Category Archives: World War Two

Pershing Square, 1944

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There probably wasn’t much to do in L. A. on a warm day in early June of 1944 if you were a senior citizen, there were only so many night watchmen gigs and air raid wardens were no longer in demand. And it certainly wouldn’t have been easy to get around, not with rationing and the buses and trains and red cars packed with younger people coming and going to work—all the plants ran three shifts, 24/7–so the benches are packed downtown in Pershing Square. The headlines are screaming about the Invasion just unleashed on the beaches of Normandy, which is certainly what these gentlemen are all talking about thinking about and worrying about, and reminiscing about how it was back in ‘17 when it was their turn over there. They’re talking about the war, this war and theirs, and their telling tales of their youth, some even true, and they’re talking about their aches and pains. Meanwhile the War gets won without them.

Camouflage

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Aside from a dozen or so shells from the deck cannon of a Japanese sub that dId little damage to an oil field outside Santa Barbara, and a few hundred Japanese balloon bombs that started a small number of fires and killed a mother and five children in the northwest (versus the third of a million or so Japanese civilians killed by US bombings in 1945), the Japanese were never able to strike the west coast with anything at all, no air raids, no shelling. The Germans didn’t even manage that. Their U-boats sank ships within sight of the east and gulf coasts, but none ever took shots at anything on land. Planned long range bombers by the Japanese and Germans came to nothing. Americans got off very lucky, with just about every other belligerent in the war bombed by somebody, but aside from Britain no other country but the US thought that big four engine bombers would be of much use. There was no Nazi or Japanese B-17, and the Germans lost the war before they were able to construct a V-2 type rocket bomb that could cross the Atlantic or build a nuclear weapon for it to carry. Not that they weren’t working on it. The Japanese version of the bomb never even got past the conceptual stage. One gets the impression that neither the Japanese nor Hitler hadn’t thought this war thing out too clearly.

But we didn’t know any of that in 1941. Like Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, the Japanese army and navy seemed quite invincible for a while. It was assumed that flights of Japanese bombers would appear over Los Angeles (or San Francisco or San Diego), or the same carrier planes that surprised the sleepy sailors and soldiers in Hawaii on December 7 would appear unexpected about the west coast, or an armada of Japanese battleships would come out of the fog off a few miles off Long Beach firing enormous shells which could hit as far downtown LA. The Coast Artillery would fight it out with the battleships (you can see where the enormous cannon of the U.S. Coast Artillery were installed at Fort MacArthur above San Pedro). But there wasn’t much anybody could do to stop those big four engine Japanese bombers, which didn’t exist, though we couldn’t be sure of that. And we could have lost the Battle of Midway, all our carriers sunk instead of theirs, and the Japanese could sale a fleet of them up to the California coast and attack Los Angeles like they had Pearl Harbor. Sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but it was considered feasible to nervous planners then. War was on, unimaginably, and suddenly everyone on the West Coast was scared shitless.

So civil defense authorities and jumpy officials in the Pentagon ordered construction of vast camouflage netting to conceal acres and acres of aircraft manaufacurers and other vital facilities, and like magic entire suburban neighborhoods and parks and meadows instantly appeared, and large parts of America’s war effort looked as unbombworthy as a sleepy distant suburb. Meanwhile, invisible to anyone in a cockpit of a bomber a mile high, planes at this particular Douglas plant were produced by the thousands, part of the hundred thousand plus aircraft produced by Americans during the war. It was an enormous art project, really, and doubtless all sorts of artists (especially movie studio artists and set designers) suddenly found themselves classified as essential war workers and couldn’t be drafted as they were needed to create non-existent suburban neighborhoods nobody in their right mind would waste a bombload on.

I wonder if it was considered as weirdly cool and beautiful back then as it seems now. Did Rosie the Riveter admire the billowing cover overhead aesthetically? Or was it just another crazy war thing? Everything must’ve seemed crazy by that point. And then the war ended, the covers were taken down, rolled up and stored somewhere, forgotten. Nuclear bombs had made the whole idea kind of silly anyway. They incinerated city and suburbs alike, no respect for art.

The camouflaged Douglas factory in Santa Monica, 1945.

If Day

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(Written in 2016 and never posted.)

Never heard of this before, a simulated violent Nazi takeover of Winnipeg, Canada on a wintry February day in 1942. If Day, they called it, and no one had to explain what the if meant. The Axis powers were winning the war in February of 1942–indeed, they had yet to peak, that would be later, in the summer–and the notion that the Blitzkrieg could reach far into Canada seemed unlikely, but not impossible. An even though everyone in town knew this was a simulated Nazi conquest, it must have creeped the hell out of them. The Canadian Air Force painted up planes in Nazi colors and markings and buzzed the city, even bombed, and an armored column of Wehrmacht soldiers defeated the local Canadian units and captured them. The city fell quickly, the SS came in shooting, and men in German uniforms patrolled the streets harassing and threatening people. Gestapo agents, fully armed and uniformed (the uniforms and Nazi accessories were borrowed from Hollywood film studios) arrested people, sometimes en masse (they carried off the mayor and city council), or singly off the sidewalk, and posters threatening death for all manner of infringements went up all over town. The radio stations were seized, the CBC broadcast martial Nazi music and Hitler’s speeches all day. The afternoon edition of the Winnipeg paper came out in German. The day culminated in a goose stepping Nazi victory parade. The idea was to spur the sale of victory bonds, and it worked better than the organizers could have imagined, Manitobans purchased $60 million (Canadian) in bonds by the end of the month—about one billion in 2016 American dollars.

Talk about performance art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Day

A little riffing on Le Pen and fascism and French history

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The landslide defeat of Le Pen today is historically a big thing for France—it is perhaps the most decisive defeat that the peculiarly French form of the far right has suffered since World War 2. The electorate, presented with the movement’s most presentable package ever, utterly rejected it. This doesn’t mean it is going away. It never has gone away. Yet it was only actually in power once, during the Vichy years, 1940-44. Nowhere was the Nazi consolidation of their conquest easier than in France, where perhaps a third of the populace were pre-disposed to a fascist government already and where the Nazi occupiers found no shortage of talented civil servants to operate the French government and bureaucracy for them. The French took care of collecting victims of the Holocaust for the Germans, the French collected and shipped their own citizens off to work in German factories, the French even had their own Gestapo. It was as if there had been a fascist infrastructure sitting there in France awaiting a fascist takeover. Whether that takeover came from inside or outside (i.e., from Germany) was no matter to the French right. When France’s greatest living military hero, Philippe Petain, who’d saved the French Army from mutiny and collapse in 1917 and eventually led them in victory through Berlin a year later, agreed to lead France under Nazi domination it just signalled how profoundly fascist the nation had become. Perhaps half the county felt it their patriotic duty to follow Petain. Perhaps more. A little known factoid from the war is that most of the French soldiers rescued at Dunkirk as the Blitzkrieg closed in demanded to be returned after the French surrender to France to finish their service in the Vichy army. That Vichy was a fascist puppet state did not bother them. France was now allied with Nazi Germany and Germany was at war with England. Serving in the Free French forces under De Gaulle was seen by many and perhaps most French soldiers in 1940 as being unpatriotic. That changed as Nazi repression grew worse and Nazi demands for French manpower increased and as Nazi armies were defeated on battlefields. But in 1940 it was obvious that fascism had dug deep roots in the French national psyche. No other state the Nazis conquered rolled over as did France. No other subject people collaborated so. Reading the histories of those days is surreal. France had been enemies to the death with Germany in World War One. They died in unbelievable numbers defending France. Not now. The spirit of fascism had transformed the land in the years between the wars. Not everyone was a fascist, of course, but enough were to make it very uncomfortable for those who were not.

Apparently that spirit remains. It just wasn’t quite sure how widespread it is. We now know. About a third of the French electorate has fascist tendencies. Some of that third are powerfully fascist, some just ornery nationalist. Which is about what it was in the 1930’s. Things haven’t fundamentally changed at all. Perhaps the left’s retribution after liberation in 1944 had not been ferocious enough. Perhaps they should have hanged Petain, and shot tens of thousands more. Perhaps they should have thrown a million collaborators in re-education camps. Perhaps there should have been a purge worthy of the darkest days of the French Revolution. But they were a democracy. And democracies don’t do that sort of thing. Besides, that is what Vichy had been doing. They were the ones killing and torturing and exacting brutal revenge on political enemies for four long years. No one wanted to go through that again.

Which might be what doomed Le Pen’s party to defeat. No one wanted to go through life under a far right government again. The French right had power only once, from 1940-44, and only because an anti-democratic foreign regime forced itself upon it. Without Nazi Germany there never would have been a fascist government in France. And now in lieu of Hitler it was Putin trying to put the French hard right in charge. A lot of bad memories came rushing back, you could see it in the French press. A lot of talk about Vichy, and Petain, and how the French Right had once sold out the French people for the sake of its brutal ideology. And then all the talk of an aggressive foreign dictator–Putin–interfering in French domestic politics, again, just like the 1930’s, when German Nazis and French fascists were very close. Not that Le Pen and her platform were anything even close to Naziism, but it sure smelled funny. And familiar. Like those odd smells that suddenly bring back the past in powerful deja vu. It was all too much, and today the French voters kicked the French right to the curb. The threat is over for now.

Not that the French far right’s struggle is over. It is never over. In France the next Revolution is always just around the bend (there have been five Republics since the Revolution, and perhaps twice that many regime changes). You can dream big dreams in France, because politically just about anything seems within the realm of possibility. Le Pen’s party will retreat and reform, as there is always fertile ground in France for this fierce Francophile nationalism (remember how it once conquered Europe), and at the same time elements of the far right might well grow more radical, getting violent and militant and perhaps even paramilitary. None of this is new. It was a powerful far right/fascist coalition that did so much to weaken the French Third Republic as Nazi Germany grew into a mortal threat in the 1930’s. Of course back then the French Far Left, with some elements following orders from Stalin, was the right’s foil, and Left and Right battled in the streets even as both undermined the center. During the Vichy regime those street battles took on a much more vicious nature as the left formed the core of the French Resistance (the Maquis) and the right became the parts of the Gestapo’s police state (the Milice). Now that French hard Left and even its softer Left is pretty much spent (for now, anyway) as a political force, only anti-semitic fascism remains as a mass movement, deeply rooted radical ideology in France. That is what made Le Pen’s campaign so unsettling, that unlike Trump she did not come out of nowhere but was the leader of a generations old political party that represented at least a century and a half of French ideological history. German fascism had shallower roots in 1933, yet swept the country after a couple electoral victories. Were we seeing a repeat of that success in France?

Nope. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, more or less, came though.

Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H25217,_Henry_Philippe_Petain_und_Adolf_Hitler

Maréchal Pétain meets Adolf Hitler in October 1940. As low a point as there ever was in French history, it is also the high water mark of the French far right’s political power. You’d be hard pressed to find an entire political movement that ever betrayed its own country in such abject humiliation as did French conservatives after the French surrender in 1940. Not even Lenin turned his entire country over to the Germans in 1918 in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Hitler left the French with no pride whatsoever, and the French Right had no problem with the set up at all. Thus Marine Le Pen licking Putin’s jackboots was nothing new to those aware of the history of French fascism.

It was the best of times: the nostalgia of modern day fascism, a Dutch case history.

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Geert Wilders, the headline said, the Donald Trump of the Netherlands who wants to lead his country of the European Union and shut the borders to Muslims. You see this a lot lately, countries have their own Donald Trumps. Yet Geert Wilders has been a player on the Dutch political stage for years, and the Netherlands has a political history that most European nations share but the United States doesn’t. We’ve had the KKK. But the KKK, even at its most vast in the 1920’s, was never a political movement in the sense of wanting to take over the reins of government. There has never been a hard right fascist movement in the US that amounted to more than a few hundred to a few thousand scattered weirdos in jack boots. But there is scarcely a nation in Europe that did not in the 1930’s have a militant movement of hardened fascists whose goal, whether through elections (as in Germany) or military coup (as in Spain) or revolution (as in Italy), was the fascist control and re-engineering of society. Most of them became willing participants in the Nazi regime once the Germans conquered or assimilated their countries. Other fascist movements–as in England and Switzerland–never got the chance before their leaders were imprisoned or interned by their government for the duration of the war. And still others–Spain, mainly, but also the fascist elements in Portugal–eschewed the Germans almost completely and survived fascism’s collapse in 1945. (However, Spain sent fifty thousand volunteers, the Blue Division, to the Russian front where nearly all fought to the death, paragons of the fascist warrior ideal, if about as un-Aryan as a European could be). The Dutch had a home grown nazi/fascist/national socialist movement before the war, a movement that was both well developed and well known by the late thirties, so well known, in fact, that Dutch nazis were the evil conspirators in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.

But things were moving so fast and on such a scale that all their dreams of a Dutch fascist empire seemed like schoolboy fantasies. Holland was too small. It hadn’t fought a war since the Battle of Waterloo. Twentieth century history was vast and sweeping and full of revolution and war and transformation. What was Holland but shopkeepers and chocolate and memories of greatness gone by? So man did those Dutch national socialists get excited when Hitler invaded Holland without warning in the spring of 1940. Yes, the Luftwaffe leveled Rotterdam, just to show that the Luftwaffe could level Rotterdam. But look at the upside. Now at last Dutch fascists could have their Greater Dutch Empire, including Belgium, the Belgian Congo, the Dutch East Indies, South Africa (they assumed Hitler would take it from the defeated English and give it to back the Dutch) and a few places in the western hemisphere even–Suriname, Curacao, Aruba and a smattering of other islands acquired in the sugar and slaves days. Even the Frisian Islands. It would be a global empire, with domains on four continents and hundreds of millions of subjects. No one would laugh at the Dutch then, with their wooden shoes and tulips and Bergen Op Zoom. They would be the rulers of a mighty fascist empire. Not even Germany, which in the mid thirties was still just a rump state of what had been Imperial Germany–had anything even remotely possible (it seemed at the time) on the scale of such a Dutch fascist empire. And who would lead this realm? Who was the mighty leader of which there were problems only he could fix?

It was to be Anton Mussert, the leader and co-founder of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement) of Holland since 1931. Virtually every country in Europe had their little führer to be, Mussert was the Dutch version. But it was a fleeting fantasy. By 1939 it was obvious that Hitler’s Germany was no longer a rump state of anything, and Dutch fascists, if they wanted to avoid being a boil on Germany’s Nazi ass, better join with the Third Reich. The Nazi invasion was their deliverance, their moment, the end of history and beginning of the new era. Hitler, as he did with the local Nazis everywhere he conquered, put Mussert in charge and expected him to serve his new masters. He did, too. He was quite helpful when it came to rounding up Holland’s hundred thousand Jews, and even more helpful when the Nazis began plucking Dutch men off the streets to work in German war industries. He must have been annoying, though, as the Germans eventually stopped bothering with him, and by the time the Nazis were deliberately starving the Dutch in 1944 no one paid attention to Mussert at all. He said virtually nothing as his people starved–the Nazis kept him well fed–and one can only imagine the dread filling him as he watched the Allies advance. It all ended so fast. In 1940 Germany was the crest of the future of mankind, the Dutch included. By 1945 Nazi Germany was a leveled wasteland, destroyed, and the Nazis themselves on the run. The restored government Dutch government shot Mussert after the war, an afterthought, a footnote at best. They gave him a two day trial. I have no idea what he said in his own defense. I was just following orders wouldn’t have worked. Pride utterly gone, he begged the queen for clemency. She refused. He was executed by firing squad in 1946, in the same plaza where hundreds if Dutch had been executed (who knows how many by his direct order) during the war for violating some Nazi edict or another. If he had any last words, I couldn’t find them.

I have no idea if Anton Mussert is a hero to his new spawn. He certainly doesn’t look like a hero. He’s a balding, pudgy nebbish–pardon the Yiddish–in a silly uniform. Then again, people who look like complete schmucks can get elected president. It’s all a matter of perception. Perhaps people who think Geert Wilders is the most charismatic thing since Gouda cheese would be knocked off their feet by a shot of Anton Mussert giving the straight armed salute. I have no idea. It is very difficult to get into the mindset of these atavistic Nazi nostalgists.

Many of the new Dutch fascists (or however one says Alt-Right in Dutch) certainly do lionize the few ten thousand Dutch who joined the Waffen SS to wear groovy black uniforms with skulls and crossbones and swastikas to fight hard against Bolshevism and Jewry and commit inexplicable war crimes. Some of the surviving Dutch SS members were hanged or shot later too. Probably not enough, but some. Most of them were killed on the Russian front. Things were never easy at home either those five long years, 1940-45. I read somewhere that the Netherlands had more dead and killed residents per capita than any other country in Western Europe. War, Holocaust, famine and bombing took their toll. Denmark, another flat, small peace  loving democratic monarchy, had skated though the Nazi occupation relatively unscathed, even after saving almost every one of its Jewish residents from the Holocaust. But Holland was not Denmark. Holland was trashed, starved, bombed, and fought over. Thousands of its citizens were slaves in the German foreign workers program. It certainly was unable to save its Jewish population. Yet the Danes avoided all that horror without the need of  a quisling like Mussert. His being on a first name basis with Hitler did The Netherlands no good at all. He made a lot of those dead Dutch possible. That was brought up in his trial. I wish we knew what he uttered in is own defense.

Neither could The Dutch, unlike the equally humiliated French, take solace that their overseas empire was still in the fight. Because for the duration of the war in the Pacific (1942 to 1945) in the vast Dutch colonial domain known as the East Indies, the tens of thousands of Dutch soldiers and sailors and civilians and colonial administrators captured or interned by the Japanese died at a prodigious rate in Japanese camps. And millions of subject Indonesians were killed or worked or starved to death (about four million is the usual figure). The Asian Holocaust that took place within the Japanese Empire from 1937-45 was nearly as brutal as anything the Third Reich came up with, and sometimes more so, and only China saw more violence, murder and brutality under Japanese fascist occupation than did the Dutch East Indies. (The Philippines came in a close third). The Dutch were just as helpless in preventing any of it as they were back home in Holland. Afterward, the Indonesians learned that no matter how much they hated the Japanese, the Japanese had at least shown that Asians can defeat Europeans. Japanese arms had beat the Russians in 1905. Then even more stunningly, Japanese armies, navies and air forces in 1941 and 1942 routed the Americans in the Philippines, the English at Singapore, the French in Indochina (they just walked in and took the place, and the French let them) and most importantly from the Indonesian nationalist point of view, they easily routed the Dutch the length and breadth of the Dutch East Indies. So the Indonesians rose up and booted out the Netherlands colonial administration and the tens of thousands of Dutch soldiers sent to put down the rebellion. Japanese prisoners even pitched in (as they did in Indochina as well). Somehow the whole story has slipped from the public historical consciousness, but it was one of the great anti-colonial revolutions, and the Battle of Surabaya, even though the Dutch army (and navy and air force) won it tactically, it is one of the most decisive battles since World War Two, leading to the end of a great colonial empire. An army raised by small, brown skinned, colonial subjects, armed with as many modern weapons as they could get their hands on, nearly beat a modern European army. It did not go unnoticed throughout Asia. Indeed, perhaps the Indonesian Revolution will prove a key moment in world history, though we don’t know it yet.

Yet it is certainly a key moment of colonial liberation that is impossible to imagine without the context of the rise of fascism–a German fascism corrupting and conquering the Netherlands, and Japanese fascism seizing the East Indies. Holland as a colonial power was mortally wounded by the Japanese, as was Britain’s hold on India after the abject humiliation of their loss of Singapore. Fascism, though it failed, inflicted wounds on European colonial powers that bled their colonial empire to death within a few years. The Netherlands, Great Britain, France and Belgium were booted from Asia inside of a decade, and from Africa wiithin two. (Only Portugal, protected from the storm of Nazi revolution and total war by the neutrality of Spain, found its overseas empire unfazed.) That was the power of fascism, the lasting result of its nihilism and destruction. From 1931 to 1945 it was an existential threat to the world on a scale not seen since the Mongol invasions. It lost, totally, completely, nearly annihilated. But it left little fascist seeds scattered about, blown by the winds, and they seem to be germinating at last. Like Geert Wilders, for instance, the 21st century Anton Mussert, sans jackboots.

When you come down to it, weighing the good (shiny uniforms, getting to hang with Hitler) against the bad (murder, starvation, genocide, loss of empire and dignity), Dutch fascism turned out to be a complete disaster and abject humiliation for the Dutch people and Dutch state. And now a reborn Dutch fascism, a kinder, gentler fascism, seems to be returning, following the distinctly non-German playbook that Anton Mussert and his pals were so effective with for a while in the 1930’s. There is that musty haven’t-we-been-here-before feel in the sights and sounds and ideology of Geert Wilders. Nostalgia. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

anton-mussert

Anton Mussert

Winston Churchill on funding the arts

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Perhaps you’ve seen this quote lately:

When Winston Churchill was asked to cuts arts funding in favor of the war effort, he simply replied “Then what are we fighting for?”

Alas, Winston Churchill never said that. I’ve heard various accounts of how it was he never said it–one blamed Kevin Bacon because he knows everybody–but Winston never said it. He so never said it I laughed the first time I read it because it seemed so ludicrous. For one thing Churchill would have starved his own grandmother to defeat Hitler. For another almost everyone artistic was drafted into the service or being used for the war effort in one way or the other (many of the young male leads you see in British war-era films had been wounded and discharged already.) Thirdly, England was in hock so deep to the United States even before we entered the war that it eventually had to sell off its empire to pay us back, so arts funding would have meant nothing compared to, say, India. And finally I wonder if most of Britain’s arts funding already came from the aristocracy. There were enough of them. Still are.

In a country that didn’t even have enough bomb shelters for its working class population, detouring scarce funds instead into the arts would have been a travesty. Those were different times, desperate times. We can’t even conceive how desperate. We should be thankful that we can have debates about arts funding. That’s an option of civilizations not facing annihilation.

However, Winston Churchill did once say that a man who blew the trumpet for his living would be glad to play the violin for his amusement. And I have never been able to figure out what the hell that means. But he was a painter, and you how they are.

Tokyo Rose

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[2014. The offending list has since disappeared, incidentally.]

Sometimes you see something on the web that really bothers you. There was a time when you’d leave a comment, but comments sections are now sewers of hate and confusion and paranoia and worthless for anything but outrage and craziness. So instead you find out who’s in charge and send them an email, and more often than not the guy in charge reads it. So after seeing something I thought was totally wrong and unfair in an idiotic bit of clickbait on Answers.com, I emailed David Karandish, the CEO of Answers.com, and said this:

I know in the grand scheme of things it means nothing, but the answers.com piece 9 Notorious Traitors in History lists Iva Toguri D’Aquino aka Tokyo Rose in its sixth spot, between the fairly loathsome creatures Ezra Pound and Vidkun Quisling. Alas, it is a well known if tragic tale that D’Aquino was not only not a traitor but her treason trial was a travesty and she received a full presidential pardon in 1976. Even a cursory reading of her Wikipedia entry would have shown this, this paragraph in particular:

On January 15, 2006, the World War II Veterans Committee (sponsors of the Memorial Day Parade in Washington D.C. and the National World War II Memorial, the newest monument on the National Mall, citing “her indomitable spirit, love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans”, awarded Toguri its annual Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award. According to one biographer, Toguri found it the most memorable day of her life.

As I said, in the grand scheme it means nothing, and I understand the pressures of coming up with content and clickbait and just how ephemeral this all is anyway, but still a couple ten thousand people who read your site’s essay will learn, again, that Tokyo Rose was a traitor. There was a time when history a few generations old was the realm of scholars, but no more. Now it’s in the hands of interns and amateurs and smartasses.

 Brick

That was it. It means nothing, does nothing, matters not a bit. I know that. In fact it was a waste of a half hour and we only get so many half hours in life. But it made me feel a little better.

Iva Toguri served six years for treason, and was later pardoned by President Gerald Ford. Ford had served in the Pacific in the war, and had probably listened to Tokyo Rose every day.

Iva Toguri served six years for treason, and was later pardoned by President Gerald Ford. Ford had served in the Pacific in the war, and had probably listened to Tokyo Rose every day.

Collaboration

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I think when English and Americans condemn France for its collaboration in World War 2–and I am not justifying the craven Vichy government–they forget one key point about themselves. And that is that unlike Britain and the USA, France was conquered, occupied, and then left in part a puppet state, a succession of events which they had no control over once the Germans had flanked their armies and left Paris, and France itself, essentially defenseless.  A simple miscalculation by the French high command–they had placed the left wing of their army, with most of their armored forces, too far forward to respond to the German blitz through the Ardennes–brought about military collapse. It was sudden and complete, even more sudden and complete than the defeat in 1871, and completely opposite the brutal slog of 1914-18. War like this didn’t even seem possible. The French–the government, the press, the labor leaders, the armed forces, the population–were stunned into cowed acquiescence. Cleverly, their Nazi conquerors offered employment and a future to all kinds of French citizens. The French were now subjects with a stake in the future of the Third Reich, a status not granted to the citizens of Poland, etc., who faced extermination by murder or starvation or endless chattel slavery.

The German occupation was helped along immeasurably by the presence of a very large pre-war fascist and extreme rightist movement in France. This was true across large parts of Europe (even the neutral Swiss arrested their own Nazi sympathizers just in case). These homegrown fascists were more than willing to take up leadership, administrative and policing roles in both Vichy France and German occupied France, as well as throughout the French colonial empire. It’s hard not to think of these French collaborators with a visceral disgust, even seventy five years later. Yet we’ve almost forgotten that there were fascist elements–and Stalinist elements–in Britain as well ready to take their place in their own Nazi occupation government should it come to be. Had Hitler’s planned Operation Sea Lion somehow succeeded in crossing the English Channel there can be little doubt that the virtually disarmed Britain (with nearly all the Royal Army’s equipment–cannon, tanks, machine guns, etc.–abandoned at Dunkirk) would have been conquered as easily as France. And that there would have been some degree of collaboration with Nazi occupation authorities in England (remember the film It Happened Here?) Would there have been the same degree of collaboration as in France? Hard to tell. The fascist movement was smaller in England, but it was not insignificant. Indeed, it included the former King Edward, then living in France as the Duke of Windsor, and who was quite chummy with Adolf Hitler as late as 1939. (The Nazis had big plans for Edward, but the British spirited him away to the Bahamas before the panzers reached him.) In France the suddenness of defeat made fascism seem irresistible, inevitable. It’s hard to see why England would have reacted any differently. And it’s not like the English would have had much choice. To refuse to collaborate was often the last decision one ever made.

For argument’s sake, and strictly theoretically speaking, let’s also assume that had Britain or France somehow been occupied by the Soviet Union, as were the Baltic States and eastern Poland in 1939, there would have been no shortage of collaborators either. The NKVD (Stalin’s vast secret police organization) had no problem finding local Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians to work for the Soviet occupation–even as the same NKVD was arresting, torturing, imprisoning, exiling or executing hundreds of thousands of the collaborators’ countrymen. Hitler or Stalin, it did not matter, there were quite literally millions of civilians, police and military the breadth of occupied Europe willing to join up (there were half a million “Germanic non-Germans” in the Waffen SS alone, though many of those were conscripts, and perhaps a million Russians assisted the Wehrmacht as soldiers or auxiliaries, if only to avoid starvation as prisoners of war). Had the US somehow been conquered by Hitler or Stalin there would have been no shortage of collaborators here either. It might seem immoral, ludicrous and inconceivable now, but in the 1930’s both fascism and Stalinist communism were seen as legitimate ideologies by a remarkable number of people. That became clear when the Spanish Civil War erupted and the intelligentsia and artistic communities across the western world began splitting into two camps. I am not sure now which side had more supporters, even in the U.S. In Hollywood there were rallies and star studded fundraisers on behalf of the fascists. Though it wasn’t so much fascism that drew these people, but anti-communism. By this point communism–then still more widely known as bolshevism–had terrified many. Remember that this was during Stalin’s purges and show trials, and after the appallingly brutal famine in the Ukraine (the Holodomor.) Bolshevism was not revolution like our own genteel (or so we remember it) American Revolution. This was a French Revolution gone utterly mad and evil. Thus Franco, wrapping himself in the anti-communist banner, received a surprising amount of support even among western intellectuals and bohemians, far more than we care to remember now. I mean Gertrude Stein? J.R.R. Tolkien?

On the other hand, the Spanish Republic’s supporters splintered immediately into liberals and socialists on the one hand and an ardent Stalinist bloc that in Spain actually purged the non-Stalinist Republicans, executing hundreds, sometimes right in the front lines. Stalin’s paranoia had an incredibly long reach. It is forgotten now that George Orwell himself, the voice in English of the anti-fascist Republican cause, barely escaped such an execution in Barcelona. Agents came to his hotel looking for he and his wife. They escaped to France, but just barely. (The film Land and Freedom vividly shows some of this madness.) Fascism, on the other hand, had an almost universal solidarity, it was a mailed fist. Meanwhile, and tragically, anti-fascism was splintering into every faction imaginable, and the hard line Stalinists saw everyone else on the left as an enemy to be subverted or destroyed before Stalin got around to defeating fascism. (In fact, Stalin’s plans to launch a surprise assault on Nazi Germany were sidelined by his decision to purge, torture and execute nearly all his generals instead.) Spain became a microcosm of what the rest of Europe would be in the 1940’s, with Nazis and locals willing to serve them, and Stalin’s agents and those willing to serve them. Somehow, though, both Hitler and Stalin failed to make permanent inroads in Spain. Although a division of Spanish volunteers served on the Russian Front–and after Franco withdrew them, a core of 3000 Spanish fascist fanatics refused to leave, fighting till the war’s end– Franco retained his independence and his nation’s neutrality, and the Spanish communists, once Franco was gone, became genuine democratic socialists. Unfortunately you can’t say the same for the rest of Europe. Fascism was ended only by Germany’s military defeat, otherwise it might still in charge now. And Stalinism–though somewhat mellowed with age– fell only when the Soviet Union imploded through economic failure. Neither showed any sign of ever going away on its own. There was a limitless supply of people in every occupied state willing to do their German or Russian master’s bidding, even if it meant shooting down their own kind in cold blood.

It’s as if the raw material of collaboration was there throughout the Western world just waiting for its moment. My father remembered being taken to beer halls when he was a boy by his father. The rooms were draped with Nazi flags and people listened to Hitler’s speeches on the shortwave and cheered lustily–and this was in Detroit, Michigan in 1940. In Europe of course it was far worse. Switzerland had to arrest politicians and military men who actively supported Hitler (though the head of the Nazi Party in Switzerland was assassinated by a Croatian Jew in Davos in 1936 in a rare and prescient act of resistance), while both Hungary and Romania were spared conquest by the Nazis because homegrown fascist movements had taken over the government. The cost of the more honorable alternative of resisting the Third Reich was all too vividly shown by Yugoslavia, which suffered through four years of appalling warfare and murderous oppression that killed nearly ten per cent of the pre-war population.

Collaboration made far too much sense for most people at the time. It would today as well. The Polish resistance–the Home Army–was 400,000 strong in 1944. The French resistance (before the Allies landed) had one quarter of that. France had a larger population than Poland and had one twelfth of the civilian losses of Poland. But the Germans had forbad Polish collaboration. The Poles were left with no alternative but resistance. If they were caught they were almost invariably killed, but they were going to starve or be worked to death anyway. But the French could choose to collaborate actively (by assisting the regime) or passively (by not assisting the resistance). In not resisting you would survive, perhaps even thrive. Your family would eat. Joining the resistance meant a strong likelihood of torture and/or death, perhaps extended to your family members and friends and neighbors. So most passively collaborated. It was the logical choice, collaboration. They had to think about their families. I am not being sarcastic here. Passive collaboration was the genuine logical choice for most Frenchmen. In terms of taking care of their own, it was the correct thing to do.

Unlike Britain, the USA or Switzerland, France had the misfortune to be conquered, and then the fortune to be handled fairly lightly by the Reich. The Danes, good Aryans that they were even if they despised the Germans, were occupied with even a lighter touch (while spiriting almost 100% of their Jews into Sweden and out of the reach of the Holocaust), but the French (the non-Jewish French, anyway) still did extremely well compared with the genocide against the Slavic Poles. It was the relatively mellow German occupation in France made collaboration possible. Even had a Polish fascist (and there were plenty of them pre-war) wanted to join the Nazis as so many French citizens did after the surrender in May of 1940, he wouldn’t have been accepted. (Recall Sophie’s Choice where Sophie’s father was a Polish fascist, yet she still was sent to a death camp.) Besides, the Nazis went through and slaughtered the Polish intelligentsia early in the occupation, thus in one stroke sparing Poland discussions like those about French collaborationist guilt. (As for their guilt in the Holocaust, that is another matter). But any Célines there may have been in the literary salons of Warsaw were quickly executed by the Nazi occupation authorities along side the patriots.

We can condemn the French–and all the other nationalities too–for collaborating. And we should. But we should also keep in mind that our own compatriots would have acted no better in the same circumstances. With a breath of fascism in the breeze today, it’ll be interesting to watch how people collaborate these next couple months of 2016 in the United States. We will be surprised, I suspect, at who switches sides, and how fast, and without blinking an eye.

Frankreich, Milizionär bewacht Widerstandskämpfer

A member of the French Milice (the Vichy military police) guarding captured (or arrested) members of the French resistance, June 21, 1944. Note the Hitler mustache….

Artistic license

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I always get Céline and Ezra Pound confused, I said. I was being snide. You can be snide discussing Louis Ferdinand Céline and Ezra Pound. But I had to explain this time. How I’d only made that comparison because both were vicious anti-Semites and fascists. Céline was pro-Nazi (but not necessarily pro-Hitler) to the point of being a collaborator. The only thing that kept him from the firing squad–which he deserved–was his reputation as a writer. He was a seminal figure in Holocaust Denial as well. Just an evil bastard all around. Loathsome. Not that he cared what other people–aside, perhaps from his fellow collaborators–thought. The more one is hated, he said, the happier one is. I believe the Resistance had him marked for assassination but the war ended first and he became something for the liberated and restored judicial system. They let him go.

Ezra Pound was not much better, though unlike Céline at least he seemed to be certifiably mad. It probably saved him from the gallows. He spent the war in Mussolini’s employ, delivering viciously treasonous and unhinged anti-Semitic broadcasts. He was captured after the war by a literary-minded American officer. Bad luck. They kept him in a cage and he railed and ranted. The worm had turned.

But what writers they were, both of them. Pound one of the finest ever in the English language, certainly in American English. His stuff utterly mystifies me, I could spend years trying to crack it. It’s bare boned, gorgeous, magnificent. Céline was one of the greatest of French writers, we had nobody like him in American literature till Burroughs, who in fact idolized Céline. It’s weird how so many Americans took Céline to heart–but then the United States had never experienced a Nazi occupation. We could read his prose and separate the writer from the times, I suppose. (Ginsberg befriending him, though, remains a little hard to figure out.) I know that my rule has always been you have to separate the art from the asshole. I know a lot of literary types like to excuse Céline and Pound’s “excesses”, as if writers are different from you and me. But a war criminal is a war criminal. Some just write really well.

In his defense at his trial Céline composed Réponses aux accusations formulées contre moi par la justice française au titre de trahison et reproduites par la Police Judiciaire danoise au cours de mes interrogatoires, pendant mon incarcération 1945–1946 à Copenhague. You’ll find it in his canon, in English, titled Reply to Charges of Treason Made by the French Department of Justice. I’ve never seen it, though I’d love to, as its prose apparently swept the judges off their feet. He never served another day in jail. Céline should have hung but he wrote so well. Pound too. They hanged that hack Lord Haw Haw (real name William Joyce) even though his copy was nowhere near as vile as the spew that came from Pound’s pen and mouth during the war, nor as corrosive as any of Celine’s wartime pamphlets. But Céline got off with a one year sentence, suspended, and later an amnesty. Genius has its perks. Artistic license. The Americans, not so literary minded, were a little harsher on Pound, who was locked up in a psychiatric hospital for twelve years. Not that he was actually insane, he was just eccentric and vile and hypergraphically talented, yet weird enough to pass for a lunatic. He wrote The Pisan Cantos during his stay. Hot wind came from the marshes and death-chill from the mountains.

Lord Haw Haw, a lousy writer, received no mercy. His fellow Englishmen, who’d listened to him on Nazi radio every day till the end of the war, felt no pity. Nor did anyone clamber to save his scrawny neck as they had Pound’s and Céline’s. The sentence was death. May the swastika be raised from the dust! he yelled artlessly. His neck snapped seconds afterward.

The Nazis themselves had no soft spot for wayward intellectuals. Thus they tortured and shot without compunction one of the greatest historians of modern times, Marc Bloch. Though his influence is imperceptible in the United States, he had revolutionized the study of history when he co-founded (with Lucian Febvre) the Annales School of thought. Bloch and Lefebvre’s methods were to narrative history what Thucydides was to Homer. To the Nazis, however, Bloch was just another resistance member who wouldn’t talk. Not that they were unaware who he was. No mercy was shown despite his brilliance. Klaus Barbie himself is said to have tortured him. You can imagine their conversations. Yet Bloch still wouldn’t talk. Then, with the Americans already in France, Barbie had a squad take him into the courtyard of the Gestapo building and execute him. Vive La France! Bloch cried out. He was 57 and looked like a rumpled college professor. He’d been working on Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien. In English they titled it The Historian’s Craft, seeming to utterly miss the point. Bloch wrote his last pages in his cell. 

Barbie was finally caught in 1983. He’d been in Bolivia since the war, surrounded by like-minded Nazis while enchanting successive dictators. He helped to overthrow a democratically elected government or two, dealt in arms, taught torture. It was a good life. Then his luck ran out and he was extradited to France in chains. It was a huge trial, every day in the papers. The Butcher of Lyon, they called him. He had killed, either by his own hand or his own direct order, fourteen thousand people. Men and women. The elderly and children. Entire families. He never wrote anything that I know of, but he performed exquisitely painful tortures. He literally–not metaphorically–skinned men alive during interrogations. In an era of abundant state sanctioned sadists, Barbie stood out for the quality of his work. If pain were literature he was a Céline. If pain were poetry he was an Ezra Pound. He was that good.

The evidence against Barbie was overwhelming–the Germans kept accurate, detailed records of everything they did, no matter how horrible–and he was convicted of crimes against humanity, among them the killing of Marc Bloch. They threw him in jail for the rest of his life. That life lasted till 1991, when cancer ate up his insides and he died at aged 77 in agony and awfulness and alone. When I stand before the throne of God, he said, I shall be judged innocent. 

What a strange little essay this was. It just gushed out while I was watching Zorba the Greek. Kazantzakis, you know, he can do that. I saw a photo of his headstone once. A Greek friend translated it for me. I don’t hope for anything, it read, I don’t fear anything. I’m free.

Horses were not an option because the Wehrmacht ate them.

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(2015)

Being dull, I spend a lot of time that could be spent watching the Weather Channel instead watching (or listening, actually) to lectures online. Science and history, for the most part. Arcane, big words, hopelessly obscure, badly rendered power points, that kind of thing. On the Weather Channel the meteorologist babe had legs to die for, but on my computer a guy was going on about the Wehrmacht. I kept listening. He said it was a mess, that Wehrmacht, nothing like you see on Combat! In 1942 their reconnaissance units had run out of motorcycles–those nifty sidecar things Vic Morrow is always ducking from on Combat!–because the motors had all frozen, seized, and self-destructed in the Russian winter. Horses were not an option because the Wehrmacht ate them. So they gave the reconnaissance units bicycles. Bicycles. Blitzkrieg with a low carbon bootprint.

The lecturer, Dr. Robert Citino, is a smartass (“cheeky” doesn’t quite cut it) who is one of America’s leading experts on things German and military, apparently. A fascinating talker. The perfect blend of details and anecdotes, the personal and the whole picture. He knows his scheiss, and he’s funny as hell, too. Weird even:
“….my book on the Russian campaign in 1942, which I will attempt to explain without the use of maps–I will ask several people in the front row to come up and pretend to be various terrain features, if you wouldn’t mind….”

The room full of cadets laughs nervously. Especially the plebes.

It turns out that the German generals weren’t as smart as their uniforms. Flipping through the comments below the video, his describing the Wehrmacht command as often stupid is not going over well. And we’re not even talking Wehrmacht involvement in war crimes, he adds. That’s another lecture. Actually I just saw another lecture on just that. The lecturer, Dr. Geoffrey Megargee, a tad cheeky himself, was an expert on the Holocaust on the Eastern Front. Einsatzgruppen, etc. Army involvement in genocidal war crimes was pervasive, he said. The Nuremberg Trials found commanders-in-chief Keitel and Jodl guilty of crimes against humanity, but could have carried those war crimes trials down to dozens of army and even corps level commanders too. And hanged them all, he added. It was a startling afterthought, and off topic–he was discussing the German general staff–but it was obvious even in this purely academic setting how much he hated Nazis. You don’t hang the people you love. The YouTube Neo-Nazis hated him back.

And now the Nazis really hate this funny Wehrmacht expert guy too. Amazing how many Nazis there are on YouTube. Apparently Dr. Citino is a Jew loving stooge. Or is a Jew himself. He’s Italian someone pointed out. He’s from Cleveland, but his people came from Sicily. Then he’s a race traitor too, a Nazi added. Another pointed out that Italians were not Aryans, and stabbed the Reich in the back. Others jumped in, trashing all things Nazi. A strange sort of alternative reality melee erupts, refighting the war in catty comments. Meanwhile the professor is saying how a magazine asked him to list the ten best German generals on World War Two. It was kind of absurd, he said, like picking out the ten best heavy metal guitar players. More laughter. This time the plebes join in. Apparently air guitar is not a West Point hazing ritual.

Later I’m in the car and flip on the radio and it’s Highway Star by Deep Purple. Richie Blackmore is laying out his solo with heavy metal perfection. Erich Von Manstein, I think to myself, definitely.