The good war?

Jonathan Sumption admires the sweep and bravura  of Max Hastings’s account without agreeing with every word

The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps, more to it than the moral balance. The second war has gained in public esteem by being everything that the first war was not. It was fought for recognisable and, on the whole admirable, objectives. It did not begin, as the first had, among the conspiratorial fumblings of European chanceries. It did not become an object in itself.

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Casualties among combatants were relatively light among the western allies, whose historians have tended to set the agenda, whereas everyone’s image of the first war is one of squalid mud trenches and pointless military massacre. The second war was a war of movement, of grand strategy, of decisive battles, where the first was one of slow attrition and painful stalemate. Above all, the second war produced heroes, according to our own measure of these things, whereas the leading figures of the first war now seem dated, heartless, unimaginative and personally rebarbative.

Of Max Hastings’s nine books about the second world war, this is the one with the broadest sweep and most relentlessly pessimistic message. Like so much recent writing on the second world war, it tries to correct the triumphalist and self-righteousness clichés by pointing to the black side: the ‘cynicism’ (his word) of going to war for Poland when there was nothing to be done to save her; the myth of a united Britain defying Hitler; the bondage in which Britain is said to have held her colonies in order to extract the maximum of resources for a war which was no concern of theirs; the strategic errors and tactical incompetence of the armed forces, especially that familiar target of Hastings’s earlier invectives — the British army; the occasional incidents, such as the shooting of prisoners, which would have ranked as war crimes if done by the Germans.