The Second World War
A Complete History
1989
MARTIN AND I ARRIVED on the same day in the autumn of 1956 at Magdalen College, Oxford, where we were to read history. Two years of national service was obligatory at the time. Martin had been in the Intelligence Service, learning Russian, a junior conscript in the Cold War. Knowledge of the language and the geopolitical background were undoubted assets. My grandfather Harry Pryce-Jones, a career soldier, saw to it that I did my service in his old regiment, the Coldstream Guards. Stationed in Germany, at least I practiced my German.
The Oxford history syllabus began with the Anglo-Saxons and stopped well short of the present. In charge of taking us through the first thousand or so years, K. B. McFarlane (Bruce, not that any undergraduate would dare to call him by a first name) was one of the country’s most formidable medievalists. He looked the part, a large ungainly man with a crabby expression, wearing a brown tweed suit and sitting almost sideways in an uncomfortable chair, stroking the tabby cat in his lap. Whether out of perfectionism or sterility, he could hardly bring himself to publish anything. A few days after arriving, I was writing about the Romano-British system of communication. He’d given me some thirty sources and wanted to know why I hadn’t used them. In the time available I had been able to read only one book and half of another. My method was faulty, he explained; the right way to read was to turn to the book’s index and look up anything you needed.
Another historian and Fellow of Magdalen College was John Stoye, of Yugoslav origins, author of a lively book about the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. On the same staircase as mine in college were the rooms of Karl Leyser. A refugee from Germany, in spirit he was still gripped by emperors and bishops in the Dark Ages of the German past. So good-natured was he that he didn’t mind my exploiting Brahms’s song for a pun on his name, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer.”
By the beginning of our second year, it was obvious that Martin was a born historian. Wasting no time, he already showed that he could find his way through archives and primary sources. A. J. P. Taylor was also a fellow of Magdalen. He was then a national figure on account of his television lectures on modern history. Delivering them apparently impromptu and without hesitation, he had in fact written out and learned by heart what he would say. He consented to have as pupils only the eight handpicked undergraduates who were thought to have the best prospects for a good degree and success in their careers, preferably in the academy or the media. For Taylor, the objective of historiography was to get your point across even if this was only prejudice dressed up in assertive prose. He expected Martin to be his protégé, but Martin instead came to the McFarlaneite view that the historian owes it to his subject to be completely knowledgeable and impersonal.
After graduating, I soon found myself literary editor of Time and Tide, a weekly magazine. The editor, John Thompson, hoped I’d discover new talent. The reviews Martin wrote for Time and Tide were his first appearances in print. In one of them, dated July 27, 1961, he laid out the ground rules as he had learnt them at Oxford, with a split infinitive thrown in too: “It is necessary for the historian to continuously cross known ground, sift published materials, and search out new evidence.” The Appeasers (1965), his first book, co-authored with Richard Gott, established what has become received opinion that the background of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his supporters left them unfit to understand anyone from a background as different as Hitler’s. (Gott had a similarly privileged background, with a Field Marshal in the family. The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky exposed the fact that Gott had accepted money from the KGB, which put him in the same bind as the pre-war appeasers, unable to understand the real nature of those with whom he was dealing.) Martin then wrote biographies of Lord Allen of Hurtwood and Sir Horace Rumbold, two very different characters who nonetheless typify on the one hand the willing dupe of the period and on the other hand the realist.
In Oxford days, Martin was not the proud Jew he later became. Nobody could know, he once said confidentially, that behind the name Pryce-Jones were Jewish origins. Three years old at the outbreak of war, he had been sent on his own to Canada. Though not Jewish, the woman who had him in charge took the trouble to learn to cook kosher for him, and wrote a weekly letter that she pretended came from his mother, who did not communicate. In the family background was his uncle Leo Trepper. Born in Poland, he emigrated to Mandated Palestine and became a Communist, only to return to Brussels at the outbreak of war in order to run the outstanding Soviet spy network known as Rote Kapelle. Stalin trusted his pact with Hitler and disbelieved the network’s warning in June 1941 that the German army was about to invade. Many of Trepper’s agents were liquidated either by the Gestapo or the NKVD, then the acronym of the Soviet secret police, but Trepper himself was to survive years in the Lubyanka. He returned to Israel and is buried there.
Marriage to Susie Sacher brought Martin’s Jewish identity out into the open. She was as thorough a researcher in the archives as he, and was to write a book about the English National Opera. Members of the Sacher family were major shareholders and directors of the Marks and Spencer chain of supermarkets and also lifelong Zionists. Susie’s parents, Audrey and Michael, owned a house in Jerusalem. Martin was to take every opportunity to travel to Israel and stay there for long periods of research. There’s a tight circle of Israeli academics, writers and diplomats with the historical knowledge, the intellect and the will to defend Zionism in times of peace as well as war, and Martin took his place in it.
The preface of Exile and Return (1978) opens with a statement that he is answering questions frequently asked about “the nature, the evolution, and the aims of Zionism.” Martin particularly documented the persecution of Jews by Germans turned Nazi and Russians turned Soviet, all making Zionism a default ideology for survival assembled from the mass of evidence left by victims and victimizers. Published in 1978, Auschwitz and the Allies shows that the Allies were fully informed of the program of mass murder but bureaucratic indifference and obstruction put paid to plans to bomb the railheads from which Jews were deported to their death. When I was in Vienna in 1984 writing a book for the Time-Life series “The Great Cities,” out of the blue Martin sent me a summary of the deportation of 50,000 Viennese Jews between March 1938 and the end of 1943.
In an unusual concession, Soviet Jews in principle during the 1970s had permission to emigrate to Israel. In practice, the Soviet authorities withheld exit visas for a number of handpicked Jews, refuseniks as they were known. Here was a cause readymade for Martin, the Zionist and Russian speaker. The Jews of Hope (1984) is a journalistic account of the cat-and-mouse game the KGB was obliging some Jews to play. A couple of years later, Shcharansky. Hero of Our Time was the biography of someone internationally celebrated for refusing to compromise even during his years in the Gulag. At some point, in a familiar tactic, the KGB detained Martin at Moscow airport, stripped him to his underwear, and photographed him.
Martin was in the habit of sending postcards to his friends from forsaken Russian towns where he was pursuing refuseniks. Here is one, half covered with colorful postage stamps. “I bought you this card in Tbilisi but as the Georgian government had only just decided on its new currency (the Lada) there were as yet no stamps. So I flew to Moscow and bought these – in Communist days £2,300 worth – but now not 50p – about a quarter of a cup of coffee. I am in St Petersburg now, having visited Jews greeting me today in remote villages where the temperature was minus 29 – and my face is burnt, lips cracked, and fingers being thawed by the radiator they specially brought into my room in the Asturia Hotel. Hope to see you soon – much to tell!”
The American president, Ronald Reagan himself, wanted Martin to brief him on the subject of refuseniks. The president’s Boeing flew Martin by himself to Washington and an aide conveyed him to the White House. A session of thirty minutes was due to start at half past twelve. At five minutes to one, Reagan entered the room, complaining loudly about dissatisfied Congressmen who were making trouble for him. Martin had not got a word in before another aide hurried Reagan away to greet his lunch guests. Once again the sole passenger, Martin was then flown home.
Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, had been under contract to write his father’s official biography. Finding that the necessary research was beyond his capacity, he advertised for a qualified assistant. A fledgling Oxford don at the time, Martin responded, and Randolph had the sense or the good fortune to take him on. Randolph’s name is given as the author of the first two of the eight volumes of the official biography, but rumor was already putting it about that Martin was his ghost. The remaining six volumes are anyhow exclusively his. Each is between a thousand and fifteen hundred pages long, weighing so many pounds that they are awkward to handle. All have two and sometimes three companion volumes of similar bulk containing supporting documentation from all possible sources. Martin must have felt unqualified admiration for Churchill and unqualified hostility for Communism and Nazism, but he is the only historian I can think of who accumulated facts for their own sake, not for commentary or the formation of opinion. Martin’s eighty-odd books are free from value judgments. The man himself is missing from the monument.
