboured enormous gratitude and goodwill vis-à-vis the Russians and other ethnic groups – Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Uzbeks, etc. – of the Soviet Union. The name given in June 1945 to one of the largest squares in Paris still recalls that distant and brief moment in time: Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, ‘Square of the Battle of Stalingrad.


(Sources are available on request) 9
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Resident historian Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, Big business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and Myths of Modern History.

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November 1918: Red Revolution in Strasbourg

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By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

In the context of the revolution that erupted in Germany as the country suffered defeat in November 1918, a revolutionary situation also arose in Strasbourg, capital of Alsace, a province that still belonged to the Reich at that time.

Inspired by the proclamation of a “free and socialist republic” in Berlin by Karl Liebknecht on the 9th of that month — and the proclamation, on November 8, of a Bavarian soviet republic (Räterepublik) in Munich, mutinous soldiers as well as civilians seeking radical political and social changes, mostly workers, established a Russian-style revolutionary council or “soviet” in the Alsatian capital and immediately introduced all sorts of radical democratic reforms, including abolition of censorship, wage increases, improved working conditions, the right to strike and to demonstrate, etc.

In addition, the revolutionaries declared that they wanted “nothing to do with the capitalist states” and desired to be neither German nor French but aspired to be able to live, thanks to the “triumph of the red flag,” in a “Republic of Alsace-Lorraine” (Republik Elsaß-Lothringen) that would be free, democratic and linguistically tolerant. A red flag fluttered from the lofty spire of the Alsatian capital, but the democratic project launched there resonated throughout the province: revolutionary movements simultaneously emerged in many other towns of the province, including Colmar, Mulhouse, Haguenau, Molsheim, Neuf-Brisach, Ribeauvillé, Saverne, and Sélestat. Red flags also appeared in the city of Metz, major city of the northern part of Alsace’s neighbouring province, Lorraine, likewise still part of the German Reich in 1918, though not for much longer.

In Strasbourg, the local bourgeoisie, overwhelmingly German-speaking, as well as the local social-democratic leaders, were horrified and decided that they preferred to be “French rather than red.” They appealed to the French army to “rush to Strasbourg as soon as possible” in order to put and end to “red rule” in the city. French troops entered Strasbourg a few days earlier than planned, namely on November 22, overthrew the soviet and cancelled all the democratic measures it had fathered. Strasbourg and the rest of Alsace (and the north of Lorraine) were unilaterally and unceremoniously annexed by France and subjected to a draconian process of “re-francisation”, including a prohibition of the use of the German and even Alsatian languages in education and in the public administration, the demotion of persons of insufficiently French origin to the status of second-class citizens, and the expulsion or ostracism of anyone suspected of disloyalty to France; the famous Doctor Albert Schweitzer was one of the victims of this sort of treatment. After their “liberation”, the Alsatians were less free than before and were no longer allowed to speak their own language, and many of them were (mis)treated as aliens in their own land.

Meeting of the Strasbourg soviet on November 15, 1918 (Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg 686107, CC BY 2.0, c/o Wikimedia Commons)

The case of Alsace illustrates the sad fact that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the Great War was not a “war for democracy” at all. Even the arguably most democratic of all belligerent powers, France, clearly did not fight for ideals such as democracy, justice, and the Wilsonian principles of self-determination; its victory represented the triumph of a fanatical and intolerant version of nationalism, a consolidation of authoritarian rule, and a setback for democracy.  

*

About the author
Jacques R. Pauwels is historian and political scientist, author of ‘The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War’ (James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002). His book is published in different languages: in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Together with personalities like Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Robert Weil, Michel Collon, Peter Franssen and many others… he signed “The International Appeal against US-War”.

Featured image: Proclamation of the republic in Strasbourg on November 10, 1918 (Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg 686071, c/o Wikimedia Commons)

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, Global Research, 2018
 

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The Allies Second Front in World War II: Why Were Canadian Troops Sacrificed at Dieppe?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jacques Pauwels

August 19, 1942, 80 Years Ago

Landing craft draw away from transport boat during raid on Dieppe.

Landing craft draw away from main gunboat during Operation Jubilee (Raid on Dieppe)

The tide of World War II turned in early December 1941, when a counter-offensive of the Red Army in front of Moscow signaled the failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy. That setback doomed Nazi Germany to lose a war it had to fight without the benefit of Caucasian oil and other resources it had hoped to gain through a speedy victory over the Soviet Union. The war was far from over, however, and for the time being the Red Army continued to do battle with its back to the wall, so to speak. Material help from the United States and Great Britain was forthcoming, but what the Soviets really needed from their allies was effective military assistance. And so Stalin asked Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe. An Anglo-American landing in France, Belgium, or Holland would have forced the Germans to withdraw troops from the Eastern Front, and would therefore have afforded the Soviets much-needed relief.

In Great Britain and in the USA, which had entered the war only recently, in December 1941, political and military leaders were divided with respect to the possibilities and the merits of a second front. A number of British and American army commanders – including the American chief of staff, George Marshall, as well as General Eisenhower – wanted to land troops in France as soon as possible. They enjoyed the support of President Roosevelt, at least initially. He had promised Churchill that the United States would give priority to the war against Germany, and would settle accounts with Japan later; this decision became known as the “Germany First” principle. Consequently, Roosevelt was eager to deal with Germany right away, and this task required opening a second front. In May 1942 Roosevelt promised the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Molotov, that the Americans would open a second front before the end of the year.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was an outspoken opponent of a second front. He may have feared, as some historians suggest, that a landing in France might lead to a duplication of the murderous warfare associated with the battlefields of northern France in the First World War. But it is more likely that Churchill liked the idea that Hitler and Stalin were administering a major bloodletting to each other on the Eastern Front, and that he believed that London and Washington would benefit from a stalemated war in the East. Since he already had nearly three years of war experience, Churchill had much influence on Roosevelt, a newcomer to the war in Europe. It is therefore understandable that the opinion of the British leader ultimately prevailed, and that plans for opening a second front in 1942 were quietly discarded. In any event, Roosevelt himself discovered that this course of action – or rather, inaction – opened up some attractive prospects.

For example, it allowed him, in spite of the “Germany First” principle, to quietly commit a high proportion of manpower and equipment to the war in the Pacific, which was very much “his” war, and where American interests were more directly at stake than in Europe. He and his military and political advisors also started to realize that defeating Germany would require huge sacrifices, which the American people would not be delighted to bring. Landing in France was tantamount to jumping into the ring for a face-off with a formidable German opponent, and, even if ultimately successful, that would be a bloody and costly affair. Was it not far wiser to stay safely on the sidelines, at least for the time being, and let the Soviets slug it out against the Nazis?

With the Red Army providing the cannon fodder needed to vanquish Germany, the Americans and their British allies would be able to minimize their own losses. Better still, they would be able to build up their strength in order to intervene decisively at the right moment, like a deus ex machina, when the Nazi enemy and the Soviet ally would both be exhausted. With Great Britain at its side, the USA would then be able to play the leading role in the camp of the victors, to act as supreme arbiter in the sharing of the spoils of the supposedly common victory, and to create a “new order” of its liking in Europe. In the spring and summer of 1942, with the Nazis and Soviets locked in a titanic battle, watched from a distance by the “Anglo-Saxon” tertius gaudens, it did indeed look as if such a scenario might come to pass. (Incidentally, the hope for a long, drawn-out conflict between Berlin and Moscow was reflected in numerous American newspaper articles and in the much-publicized remark already uttered by Senator Harry S. Truman on June 24, 1941, only two days after the start of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.”)

Of course, the Americans and the British could not reveal the true reasons why they did not wish to open a second front. Instead, they pretended that their combined forces were not yet strong enough for such an undertaking. It was said then – and it is still claimed now – that in 1942 the British and Americans were not yet ready for a major operation in France. Allegedly, the naval war against the German U-boats first had to be won in order to safeguard the required transatlantic troop transports. However, troops had been successfully ferried from North America to Great Britain for quite some time, and in the fall of that same year the Americans would experience no trouble whatsoever landing a sizable force in distant North Africa, on the same side of the admittedly dangerous Atlantic Ocean. (These landings, known as Operation Torch, involving the occupation of French colonies such as Morocco, did not force the Germans to transfer troops from the Eastern Front, did not provide any relief to the Soviets, and can therefore not be construed as the opening of a second front.)

In reality, it was already possible in the summer of 1942 to land a sizable force in France or elsewhere in Western Europe and open a second front. The British army had recuperated from the troubles of 1940, and large numbers of American and Canadian troops had joined them on the British Isles and were ready for action. Furthermore, it was not a secret that the Germans only had relatively few troops available to defend thousands of kilometres of Atlantic coast, and these troops also happened to be of considerably inferior quality compared to their forces on the Eastern Front. On the Atlantic coast, Hitler had about 60 divisions at his disposal, which were generally deemed to be second-rate, while no less than 260 German divisions did battle in the East. It is a fact, furthermore, that on the French coast in 1942 the German troops were not yet as strongly entrenched as they would be later, namely, at the time of the landings in Normandy in June 1944; the order to build the fortifications of the famous Atlantic Wall was only given by Hitler in August 1942, and the construction would drag on from the fall of 1942 until the spring of 1944.

Canadian infantrymen disembark from a landing craft in England during a training exercise before Operation Jubilee, the Raid on Dieppe, France, in August 1942 (MIKAN 3194482)

Stalin, who knew that the German defences in Western Europe were weak, continued to press London and Washington for a landing in France. Churchill also experienced considerable domestic pressure in favour of a second front, for example from members of his own cabinet, such as Richard Stafford Cripps, and particularly from the side of the trade unions, whose members were sympathetic to the plight of the Soviets. Thankfully, relief from this relentless pressure came suddenly to the British Prime Minister in the form of a tragedy that appeared to demonstrate conclusively that the Western Allies were not yet able to open a second front: on August 19, 1942, a contingent of Allied soldiers, sent on a mission from England to the French port of Dieppe, seemingly in an effort to open some sort of “second front,” were tragically routed there by the Germans.

The Germans were ready. Dieppe was a strong point in Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Of the total of 6,086 men who made it ashore, 3,623 – almost 60 percent – were either killed, wounded, or captured. The British Army and Navy suffered approximately 800 casualties, and the RAF lost 106 aircraft. The 50 American Rangers who participated in the raid had 3 casualties. But the bulk of the losses were suffered by Canadian troops, with nearly 5,000 men the bulk of the entire force; no less than 3,367 of them – 68 percent! – became casualties; about 900 were killed, nearly 600 were wounded, and the rest were taken prisoner. Of losses such as these, it is traditionally considered that they were “not in vain”; but unsurprisingly, the media and the public wanted to know what the objectives of this raid had been, and what it had achieved, especially in Canada. However, the political and military authorities only provided unconvincing explanations, though these duly found their way into the history books. For example, the raid was presented by Churchill as a “reconnaissance in force,” as a necessary test of the German coastal defences. But did one really have to sacrifice thousands of men to learn that the Germans were strongly entrenched in a seaport surrounded by high cliffs, in other words, in a natural fortress? In any event, crucial information such as the location of pillboxes, cannon, and machine gun positions could have been gleaned through aerial reconnaissance and through the services of local resistance fighters.

Fiasco: Bodies of Canadian soldiers lie among damaged landing craft and Churchill tanks of the Calgary Regiment after Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942 (MIKAN 3192368)

Talking about the Résistance, the raid was also purported to boost the morale of the French partisans and the French population in general; if so, it was unquestionably counterproductive. Indeed, the outcome of the operation, an ignominious withdrawal from a beach littered with abandoned equipment and corpses, and the sight of exhausted and dejected Canadian soldiers being marched off to a POW camp, was not likely to cheer up the French. If anything, the affair provided grist for the propaganda mill of the Germans, allowing them to ridicule the incompetence of the Allies, boast of their own military prowess, and thus dishearten the French while giving a lift to Germany’s own civilians, who were very much in need of some good news on account of the constant flow of bad tidings from the East.

Last but not least, Operation Jubilee was also claimed to have been an effort to provide some relief to the Soviets. It is obvious, however, that Dieppe was merely a pinprick, unlikely to make any difference whatsoever with respect to the fighting on the Eastern Front. It did not cause the Germans to transfer troops from the East to the West; on the contrary, after Dieppe the Germans could feel reasonably sure that in the near future no second front would be forthcoming, so that they actually felt free to transfer troops from the west to the East, where they were desperately needed. To the Red Army, then, Dieppe brought no relief.

Historians have mostly been happy to regurgitate the official rationalizations of Jubilee, and in some cases they have invented new ones. Just recently, for example, the Dieppe raid was proclaimed to have been planned also, if not primarily, for the purpose of stealing equipment and manuals associated with the Germans’ Enigma code machine, and possibly even all or parts of the machine itself. But would the Germans not immediately have changed their codes if the raid had achieved that objective? (The argument that the plan was to secretly steal the Enigma material, and that that the raiders would have blown up the installations prior to withdrawing from Dieppe, thus destroying evidence of the removal of Enigma equipment, is unconvincing, because it presupposes a high degree of naivety on the part of the Germans.)

After the June 1944 allied landings in Normandy, code-named Operation Overlord, an ostensibly convincing rationale for Operation Jubilee was concocted. The Dieppe Raid was now triumphantly revealed to have been a “general rehearsal” for the successful Normandy landings. Dieppe had supposedly been a test of the German defences in preparation for the big landing yet to come. Lord Mountbatten, the architect of Jubilee, who was – and continues to be – blamed by many for the disaster, thus claimed that “the Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe” and that “for every man who died in Dieppe, at least 10 more must have been spared in Normandy in 1944.” A myth was born: the tragedy of Jubilee had been the sine qua non for the triumph of Overlord.

A very important military lesson had allegedly been learned at Dieppe, namely, that the German coastal defences were particularly strong in and around harbours. It was for this reason, presumably, that the Normandy landings took place on the harbourless stretch of coastline north of Caen, with the Allies bringing along an artificial harbour, code-named Mulberry. But was it not self-evident that the Germans would be more strongly entrenched in seaports than in insignificant little beach resorts? Had it really been necessary to sacrifice thousands of men in order to learn that lesson? And one must also wonder whether information, obtained from a “test” of the German coastal defences in the summer of 1942, was still relevant in 1944, especially since it was mostly in 1943 that the formidable Atlantic Wall fortifications had been built. If Dieppe was a “general rehearsal,” why was the main event not staged until two years later? Is it not absurd to proclaim Jubilee as a rehearsal for an operation that had not even been conceived yet? Finally, the advantage of lessons learned at Dieppe, if any, were almost certainly offset by the fact that at Dieppe the Germans had also learned lessons, and possibly more useful lessons, about how the Allies were likely – and unlikely – to land troops. The idea that the tragedy of Jubilee was a precondition for the triumph of Overlord, then, is merely a useful myth.

Canadian troops march through the city as prisoners, not conquerors.

Even today, then, the Dieppe tragedy remains shrouded in disinformation and propaganda. But perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the truth about Dieppe by finding inspiration in an old philosophical conundrum: If one seeks to fail, and does, does one fail, or succeed? If a military success was sought at Dieppe, the raid was certainly a failure; but if a military failure was sought, the raid was a success. In the latter case, we should inquire about the real objective of the raid, or, to put it in functionalist terms, about its “latent,” or hidden, rather than its “manifest” function.

There are many indications that military failure was intended. First, the town of Dieppe happened to be, and was known to be, an eminently defensible site, and therefore necessarily one of the strongest German positions on the Atlantic coast of France. Anyone arriving there by ferry from England sees immediately that this port, surrounded by high and steep cliffs, bristling at the time with machine guns and cannon, must have been a deadly trap for the attackers. The Germans could not believe their eyes when they found themselves being attacked there. One of their war correspondents, who witnessed the inevitable slaughter, described the raid as “an operation that violated all the rules of military logic and strategy.” Other factors, such as poor planning, inadequate preparations, inferior equipment (such as tanks that could not negotiate the pebbles of Dieppe’s beach), make it seem more likely that the objective was military failure, rather than success.

On the other hand, the Dieppe operation, including its bloody failure, actually made sense if it was ordered for a “latent” non-military purpose. Military operations are frequently carried out to achieve a political objective, and that seems to have been the case at Dieppe in August 1942. The Western Allies’ political leaders in general, the British political leadership in particular, and Prime Minister Churchill, above all, found themselves under relentless pressure to open a second front, were unwilling to open such a front, but lacked a convincing justification for their inaction. The failure of what could be presented as an attempt to open a second front, or at least as a prelude to the opening of a second front, did provide such a justification. Seen in this light, the Dieppe tragedy was indeed a great success, even a double success. First, the operation could be, and was, presented as a selfless and heroic attempt to assist the Soviets. Second, the failure of the operation seemed to demonstrate only too clearly that the western Allies were indeed not yet ready to open a second front. If Jubilee was intended to silence the voices clamouring for the opening of a second front, it was indeed a great success. The Dieppe disaster silenced the popular demand for a second front, and allowed Churchill and Roosevelt to continue to sit on the fence as the Nazis and the Soviets slaughtered each other in the East.

The political motivation for Dieppe would explain why the lambs that were led to the slaughter were not American or British, but Canadian. Indeed, the Canadians constituted the perfect cannon fodder for this enterprise, because their political and military leaders did not belong to the exclusive club of the British-American top command who planned the operation, and who would obviously have been reluctant to sacrifice their own men. Our hypothesis likewise explains why the British were also involved, but in much smaller numbers, and why the Americans sent only a token force.

After the tragedy of Dieppe, even Stalin stopped begging for a second front. The Soviets would eventually get one, but only much later, in 1944, when Stalin was no longer asking for such a favour. At that point, however, the Americans and the British had urgent reasons of their own for landing on the coast of France. Indeed, after the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, when Soviet troops were relentlessly grinding their way towards Berlin, “it became imperative for American and English strategy,” as two American historians (Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble) have written, “to land troops in France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of [Soviet] hands.” When a second front was finally opened in Normandy in June 1944, it was not done to assist the Soviets, but to prevent the Soviets from winning the war on their own.

The Soviets finally got their second front when they no longer wanted or needed it. (This does not mean that did they did not welcome the landings in Normandy, or did not benefit from the belated opening of a second front; after all, the Germans remained an extremely tough opponent until the very end.) As for the Canadians, who had been sacrificed at Dieppe, they also got something, namely, heaps of praise from the men at the top of the military and political hierarchy. Churchill himself, for example, solemnly declared that Jubilee had been “the key to the success of the landings in Normandy” and “a Canadian contribution of the greatest significance to final victory.” The Canadians were showered with prestigious awards, including no less than three Victoria Crosses. The hyperbolic kudos and the unusually high number of VCs probably reflected a desire on the part of the authorities to atone for their decision to send so many men on a suicidal mission in order to achieve highly questionable political goals.

Jacques R. Pauwels  is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti,  Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Jacques Pauwels is The Greanville Post's resident historian.
Prof. Pauwels has taught European history at varous universities in Ontario, Canada, including the  University of Waterloo and the University of Guelph. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War,  all published byJames Lorimer in Toronto. His new (2022) book, Myths of Modern History,  is now also available stateside:  https://www.casematepublishers.com/myths-of-modern-history.html . For a recent review of three of his books by Inderjeet Parmar, professor of international politics at the City University of London, see Review: A Trilogy That Challenges the Core Self-Declared Virtues of Western Civilisation.
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May 1945: Nazi Germany Surrenders, but… on May 7, 8, or 9?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Jacques R. Pauwels

May, 1945. Russian "war tourists" in Berlin. "These were, indeed, the men of the armies which had fought and beaten two-thirds of Germany’s land forces on the Eastern Front while the magnificently equipped British and Americans had trouble enough dealing with the other third in Normandy, Italy, and along the Siegfried Line. They were stocky, hard-faced peasants and herdsmen from the Steppes. They looked inured to hardship,” Australian war correspondent Osmar White described the victors.

Victory Day, May 9, 2021, Moscow's Red Square.

In 1943, the Americans, British, and Soviets had agreed that there would be no separate negotiations with Nazi Germany with respect to its capitulation, and that the German surrender would have to be unconditional. In the early spring of 1945, Germany was as good as defeated and the Allies were getting ready to collectively receive its unconditional submission. But where would that capitulation ceremony take place – on the Eastern Front, or on the Western Front?

If only for reasons of prestige, the Western Allies preferred that Nazi Germany would acknowledge defeat somewhere on the Western Front. Secret talks with the Germans, which the British and Americans were already holding at that time (i.e. in March 1945) in neutral Switzerland in flagrant violation of inter-allied agreements, under the code-name Operation Sunrise, promised to be useful in that context. They could produce a German surrender in Italy, which had been the original objective of the talks but could also yield an agreement with respect to the coming general and supposedly unconditional German capitulation. Intriguing details, such as the venue of the ceremony, might possibly be determined in advance and without input from the Soviets. There actually existed many possibilities in this respect, because the Germans themselves kept approaching the Americans and the British in the hope of concluding a separate armistice with the Western powers or, if that would prove impossible, of steering as many Wehrmacht units as possible into American or British captivity by means of “local” surrenders, i.e. surrenders of larger or smaller units of the German army in restricted areas of the front.

Russian Federation army on May 9, 2021, commemorative units.

 

The Great War of 1914-1918 had ended with a clear and unequivocal armistice, namely in the form of an unconditional German surrender. The capitulation was signed in the headquarters of Marshal Foch in the village of Rethondes, near Compiègne, on November 11 shortly after 5 a.m., and the guns fell silent on that same morning at 11. The Second World War, on the other hand, was to grind to a halt, in Europe at least, amidst intrigue and confusion, so that even today there are many misconceptions regarding the time and place of the German capitulation. The Second World War was to end in the European theatre not with one, but with an entire string of German capitulations, with a veritable orgy of surrenders, and even after the signings it sometimes took quite some time before the hostilities were terminated.

It started in Italy on April 29, 1945, with the capitulation of the combined German armies in southwestern Europe to the Allied forces led by Alexander, the British field marshal. The ceremony took place in the town of Caserta, near Naples. Signatories on the German side included SS General Karl Wolff, who had conducted the negotiations with American secret agents in Switzerland about sensitive issues such as the neutralization of the kind of Italian anti-fascists for whom there was no room in the American-British post-war plans for their country. Stalin had found out about this “Operation Sunrise” and expressed misgivings about the arrangement that was being worked out between the Western Allies and the Germans in Italy, but in the end, he gave his blessing to this capitulation. The armistice was signed on April 29 but provided for a cease-fire only on May 2. This purported to allow sufficient time for American or British troops to hurry all the way to Trieste, where German troops were fighting off Tito’s Yugoslav partisans; the latter had good reason to believe that this city might become part of Yugoslavia after the war and undoubtedly had in mind the dictum that possession is ninety percent of the law. But the Americans and British wanted to prevent this scenario. A New Zealand unit reached Trieste “after a hectic dash up from Venice” on May 2 and helped to force the Germans in the city to surrender the next day, in the evening. A Kiwi chronicle of this event euphemistically relates that their men “arrived just in time to liberate the city together with units of Tito’s army,” but admitted that the objective had been to prevent the Yugoslav communists from seizing Trieste on their own and putting in place their own military administration, thus solidifying their claim to the region.

Many people in Great Britain firmly believe even today that the war against Germany ended with a German surrender in the headquarters of another British field marshal, namely Montgomery, on the Luneburg Heath in northern Germany. Yet this ceremony took place on May 4, 1945, that is, at least five days before the guns finally fell silent in Europe, and this capitulation applied only to German troops that had hitherto been battling Montgomery’s British Canadian 21st Army Group in the Netherlands and in Northwest Germany. Just to be on the safe side, the Canadians accepted the capitulation of all German troops in Holland the next day, May 5, during a ceremony in Wageningen, a town in the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland. To the British, it is of course important and gratifying to believe that the Germans had to beg for a cease-fire in the headquarters of their very own “Monty”; to the latter the prestige associated with the event provided some compensation for the fact that his reputation had suffered considerably from the fiasco of Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 attempt to cross the Rhine in the Dutch town of Arnhem, an undertaking of which he had been the godfather.

In the US and in Western Europe, the event on the Luneburg Heath is rightly viewed as a strictly local capitulation, even though it is recognized that it served as a kind of prelude to the definitive German capitulation and resulting ceasefire. As far as the Americans, French, Belgians, and others are concerned, this definitive German surrender took place in the headquarters of General Eisenhower, the supreme commander of all allied forces on the Western Front, in a modest school building in the city of Reims on May 7, 1945, in the early morning. But this armistice was to go into effect only on the next day, May 8, and only at 11:01 p.m. It is for this reason that even now, commemoration ceremonies in the United States and in Western Europe take place on May 8.

Russians sighteeing around the conquered city. Berlin—as expected—was a costly destination.

However, even the important event in Reims was not the final surrender ceremony. With the permission of Hitler’s successor, Admiral Dönitz, German spokesmen had come knocking on Eisenhower’s door to try once again to conclude an armistice only with the Western Allies or, failing that, to try to rescue more Wehrmacht units from the clutches of the Soviets by means of local surrenders on the Western Front. Eisenhower was personally unwilling to consent to further local surrenders, let alone a general German capitulation to the Western Allies only. But he appreciated the potential advantages that would accrue to the Western side if somehow the bulk of the Wehrmacht would end up in British-American rather than Soviet captivity. And he also realized that this was a unique opportunity to induce the desperate Germans to sign in his headquarters the general and unconditional capitulation in the form of a document that would conform to inter-Allied agreements; this detail would obviously do much to enhance the prestige of the United States.

In Reims, it thus came to a byzantine scenario. First, from Paris an obscure Soviet liaison officer, Major General Ivan Susloparov, was brought over to save the appearance of the required Allied collegiality. Second, while it was made clear to the Germans that there could be no question of a separate capitulation on the Western Front, a concession was made to them in the form of an agreement that the armistice would only go into effect after a delay of forty-five hours. This was done to accommodate the new German leaders’ desire to give as many Wehrmacht units as possible a last chance to surrender to the Americans or the British. This interval gave the Germans the opportunity to transfer troops from the East, where heavy fighting continued unabatedly, to the West, where after the signing rituals in Luneburg and then Reims hardly any shots were being fired anymore. The Germans, whose delegation was headed by General Jodl, signed the capitulation document at Eisenhower’s headquarters on May 7 at 2:41 a.m.; but the guns were to fall silent only on May 8 at 11:01 p.m. Local American commanders would cease to allow fleeing Germans to escape behind their lines only after the German capitulation went into effect. It can be argued, then, that the deal concluded in the Champagne city did not constitute a totally unconditional capitulation.

The document signed in Reims gave the Americans precisely what they wanted, namely, the prestige of a general German surrender on the Western Front in Eisenhower’s headquarters. The Germans also achieved the best they could hope for, since their dream of a capitulation to the Western Allies alone appeared to be out of the question: a “postponement of execution,” so to speak, of almost two days. During this time, the fighting continued virtually only on the Eastern Front, and countless German soldiers took advantage of this opportunity to disappear behind the British-American lines. However, the text of the surrender in Reims did not conform entirely to the wording of a general German capitulation agreed upon previously by the Americans and the British as well as the Soviets. It was also questionable whether the representative of the USSR, Susloparov, was really qualified to co-sign the document. Furthermore, it is understandable that the Soviets were far from pleased that the Germans were afforded the possibility to continue to battle the Red Army for almost two more days while on the Western Front the fighting had virtually come to an end. The impression was thus created that what had been signed in Reims was in fact a German surrender on the Western Front only, an arrangement that violated the inter-Allied agreements. To clear the air, it was decided to organize an ultimate capitulation ceremony, so that the German surrender in Reims retroactively revealed itself as a sort of prelude to the final surrender and/or as a purely military surrender, even though the Americans and the Western Europeans would continue to commemorate it as the true end to the war in Europe.

It was in Berlin, in the headquarters of Marshal Zhukov, that the final and general, political as well as military, German capitulation was signed on May 8, 1945, or put differently, that the German capitulation of the day before in Reims was properly ratified by all the Allies. The signatories for Germany, acting on the instructions of Admiral Dönitz, were the generals Keitel, von Friedeburg (who had also been present in Reims) and Stumpf. Since Zhukov had a lower military rank than Eisenhower, the latter had a perfect excuse for not attending the ceremony in the rubble of the German capital. He sent his rather low-profile British deputy, Marshal Tedder, to sign, and this of course took some luster away from the ceremony in Berlin in favour of the one in Reims.

As far as the Soviets and the majority of Eastern Europeans were concerned, the Second World War in Europe ended with the ceremony in Berlin on May 8, 1945, which resulted in the arms being laid down the next day, on May 9. For the Americans, and for most Western Europeans, “the real thing” was and remains the surrender in Reims, signed on May 7 and effective on May 8. While the former always commemorate the end of the war on May 9, the latter invariably do so on May 8. But the Dutch celebrate on May 5, date of the ceremony in the Canadian headquarters in Wageningen. That one of the greatest dramas of world history could have such a confusing and unworthy end in Europe was a consequence, as American historian Gabriel Kolko has writes, of the way in which the Americans and the British sought to achieve all sorts of big and small advantages for themselves – to the disadvantage of the Soviets – from the inevitable German capitulation.

The First World War had ended de facto with the armistice of November 11, 1918, and de jure with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. The Second World War came to an end with an entire string of surrenders, but it never did come to a peace treaty à la versaillaise, at least not with respect to Germany. (Peace treaties were in due course concluded with Japan, Italy, and so on.). On February 10, 1947, all the victorious powers thus officially reconciled themselves in Paris with the countries that had been allies of Nazi Germany, namely Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland. And a peace treaty with Japan was concluded by the US and almost fifty other countries – but not the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China – in San Francisco on September 8, 1951; that treaty went into effect on April 28 of that same year. The so-called State Treaty signed between the four great victors of World War II – the US, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – in Vienna on May 15, recognizing Austria as an independent and neutral country, may also be considered to have been a peace treaty.

The reason why no real peace treaty was ever signed with Germany, is that the victors – the Western Allies on the one side and the Soviets on the other side – were unable to come to an agreement about Germany’s fate. Consequently, a few years after the war, two German states emerged, which virtually precluded the possibility of a peace treaty reflecting an agreement acceptable to all parties involved. And so a peace treaty with Germany, that is, a final settlement of all issues that remained unresolved after the war, such as the question of Germany’s eastern border, became feasible only when the reunification of the two Germanies became a realistic proposition, namely, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That made the “Two-plus-Four” negotiations of the summer and fall of 1990 possible, negotiations whereby on the one hand the two German states found ways to reunify Germany, and whereby on the other hand the four great victors of the Second World War — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — imposed their conditions on the German reunification and cleared up the status of the newly reunited country, taking into account not only their own interests but also the interests of other concerned European states such as Poland. The result of these negotiations was a convention that was signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, and which, faute de mieux, can be viewed as the peace treaty that put an official end to the Second World War, at least with respect to Germany.

At that time, in 1990, the Soviets committed themselves to withdrawing their troops from all the Eastern European countries that had been their “satellites,” and they kept that promise; they also dissolved the Warsaw Pact. American troops, on the other hand, have remained in Germany ever since, and the US Congress has just recently officially decided that they will stay there for an indefinite period, even though most Germans would like to see the Yanks go home. The US also failed to respond to the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact with a dissolution of NATO. That alliance had presumably been created to defend Europe against a Soviet threat, and that threat had ceased to exist. Washington failed to keep a promise not to expand NATO to Russia’s borders as a wuid pro quo for the Red Army troops’ withdrawal; instead, Poland, the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic, etc., were enrolled as members of the alliance. As NATO clearly served offensive purposes, even in faraway countries such as Afghanistan, the alliance’s push into Europe’s eastern reaches looked increasingly threatening to the Russians.

It is not difficult to understand that Moscow viewed the planned incorporation of Ukraine into NATO to be unacceptable. This is how we got the present war in that country. Let us hope that this conflict, unlike World War II, will soon end with an unambiguous armistice and a solid peace treaty!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacques R. Pauwels is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti,  Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Pauwels has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Waterloo. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War. His new book is Myths of Modern History: From the French Revolution to the 20th Century World Wars and the Cold War - New Perspectives on Key Events.'

The views expressed herein fully reflect those of The Greanville Post. 

 

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读