A bloody good account

“The world must know what happened, and never forget.” General Eisenhower said this while visiting Nazi death camps in 1945 but is just as good for the entire Second World War itself. For six years, Death roamed the earth from the Arctic fjords of Norway to the islands in the Pacific, from the icy plains of Russia to North Africa’s deserts, claiming 50-70 million people.

Little wonder that the deadliest conflict in human history is written about again and again even some 65 years after it ended. Though every theatre of the War, every major battle, every defining moment has been written and interpreted in hundreds of books, there seems space on the shelf for one more. The most recent is Antony Beevor’s The Second World War . A huge, 800-page effort, the tome appears intimidating but Beevor’s writing makes it an easy read.

Stark illustration

Considering the vastness of the theatre and hundreds of events, to keep the reader hooked, the author needs to maintain a balance between the grand strategies, the action on the ground and, most important, the experience of the soldier. Beevor has managed to do all this. Though in this book, Beevor has not been as effective in the battlefield narrative as he was in Stalingrad or Berlin: The Downfall 1945 .

Beevor sets the tone of the book with the surreal story of Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean conscripted into the Japanese army in 1938 and sent to Manchuria. In 1939, he is captured by the Russians and sent to a prison camp. When the Russians run short of soldiers in 1942, they give Yang a rifle and send him to the Ukraine, where the Germans capture him. When they run short of soldiers, they send him to Normandy, where he surrenders to the Americans in June 1944. He ends the war as a British PoW. A starker illustration of the helplessness of the common man during great upheavals cannot be imagined.

Tedious description

Unlike most historians, Beevor puts the start of the War not at the German annexation of Poland, but in the August 1939 defeat of the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol on the Mongolian-Manchurian border by Russia’s General Zhukov. Six years later, the War, and the book, ends with the Soviet armies sweeping across Manchuria and North China! Because of his intimate familiarity with the theatre, Beevor devotes almost two-thirds of the book to the eastern front. But tedium tends to set in by the relentless description of one battle after another.

Rather than this, could he have offered more space to the other key aspects of the War such as the Manhattan Project, the Blitz, or the Battle of Britain, all of which get passing mention? Beevor is best at describing individuals and incidents on the battlefield. For this he relies on soldiers’ diaries and letters. And, as a historian he is quite at ease dealing with the larger strategies, too. Thus, the accounts of the major conferences at Casablanca, Tehran or Yalta come alive as much as in the writing as in the detail.

The weakest link is his account of the Pacific theatre. Lost in the clinical description of the action is the life of an individual marine or Japanese infantryman — this is what made Stalingrad a great read. Why were so many lives lost/sacrificed for the numerous small, Eden-like islands to whose people Germany or Britain could well have been in Mars?

Some of the defining moments of the War, Beevor deals with differently. The Dunkirk fiasco is dealt in full, the action moving from the beaches to the War Cabinet in London to the Generals’ command posts. Why the German army was called to halt when the British Expeditionary Force on the beaches was literally caught between the sea and a hard people remains one of the great, though fortunate, mysteries of the War. In Africa, Beevor lands Rommel as explosively as a Panzer shell, befitting the legendary General. But his progress and battles in the continent are told in fits and starts much like the German campaign. This was possibly another defining moment Hitler lost when he starved Rommel of tanks and supplies. Had Germans got to the oil fields in North Africa, the outcome could well have been different!

War’s depravity

The decisive point of the War was perhaps Hitler’s decision, over-ruling his Generals, to invade Russia and his terrible under-estimation that the annexation would be complete by winter. He very badly misjudged the vastness of the theatre and the doggedness of the Russian. Beevor stages all the battles well; after all, he has devoted an entire book to that theatre. But on the key question of Hitler forbidding a retreat in front of an iced-out Moscow in December 1941, he devotes little space. Beevor brings out how the War’s depravity plunged depths beyond the mere killings to the Holocaust, how in various countries prisoners were used for medical experiments, and women were exploited. If in Germany, scientists developed techniques for turning corpses into soap and leather, in the Pacific, some Japanese troops resorted to cannibalism. Beevor is unsparing of the reader in bringing to them man’s inhumanity to his brethren.

Bravery, heroism, inhumanity, stoicism, pettiness, cruelty … hunger, disease, death … . These are all the ingredients of a war, especially one of such proportions. And, Beevor brings alive all these in his epic on the Second World War. Like a good news reporter, he answers all the five Ws and the H of the War in all their gory detail.

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