March 18, 1981
Books Of The Times
Date: March 8, 1981,
Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 7; Page 12, Column 3; Book Review
Desk
AN
AMATEUR HISTORIAN
The
War Between the Generals.
Inside the Allied High Command. By David
Irving. Illustrated. 446 pp. New York:
Congdon & Lattes. $17.95.
By JOHN LUKÀCS
IN
June 1944 the armies of the English-speaking
democracies crossed the English Channel to
land in France. Though the German enemy did
not surrender until 11 months later, they
were already beaten and they knew it, even
though they were not admitting it. The
campaign had its dramatic episodes - the
landing, the race across France, the German
counterattack in the Ardennes - but, all in
all, it was not the kind of campaign to
excite the interest of future military
historians.
THE superiority of the Allies
was overwhelming; their generals were cautious.
Sir Bernard Montgomery was cautious and
conservative; Dwight D. Eisenhower was
cautious and unimaginative - though George S.
Patton, who also knew that the Germans in
front of him were weaker than his army, would on
occasion strain at the leash. This Allied
campaign had many things in common with the last
Allied offensive against the Germans in 1918 and
even with the allied powers' offensive against
Napoleon in 1814, long before motorization and
air power. There was one big difference,
however. In 1944 the Allied armies faced a
fraction of the power of their enemies.
Threefourths of the German armies were chewed up
by the Russians in the East. At the end of the
war the Anglo-American armies could have
captured Berlin; the Germans melted away before
them. For complex reasons, the roots of which
lie within the character of Eisenhower, the
eventual world leader of anti-Communism refused
in 1945 to listen to Sir Winston
Churchill and to advance to the German
capital.
There was another difference between this
campaign and those of the past. The
Anglo-American armies (unlike the Russian ones)
moved ahead amidst reams of paper. This war was
democratic and bureaucratic. The signals, the
logs, the diaries, the records, the memoranda of
the generals would fill an entire Pentagon. In
the progress of the armies this mass of paper
was often a handicap. In the progress of certain
historians - especially those who believe (or
pretend to believe) that history consists of
documents (which of course is not the case) - it
is often an advantage.
David Irving
is an amateur historian, and an indefatigable
collector of documents. There is nothing
wrong in this: Many of the best historians
are not, and have not been, professionals.
However, Mr. Irving is one of the worst
contemporary historians.
Such a damning contention must be
illustrated. Despite the long list of sources at
the end of the book (including a "David Irving
Author's Archives" that wags like the tail of an
eager dog), the book does not include a single
reference for his quotes; they are not
verifiable. Furthermore, Mr. Irving often
pretends to know not only what certain people
may have said but what they may have imagined.
"(Patton)," he writes, "actually dreams of using
the surviving German divisions in his army
sector for a drive against what he now considers
the true enemy - the Soviet Union." "It would be
a tragedy, (Eisenhower) thinks, if the shameful
realities should leak out. He has pledged
himself to prevent it. ... The big cover-up is
beginning."
Mr. Irving's factual errors are beyond
belief. He says that "forty per cent of the
prisoners" in southern France "turned out to be
Russians who had volunteered to fight for
Germany against Stalin." Mr. Irving writes of
the "famous tank country" of Lower Saxony (there
is no such thing), and that in April 1945 "the
German resistance was becoming increasingly
determined" (at a time when the Germans had
begun to surrender in droves). He writes that
the Battle of Verdun "annihilated hundreds of
thousands of both British, French, and German
youth. An eighteen-year-old Austrian corporal
named Adolf Hitler was wounded there." There
were no British troops at Verdun. Adolf
Hitler never fought at Verdun. In 1916 he
was 27, not 18. Now we come to the essence of
the matter, which is that one cannot separate
the history from the historian. Mr. Irving's
methods are not merely bad; they are abominable.
In this book, as in certain of his earlier
books, one of his purposes is to rehabilitate
Hitler. No writer should be condemned merely
because of his opinions. I can imagine a writer
(though I have not yet read one) who might say:
"Look, there is something to be said for
Hitler's vision of the world. He was wrong in
many ways, and what he said often led to awful
and evil consequences, but he also said ...and
...and ...- therefore we must admit that he was
not a madman, and that he was not wrong in
everything." But this is not how Mr. Irving
proceeds. He not only tells his readers that
Hitler was an able man (which, alas, in many
ways he was), but tries to convince them that he
was a man morally superior to his opponents.
He does this, in a sly way, by denigrating
Hitler's opponents. Hitler was "unlike his
myopic generals." The attempt of the German
patriots to kill Hitler was "treachery."
Charles de Gaulle was "shabby." And it seems
that the French did not really wish to be
liberated: "The French - at least in Normandy -
were none too pleased to be invaded. Things had
apparently not been so bad before the Allies
came." "In a reflective act of
self-preservation," many of the Frenchmen
"seized arms to aid Rommel's army against
the death-dealing newcomers ..." The Resistance
in France was "a witchhunt ... a winter of long
knives"; in Belgium it had turned into "a
Frankenstein creature." The liberation of Paris
consisted of the French "looting and rioting."
The Americans "vandalized, robbed, raped,
murdered," and "bored GIs used their firearms
indiscriminately against the French."
Mr. Irving's language gives him away. His
list of American atrocities against German
prisoners is long; German atrocities against
American prisoners are insubstantial rumors.
There are "the proud SS divisions," while "GI
morale was breaking down." "Several hundred"
American pilots deserted to Switzerland and
Sweden. "Most of the wounds" in one American
field hospital were "self-inflicted." Again and
again he refers to American "cowardice," and to
"the American crime wave sweeping France." "At
about this time, Eisenhower had offered pardons
to the American soldiers in military prisons if
they would take up arms and fight. He was not
encouraged to hear that only a few, those with
long sentences, had accepted the offer." In
Italy, the American black troops "had turned and
run." The Women's Army Corps was "promiscuous,"
and the women of the Red Cross were "hangers-on
and camp followers."
Mr. Irving is an Englishman: still he is
contemptuous of his own people. His bete noire
is Churchill: "lying in an enormous bed, the
color of a pink wax cherub." He "was aiming to
cut off his nose to spite his face." Churchill
is "crabby," "ailing," "peevish," on one
occasion his "tears skidding down one fat
cheek." His brain was "befuddled." Before the
Germans were to fire their rockets at England,
"official London began to empty, as word of this
ugly development was passed among the privileged
few." When the rockets appeared, "once again the
maddened London crowds had taken to the subway
tunnels."
As may now be clear, one of Mr. Irving's most
reprehensible habits is to ascribe his own
opinions and preferences to others, without a
single verifiable quote: Patton "was torn by the
sight of what the Allies had done" to the
Germans. At the end of the war "there is no
question that Patton had come to admire the
Germans, the very people he had been fighting.
Everything he saw of Russians, Poles, and Jews
aroused loathing in him ... By mid-September he
was describing the Jews as 'lower than animals'
- he had by then toured many of their refugee
camps and been sickened by the aspect." An
American general was supposed to have said that
"the Allied propaganda about the Germans was
evidently untrue." Here are three items that
come in rapid succession: John McCloy
telephones Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to
tell him that in the matter of the Morgenthau
Plan "the Semites ... had won"; Churchill
was "animated" by the Morgenthau Plan because of
"the possibility of increasing British postwar
exports at Germany's expense"; the discipline of
the United States Army was "already
crumbling."
Meanwhile, the Allied generals lived in the
midst of "ascending degrees of opulence."
Montgomery could defeat the Germans only "by
brute force." How "very shallow Montgomery's
mind was." Patton, too, was "foul-mouthed ... a
swaggering hothead who womanized ceaselessly and
lived in dread of his wife's finding out." In
Sicily, Patton found General Walter Bedell
Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff,
"cowering behind a sheltering ridge." Later,
Smith "had actually sold U.S. government weapons
in order to pay for the fancy shotgun being made
for him."
All of this sounds like a Nazi propaganda
pamphlet, which it isn't. It is an attempt at a
thoroughly researched, objective military
history, detailing the arguments, the quarrels,
the posturings and the incompatibilities of
American and British generals. These things
existed; yet Mr. Irving relishes strategy less
than gossip, mostly sexual, about the generals'
mistresses, or about the number of condoms
Patton "ordered" before going on leave to
London. The trouble is not that Mr. Irving is an
amateur historian; it is that he is a
professional writer. The trouble is not only
that many of his "facts" are wrong and that his
political preferences are often vile; it is that
he does not have the courage to admit his
beliefs. He knows that neo-Nazi books are hardly
publishable, and that they will not make money.
In fact, this book is written not for ex-Nazis
or neo-Nazis but for the broadest possible
American audience.
And so we arrive at the crowning example of
Mr. Irving's dishonesty. How does he end his
book? Here is the next to the last paragraph,
his summing up of the "Eisenhower-Montgomery
relationship": "It would be churlish to dwell on
the differences between these two great
commanders in chief ... The victory which the
Allies won, against fearsome odds, was due not
just to the wonders of Ultra, the superiority of
Anglo-American air power, and the rightness of
their cause. It owed much to the fine
generalship displayed by their senior
commanders." Who were these fine commanders?
"Generals," he wrote earlier, who "paid courtesy
visits to each other, compared notes and plans,
sharpened knives, and slapped each other on the
back - feeling for the right place to plunge the
blade when the time came." So much for the
courage of Mr. Irving's convictions.
John Lukacs is the author of "The
Last European War, 1939-1941" and of "1945:
Year Zero." "Philadelphia: Patricians and
Philistines" will be published this
spring.
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