Eternal 1942

Past Is Past

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing one of a series of posts reflecting on mid-20th century history. This is an offshoot of a novel I’ve recently been working on.

Best,

Sam

ETERNAL 1942

In a weird way, I’ve spent the last six or so months living in 1942. I stopped reading just about anything contemporary — both because I didn’t want other voices getting into my head and because I really had a lot of research to do. And I poured through who knows how many books from archive.org — memoirs, diaries, papers, as well as secondary sources. The idea wasn’t to do some kind of Pierre Menard-ish immersion into the period I was writing about, but that is sort of what happened. I started doing my reading for my novel TORCH in June of last year — right at the time that Eisenhower, my main character, was dispatched to England to begin his secret preparations for the invasion of North Africa. Then there was a long, pleasant but nerve-wracking period of reading endlessly — while Eisenhower off in his parallel dimension was tucked away with paperwork working on his plans for the invasion — in which none of it felt exactly real and it was hard to imagine how the whole novel would shake out. Then, in the fall, there was a moment of embarking on it — beginning a narrative, trusting that it was all there and that I wouldn’t have to stop once I started. And it was a nice thought for me that, at roughly the same point in the calendar, Eisenhower was embarking on what he would, on a different occasion, refer to as his own “great adventure,” with his own overpowering sense of unreality: he had never so much as been in combat before and was now orchestrating a three-pronged amphibious invasion that “had to be fitted together like a jeweled bracelet” and was as likely as not to completely collapse. For me, the main period of writing coincided with the months in which Eisenhower and the allied forces were stuck in the mud — somehow, before planning the invasion, nobody had quite realized that there are heavy rains every winter in North Africa — and that felt appropriate enough, writing as if in a dream and just slogging forward. 

It was an interesting time to replay (at least from the safety of my coffeeshops). Churchill called it “the hinge of fate.” My grandfather was very fond of pointing out that there was a paper-thin margin (the difference being largely his own wartime exploits) without which we would have all been speaking German or Japanese. The narratives I read in my childhood war books emphasized always the three battles — Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Midway — all occurring at roughly the same time, which could easily have gone either way and could have resulted in a completely different geopolitical configuration. 

***

In the early part of the year, the Axis forces looked invincible. Hitler had gone from one success to another. Japan had a six-month rampage of unchallenged victories over the Americans, British, Australians, Dutch, and Chinese. And, more than that, there seemed in these victories to be an assertion of the efficacy of the Fascist system. The inter-war period appeared to demonstrate to most intelligent observers that liberalism and democracy simply didn’t work: the governments were too weak, dissension too potent, and the ability to make firm executive decisions ever lacking. Fascism — or Communism — seemed, obviously, to be the clear direction of history. As Henri Giraud, the Allies’ erstwhile ally in North Africa, wrote in 1943: “Sincere Frenchmen who have been in Germany as prisoners of wars can bear witness to its prosperity and moral health. Admittedly the German people do not perhaps have liberty but there is certainly neither disorder nor anarchy.”

What Giraud was unwise enough to admit to was a sort of quiet consensus among many figures of the time — that the whole liberal project had run its course and that the shape of modernity, with its large states and its limitless weapons of war, required some sort of total control. “You cannot know what pessimism is unless you had been through 1940,” a politician of the time observed. 

By the end of 1942, that set of attitudes was all but forgotten. Eisenhower complained that everybody around him was too busy ironing out their plans for defeated Germany to actually focus on the task at hand. Several critical figures within Axis Europe — notably, Darlan, the “Dauphin” of Vichy; and Canaris, the head of Hitler’s intelligence service — simply looked at charts showing American and Soviet production, as compared with that of the Axis, and decided that it was time to switch sides. Within three years, Truman, on V-J Day, could confidently declare, “This is the day when Fascism and police government ceases in the world.”

By spending all these months in a kind of suspended 1942, I was trying to understand, more than anything, what exactly had shifted, how had one conception of the world given way to another and what exactly was this new dispensation that had taken hold. And my conviction — which I hold to — is that, in an important sense, almost nothing has changed in our geopolitics since that time. The map of Europe for the second part of the 20th century mirrored the advances of the Allied and Soviet armies, with the faultline between NATO and the Soviet bloc occurring exactly at the spot where the armies converged. The dominant geopolitical factor from the 1940s to the present remains nuclear weapons, which were developed in earnest starting in 1942. The United States suddenly assumed a new identity as an interventionist, globe-striding power pretty much at the moment the armada of American forces appeared in North Africa — much to the mystification of the local French and Arabs. 

Part of it of course was an understanding of the evils of Nazism (and of its Japanese equivalent). Hitler had had abundant sympathizers all through the ‘30s. “If you were a banker in Basel or a policeman in New York, you became automatically an apologist of Nazism and fascism and if not an anti-Semite at least an apologist of anti-Semitism,” the perceptive journalist Edmund Taylor wrote in 1939. The Gestapo, Dachau, the Night of the Long Knives, the Night of Broken Glass were all infamous, but it was possible — especially for those who were themselves reactionary and anti-Semitically inclined — to see them as manifestations of ‘order,’ in Giraud’s terms or as part of Germany’s ‘special path,’ Germany’s restoration to its place among nations after the injustice of Versailles.

The Phony War and the relatively benign treatment of Occupied France made it still possible to believe that Nazism was an extreme-yet-legitimate form of government, but by 1942 it was clear that Nazism was something else entirely. Part of what was most intriguing for me in working on my project was the change in conviction of people like Eisenhower or Ernie Pyle, basically good-natured and somewhat naive Middle Americans, who seemed to grasp that they were facing a system that was fundamentally inhumane. “When they first arrived I frequently heard [soldiers] say that they didn’t hate the Germans. I didn’t hear that for long,” Pyle wrote. “If I am at all correct we have about changed our character and become a war nation.” Eisenhower wrote, “Daily within me there grew the conviction that as never before in a war the forces for good….were confronted by a completely evil conspiracy with which no compromise could be tolerated.”

Understanding what Nazism really was was the other main piece of my project, but even the Nazis themselves had a fairly clear understanding that they were venturing beyond the bounds of anything in conventional morality and that what they really stood for was very different from what they claimed in their propaganda. “On the 22nd of June, a door opened before us, and we didn't know what was behind it,” Hitler said. And many in the Wehrmacht understood the full significance of Hitler’s 1941 order on the brink of Barbarossa to execute any captured Soviet commissars. “We are not fighting a civilized war, we are concerned with the destruction of an ideology,” said Keitel, the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, when Canaris complained to him. Even for avowed Nazis, Nazism was understood to be a suture within all the normal operations of civilization. “The man of history reaches forward for ends that are comprehensible only to a few,” Hitler had written.

***

The enduring result of this understanding of Nazism as an ideology apart is to create an almost theological politics from that time to this. The basic operation of civilization — more than any ‘positive’ aim — is to oppose the emergence of some reconstituted Nazism. That sensibility runs, I would argue, through virtually every action in our contemporary political landscape. “Never again” — the post-Holocaust rallying cry — posits an approach to politics that is the negation of anything connected to the Nazi regime. Influential thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper (who sort of won the day in the mid-century political philosophy disputes) argued that ideology and historicism themselves were the problems, and propounded a largely negative philosophy (‘neoliberalism’ is another term for it) that was highly suspicious of anything leading to the certitudes associated with Nazism and that instead advanced a hands-off, low-key approach to virtually anything in life. Our politics — on all sides of the spectrum — is largely just a watching-out for the specter of Nazism. Conservatives are concerned about ‘government overreach’ which will lead inevitably to ‘the Gestapo’ knocking on the door. Liberals are constantly monitoring conservatives for signs of the volkisch and militaristic sensibilities that are understood to be a kind of mind-virus and to lead in due course to a Nazi reprise. A dispute like Israel/Palestine, no matter how many other historical antecedents are in the mix, tends to be framed by both sides with reference to the Nazi period: the Israelis believing that its enemies are attempting to perpetrate a ‘second Holocaust’; progressives contending that Israel, through some sort of traumatic transference, has become a ‘Fascist’ state, organizing ‘ghettos’ and conducting ‘genocide.’

That ‘theological politics,’ or ‘politics by negation,’ was far from the consensus vision early in the war. The smart people tended to believe in a balance of powers — a vision of politics that went back, at the very least, to Metternich and that led to the fatal miscalculation that Hitler’s Germany could be used as a wedge against the Soviet Union. By 1942, a different idea was starting to take hold and that’s the idea that lasts from that day to this — the forces of civilization looking to identify and to zap extremism — and that’s become the basis of America’s vision of its own empire. By the late 1940s, International Communism was understood to be the threat to civilization, much in the way that Nazism had been. In the 2000s, it was “Islamofascism.” Now, it seems to be “illiberalism.”

My point here is not to argue with that conception of politics. It’s also, at some fundamental level, what I believe. My point is that it was a fairly new conception and it emerged at a specific moment in time — somewhere between the invasion of the Soviet Union and the discovery of the first concentration camps. And it can be possible to see the transition occur in a matter of months. It happened, for instance, in the North Africa campaign — which had been perceived, by both sides, as a ‘war without hate’ (no concentration camps, little political interference, fair treatment of prisoners of war, etc). But, by 1943 and the end of the Tunisian campaign, Eisenhower had come to view it differently. At the conclusion of the campaign, the German general Von Arnim wished to surrender to Eisenhower personally and Eisenhower refused him. Here is how he explained himself:

The custom had its origin in the fact that mercenary soldiers of old had no real enmity for their opponents….For me, World War II was far too personal of a thing to entertain such feelings. Because only by the complete destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible, the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word.

The sense was that the Nazi period wasn’t just a continuation of history, it was history in the balance. Nothing so dramatic had ever happened before or was likely to ever happen again. Evil had entered unmistakably into human affairs and had demonstrated its ability to manage entire states. And that meant a schism from anything that had ever occurred — there could no longer be an assumption of rationality on the part of state actors; no longer an assumption of the balance of power as a path to peace. Around 1942, it became clear what we were against and everything in politics since then has, in a way, been dedicated to containing that evil.