Popular resistance during WWII
According to one count, the neoconservative ideologue Bill Kristol has written no fewer than 61 opinion pieces referencing the Munich agreement that prefaced the Second World War.
In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, Kristol joined with all the other warmongers warning of the dangers of “appeasement”. Since then, he’s distinguished himself by discovering echoes of Munich in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel, Russia and just about every place else where the possibility of avoiding or ending military conflict has even momentarily arisen.
This is not an accident. As Donny Gluckstein notes in his introduction to the excellent new book Fighting on all fronts, the Second World War serves as a key reference for today’s politicians, since it’s the most widely accepted modern instance of a “just war”. The 100th anniversary of the Great War might have spurred a certain degree of revisionism, but we’re still unlikely to hear pundits spruiking the next Middle Eastern adventure with comparisons to the struggle against Kaiser Bill, which is still popularly understood as a horrific and futile slaughter.
The Second World War seems different, most obviously (though not only) because of the Holocaust. Given Hitler’s methodical extermination of millions, the war that brought him down seems unequivocally a good thing. And if Western military forces played a progressive role in 1945, why can’t they serve the same function today?
The present, then, has a lot at stake in the past. “Seventy years separate the end of the Second World War from 2015”, says Gluckstein, “and yet the issues it raised remain fundamental to our understanding of the world today”.
To unpick those issues, Gluckstein divides the war into a series of phases, in which different elements predominated. He notes that the conflict began as a simple clash of imperialisms, with the older empires first accommodating and then resisting German expansion. Most of the Western leaders had no principled opposition to Hitler – indeed, many openly admired the militant anti-communism he espoused. But the invasion of Poland conclusively demonstrated the extent of Nazi territorial ambitions and thus made war inevitable between the upstart German empire and the older powers it threatened.
Most ordinary people showed little initial enthusiasm for a new world war only two decades after the last bloodbath had ended.
“Yet something extraordinary happened as the war progressed”, writes Gluckstein. “Instead of the usual waning of militaristic ardour after initial euphoria, and despite millions killed and maimed at levels unprecedented in human history, backing for the fight against the Axis grew.”
Gluckstein attributes the shifting sentiment to, on one hand, the rise of resistance movements in countries under occupation and, on the other, mounting anti-colonial sentiment throughout Asia. The conflict, he says, should thus be understood as two distinct struggles, intersecting in complex ways that changed over a time: both an imperialist war and a people’s war.
It’s a thought-provoking argument, but the brief introduction leaves many questions unanswered – possibly because Gluckstein intends it to be read alongside his own A people’s history of the Second World War.
Fighting on all fronts is, by contrast, a collection of essays. Its strength lies in detailed analyses of specific fronts and issues, from the Huk rebellion in the Philippines to the “emergency” in Ireland. A short review like this cannot do justice to the extent of the material covered in Fighting on all fronts: readers are advised to get a copy and read for themselves.
Briefly, though, Kay Broadbent and Tom O’Lincoln contribute an important chapter looking at political struggle inside Japan, a nation often portrayed as entirely populated by fanatical militarists giving their lives joyfully for the emperor.
They describe instead low level but heroic resistance taking place throughout Japanese society, from factory workers going absent without leave to anonymous pamphleteers daubing factory poles warning that “thousands die for the glory of a single general”. In particular, they write of the Tokyo Printers Union, which kept fighting “to show the determination of Japan’s entire union movement”. It remained active until its male leaders were arrested in 1942 – and then it continued under the stewardship of women.
Similarly, Janey Stone looks at Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe, seeking, in particular, to dispel the myth of passivity in the face of genocide. She chronicles the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which impossibly brave (and mostly very young) activists fought off 2000 battled-hardened Nazis for six long weeks. But Warsaw was not the only example. She writes:
“There were underground resistance movements in approximately 100 ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe (about a quarter of all ghettos) and uprisings occurred in five major ghettos and 45 smaller ones. In addition there were uprisings in three extermination camps and 18 forced labour camps. Some 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans fought in approximately 30 Jewish partisan groups and 21 mixed groups while some 10,000 people survived in family camps in the forest.”
Stone notes that, even in the ghetto uprisings, politics made a huge difference, with Zionist organisations that preached emigration rather than resistance incapable of leading the fight against Nazism.
Elsewhere, the heroism of those battling against fascist occupation was sacrificed by a Stalinist leadership more concerned with Soviet interests than social transformation. Gluckstein’s chapter on the battle between Germany and the Soviet Union – by far the bloodiest front – illustrates the extent to which the Second World War represented the culmination of what, in the thirties, Victor Serge was already calling the Midnight in the Century. Gluckstein writes that the Nazi invasion was beaten back by a popular resistance, which was handicapped at every stage by bureaucratic Stalinist brutality.
In his chapter on Australia, Tom O’Lincoln takes aim at a number of nationalist myths about the war. He points out that, while Labor’s great hero John Curtin claimed to be fighting for “the rights of free people in the whole Pacific”, the whole region was actually a bastion of white colonialism with, for instance, a kind of Jim Crow system enforced in Papua by white Australians. The famous “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” of the Kokoda legend did not assist the diggers out of love. On the contrary, they were conscripted, and often treated abominably. In other places, such as Timor, local people alternated between support for Japan and support for Australia, as each power seemed as bad as the other.
The Australian army itself was not immune from discontent. O’Lincoln cites troops stationed on the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns who, deciding they were being treated like dogs, took to barking in protest. “The idea took on like wildfire …” one of them remembered. “Faintly at first you could hear the yapping and barking from far away units and then louder until it reached our camp.”
O’Lincoln accepts that “the great majority of Australians would endorse the war effort on the simple grounds that a Japanese invasion must be avoided”. He dismisses this on the basis of the recently established scholarly consensus that Japan never intended to invade and lacked the resources to do so.
It’s not an altogether satisfactory response. After all, ordinary workers could not have known Japan’s weakness at the time. If they did believe an occupation imminent, what attitude should they have taken? In his brief and somewhat cryptic comments to his Australian followers, Trotsky urged a struggle against invasion, with the caveat that workers should maintain their independence while fighting. What, concretely, would that have meant?
These are not easy questions to answer. In some ways, it’s a shame that the format of the book (as a collection of disparate essays) militates against a more systematic exploration of the concepts Gluckstein outlines in his introduction, particularly the idea of “people’s war”. One might also have hoped for a chapter (a complement to Stone’s writing on Jewish resistance) looking specifically at issues associated with the Holocaust, given their centrality to contemporary debates about the war.
Nevertheless, the book is an important intervention, one that draws attention to aspects of the Second World War that you’ll never hear mentioned by the propagandists who invoke Hitlerism each time they launch an air strike.
In that respect, it’s a fantastic resource, one that will be consulted again and again by writers and activists in our own era of permanent war. Have it on hand the next time Bill Kristol mentions Czechoslovakia.
