I just finished James Heartfield's Unpatriotic History of the Second World War. It's such a large book and covers so much, it's pretty much impossible to give a summary review.
I read it just after finishing Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's Untold History which covers similar material in the chapters on WWII. In Heartfield's telling the emphasis is on the Brits and their own particular sugar coated deceits. Some of the best parts for me were the extensive rundown on allied efforts to suppress communist lead undergrounds and resistance movements across Europe. There was lots of detail I didn't know. I had only bits and pieces of these efforts, partly from Andre Malraux, by indirection. De Gaulle picked Malraux to give a long speech to the national assembly right after `liberation' to convince representatives to disarm when the main factions who were resisting disarmament were communists. The other source was Basil Davidson's book Special Operations Europe, which James might have suggested on list. Then there was a little more elaboration in Untold History.
My one central revelation was that I never quite understood that many Europeans expected to gain a revolution from the destruction of the old orders, and that was precisely what the US, Britain and the political elites of Europe had no intention of allowing. Liberation had a duel meaning for the people that involved a lot more than merely the end of Nazis occupation, but also a follow through to a liberation from the old class orders that ruled before the occupation. That expectation was crushed in the name of stability.
The other revelation was just how brutal and bloody the war in Pacific was, which was captured by the rather stunning fact there were very few Japanese prisoners of war. The US tends to credit the Japanese military mind of fighting to the death, when the reality was less psychological. Take no prisoners was the understood policy and there were few facilities to hold Japanese POWs.
Another stand out were the sections on the intelligentsia, its divisions and its gullibility to embrace the anti-fascist mantle without much reflection on the larger imperial projects behind the fine words.
I spent sometime thinking about how I perceived the war by the early 1960s. I remember two novels The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Catch-22(1961). But they didn't impress me much. A little known third novel was John Horne Burns, The Galleria (1947) was much better and captured the extraordinary cynicism that must have been ubiquitous. I remember I recognized something of my stepfather in that work.
A work which is rarely mentioned is Camus, The Plague (1947). From his journals, you find he was searching for a metaphorical world to deal with resistance in WWII and played around with some ideas from Moby Dick, but settled on the medieval threat of plague, its destruction of a quarantined city left to its own. Camus wondered in his journals, during the background sketches for The Plague, was tragedy still possible? He didn't outright say so, but it was apparent he didn't think so. Another work by Alain Robbe-Grillet also deals with what I have to assume was the war, this time in the weird and paranoid world of, In the Labyrinth (1959).
In general the traditional arts were almost entirely lacking in any meaningful way to appropriate the experiences of millions. There was nothing like Goya's Disasters of War. You have to change over to film and documentary or neorealist movement to get to the war. In a larger critical world, I think the documentary or just the document has taken the place of a war fiction to reach into the nature of war and its thorough going destruction of societies. This breakdown of the arts, leaves history in a unique place and underscores the importance of works like Heartfield's, and Stone and Kuznick's on similar material.
The general effects of Vietnam had little to do with its best known depictions of Apocalyse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket. What was depicted was the breakdown of the military, which was real enough but only understood within the military or the chance encounters like I had with deserters. And then the society beyond was breaking down in a lot of less obvious ways or at least ways that could be ignored, like the simple fact the government lost all of its credibility. It was trivialized as the Credibility Gap. What couldn't be ignored by anybody who thought much about the devolving of the war from meaninglessness to corrosion was the hollowing out of nearly all the institutions of society. This breakdown already had the preamble of civil rights movements and much their transformation or adaptation to the inequalities of the draft. Who served the worst duty? The down and out with no other useful skills. Another people's war.
In the post-WWII background were the collections of writings in existentialism that were a lingering intellectual residue of the war and its aftermath. What of the case of Heidegger? If there were ever examples of das man, the they, inauthencity on the grand scale it was the nazis regime. So how on earth did Heidegger get sucked into the meaningless, fraudulant, and fabricated national identity and its equally fabricated duties to the state in place of an existential responsibility to act independent of any sanctioned authority? These were questions that perhaps lay outside a footnoted history, but they are continuing questions.
Both works left me little except a kind of abstract sadness. I was reminded of Gnossiennes (1,2,3) by Erik Satie, a set of aimless nocturns that move in vague circles and ambiguous shadows. Not much of a cenotaph for sixty million dead.
There is a kind of strangeness to learn you were born in such a world and know that over forty years of your life were dominated by endless minor variations that killed many millions more.
CG